UMM EL-FAHM, Israel — A political sideshow for much of the past six decades, Israel’s Arab minority is hoping to gain much-needed muscle after this week’s parliamentary election, with four Arab parties uniting under one banner for the first time.
Surveys show the Joint Arab List could even finish third in Tuesday’s vote and become a factor in the coalition-building that dominates Israeli politics, where no party has ever won a parliament majority.
Many in the Arab community, which makes up 20 percent of Israel’s 8 million population, see the newfound unity as a breakthrough in battling discrimination and gaining recognition. Though they have full and equal rights, Arab Israelis often say they are treated as second-class citizens.
“We've been waiting for this for decades,” said Mirna Baransi, 24, a student from Nazareth. “We'll have more power now to make a difference.”
Israeli Arabs are descendants of residents who stayed put during the 1948 war of Israel’s founding, in which hundreds of thousands of fellow Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes, ending up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Those who remained have long pointed to inferior services and unfair allocations for education, health and housing. More than half of the Arabs in Israel live below the poverty line.
In Umm el-Fahm, an Arab Israeli town of 48,000 that borders the northern part of the occupied West Bank, signs urging residents to vote for the Joint Arab List are pinned along the main road.
A blue-and-gray party banner — “One cause, one vote” — hangs at the town’s entrance. Nearby, a mosque minaret overlooks the golden arches of a McDonald’s and memorials commemorate 13 local youths killed by Israeli police in 2000 while demonstrating in solidarity with a Palestinian uprising.
Khitam Mahmis, 46, said she has never before voted in an election, but this time she will. “Life is getting worse for the Arabs here. If we go to the ballot with more people, then we will get more,” she said.
Arab parties have never been included in any Israeli government, nor have they sought membership. That is unlikely to change now — but the Joint Arab List could still have a big role to play after the votes are counted.
The Arab parties have traditionally won around 11 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. As a joint list, opinion polls predict, they could win 13, while their internal projections suggest this could even rise to 15, putting the group a clear third.
In Israel’s parliamentary election system, voters choose parties rather than individual candidates, and the head of the party with the most political allies will usually win a presidential mandate to try to form a government.
Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint Arab List, has hinted that the faction may back Isaac Herzog, whose center-left Zionist Union is running neck-in-neck with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud before the March 17 vote.
In such a tight race, every seat is crucial.
“We want this government which led all of us, Jews and Arabs, to a dead end, not to continue,” Mr. Odeh told Reuters. “But we are not in Herzog's pocket.”
But some of Mr. Odch’s partners are unlikely to recommend any candidate.
Flagging in opinion polls before Tuesday's election, Mr. Netanyahu is trying to rally rightists by casting his center-left challengers as tools of a global campaign to usurp power.
Over social media and broadcast interviews, the three-term leader has accused unspecified foreign governments and tycoons of funneling “tens of millions of dollars” to opposition activists working to undermine his Likud party and boost the Zionist Union joint list led by Mr. Herzog and Tzipi Livni.
They, in turn, have dismissed the rhetorical fusillade as a bid by Mr. Netanyahu to shift voters’ attention from socio-economic problems to security challenges such as the Palestinian statehood drive and Iran's nuclear diplomacy, on which the prime minister argues that he alone can resist pressure from abroad.
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