Palestinian citizens of Israel put to 'loyalty test' after election wins

Palestinian citizens of Israel say Arab parties' success in recent elections has led to growing pressure on them.

On election day, Lama Yassin, 31, drove to polling stations in her hometown of Arrabeh, where Palestinian citizens of Israel make up an overwhelming majority. She said families were coming to the polls together — grandparents and grandchildren. It was the first time in a really long time that she felt there was hope — hope of a change.

The overwhelming Arab turnout in the October 27 Israeli election won the Arab parties a record 19 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

Thabet Abu Rass, an expert on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, had predicted the Arab parties would be impossible for Gadi Eisenkot's opposition bloc to ignore: their seats push it past the 61-seat threshold for a ruling coalition.

Instead, Yassin and others saw Israeli channels invite 'Jews to talk about Arabs and Arab voter turnout,' she recalled, with almost no Arab guests. 'The whole conversation was about how dangerous these Arab voters are.' The 'most disgusting term' she saw online, however, was the repeated refrain of 'election terrorism' on Channel 14, the hard-right, pro-Netanyahu station.

Within a day of the vote, Likud and figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir accused the Arab parties of stealing the election through 'bribery, threats, violence, forgeries.' The accusations have continued even after the Central Elections Committee and the Israeli police said they found no sign of organised tampering.

Distraught, Yassin posted an Instagram video that went viral among Palestinians, capturing the doublespeak of Israelis they so often hear: 'Eating hummus with us? 'Brothers and friends'. Helping someone in distress? 'Brothers and friends'. Voting in large numbers? 'Terror at the ballot box'.'

In the video she added: 'When it suits you, we are brothers and friends. When it suits you, we are a symbol of coexistence. When it suits you, you go around the world boasting about our integration into Israeli society. But the moment we demand to have influence, to shape policy, and to take part in decision-making — suddenly, our very presence becomes a threat.'

More than a week after the election, Jaffa's Ajami neighbourhood offers both the history leading up to — and the fraught circumstances of — this moment. Faded Arabic signs on abandoned buildings hint at the Palestinian community that thrived in Ajami before 1948. On Ajami's streets, posters of children killed during Israel's war on Gaza hang metres away from campaign posters for Ra'am and the Joint List.

From the back office of his cluttered hardware shop, Omar Siksik, once a Tel Aviv-Jaffa city councilman who now co-chairs Kulna Yaffa, a grassroots, Arab-Jewish civic initiative in the city, weighs this moment of unprecedented representation — met by renewed delegitimisation efforts — against Ajami's own history. It is a struggle, he says, for basic existence.

Before 1948, Jaffa had about 100,000 Palestinians. After the Nakba, fewer than 4,000 remained — with those left fenced inside Ajami under military rule. 'We called it the Ajami ghetto,' explained Siksik. Born there in 1957, he grew up sharing a toilet and kitchen with newly arrived Jewish immigrants who took the homes of expelled Palestinian neighbours.

Over time, the fence surrounding Ajami was torn down, martial law ended, and the Palestinians who remained there were granted Israeli citizenship. But later, when Siksik became the head of the Rabita Association, a nonprofit for the Palestinian residents of Jaffa, he remembered 'sleeping under the bulldozers' that were razing the houses of Palestinians in the area, a practice that Rabita had fought in court. For Siksik and others, election day is the only occasion that's different. 'This is a democratic election,' he said.