Roanoke Times · Roanoke, Virginia · 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
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.’”
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 clipping
"Unable to vote, Palestinians shrug off elections," Roanoke Times, 15 September 2019, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2019-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2019-003
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Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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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