In a letter signed by 250 academics, politicians and other public figures from the radical left, a call went out for a wide Jewish-Arab unity on the left to conquer the Knesset and change Israel.
In the letter, the Jewish leftist radical leaders called on their Arab compatriots to join them, writing “the breakup on the Knesset brought the end of an awful government, maybe the worst in the history of Israel, which widened the colonialist enterprise on the occupied territories, deepened the economic gaps in Israeli society, and widened the exclusion of Palestinian citizens in Israel from the public sphere.”
Aside from being a misnomer, the accusation of “widening the colonialist enterprise” stands out as being particularly ironic, given that the past government has been instituting a freeze on Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem for many long months despite there not even being an official request to do so from an external source, and amid a severe housing crisis.
“This was also the most racist government in the history of the state,” claimed the letter. “A government that conducted clear discrimination in allocating resources between Jews and Arabs, ignored hate crimes, and anchored in all laws the discriminatory reality in Israel.”
The radical leftists continued “the Israeli left must mark a completely new direction, a joint Jewish-Arab political front. There’s no more room for a Jewish left or Arab left, only a Jewish-Arab left.”
“A (Knesset) list like this, with Jewish-Arab cooperation at its center for peace and social justice, will constitute a leading force in the difficult struggles we can anticipate in the Israeli society in general and in the next Knesset in particular,” they wrote.
In conclusion, the leftists wrote “we can and must come out with a new message against the deepening of the occupation, the rising of the separation walls, the deepening of economic inequality, and the serious threats on democracy.”
The letter comes amid talk of unity among the three Arab parties, United Arab List, Balad and Hadash, which together would be likely to gain somewhere between ten and 13 seats making the joint list roughly the fourth largest party. Labor and Hatnua recently joined to form a large leftist party running neck and neck with Likud according to polls.
Among the signatories of the letter were actor Mohammad Bakri, playwright Joshua Sobol, singer Mira Awad, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, former MK Roman Bronfman, Prof. Orit Kedar of Hebrew University, Prof. Niv Gordon of Ben Gurion University, Prof. Shai Lavi of Tel Aviv University, and many others.
