{"id":186612,"date":"2021-06-14T12:01:35","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T11:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=186612"},"modified":"2024-06-12T21:24:21","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T20:24:21","slug":"power-at-any-cost-how-opportunistic-mansour-abbas-joined-hands-with-avowed-arab-killers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/06\/power-at-any-cost-how-opportunistic-mansour-abbas-joined-hands-with-avowed-arab-killers\/","title":{"rendered":"Power at Any Cost: How Opportunistic Mansour Abbas Joined Hands with Avowed \u2018Arab Killers\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mansour Abbas, leader of the United Arab List, Raam. (Photo: via Knesset website)<\/p><\/div>\n

7 Jun 2021 – <\/em>We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel, following the formation of an ideologically diverse government coalition, which for the first time includes an Arab party, Ra\u2019am, or the United Arab List.<\/p>\n

If we are to accept this logic, the leader of Ra\u2019am, Mansour Abbas, is a mover and shaker of history, the same way that Naftali Bennett of the far-right Yamina party, and Yair Lapid, the supposed \u2018centrist\u2019 of Yesh Atid \u2013 New Hope \u2013 are also history makers. How bizarre.<\/p>\n

Sensational media headlines and hyperboles aside, Israel\u2019s new government was a desperate attempt by Israeli politicians to dislodge Benjamin Netanyahu, the country\u2019s longest-serving prime minister, from power. While Lapid is fairly new to Israel\u2019s contentious politics, Bennett and Abbas are opportunists par excellence.<\/p>\n

Lapid is a former TV anchorman. Despite his claims to centrist ideologies, his political views are as \u2018right\u2019 as they get. The problem is, such characters as Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, also of Yamina, and Netanyahu himself, of course, among others, have relocated the center of Israel\u2019s political spectrum further to the right, to the point that the right became the center and the ultra-right became the right. This is how Israel\u2019s neofascist and extremist politicians<\/a> managed to become kingmakers in Israel\u2019s politics. Bennett, for example, who in 2013 bragged about \u201ckilling lots of Arabs\u201d in his life is set to be the prime minister of Israel.<\/p>\n

It is in this strange context that we must understand Mansour Abbas\u2019s position. His meager four seats at the Israeli Knesset made his party critical in forming the coalition that is purposely created to oust Netanyahu. Ra\u2019am does not represent Israel\u2019s Palestinian Arab communities, and by joining the government, Abbas is certainly not making history in terms of finding common grounds between Arabs and Jews in a country that is rightly recognized<\/a> by Israeli and international human rights groups as an apartheid state.<\/p>\n

To the contrary, Abbas is moving against the current of history. At a time that Palestinians throughout historic Palestine \u2013 the occupied Palestinian territories and today\u2019s Israel \u2013 are finally unifying<\/a> around a common national narrative, Abbas is insisting on redefining the Palestinian agenda merely to secure a position for himself in Israeli politics \u2013 thus, supposedly \u2018making history.\u2019<\/p>\n

But even before Abbas shook hands with Bennett and other Israeli extremists who advocate the killing of Palestinians as a matter of course, he made it clear that he was willing to join a Netanyahu-led government. This is one of the reasons behind the splintering of the once unified Arab political coalition, known as the Joint List.<\/p>\n

Following his meeting<\/a> with Netanyahu in February, Abbas justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one \u201cneeds to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

The fact that Netanyahu was largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel\u2019s Palestinian communities, seemed entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who was inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it included Israel\u2019s most chauvinistic political actors. Sadly, though not surprisingly, this has proved to be the case.<\/p>\n

Abbas\u2019s position became impossible to sustain in May during the well-coordinated Israeli war<\/a> in Gaza and the racist attacks<\/a> on Palestinian communities in Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and throughout Israel. But, even then, when Palestinians were finally able to articulate a common narrative linking the occupation, siege, racism, and apartheid in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel together, Abbas insisted but to develop a unique position that would allow him to sustain his chances of achieving power at any cost.<\/p>\n

Although it was the Palestinian Arab communities that were under systematic attacks<\/a> carried by Israeli Jewish mobs and police, Abbas called<\/a> on his community to \u201cbe responsible and behave wisely,\u201d and to \u201cmaintain public order and keep the law.\u201d He even parroted similar lines used by right-wing Israeli Jewish politicians, as he claimed that \u201cpeaceful popular protests\u201d by Palestinian communities inside Israel have turned \u201cconfrontational,\u201d thus creating a moral equilibrium where the victims of racism, somehow, became responsible for their own plight.<\/p>\n

Abbas\u2019s position has not changed since the signing of the coalition deal on June 2. His political narrative is almost apolitical as he insists on reducing the national struggle of the Palestinian people to the mere need for economic developments \u2013 not fundamentally different from Netanyahu\u2019s own \u2018economic peace\u2019 proposal<\/a> in the past. Worse, Abbas intentionally delinks the state of poverty and underdevelopment in Palesitnian communities from state-championed racial discrimination, which constantly underfunds Arab communities while spending<\/a> exuberant amounts of funds on illegal Jewish settlements that are built on ethnically cleansed Palestinian lands.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have reached a critical mass of agreements in various fields that serves the interest of Arab society and that provide solutions for the burning issues in Arab society \u2014 planning, the housing crisis, and of course, fighting violence and organized crime,\u201d Abbas said <\/a>triumphantly on June 2, as if the rooted inequality, including communal violence and organized crime are not direct results of racism, socio-economic inequality and political alienation and marginalization.<\/p>\n

No history has been made by Abbas. He is but an example of the self-serving politician and a direct expression of the endemic disunity in the Palestinian Arab body politic inside Israel.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the unprecedented success<\/a> of the Arab Joint List following the March 2020 elections, has now culminated to a tragic end, where the likes of Abbas become the unwelcomed \u2018representative\u2019 of a politically conscious and awakened community.<\/p>\n

In truth, Mansour Abbas, a Palestinian Arab politician who is willing to find common ground with extremists and proud \u2018Arab killers\u2019,\u00a0 only represents himself. The future shall attest to this claim.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of <\/em>The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is <\/em>The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is <\/em>These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (Clarity Press, Atlanta). Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul Zaim University (IZU). His website is <\/em>www.ramzybaroud.net<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 ramzybaroud.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

7 Jun 2021 – We are led to believe that history is being made in Israel, following the formation of a government coalition that for the first time includes an Arab party, Ra\u2019am. In truth, Mansour Abbas, a Palestinian Arab politician who is willing to find common ground with extremists and proud \u2018Arab killers\u2019, only represents himself. The future shall attest to this claim. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":186613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2221,120,1829,1030,87,267,1029,487,2395,2414,2415,2416,771,1027,2417,85,2418,109,287,1572,985,880,292,70,126,1025,886],"class_list":["post-186612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-checkpoints","tag-conflict","tag-coronavirus","tag-fatah","tag-gaza","tag-geopolitics","tag-hamas","tag-human-rights","tag-international-criminal-court-icc","tag-israeli-apartheid","tag-israeli-army","tag-israeli-occupation","tag-nakba","tag-oslo-accords","tag-palestine-israel-apartheid-wall","tag-palestine-israel","tag-palestinian-rights","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-settlers","tag-social-justice","tag-state-terrorism","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-west-bank","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264147,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186612\/revisions\/264147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186613"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}