At the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the National Committee of Heads of Arab Localities decided to start a fight with the government, with their justified demand for more funds and prevention of the municipal services from collapsing. The strike was hardly covered in mainstream media, and the Arab media sufficed with press releases from the committee or sharing statuses on social media.
The demand of the Arab council heads is justified. The gap between an Arab local council and a Jewish one is unbelievable. Most of the Arab communities are basically poor neighborhoods. The restrictions on development for Arab towns and the lack of plans for commercial and industrial zones have created a dependence on home property taxes, where even full tax collection cannot promise economic independence. The economic crisis caused by the virus has hurt the income of Arab local councils and increased significantly their dependence on state grants, which already depend on the rates of home property tax collection. These have dropped sharply due to financial hardships and unemployment.
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But while the demand of the Arab local authorities is justified, both in principle and specifically, their campaign was riddled with mistakes. It seems the heads of the authorities immediately chose methods of protest to create a crisis with the government, which only brought their struggle to a dead end and forced them to return to their towns with no real achievement.
The municipal strike was called in the midst of the coalition talks, when the political system was busy with a political crisis and also the pandemic emergency. The strike, which included a protest tent, seemed to be an attempt to aggravate the previous government during its final days. All that was left was to negotiate with officials in the finance and internal affairs ministries, who had no authority beyond making recommendations to the politicians, who anyway changed when the new government was formed. But even that option was not exhausted: The committee appealed to the High Court of Justice to force the government to allocate funds, which in fact stopped the negotiations with Finance Ministry officials, and may have given the politicians a good excuse to explain their inability to make a decision due to the existence of a judicial process.
While waiting for a new government they could have called upon the finance minister and prime minister, especially the designated "alternate" prime minister, who was recommended by the Joint Arab List, and could have demanded that he keep to his promise. They could have led an act together with the Federation of Local Authorities in Israel. Instead, the committee of local council heads put members of the Joint List at the forefront of their battle against the parliament and government, which only added to the contrarian character of the fight.
The failure was absolute: the strike caused severe damage to citizens who needed services that were cut, such as various social services, tenders for employing workers or contractors for new projects. The Arab local authorities achieved nothing in this strike, which may have been useless to begin with, and in many ways only added oil to the emergency fire.
