The aftermaths of Operation Cast Lead, the biggest offensive against Palestinian territories since 1967, are going to influence the vote of the Arab Israelis, who represent almost the 20% of the whole population. How will these voters, that now can count only one representative Minister, behave during these elections? The contradictions that involve their leadership were renewed the 12th January, when the Central Elections Committee, with a measure widely approved by the major parties – Likud, Kadima and Labor – excluded two Arab parties, Balad and the United Arab List – Ta’al, from the elections. The Arab parties were accused to held ambiguous relationships with terrorists and to deny Israel as a Jewish State. On the 21th the High Court of Justice revoked the measure, explaining that it was built on antidemocratic and racist basis.

The two parties menaced to establish an alternative Arab Knesset if the measure was not going to be revoked. Their bargain power in the general game isn’t that much: according to Haaretz polls, Balad and Ual-Ta’al can count on two or three seats each, on the 120 composing the Knesset. Back to the initial situation in which there are 34 parties running for the elections – this one a sign of a society counting plural and stratified minorities and political issues – international media took it as a chance to reflect upon the meaning of the exclusion measure and on the state of democracy in Israel, recently exposed to more than one interrogative.

It seems quite obvious that the exclusion and later admittance to the electoral run were taken under the stress of the military operation in Gaza. These facts, though, can be seen also as a sign of Likud’s – the right wing party lead by Netanyahu, the election favourite – radicalization and under the influence of one of Israel’s most discussed parties, Lieberman’s Israel Beitenou. Israel Beitenou, according to last polls, could become the third political force in an hypothetical scenario, beside Likud and the center-right oriented Kadima. Which kind of repercussions could an electoral scenario as this one have for the Arab Israelis? The already harsh climate between the two parts, as The Jerusalem Post stated, has definitely gone off when Lieberman and a member of the Ual party, Sanaa, argued around fascist and terrorist biases, which don’t help the democratic spirit to improve.

As Haaretz later reported, Lieberman declared that “The court […] gave the Arab parties license to kill the state of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. In the next Knesset, we will pass a citizenship law that will prevent the disloyalty of some of Israel’s Arabs”. On the other hand, another member of Ual-Ta’al, Ahmed Tibi, declared that “The sentence of the Court is only the beginning, since in Israel racism has become mainstream”. That Arab Israelis are victims of racism is nothing new on the spot. In a comment on the Jerusalem Post, the former Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh remembered that, beside Rabin, no Israeli Prime Minister has ever had a different attitude towards the Palestinian community. Inequality, as Sneh affirmed, goes from discrimination at work to exclusion from overall planning building projects, especially in the North. For Sneh, this has arisen an hostile and negative political leadership.

The major Arab party, Hadash, has been charged of ambiguity by political analysts since its website seems to propose two different versions – one in Hebrew in which they oppose the conflict in Gaza without recognizing terrorists and one in Arabic declaring support to “any form of resistance”. Haaretz reflected upon the contradictions that live within the Arab leadership in Israel; it underlines the conflicted nature of a party that has the sticky duty to represent a community that feels the war differently from other citizens in Israel and to express a radically different sensibility and political tradition from the surrounding context. As the New York Times informed in a recent report in the villages of the North, where the presence of Arab Israelis becomes more evident, these citizens are constantly pending between processes of “Palestinization” and “Israelization”. As Shalom Dichter, former co-director of Sikku – an association promoting equal rights in Israel – stated, the relationship between the Jewish State and its Arab minority always moved on “an axis of continuous inclusion and exclusion”.

Arab Israelis are part of that 4% that opposed the war in Gaza. Their protests, when not repressed by the police, were damped by their own political leaders. The polarization generated through the conflict, lying on identity issues more than political ones, is going to vex Arab minorities in Israel and to have predictable effects on their electoral choices. No matter how the elections on the 10th February will turn on, it’s not hard to foresee that times will be harsh for the Palestinians in Israel.