Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.

Jaffa, Israel — Outside of Ahva Elementary School in Ajami, a historic Palestinian neighborhood just south of central Tel Aviv, the mood was defiant on October 27, the day of Israel’s national elections. “We fear that if we do not get this government out of power, we will lose everything,” one Palestinian voter told me after casting her ballot.

It came as no surprise that she, like most of the Palestinian citizens of Israel I interviewed on Election Day, asked not to be named. Since October 7, 2023, more than 400 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been investigated by police for “incitement,” often over social media posts, according to the legal rights group Adalah.

During the 1948 war, which Palestinians call the Nakba, most of Jaffa’s nearly 100,000 Palestinian residents fled or were expelled. The fewer than 4,000 who remained were concentrated in Ajami, fenced in with barbed wire, where they lived under Israeli military rule until 1949.

Just weeks ago, it was not clear that the parties most Palestinian citizens of Israel vote for would even appear on the ballot. In September, Israel’s Central Elections Committee, a body of party representatives, voted to disqualify both Arab parties — which are led by and draw most of their votes from Palestinian citizens of Israel — from running in the election. The Joint List is an alliance of three parties running together to clear the 3.25 percent threshold needed to enter the Knesset.

Hadash, a left-wing party with roots in Israel’s Communist Party, is the only one of the three with both Jewish and Palestinian members. Ta’al’s platform has historically focused on the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Balad, a Palestinian nationalist party, calls for Israel to become a state of all its citizens, with equal rights for everyone.

Netanyahu May Lose Israeli Elections. That Won’t Save Gaza From Occupation.

The other party, running independently, is Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, which in 2021 became the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition.

The two Arab parties were eventually reinstated and allowed to run in the Israeli election, but only after an appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court.

As Israelis vote to elect the country’s 26th parliament (Knesset), Palestinian voters in the Ajami neighborhood said Gaza was at the top of their minds. Just down the road is a public memorial displaying photos of some of the more than 20,000 children who have, according to a UN commission, been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

The memorial, at Hajj Kahil Square, has been torn down more than once. In May, according to Bokra, a Palestinian news site, two men, one of them carrying a rifle, ripped the photos from the walls. The next day, Jaffa residents put them back up and renamed the traffic circle the “Gaza Children’s Roundabout.” Police, who ultimately answer to Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far right minister of national security, have also tried to stop protesters from displaying the images.

Whether or not to participate in Israel’s national elections has long been a fraught topic........

© Truthout