Arab in Israeli parliament defends Palestinian attacks

MICHELE CHABIN, SPECIAL FOR USA TODAY

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM - Hanin Zoabi, an Israeli Arab, believes Israeli Jews are colonialists who stole Palestinian land. She makes no distinction between the recent deaths of Israeli civilians and their attackers, calling both “victims of the Israeli occupation.” Those are typical views of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as some Arab citizens of Israel like Zoabi.

But for her to make such comments strikes many Jews as incendiary — because she is also a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Zoabi’s verbal attacks have sparked questions among Jews here about her loyalty to Israel — as well as the loyalty of the other 16 Israeli Arabs in the Knesset — at a time when Israel is confronting months of attacks on Jews by Palestinians.

“The main criminal here is the occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian people,” Zoabi said in an interview. “If we want to defend the people, Jewish and Palestinian, we must struggle against occupation and Israeli aggression.”

Israel’s Arab citizens make up 21 percent of the population, but suspicions about them among Jewish citizens have soared in recent months because a handful of Israeli Arabs were among the more than 100 Palestinians who have attacked Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Hostilities escalated in February after Zoabi and two other Israeli-Arab lawmakers met with families of Palestinian attackers killed by Israeli security forces. The three stood for a moment of silence in memory of the attackers to focus attention on Israel’s refusal to hand over the bodies for burial.

“We sat with bereaved families that lost their sons and daughters, and anyone who would differentiate between” Israeli and Palestinian “families would be a racist,” Zoabi said.

Angered by the visit, the Knesset’s Ethics Committee temporarily banned the three lawmakers from most parliamentary activities, and the Constitution Committee green-lighted a bill that would empower 90 of the 120 lawmakers to suspend a fellow member for “inappropriate” behavior.

Under the controversial bill, which should come up for a vote in the coming weeks, voicing racist ideology or support for armed conflict against Israel could lead to a suspension. So could opposition to the long-enshrined definition of Israel as both a democratic and Jewish state.

Opponents of the measure, including Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, consider it blatantly undemocratic. Knesset member Sharren Haskel, of the right-wing Likud Party, hopes it passes.

“When (the Arab Knesset members) met with the families of terrorists, including one who murdered a mother in front of her children, and stood for a moment of silence to commemorate them, they were in fact promoting violence and hatred against the citizens of Israel,” Haskel said. “No one should be able to use their parliamentary privilege to destroy our democracy.”

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping, and nothing on it contradicts the label. Adjudicated against the printed page: Nothing printed on this page names the newspaper. No masthead, folio, running head or page number; the top margin carries no ink at all. The only credit is the byline block "MICHELE CHABIN / SPECIAL FOR USA TODAY", which names the copy's origin, not the paper ESCALATING TO MARIA ON THE NEWSPAPER COUNT. "The Californian" does not exist in the archive. The nearest thing is "Salinas Californian" (1 record), and there is also a Californian in Bakersfield; both are Gannett papers that carry USA TODAY copy, which is all the page tells us. Ingesting "The Californian" would add a 6 Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “The Californian”.

Context added by this archive

The single most useful clipping in this batch for the question of how Palestinian citizens of Israel are handled in American papers. Zoabi speaks at length, in her own words, twice.

But the framing around her is loyalty: the headline, the photo caption and the third paragraph all put her loyalty, and the loyalty of ‘the other 16 Israeli Arabs in the Knesset’, in question as a collective. Haskel’s answering quote is given more space than Zoabi’s and placed last.

Cite this clipping

"Arab in Israeli parliament defends Palestinian attacks," Salinas Californian, 20 February 2016. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2016-025. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2016-025