Here’s what Israel’s election looked like from the West Bank
86-year-old Hajj Waleed Halawa has worked as a barber in Nablus since 1949. He’d rather watch movies and listen to Um Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez than talk politics.
NABLUS, West Bank — Gentle slopes dotted with olive trees rise all around this city in the Northern West Bank. It’s a bright day in the Holy Land and a few miles away, in Israel, it’s election day.
The outcome of the vote, whatever it may be, will affect all Palestinians. But residents here, who aren’t Israeli citizens, don’t have a say in who wins.
In the narrow stone alleyways of the old city there are posters and plaques on nearly every wall commemorating “martyrs” who died fighting the Israeli occupation. Nablus was once a hotbed of resistance. There’s still an open space — now used as a parking lot— where a soap factory was blown up by Israeli forces in 2002, during the Second Intifada.
The intifada ended more than a decade ago and since then, for many, the prospect of a solution to the conflict has receded even further. Many people here don’t much care about the outcome of an election, seeing little difference anymore between left and right in Israel.
They’re all the same
Emad Khofash, 24, is a master’s student studying IT in Jordan. “For us they are all the same,” he says of the candidates. “They say the left are different from the right but actually they are all the same.”
Hajj Walid Halawa, 86, has worked as a barber here since 1949. He wanted to be a mechanic or a driver but his father wanted him to do something that would keep him safe.
“For 60 years people have been dying and all that time I’ve been cutting hair,” he says.
He no longer follows politics at all.
“I don’t care about the news. I only watch movies and listen to Um Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez,” the famous Egyptian singers from the ‘40s and ‘50s.
“They [Israeli politicians] are all the same, it’s nothing but power.”
But Alaa Youssef, an oral historian from Nablus, contends there wasn’t always so much apathy here.
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“In the past we would wait for the days of the elections in Israel, because there was real competition between the two parties and real differences between them. It was in the 1980s, before Yitzhak Rabin was killed,” he says.
Things changed with the election of the right-wing Ariel Sharon, Youssef says. Implicated in several incidents of civilian killing, Sharon was followed by a series Israeli leaders, all of them far more conservative than Rabin.
Incumbent Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu announced the day before the election this week that the Palestinians would not receive statehood on his watch.
At least he’s direct, Youssef says.
“If the Labor party had remained in power maybe something good would have happened, but what’s good about Benjamin Netanyahu is that it gives us the real face of the Israeli community so we got the message that there is no peace.”
Some, though, are experiencing “Bibi fatigue.”
Hassan Mostafa, 39, works for an NGO in Nablus. He spent 12 years in an Israeli jail, where he learned Hebrew and got a master’s degree in political science and international relations.
“If you ask many Palestinians they will tell you [Israeli politicians are] all the same but it's not true. For me Netanyahu is past his expiry date. He should not be reelected.”
Mostafa also thinks the Palestinian leadership has also been in power too long too. President Mahmoud Abbas? “He’s expired too. With respect, he should be at home now.”
New hopes
While no one seemed particularly excited about the candidates for prime minister, there is some hope for change from another quarter.
For the first time in their history, all of the Arab political parties were running Tuesday in a coalition known as the Joint List. Mostafa says, “I feel proud because of that. It’s good to see Arabs united for once.”
But he believes that their participation in government — occupying 13 seats, according to initial exit polling — will mainly affect Palestinians with Israeli nationality, not those in the West Bank and elsewhere.
He speaks wistfully of another time when he could drive to Jerusalem and back again for the weekend, without a permit.
Others are hopeful that the Joint List could bring some real change to the West Bank.
“I am very optimistic about the Arabs,” says Youssef. “The Arab list will not end racism in Israel, nor the discrimination, but at least we are united for the first time since 1948.”
That unity was a defensive response to a law that raised the electoral threshold, critics say, to exclude the historically small Arab parties, as well as to a government in Jerusalem that was increasingly sending the message that Arabs were not welcome.
Arab Knesset members are also potentially stronger partners for Palestinians in the West Bank to work with on economic issues.
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Fadi Jinawi, 23, is a barber in the Askar refugee camp, adjacent to Nablus. He half-watched the election coverage on television throughout the day. He hadn’t heard of the Joint List, but said that he hoped for an outcome that would bring stability in Israel.
“If the situation is good in Israel, there is work for us; If there is war, there is no work.” Jinawi says some of his customers are Palestinians living in Israel who come to Nablus when times are peaceful.
In some ways the Arab Knesset members have the potential to represent all Palestinians, Youssef says.
“Now the field of negotiations has expanded. It’s not only in the hands of Saeb Erakat [the longtime Palestinian chief negotiator] anymore, it’s in the hands of Hanin Zoabi [one of the Arab List candidates] too, it’s not so simple anymore.”
But the fact remains that the Israeli government has a profound effect on more than 4 million people who have no capacity to choose it.
“On a good day, the occupied people can only dream about the polls,” writes Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Their fate will be determined in their masters’ elections. Their masters will determine their future; they have no right to participate in that process. In the meantime, their prime minister is to all intents and purposes an Israeli general who determines most of their daily lives.”