Stability Amidst Flux: The Arab Parties Come of Age in the 2006 General Elections

Abstract

The 2006 election, one of the most prominent experts on Arab Israeli politics predicted, would be the swan-song of Israel’s Arab parties which had dominated the Arab electoral scene for the past two decades in favour of a massive return to the Zionist parties. Nothing proved further from the truth. Despite a low, though hardly an exceptionally low, voting participation rate, the three Arab political parties which passed the newly increased 2 percent threshold—the United Arab List–Arab Movement for Change (UAL–AMC); Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality); and the Balad (National Democratic Assembly)—succeeded in gaining ten seats in the Knesset. Hadash won 85,823 of the votes to secure three seats, Balad, 71,299 votes and three seats, securing the third seat only as a result of a surplus vote agreement with Hadash, and the UAL–AMC, which showed the strongest performance by drawing 94,457 of the votes, gained four seats (see Table 1). Combined, this was as good an electoral performance as these parties have ever had, especially after considering heavy voter fatigue (five national elections in ten years); the voices during the campaign that vociferously criticized the political fragmentation in the Arab sector; and the excessive focus on the leaders of these parties to the detriment of their political agendas. The latter might have been the reason why only 56.5 percent of the Arab electorate cast their vote, the lowest Arab participation rate ever in a legislative party election, considerably lower than the Jewish electorate, which also produced the lowest turnout in all national elections to date. The Arab parties altogether secured an estimated 77 percent of the Arab vote and a total of ten seats in the Knesset. All in all, they secured 8 percent of the total number of votes in the 2006 election. Even more surprising, and ironic, for the first time in at least a quarter of a century, Arab politics seemed to be on a surer footing than the politics of the Jewish majority. Not only did ten candidates from Arab, or predominantly Arab, parties make it into the Knesset, they were almost