In August 2013, after briefly hesitating, Knesset member Haneen Zoabi announced that she was running to be mayor of Nazareth, the city where she was born and raised. Zoabi estimated that the extensive publicity she received in Israel and around the world over her controversial participation in the Mavi Marmara flotilla to the Gaza Strip in May 2010 would give her an advantage over the other two contestants. Her opponents, Ramez Jeraisi of the Arab party Hadash and Ali Salem, were familiar figures in Nazareth, but they lacked the media attention that Zoabi had received.
Two months later, on Oct. 22, Zoabi crashed in the municipal elections, finishing with less than 10% of the vote. Almost none of the city’s residents bought into her promises for a better future. The result was an enormous humiliation for Zoabi, explained a senior politician in the Nazareth municipality. “She was sure that all the media buzz that surrounded her and the fact that she’d become a kind of 'celebrity' in the Arab sector would take her straight to the mayor’s office,” he said. “It was a false assumption, cut off from reality and somewhat childish. The people of Nazareth simply didn’t think that she was the right person to manage their city. Most of them saw her as a curiosity of sorts.”
