Palestinians of the Naqab make their voice heard
Arab News · Dr. Dania Koleilat Khatib ·
Palestinians of the Naqab make their voice heard
Israel’s Palestinian parties landed 19 seats in last week’s Knesset elections, provoking the ire of hard-liners in the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused them of fraud and of stealing the elections. While everyone was talking about the pleasant surprise of the Palestinian parties’ success, no one looked closely at the dynamic, namely at a particular faction of the Palestinian population of Israel: the people of the south, the Bedouin population of the Naqab.
We are talking about more than 300,000 people in the Naqab, including Bir Al-Saba. According to my source, the people of the Naqab gave 125,000 votes to the United Arab List (Ra’am) led by Mansour Abbas and 20,000 to the Joint List. What drove so many people in the south to vote was their constant marginalization by successive governments. Ra’am is based on an Islamic movement. Such movements are by nature very active at the grassroots level. Ra’am is also very effective in working with the marginalized factions of society. Initially, the movement came from the south, the hub of disfranchised Palestinian communities in Israel.
Ra’am represents the southern wing of the Islamic movement inside Israel. This movement split into two branches in 1996, with the northern branch being led by Sheikh Raed Salah and the southern by Sheikh Abdullah Nimar Darwish. The latter was later developed by Abbas. The party represents a mixture of its Islamic background and the defense of the civic and national rights of Palestinians inside Israel. It is characterized by its high degree of pragmatism. While many Palestinian citizens of Israel take the position of boycotting the government, Ra’am seeks change from the inside, through engagement. Though it is an Islamic movement, it works on issues that directly affect people’s lives and does not really tackle ideology.
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