Palestinians in Israel are far more liberal than Jews. Nearly 90 percent say they would support a Palestinian party being part of the government, while Israeli Jews reject that idea overwhelmingly. So the one group that doesn’t buy into Zionism is the only hope to save Israel from its rightwing intolerance; and it is time that American Jews understand that reality.

Watching the election results on Israeli TV this week was to see Zionism in all its racist glory. The Palestinian parties were big winners Tuesday, finishing third with 13 seats, and the experts all declare, No governing coalition can include Arabs!

When Donald Trump race-baits minorities, the New York Times offers his targets space to respond. But the Times published Netanyahu’s smears of Palestinian political parties as terrorists without giving them space to respond and repeatedly diminished their achievement in the election, in which they finished behind the two leading Jewish parties.

The Israeli election challenges Americans to recognize what “Jewish democracy” has produced: a rightwing society in which all the politicking has been on the far right, and even the center-left Blue White calls for expanding the illegal occupation and pounding Gaza. Palestinian parties are a sign of real democracy, but leading Jewish parties want nothing to do with them.

With only two days to go, the Joint List was campaigning for a last push to unseat Netanyahu is Israel’s snap election. “It’s simple,” Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List told Mondoweiss. If 65 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel vote on Tuesday, “we will bring down Netanyahu.” 

Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud says Israel’s repeat national elections grants the Palestinian leadership a golden opportunity to seek lessons from last April’s results where they dropped four seats and lost their standing as the third-largest party in the legislature.

The governing coalitions that are likely to come out of the Israeli election are all absent the third largest party, the Palestinian Joint List, because it’s not Jewish and Zionist. “We will not invite a party that does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” Blue and White leader Gabi Ashkenazi says. So what does that say about Israel’s claim to be a democracy?

If you want a metaphor for Israel don’t think of Spartan farmer-soldiers, as the Zionist myth would have it — a better metaphor would be 1950s Alabama, with an air force. “The average Israeli is xenophobic and racist on a level which would make a Trump rally go pale,” Yossi Gurvitz writes.

The nature of Zionist politics is always to lurch right not left. As Israel moves closer to elections Ehud Barak’s party has pushed talking points on “deterrence” in Gaza which has made his leftwing Meretz partners uneasy.

As Israeli elections approach, Avigdor Lieberman remains the kingmaker of a likely rightwing coalition. Even if the new leftleaning Democratic Union and center join up, they would need the Palestinian parties and Lieberman to create a majority bloc, and that is not going to happen, Jonathan Ofir observes.