Middle EastP Marginalised and alienated, Israel's one million Arabs face a dilemma when it comes to state elections, writes Nuala Haughey.
As election campaign rallies go, this week's gathering in the northern Israeli Arab village of Judeida was a decidedly laid-back affair.
Arab Knesset member Mohammed Barakeh, seeking re-election in this month's Israeli parliamentary polls, was making private house calls in this community in the hilly western Galilee region.
But it appeared to be a case of the mountain coming to Mohammed rather than the other way around, as the parliamentarian from the left-wing Hadash party sat in a corner of a living room fingering worry beads while invited village men came to pay their respects. If the setting was low-key, the message was not.
Parties representing Israel's substantial Arab minority are struggling to maintain their parliamentary toehold in the face of apathy from alienated constituents, who feel the Jewish state does not represent their interests.
Analysts say a combination of new legal barriers, increased competition and growing calls for an election boycott could result in a dramatic drop in the number of deputies from Arab parties returned to the 120-member Knesset, where they currently hold eight seats.
"We are asking that everybody be responsible and vote and if somebody doesn't vote it's basically not taking a stand," Barakeh (50) told his attentive audience in one house in Judeida. "We are at risk, and anybody deciding that they are not taking a stand is very dangerous."
Israel's one million Arabs, who account for almost a fifth of its population, are descendents from families which stayed while hundreds of thousands fled or were forced out during the 1948 war of the Jewish state's founding.
Though entitled to vote as citizens of Israel, they face widespread discrimination in education, housing and jobs and are often viewed with suspicion and hostility by the state, which sees them as a "fifth column" or enemy within. Right-wing Jewish politicians openly discuss the option of "transferring" Arabs citizens clustered in an area of Israel known as "the Arab triangle" into the neighbouring occupied Palestinian territories.
Bitter experience has taught these voters that even though the role of Arab legislators can at times be decisive, they stand no chance of being invited to join the coalition governments led by Zionist parties which Israel's proportional representation electoral system tends to produce.
Marginalised and estranged from power, Arab Israeli voters are faced with a dilemma when it comes to state elections, says political scientist Dr Amal Jamal from the University of Tel Aviv: "On the one hand the Arab community knows that if they don't vote they won't have a voice inside the Knesset and will delegitimise their own leadership, while on the other hand, if they do vote and send these people to the Knesset they can't deliver."
But Barakeh, whose party has both Arab and Jewish members, insists that Arab deputies serve a vital role as guardians of the weakest sector of Israeli society.
"People appreciate our stand in the Knesset against racist violations and decisions. The Arab MK [ member of the Knesset] is as a kind of mediator between voters and the state institutions."
While parties like Barakeh's Hadash struggle to increase Arab voter turnout, there are growing calls for Israeli Arabs to boycott elections, which by definition presume the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
"After 60 years of voting for the Knesset, the national and political goals of the Arab community inside Israel have not been met," says Eghbarieh Rja (54), a former teacher who leads the Popular Committee for Boycotting the Elections. While opinion polls have shown little evidence that the boycott movement is gaining ground, in the last state elections in 2003, 62 per cent of eligible Arabs cast ballots, their lowest turnout to date in a parliamentary poll.
This followed a widespread Arab boycott of the 2001 prime ministerial contest after Israeli police killed 13 Arab citizens during demonstrations in sympathy with Palestinians in October 2000, an event which seared the consciousness of the generally submissive minority population.
Barakeh dismisses boycott calls as nonsense. "If we don't go to the Knesset and we sit at home does this bring us the missing paradise?" he asks. "The aspiration of the Zionist movement was to not have a single Palestinian in this country after the Naqba [ the "catastrophe" of the events of 1948]. So our survival should not be taken for granted."
A new increase in the threshold to qualify for a Knesset seat from 1.5 to 2 per cent of the popular vote has also raised doubts that all four Arab groups currently in parliament will retain their seats.
"Arab politicians fear if voting turnout is low this may be a disaster for their parties," says Dr Jamal.
"That why we see all the Arab parties behaving unusually in pushing for a high voter turnout and only then asking for people to vote for them. This indicates they are worried, because usually in politics a politician only asks people to vote for himself."