Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January 2005 and is in the fifteenth year of his “four-year” term, so you’d think the last thing his Fatah party would want to do is call more attention to the fact that Palestinians have not had any elections since 2006. But you’d be wrong.
Ahead of the September 17 Israeli election, Fatah’s Facebook page posted 11 different posters calling on Arabs to vote — in Israel.
Among the slogans promoted on the page by Fatah were “Your representation in the Knesset will work to restore yoru status — VOTE!” and “Your vote — your future” and “Please note: If you do not vote your vote will go to the [Israeli] right.”
This message was also pervasive in Palestinian Authority (PA) media, including PA-aligned newspapers. One day before the election, an article in the newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida by Muhammad Ali Taha read “Avoiding [Arab] voting is [Israeli PM Binyamin] Netanyahu’s goal because he is scared of the Arab vote, so go down to the polls and contribute to his downfall.”
In the same paper, columnist Omar Halmi al-Ghul wrote “Non-voting works for the benefit of the Zionist colonial forces… So we should all demand that our public vote and participate massively.”
The irony of calling for Arabs in Israel to vote while their own people in the West Bank have not had an election in almost a decade and a half has not been lost on Palestinians. They have reportedly been flooding social media with responses along the lines of — “They should vote? What about us?” and ending their posts with the trending hashtag (in Arabic): #wewantelections.
Source: Australia-Israel Review, October 2019, page 11.
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