MENA Minorities

The Knesset election took place already five month ago, but the traditional paper about the Arab voting behaviour from Tel Aviv University's Konrad Adenauer Center is a welcome opportunity for a supplement. The great thing about the paper is, that you don't have to compile the data of Arab villages from the election commission yourself (not fun at all if you are not literate in Hebrew). Bayan-The Arabs in Israel Issue no. 5, June 2015 (ed. by Itamar Radai & Arik Rudnizky) Let me just highlight a few numbers: The Joint (Arab) List led by Aymen Odeh reached 82.4% in the whole so called Arab sector (i.e. Arab villages and towns including Druze and Circassians - mixed cities with Jewish majority like Haifa or Akko not counted ). If we add the 0.8% of the minor Arab parties who were not part of the Joint List, the Arab parties achieved 83.2% in the Arab sector. This is a rise of 5% compared to the 2013 election. If we have a comparative look at the 2009 election, wh...

Swedish Journalist Carl Drott provides a fascinating account of the Dawronoye , a Christian guerrilla force, operating in Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Read all about its roots in the Turkish far left of the 1980s, its relationship with the Kurdish PKK and how its caders helped to set up the Syriac Military Council. Noteworthy is how the fighters interviewed were annoyed by the ongoing argument in the diaspora, whether they should call themselves Syriacs, Assyrian or Aramean. The Revolutionaries of Bethnahrin  by Carl Drott, War Scapes

Recently the Israeli Druze have gained the attention of national and international media. This has mainly two reasons: The tragic death of two members of the community in the recent terror attacks in Jerusalem and  Muslim-Druze violence in the Galilee village of Abu Snan .  Jadan As'ad (who is related to former Knesset-member As'ad As'ad), a border policeman from the village of Bait Jann, was killed when a Palestinian driver slammed into a light rail station on November 5. The other, Zidan Saif a policofficer from the village of Yanuh, was killed while he tried to rescue the inmates of the synagogue in Har Hof during the terror attack on November 18. His funeral was that of a national hero with hundrets of Haredim and President Reuven Rivlin in attendence. Additionally, in the mixed village of Abu Snan (one of the few with a Muslim majority and a Druze minority) clashes between Muslim and Druze youth occured, which led to wounding 41 people. The Druze side was using l...

I have touched the phenomenon of Aramean nationalism among Israel's Christians population  - which is kinda connected with the attempts of recruiting Christians into the IDF - here and here already. Now Haaretz features an article about it but disappoints for mainly two reasons: No mention that Aramean nationalism in Israel is foremost found among the tiny Maronite community (not all Christians) and no discussion of the active part the state is playing in these regards. Israeli Christian community, neither Arab nor Palestinian, are fighting to save identity by Judy Maltz, Haaretz