[Mb-civic] Israeli Arabs See Lesson in Hamas Victory - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Israeli Arabs See Lesson in Hamas Victory

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 5, 2006; A17

KFAR QASEM, Israel -- Ibrahim Sarsur, the former mayor of this Arab city 
with a view of Tel Aviv's skyline, stepped onto the plywood platform 
soon after the evening call to prayer. Over his shoulder, a green banner 
warned, "Voting for the Zionist parties is supporting those who spilled 
our blood, robbed our land and violated our holy places."

"If you give your vote to them, a Jew will enter and an Arab will not," 
Sarsur shouted to the hundreds of men filling rows of white plastic 
chairs in a smoke-filled community center. "Islam has opened our hearts 
-- this is our message.

"Why do you have to vote?" he asked, then answered his question: "For 
this program that connects this life with the next life."

With national elections less than a month away, parties that represent 
Israel's Arab population are struggling to maintain their small foothold 
in the Israeli parliament. As the parties grapple with new legal 
barriers, fresh competition and a frustrated constituency, at least one 
coalition is drawing a lesson from Hamas's recent victory in the 
Palestinian territories: The solution is Islam.

The United Arab List has adopted an explicitly Islamic message in the 
hopes of inspiring thousands of Arab voters who have boycotted past 
elections. Using Koranic verse and showcasing religious candidates, 
Sarsur's party, called the Islamic Movement, and its secular-nationalist 
partner are seeking to unite Israel's religious Islamic parties, who 
like their more radical Palestinian counterparts have long disagreed 
over whether to take part in elections that, in effect, presume the 
legitimacy of the Jewish state.

By winning a parliamentary majority in its first national elections, 
Hamas has validated for many members of Israel's religious Islamic 
parties the virtue of participating in mainstream politics. But the 
Islamic turn here has alarmed a coalition of Zionist parties, which 
narrowly failed last week to have the United Arab List disqualified from 
the March 28 elections for advocating the creation of an Islamic state 
in Israel.

"Hamas gave the Islamists here an example to follow," said Jafar Farah, 
director of the Musawa Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. "The 
Arab parties will never win a majority here, so their position is much 
different. But Hamas's participation has affected positively the 
discussion within Israel's Islamic movement."

In a recent interview at his home, festooned with ribbons celebrating 
his second pilgrimage to Mecca this year, Sarsur said the success of his 
candidate list depends on his ability to get Islamic voters to the 
polls. Only 62 percent of eligible Arabs cast ballots in Israel's 2003 
elections, their lowest turnout in a parliamentary election. The goal 
this time, Sarsur said, is to increase turnout by 10 percentage points. 
By his estimate, that would translate into a two-seat gain for the Arab 
parties in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

"We are concentrating on the religious elements, using religious 
terminology, in trying to appeal to the hearts of those who have been 
boycotting," Sarsur said. "We are trying to persuade all Islamists that 
having us in the Knesset is of greater value than a boycott."

The Arab families who remained in their villages during Israel's 1948 
war of independence account for roughly 20 percent of the Jewish state's 
6 million people. Though citizens of Israel, they face discrimination in 
immigration policy, land ownership, education and public employment, 
either explicitly or in the application of the law.

They are also viewed with suspicion by Israel's security services, who 
fear they might be a Palestinian fifth column concentrated in a strip of 
towns running north from here along the 1949 armistice line into the 
Galilee region. When Arabs in these towns erupted in protest at the 
start of the most recent Palestinian uprising in the fall of 2000, 13 
were killed as Israeli security forces put down the riots.

Now the victory of Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the 
United States and the European Union, has revived fears over the 
intentions of Israel's Arab citizens. Last month, the head of Israel's 
Shin Bet security service, Yuval Diskin, warned that "a Hamas government 
along the borders of Israel could have an impact on the Israeli Arabs 
and the Islamic organizations in Israel. This could be a problem."

"When we hear people at the top political levels saying we are a threat, 
it can only make us very anxious," said Sarsur, who heads the Islamic 
Movement's southern branch. "The Judaization of the state threatens us. 
But we want to be Israelis in the civil sense of the word."

The Arab parties are a collection of religious Islamic parties and 
communist and secular-nationalist movements, and together they hold 
eight of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats. They exert influence on the 
margins, but sometimes in important ways. Arab support for Israel's 
withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last year helped ensure its passage in 
parliament.

Since the 2003 election, however, the threshold to qualify for a Knesset 
seat has been raised from 1.5 percent to 2 percent of the popular vote, 
raising doubts that the three Arab groups in parliament will keep their 
spots. Arab leaders say the Kadima party, the centrist group formed late 
last year by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, is likely to peel off some 
Arab voters now that Sharon is unable to run because of a debilitating 
stroke. And the Labor Party will enter elections behind Amir Peretz, 
whose long tenure running Israel's labor federation, a bastion of Arab 
workers, has made him a popular candidate to many of them.

"The Arab political situation is very, very bad," said Asad Ghanem, head 
of the government department at the University of Haifa. The Arab 
parties' candidates, he said, "are seen by many in the Arab public as 
opportunistic, as politicians who only want to hang onto their seats. It 
may be that the Arab public will punish these Arab parties."

Like Hamas and the smaller radical group Islamic Jihad in the 
Palestinian territories, which lie about a mile east of this city's 
palm-lined medians and green-domed mosque, Israel's Islamic movement is 
split over the best approach toward a political system endorsed by Israel.

The movement's northern branch, led by Raed Salah, has urged followers 
to boycott Israeli elections. The longtime mayor of Um el-Fahem, Salah 
has been in and out of Israeli jails for the past two decades for having 
contacts with anti-Israel groups, including Hamas.

But Salah recently softened his message. Following the Islamic 
Movement's convention a few days after Hamas's Jan. 25 victory, the 
northern branch announced that its "followers have the right to take a 
position in the Knesset elections that is in accordance with our 
ideological understanding and our national feelings."

The statement could provide a boost to Sarsur's southern branch, whose 
base is this former farming community of 20,000 that now mostly provides 
cheap labor to the service industries on Israel's coastal plain.

Sarsur, a slight, garrulous man with a tidy gray beard, was born here in 
1959 -- three years after Israeli border police killed 49 villagers for 
violating curfew at a time when the Arab population of Israel was living 
under military government. A dozen of his relatives were among the dead.

He studied English literature at Bar-Ilan University and hoped to teach 
in a high school. But he gave up after the Education Ministry rejected 
his application for nine years. He ran successfully for mayor and is now 
a civil engineer.

Campaign literature emphasizes Sarsur's title as "sheik," a religious 
leader. And three of the top five candidates on the list -- which 
includes the nationalist Arab Renewal Party -- are with a religious 
Islamic party.

"We have strong relations with Hamas in Gaza," Sarsur said. "And we can 
play a very constructive role in this process. We know the mentality of 
the Islamists in the occupied territories. And we know the mentality of 
the Israelis."

At twilight, Kamal Ibder, his bushy beard streaked with a white stripe, 
draped party banners around a traffic circle at the entrance to town. 
"Our power," the signs declared, "is in our unity."

When Ibder is not driving a forklift at a Coca-Cola plant near Tel Aviv, 
he is a foot soldier for the Islamic Movement. He ascribes what he 
believes is its growing support to the same kind of grass-roots social 
work that made Hamas popular among Palestinians.

"When it comes to the Islamic Movement, we're talking about a party that 
takes care of the needy, as opposed to the others who only care when the 
elections come," said Ibder, 43. "I am very optimistic."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401057.html?nav=hcmodule
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