The Weekly Dispatch: On the Israeli elections | 10% off at McNally Jackson | Our Arab by Zaina Arafat

The jump in turnout should be read principally as a desperate attempt both to unseat the right-wing government and to return to a semblance of normalcy in everyday life between the river and the sea. In a tragically ironic twist, it is a desperate attempt to secure a colonial reality that is less invested in obscene forms of violence and more capable of masking it through a slow-grinding process. As a tactical intervention, it is also meant to offer Israel’s opposition a clear path towards securing a government, one in which they would have to grant some concessions to Palestinian citizens of Israel, largely on issues pertaining to everyday life and on the issue that has exhausted Palestinian political communities: the willful lack of policing that has permitted the rise of organized crime in Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel, with strong indications of Israeli intelligence sanctioning it.

Both the Joint List and Ra’am are projected to win a record number of seats, around 19. That showing compounds a problem that has already produced repeated political stalemates. Israeli politics has become so polarized around the figure of Netanyahu, and has shifted so far to the right through demographic and ideological change, that the two dominant blocs can neither govern together nor secure a majority on their own. The opposition, a largely weak collection of forces, is also incapable of truly embracing an overt political coalition with Arab parties. It is caught between its hatred of Netanyahu and its utter disdain for any political embrace of Arab parties, both in principle and out of fear that such an embrace would entail a tacit empowerment that might also push Israel towards compromises on national grounds. So the things Israelis casually fear are a Palestinian state or equal political, economic, and civic rights.

It is not a shock, then, that one of the first cynical moves by the Netanyahu-led coalition has been to invoke foreign interference in the elections, and the role of Qatar, Turkey, and the “Muslim Brotherhood” in shaping the outcome through “bribes” and influence operations, which, it claims, explain the strong showing of the Arab vote in the current electoral round. Right-wing Israeli media already call it “Ra’amgate,” a reference to Ra’am, the list led by Mansour Abbas and affiliated with the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement. Abbas, in recent years, moved to break many of the political taboos around Palestinian participation in Israeli elections, situating himself as a pragmatic leader, devoid of nationalist sentiment and interested in full civic and economic rights within the horizon of the Israeli state as it stands. Despite the many concessions, both symbolic and material, he is still treated as a “suspect” and as having a hidden agenda by many pundits and Israeli political operatives. What motivated Netanyahu, who is himself implicated in a Qatar bribery scandal through assistants who worked in his office, was to muddy the waters of any possible coalition that would see Abbas working with the opposition to unseat the Prime Minister.

But the Arab vote in Israel and its strong showing at the polls tell a different story. They speak to the sense of brokenness that has defined politics outside Gaza, and indeed in Gaza itself. The incapacity to muster an active form of resistance, and the daily assault on Palestinian life in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, and within Israel itself, have propelled a cruel push towards a protest vote built on the hope both of ousting the “Kahanist” forces from Israeli politics and of returning to a pre-October 7 sense of normalcy. It is cruel because it comes on the heels of symbolic concessions and amid the weakness of Arab political movements, which have been left wrecked as political forces and without a material and political social base. It is also cruel because it carries a sense of “cruel optimism,” in which voters know all too well that the Zionist forces on the ballot disagree on much but agree on who is on the menu – the Palestinians. But it is the desperation of the “at least” logic that stands out: at least a new government will curtail some settler excess, show more pragmatism in economic relief, and take more steps towards fighting crime. In other words, it is a symptom of a society that has lost much of its capacity to solve its own problems and is hanging its wager on forces that share the same desire to eliminate.

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Fewer and fewer Palestinians living in the diaspora today have direct experiences of their homeland. How can they maintain a connection to a land so volatile, ever shrinking, and nearly unattainable? And how can a child of diaspora raise a child of diaspora, at a time when Palestinians throughout the world—particularly those living in their homeland—are more vulnerable than ever to censorship, violence, and erasure?

Luminous, joyous, and evocative, Our Arab: On Longing, Belonging, and Hope is Zaina Arafat’s highly anticipated follow-up to her award-winning novel You Exist Too Much. In essays that move from Nablus to the Appalachian Mountains and from Amman to Manhattan, Arafat reveals “in a singularly compelling voice” (Leslie Jamison) that to live in diaspora is to exist in a state of longing: longing to be elsewhere, longing to return home, and longing to know what home is.

A call to action and a call to love, Our Arab holds many truths at once—about society, identity, and family—and flashes with radical compassion, fierce pride, bitter loss, and righteous anger, forming an incredibly complex portrait of what it means to be Palestinian today.

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