Fear of Netanyahu victory may drive big surge in Palestinian voter turnout

It’s not hard to grasp why Palestinian citizens of Israel might view Gadi Eisenkot, the former chief of staff who is mounting a formidable electoral challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu, as merely the lesser of two evils.

With Netanyahu’s coalition continuing its brutal attacks on Gaza, its enabling of settler violence and Palestinian displacement in the West Bank and its blind eye to soaring murder rates in Arab areas, anyone might seem better than Bibi.

Even Eisenkot, a man known best for his doctrine of disproportionate bombing in Lebanon as chief of staff and currently as a rejectionist of Palestinian statehood and of Arab parties as coalition partners, seems less egregious than Netanyahu.

“In these elections the options are the Netanyahu camp, which is offering genocide and the anti-Netanyahu camp, which is offering apartheid,” says Sami Abu Shehadeh, leader of Balad, an antizionist party that is one of three parties comprising the Joint List, which is polling as the largest Arab grouping in advance of the October 27 ballot.

“We don’t want either. We want a normal democracy where people get rights according to citizenship, an end to wars in the Middle East and equality, justice and freedom for everyone,” he told The Jewish Independent in his office in Jaffa on Tuesday.

But Abu Shehadeh stresses: “Unfortunately we are small, and on the margins, and the real options are genocide and apartheid.”

Within those parameters, he says, “apartheid is much less evil than genocide. Genocide means you won’t exist. Apartheid means you can at least stay and struggle for a better [situation]”.