Israeli lawmaker: All Palestinians can become Israeli citizens, but they can't vote

Scott Roth & Phil Weiss
Mondoweiss
Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:01 UTC

Miki Zohar, with the leader of his party, Benjamin Netanyahu

Everyone always asks, If there's not going to be a Palestinian state, what does Israel plan to do with all those Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under its control? Here's a visionary answer from an up-and-coming member of the Knesset from Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, Miki Zohar, speaking on Israeli television Sunday.

That's right, this is Zohar's vision, on the English language program The Spin Room.

The two state solution is dead. What is left is a one state solution with the Arabs here as, not as full citizenship. Because full citizenship can let them to vote to the Knesset. They will get all of the rights like every citizen except voting for the Knesset.

Journalist Ami Kaufman: Is that a democracy?

Yes it is a democracy because they will get full rights and all the needs to get to prospect and to succeed here in this country. But they won't be able to vote to the Knesset. But my idea is that we can let them to vote to the Knesset with only three things that they need to do like every other citizen. One, to go the army or to go serve the country, like everyone else here in Israel is obligated to do.

Journalist Tami Molad: You want 2.5 million Palestinians serving in the Israeli army?

I promise you, they won't serve in the army, they will let go the option to vote. They won't vote to the Knesset. They would prefer not voting and not donating to this country, believe me.

It's astonishing to think that Miki Zohar, a lawyer and religious Jew of 36, thinks he has come up with a brilliant solution, when his answer is just as old as Jim Crow and apartheid and white supremacy. The good thing about his comments is that he is expressing openly what Israel has gotten away with for decades now, governing a people who are not granted the right to vote for their government. And yet our leaders call Israel the only democracy in the Middle East.

Zohar's comments are a lot like settler Yishai Fleisher's view of Israel's future, published without rejoinder by the New York Times two weeks ago, in which Fleisher also dispensed with the idea of a Palestinian state - and treated Palestinians as so much human matter to be moved around by Israeli shovels. These guys are helping to create Israel's new global image.

Comment: Further reading: The Apartheid Divide: Jim Crow segregation, Israel style

Over the years, the Knesset has used the veneer of democracy while acting arbitrarily to ensure that demographic and political control remains exclusively in the hands of the state's Jewish citizenry and parliamentarians.

For example, in an effort to maintain a Jewish demographic majority, the Family Unification Law of 2003 prohibits Palestinian citizens of Israel from reuniting with their spouses who live in the West Bank or Gaza. As a result, more than 150,000 children born of these so-called mixed marriages are denied the most elementary rights and privileges attendant to Israeli citizenship.

In a series of other laws, the Knesset has not only imposed a broad range of limitations on freedom of movement, speech and access to the political system for Palestinian citizens, but imposed ideological boundaries on the platforms of political parties to which they may belong.

By design, such laws thwart the ability of Palestinians to impact upon a political process which, daily, dictates every phase of their lives, but yet leaves them essentially powerless to bring about any fundamental change in the system itself. These restrictions necessarily deny Palestinian citizens an equal opportunity to play a meaningful role in the political life of Israel, otherwise available to their Jewish counterparts.