In three rounds of elections last year, Israel’s center-left bloc campaigned on the notion of dissociating itself with the country’s Arab citizens. In an effort to sway right-wing voters to switch allegiance to the center-left bloc, Blue and White party chairman Benny Gantz, now the minister of defense, made a point of keeping a distance from the Arab population. These efforts were a resounding failure, which sometimes bordered on the absurd. At one point, Gantz would not even call them “Arab citizens, preferring to use the term “non-Jews” instead.
All this has changed. Today, we learned that several Jewish public figures, formerly aligned with the center-left bloc, have created a new group, Brit [Alliance], calling for the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab political party. Among the members of this group are former Minister of the Interior Ophir Pines, former Meretz Knesset member Mossi Raz, former Labor party Chairman Amram Mitzna and former Labor Knesset member Collette Avital.
How the wheel has turned. People associated with the center-left have moved from total dissociation with anything Arab to calls for the creation of a joint Arab-Jewish party to run for the Knesset. Pines went so far as to say, “There is an Arab minority here, and I want to live with them in a civil alliance, including political partnership.”
What lay behind this new initiative to create a joint Arab-Jewish party? In a conversation with Al-Monitor, Raz said, “The initiative is the result of several factors. Avraham Burg [former Knesset speaker] and I have been talking about it for about 10 years now. Over the last two years, a few people, namely Burg, Haim Oron and Ophir Pines, began advancing the idea on a more practical level. We reached the conclusion that politics today is deadlocked. Everyone is stuck where they are. If we ever want to shake things up, we will need a joint Jewish-Arab political party. We spoke about it with lots of public figures, including Joint List representatives and party Chairman Ayman Odeh as well as activists who lead all sorts of initiatives calling for Jewish-Arab political cooperation."
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