Israeli Arabs fear a Gaza backlash as far right prepares for power role

Peter Beaumont in Umm Al-Fahm

The Observer, Sunday 8 February 2009

Israeli Arabs fear a Gaza backlash as far right prepares for power roleThe elections have been overshadowed by Gaza - and the man most likely to gain takes the hardest line on the conflict.

Fadi Mustafa is a successful young PR executive. He has an office in Tel Aviv and another in the northern Israeli Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, where his family home is. He encourages other young Israeli Arabs to break through the glass ceiling of discrimination. He was what Israeli Arabs call a "straight back", in contrast to a previous generation - the "bent backs" who were bowed down by the experience of the creation of the Israeli state and the wars that followed.

He will look any Israeli in the eye as an equal, he insists, and shows me a painting that was given to him by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman.

But right now Fadi is an angry man, enraged by the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Homeland) Party.

On Tuesday, if all the polls are right, Lieberman will emerge as the most significant beneficiary of an Israeli general election campaign played out against the bloody background of the three-week assault on Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians died, many of them civilians.

The rightwing Likud party of Benyamin Netanyahu will probably emerge as the winner ahead of the Kadima party of Tzipi Livni. But most Israelis also recognise the wider significance of the moment: these elections are likely to mark the emergence of a far-right force, with a racist anti-Arab agenda, as the country's power broker.

If Lieberman has his way - and his party has surged ahead of Labour to push it to a humiliating fourth place - Umm al-Fahm may be transferred out of Israel into the Palestinian Authority, something its residents forcefully oppose in exchange for Israeli "villages", or settlements.


Well worth continuing reading: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/08/gaza-israel-elections-far-right

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