Haneen Zoabi
Due perhaps to my Jewish identity and my family’s history, Israel tends to be the country whose politics I follow most closely apart from Canada’s and the United States’. Nevertheless, there is a giant gulf separating numbers one and two from number three. My understanding of Israeli parties, personalities, and issues is far from perfect, and when I observe the campaign leading up to the January 22 elections to Israel’s Knesset, I do so as an outsider.
There is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, something that I feel very passionately about, as I strongly believe in Palestinian national aspirations, equal for Israel’s Arab citizens, and a just peace to the decades of bloodshed. But there are other issues too, issues on which I have less access to information: the 2011 social justice protests against high housing costs that have bestowed renewed importance upon socioeconomic matters in Israel, the . . . → Read More: Song of the Watermelon: Fanatics, Zealots, Warmongers, and Peaceniks: Israel’s Crowded Electoral Landscape