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Roanoke Times · 15 September 2019

CP-2019-003

Unable to vote, Palestinians shrug off elections

The outcome of the election could determine the future for both the West Bank and peace talks

By Joseph Krauss and Mohammed Daraghmeh, Associated Press, Mas’ha, West Bank

Unable to vote, Palestinians shrug off elections — Roanoke Times, 15 September 2019
Roanoke Times · 15 September 2019

Transcribed from the clipping

“MAS’HA, West Bank — Barhoum Saleh’s town is surrounded by Jewish settlements, the sign above his roadside mechanic shop is in Hebrew, most of his customers are Israeli and he needs an Israeli permit to visit the beach a half hour’s drive away. But unlike his Jewish neighbors, he can’t vote in next week’s elections. Saleh is among the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank who have no voice in choosing Israel’s next government and no control over whether it decides to annex part or all of the occupied territory… Saleh, who is not particularly political, just wishes it was easier to take his kids to the beach. Israelis who get their cars serviced at his shop describe their trips: one drove down to Egypt’s Sinai, another vacationed in Thailand. But while they can travel in and out of the West Bank freely, Saleh must apply for a permit to enter Israel — and they are not given for family vacations. So, a few years back, he took his family to neighboring Jordan and its Red Sea port of Aqaba, where he and his children could swim in the same waters that wash up on Israel’s shores. ‘My kids were astonished when they saw the sea,’ he recalls, smiling at the memory. ‘They want land without people.’”

Photograph caption

“A man walks out of a Palestinian carpentry shop under a sign in Arabic and Hebrew that reads, ‘All the people’s carpenter,’ in the West Bank village of Mas’ha, west of Qalqiliya. The 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank are unable to vote in Israel’s elections next week, which could determine whether it annexes parts of the occupied territory and places their dreams of an independent state even further out of reach.”

Context added by this archive

Six Palestinians are named in one wire story about an Israeli election: Barhoum Saleh, a mechanic; Maraei Maraei, who runs a hardware store in Mas’ha; Diana Buttu; Tareq Baconi; Ayman Odeh; and Sam Bahour, an Ohio-born Palestinian-American. The last line of Saleh’s quotation is the slogan this archive tracks from 1901 onward, said back by a man who lives on the land in question: They want land without people.

Cite this item

"Unable to vote, Palestinians shrug off elections," Roanoke Times, 15 September 2019. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2019-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2019-003

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2019-003.

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