JERUSALEM — Hanin Zoabi, an Israeli Arab, believes Israeli Jews are colonialists who stole Palestinian land. She makes no distinction between the recent deaths of Israeli civilians and their attackers, calling both “victims of the Israeli occupation.”
Those are typical views of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as some Arab citizens of Israel like Zoabi. But for her to make such comments strikes many Jews as incendiary — because she is also a member of Israel's parliament, the Knesset.
Zoabi's verbal attacks have sparked questions among Jews here about her loyalty to Israel  — as well as the loyalty of the other 16 Israeli Arabs in the Knesset — at a time when Israel is confronting months of attacks on Jews by Palestinians.
“The main criminal here is the occupation, the oppression of the Palestinian people,” Zoabi said in an interview. “If we want to defend the people, Jewish and Palestinian, we must struggle against occupation and Israeli aggression.”
Israel's Arab citizens make up 21% of the population, but suspicions about them among Jewish citizens have soared in recent months because a handful of Israeli Arabs were among the more than 100 Palestinians who have attacked Israeli civilians and soldiers. Hostilities escalated in February after Zoabi and two other Israeli-Arab lawmakers met with families of Palestinian attackers killed by Israeli security forces.
The three stood for a moment of silence in memory of the attackers to focus attention on Israel’s refusal to hand over the bodies for burial. “We sat with bereaved families that lost their sons and daughters, and anyone who would differentiate between” Israeli and Palestinian “families would be a racist,” Zoabi said.
Angered by the visit, the Knesset’s Ethics Committee temporarily banned the three lawmakers from most parliamentary activities, and the Constitution Committee green-lighted a bill that would empower 90 of the 120 lawmakers to suspend a fellow member for “inappropriate” behavior.
Under the controversial bill, which should come up for a vote in the coming weeks, voicing racist ideology or support for armed conflict against Israel could lead to a suspension. So could opposition to the long-enshrined definition of Israel as both a democratic and Jewish state.
Opponents of the measure, including Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, consider it blatantly undemocratic.
Knesset member Sharren Haskel, of the right-wing Likud Party, hopes it passes. “When (the Arab Knesset members) met with the families of terrorists, including one who murdered a mother in front of her children, and stood for a moment of silence to commemorate them, they were in fact promoting violence and hatred against the citizens of Israel,” Haskel said. “No one should be able to use their parliamentary privilege to destroy our democracy.”
Barak Medina, an expert in constitutional law at Hebrew University, said the debate over the bill exposes the friction between Israeli Jews and Arabs. “Twenty percent of the population is affiliated with an ethnicity which is formally an enemy," he said. "They feel the very establishment of the state of Israel was a nakba, a disaster. So there is inherent tension.”
Knesset member Aymen Odeh, who heads the Joint List, a coalition of Arab parties that form the third largest bloc in the parliament, accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of fomenting fear against Arab citizens by sponsoring the legislation. “Why is he inciting against Arabs and their leaders? Because we may be the votes that decide who will be the next prime minister,” Odeh said.
While Odeh condemned the Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, he stopped short of condemning violence against soldiers and Israeli settlers living on occupied-West Bank land that Palestinians claim is theirs. “The Palestinian struggle is a just struggle against the occupation,” he said.
Zoabi, with her pro-Palestinian sentiments and firebrand style, accused Israeli Jews of trying to “delete” Palestinians' historical ties to the land.
“They forget they immigrated to me, that I didn’t immigrate to them,” she said, discounting Jews' own historical ties to the territory. “Despite the huge injustice they make toward me and my people, despite the fact they stole my home and my homeland, I’m representing their vision of justice and democracy.”
Zoabi rejected accusations of being loyal to both Palestinians and her country.
“I don’t have dual loyalties. Just one, to my people and my values. I don’t believe in loyalty to the state. I believe in respecting the laws. I believe in human rights,” Zoabi said. “I am loyal to my people, the Palestinians.”
Zionism is the last of the European religious fanatic driven imperialist colonizations but it has all the characteristics of the prior European racial warfare colonizations where the native population is first branded practically non-existent, then when they can't sell that lie, the natives are primitive and don't use the land, then it's they're enemies in the way of Zionist goals of reestablishing a Kingdom of Israel that never historically existed in the first place. Oh, Israel existed but always as a struggling fledgling nation that never was able to replace the ancient Canaanite confederation of Canaanite city-states and inland tribal nations with a stable government, Canaanites never welcomed as such by Israeli Hebrews under Judah's rulership. Now, in our times, dna studies show that the Palestinian population carries both the old Canaanite and Hebrew populations genetically. Certainly the European Jews cannot claim Palestinian Right of Return since European Jews are most all Jewish convert descended. My own Ashkenazi dna analysis proves this fact that Zionists continually deny. In short, Israel showcases what happened in the Americas, in Africa, Australia and NZ when Europeans invaded and stole the land for European colonization. We don't want this racial genocidal warfare pattern to continue into the 21st Century. And no, there is no real democracy in Israel when Jews control everything and the native population must cater to European invader's demands.