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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/23/21

Why Netanyahu's Makeover Made Him an Improbable 'Arab Lover'

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Jonathan Cook
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That has effectively stymied Netanyahu's efforts to form an ultra-nationalist coalition government with the clear majority of seats he needs to pass an immunity law to block his trial.

'Coming out in droves'

Buttu noted that back in 2015 Netanyahu tried to nullify the List's influence by scaring his base into voting in greater numbers. Notoriously he warned the right that "the Arabs are coming out to vote in droves" - earning a rebuke from then-President Barack Obama.

By the 2019 election, Netanyahu switched tactics and sought to intimidate the Palestinian minority into staying home. He sent Likud election "monitors", armed with body cameras, into polling stations in Palestinian communities.

After the courts ruled his party's use of cameras illegal, in the next election Netanyahu defamed the Palestinian public as threatening to "annihilate us all".

After these various tactics backfired, Netanyahu is now pursuing a third - and potentially more successful - tactic of "divide and rule".

Good and bad Arabs

Amal Jamal, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, said Netanyahu had shifted away from inciting against the Palestinian public and focused instead on portraying the Joint List as betraying its supporters.

"This election has been about drawing a clear distinction between good Arabs and bad Arabs, between pragmatic Arabs and dogmatic Arabs, between those who will work with Netanyahu productively and those who won't," Jamal said.

In this new political discourse, most Palestinian citizens are presented as keen to improve their situation with Netanyahu's help while their leaders serve as an obstacle to progress.

As a result, Netanyahu has been hot-footing it to Palestinian communities to play up the benefits another term of his government would bring to the minority.

He has highlighted the windfall of vaccines he secured for Israel, and has promised extra budgets to stop a wave of criminal violence in Palestinian communities that is largely the result of years of police neglect and hostility.

He has also suggested that the Palestinian minority, if it is forward-thinking, will be well placed to reap the rewards of recent "peace deals" with Gulf states. The implication is that decades of systematic discrimination could be about to end.

In speeches, Netayahu has told Palestinian citizens: "Likud is your home."

Pact with Jewish Power

Few analysts believe Palestinian citizens will be directly gulled into voting for Netanyahu. After all, he is Israel's longest-serving prime minister, in power for more than a decade.

Jamal observed: "When he addresses the Palestinian public, he insults their intelligence - as though they have forgotten about his incitement and his role in passing racist laws over the past decade.

"He treats them like idiots."

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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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