The relative success of parties representing Israel’s non-Jewish populations is clearly something for the likes of the Guardian to celebrate, yet it stimulates a certain awkwardness too. ( ‘Apartheid’ and all that.)
It has been instructive to see how they have presented the story in line with their main dogmas. The principal trick has been to consistently refer to all non-Jews in Israel as’ Palestinians’.
Having to admit that some of these people might even be ‘Zionists’ would add a whole new layer of awkwardness, but the imposition of of the apparently comforting Pal identity carries with it the suggestion that Israel itself is an imposed colonial superstructure, underneath which there exists a somehow inclusive yet oppressed post-colonial nation waiting to emerge from the flames (nuclear fireball?). This is counter-factual and dangerously delusional.
Before the state of Israel it was the region’s Jews who identified as ‘Palestinian’. Once Arafat’s movement (heavily influenced by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood) separated itself from the Arab nationalisms around it in the late sixties and adopted the name themselves, they came up with a flag — and this flag features sections in the colours of green, white and black, representative of the three historical caliphates. As such it is an explicitly expansionist-colonialist emblem hiding in plain sight, far more so than the Israeli flag.
This is one reason it is so readily adopted by Islamists and Islamist-adjacent political movements across Europe and elsewhere.
Yet it would be fanciful indeed to assume that Israel’s non-Jews would all prefer to live their lives in the society that it portends, as opposed to one which offers them a chance to participate in say, free elections.
