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If there is one thing against we should fight right now, it's the attempt to lock in the Right's response to talks between Blue and White and the Joint Arab List as an expression of racism. The fact that here and there some racist filth was put up online shouldn't sully the main argument: the Right has no problem with the Arab character of the Joint Arab List; its problems are with the list's positions. The Right loathes its active opposition to Zionism, has a problem with its commitment to eradicating Israel's identity as a Jewish state and its support for initiatives to boycott Israel, as well as with its definition of the IDF as a perpetrator of war crimes and IDF soldiers as thugs. It has a problem with the Joint Arab list's support for or involvement in attempts to sue IDF commanders and soldiers in international courts and with its acceptance on one level or another of violent "resistance" (terrorism.) We should be able to expect the Zionist Left to agree with all these things, but it is busy trying to portray Joint Arab List leader Ayman Odeh as Martin Luther King Jr.
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But not only is the response from the Right – which is sometimes overly crude – not racist, it is respectable. The Right bases its attitude toward the Joint Arab List on the declared positions of the parties that comprise it, not according to any other criteria.
The Left, on the other hand, denies the Arabs' political declarations. Among themselves, they now that they are using the Arab parties – that the Arab voters were a crate on which the Left had to stand to appear the right heights. Under the celebratory wrappings, it's clear that the Jewish-Arab partnership isn't much more than a tactical one. In effect, it isn't a partnership at all – it's subservience – the Arabs are being asked to do the Zionist Left's work. It's a fact that left-wing op-ed writers had no compunction about urging the Arabs to go out in droves to vote, to save themselves from Netanyahu.
Then the Left, trembling at the motion of the wings of history, accuses the Right of racism. But it should remember that doing so fits in well with its years-long project to cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Jewish-Arab rift as racism and apartheid, rather than a national conflict. The Left needs the myth of hatred of Arabs to give itself a sense of moral superiority, but the Right points out a much more fundamental truth: that it has a problem with the political enlistment to wipe out the Zionist enterprise. It's a kind of inconvenient truth for the Left.
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But the Right has a lot more reasons to beat its breast – not because raising the minimum electoral threshold boomeranged, because of the nation-state law, or because of the attempt to put cameras in polling stations. It's doubtful whether these things had much effect on the macro level. What the Right missed, and in a big way, was the pressure in the Arab street for pragmatic politics.
To understand this, one needs to accept an assumption that we are seeing the peak of a key decade in the history of Israeli Arabs, during which the sector saw unprecedented mobility, the removal of obstacles and integration in all areas. At this point, the Left should scare up a modicum of integrity, which might be too much for it, and admit that this didn't happen in spite of Netanyahu, it happened because of the economic climate Netanyahu created, including unprecedented plans for investment in the Arab sector. True, the rhetoric is about alienation – but the policy encourages integration.
All these processes have an interesting effect on the psychology of politics: as they grow stronger, groups that jump forward start to get restless. Ironically, we can examine that in terms of comparative oppression: Israeli Arabs cannot go back, but the way forward requires them to drop their ideological opposition to Zionism and take part in Israeli politics, even if that means becoming part of the Zionist apparatus. The Arab League can go jump in a lake; Israeli Arabs are already on their way up.
When we clear away the rhetoric of Netanyahu's racism, a something that was tragically missed is revealed: that the Left is enjoying the fruits of a social process that the Right led.
But this isn't just a political tragedy – it's a cause for concern. Just as an atmosphere of acceptance is starting to take hold in the Arab public, the political Left offers Arab leaders an ideological haven and helps them institutionalize Arab hostility to the idea of Jewish nationhood and perpetuate its status as an obstacle to coexistence and true Jewish-Arab cooperation. It's a shame. The liberal Right should have gotten there earlier.
