Israel cannot call itself a democracy while excluding Arabs from political power - opinion

As a child, I learned in synagogue that Israel is the “Holy Land.” Last week, the Central Elections Committee voted to bar all Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, from running in the upcoming elections. 

I found myself asking: What makes a land holy if the people who share it are not treated as equals?

Israel has spent decades proudly calling itself the only democracy in the Middle East. Attempting to exclude the political representatives of Arab citizens, who make up roughly a fifth of Israeli society, is dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic.

The attorney-general’s office opposed disqualifying the Joint List and Ra’am because the evidence did not meet the legal threshold. The leaders of these parties have repeatedly condemned Hamas’ war crimes committed on October 7.

We need to bridge the divide

Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, has made tremendous strides toward bridging the gap between Jewish and Arab society in Israel. Yoav Segalovitz, a Jewish former senior Israeli Police commander, is running second on Ra’am’s list. Yet even this brave Jewish-Arab partnership was not enough to protect Ra’am from disqualification by the committee.

Demanding full equality and opposing military occupation should not place anyone outside legitimate political life. Arab citizens have the same right as Jewish citizens to elect representatives who express their convictions and aspirations. When political legitimacy depends on ethnic or national identity, political inequality reflects a society’s deep-rooted racism.

This matters especially now because the debate over Arab participation extends well beyond the Central Elections Committee. It concerns who will help shape Israel’s future and whether Israelis and Palestinians will be able to live in peace and security.

For Israelis and Palestinians to end the cycle of killing, fear, and revenge, Arab citizens of Israel and their political leaders can help build trust and serve as bridges between Jewish Israeli society and Palestinian society.

Arab political leaders can play a role that Jewish political leaders often cannot. They bring relationships with Palestinian society and knowledge of its language, culture, history, fears, and aspirations into Israeli political institutions.

Learning to share power inside Israel builds the trust and habits of cooperation needed for reconciliation beyond its borders. Ra’am and the Joint List must be free to run in the upcoming elections. Jewish-Arab partnership must be a foundation of the next government.

The day will come when asking whether an Israeli government can include Arab parties will sound as strange as asking whether the president of the United States can be Black. Our responsibility is to help bring that day closer.

Jews and Arabs did not choose the national identities into which we were born; however, we can choose to live in the Holy Land as equals.