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...

In Nazareth long time mayor Ramiz Jaraisi ( Hadash , Christian) finally (for the first election in autumn see here ) lost his position to his former deputy 'Ali Salam (formerly with Hadash , Muslim) after a recall election had been ordered by the Israeli Supreme Court. While some might simply argue, that after 20 years in office voters are just tired of Jaraisi, others believe the loss of the mayoralty in the so called "red city" indicates a downfall of the Communist dominated Hadash , once Israel's most important Arab party: Nazareth election beginning of end for Israel's Communist Party by Daoud Kuttab, Al-Monitor The loss of the Nazareth  mayoralty  in the March 11 recall elections marked the beginning of the end of the Israeli Communist Party in Israel. Ramez Jaraisi, the mayor for nearly four decades, lost to Ali Salam , who won more than 61% of the city’s votes.   Israeli Communist leaders in Nazareth accepted defeat and issued a stat...