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.”

Zoabi may take pride in having a master of arts in communications and journalism from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but her actual understanding of politics and communications proved to be extremely limited in the last election. The Knesset member from the Arab party Balad fell victim to the illusion of her high media profile. Though she appears relatively frequently in the media, most such appearances can be summed up as a series of provocations relating to the Palestinian struggle. Even among the Israeli Arab community that she represents in the Knesset, she is not identified with any real activity or with social and public legislation.

The senior official in the Nazareth municipality explained why Zoabi had absolutely no chance of being elected: “With all due respect to the Mavi Marmara incident, the people of Nazareth aren’t interested in that. What they are interested in is education, sewage and municipal taxes. They wanted a mayor who can get things done, who would deal with municipal issues instead of prancing around from demonstration to demonstration waving a Palestinian flag or inciting riots at the separation barrier. It had nothing to do with the fact that she’s a woman and that Arab society is a conservative one. Even women here didn’t vote for her. But even if she was a man having the same record of actions, she would not have stood a chance.”