Southfield, Mich. (Jewish Renaissance Media) — Banning two Arab Israeli members of Knesset from seeking reelection is a threat to Israel’s cherished democracy without a doubt. The only worse threat would be to let them run.
Israel’s Basic Law is pretty clear on the point: “A list of candidates will not take part in the elections to the Knesset nor shall an individual person be a candidate for the Knesset if the goals or deeds of the list or the deeds of the person explicitly or implicitly, are one of the following: (1) reject the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; (2) incite to racism; (3) support the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel.”
The disqualified candidates, Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara, argue that they don’t want to destroy Israel. Instead, they would take away its essential Jewish core.
They would like the three million Palestinians now in the West Bank and Gaza to have an unlimited right of return to what they claim as ancestral homes within Israel. Once there, of course, they would soon outnumber the non-Arab Israelis and, using their democratic rights as Israeli citizens, would promptly vote to replace the Jewish state with an Arab one.
In the meantime, Bishara and Tibi see nothing wrong with Palestinian attacks on soldiers and settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. They say they don’t approve of violence against Israelis inside the Green Line, like the recent suicide bombing that massacred 22 people in Tel Aviv, but the murderous assaults on settlers and soldiers are, in their view, acts of “liberation.”
It makes you wonder why they want to live in Israel at all, much less serve in the nation’s parliament. Can you imagine what Americans would do to a member of Congress who said Al-Qaida’s Sept. 11 attack was wrong but that its blowing up American embassies in Africa and a warship in Yemen were justified?
Israel doesn’t have a written constitution, but you would think that the people who wanted to be its citizens and its public servants would be willing to swear they would uphold and defend the state. Instead, these Arab Knesset members want the state replaced.
Until he was elected to Knesset, Tibi served as a formal counselor to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Now his status has been reduced to “informal adviser” to the corrupt, murderous terrorist.
If the Israeli Supreme Court upholds the Central Elections Committee vote to bar Tibi and Bishara, the nation’s one million Arab citizens are going to become even more polarized in their resentment of the Jewish majority. Many are likely to boycott the Jan. 28 elections entirely, thereby reducing the vote for Labor, the only party that appears willing to pursue any parts of the pre-intifada peace process.
At a time when it should be seeking unity, Israel will be even more destructively polarized. That’s a terrible outcome. But it would be even worse to allow the election of legislators whose goal is to undermine the nation they should be trying to serve.
Israel needs to make sure that its Arab minority has full and equal rights in the democracy, but it has no obligation to elevate those who, given a chance, would tear it down.
Jonathan Friendly is a contributing editor of Jewish Renaissance Media.
Loading ...