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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 4/2/20

'Foolish and Naive' - How the 'Joint List' got it all wrong for ever believing Benny Gantz

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Gantz and his supporters have demonstrated through their actions who they really abhor. They have chosen the criminal suspect, Netanyahu, over the Palestinian minority.

Gantz and the so-called Jewish "centre-left" may claim to be guardians of Israel's democracy, but it is clearly a version of democracy that does not include a fifth of the population because they are of the wrong ethnicity.

Annihilation and fraud

The discourse of Gantz's bloc throughout the three election campaigns focused on maintaining a "Jewish majority" government the only one they considered "legitimate".

Gantz's secular Jewish right, masquerading as "centre-left", has ended up spurning representatives of the Palestinian minority on exactly the same grounds as Netanyahu.

"For each of these supposed 'two sides' of the political debate, the 'Arabs' are not seen as included in Israel's self-definition as a Jewish state," Asad Ghanem, a politics professor at the University of Haifa, observed to Middle East Eye.

Netanyahu has been intensifying his incitement against the Palestinian minority since 2015, when he presented their very act of voting or their coming out in "droves" to vote, as he phrased it as a threat to Israeli democracy. More recently, he warned that Jewish opposition parties must not ally with the Joint List because "Arabs want to annihilate us all women, children and men".

In recent months, he has repeatedly called Palestinian parties "terror supporters", thereby not only discrediting those parties in the eyes of the Jewish public, but also discrediting the Palestinian citizens who sent them to parliament.

Gantz, supposedly running a campaign against Netanyahu to uphold democratic values and institutions, has not rejected this anti-democratic incitement. He has accepted and complied with it, treating Palestinian parties like some kind of contagious coronavirus patient, to be kept at a safe distance.

Treated 'like a mistress'

From the outset of every election campaign, Gantz made it starkly clear that he had no intention of including the Joint List in any future government. As he said in the run-up to the 2 March election: "I'm not afraid of talking to any legitimate political party, but the Joint Arab List won't be a part of my government."

With no credible path to power without the Joint List, however, Gantz was reluctantly forced to engage in pro forma talks with its leaders.

Those discussions were never about more than whether the Joint List might be allowed to support a minority Gantz government comprising only Jewish parties from the outside. A similar situation unfolded in the early 1990s, when Yitzhak Rabin needed Palestinian parties to pass legislation supporting the Oslo peace process through the parliament's hostile majority of Jewish members.

As with Rabin, the goal of Gantz and his bloc was never to let the Joint List anywhere near government, Ghanem noted. The negotiations were intended as leverage over a power-hungry Likud party, pressuring it to ditch Netanyahu as leader.

That was why Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, argued that Gantz was using his party "like a mistress".

Made to look foolish

When Gantz unexpectedly called last month for a unity government that would include "representation of all parts of the house" a reference to sections of the Joint List he was again not playing straight. As his latest actions reveal, he was using the Joint List as a sword over Netanyahu's head, "hoping to secure better terms for his own entry into the government", Ghanem pointed out.

The Joint List suspected all this. But even so, in the September election and then again after the March vote, Odeh broke with the prior, natural caution of Palestinian parties in dealing with right-wing Zionist politicians and backed Gantz to head the government, rather than abstaining.

All of this was done in the desperate hope that Gantz and the Jewish "centre-left" really were concerned about the state of Israeli democracy and getting rid of Netanyahu. In recent weeks even Balad, the most hardline and recalcitrant faction in the Joint List, agreed to support Gantz.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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