Democratic Difficulties

On February 18^th 2015, The Ma’an News Agency published an online article titled “Israel court quashes ban on Haneen Zuabi election campaign”. The article reports on the recent Israeli Supreme Court decision to overrule the Central Election Committee ban on two candidates for the Knesset in the upcoming elections. The Central Elections Committee barred Haneen Zuabi and Baruch Marzel last week, relinquishing the ability of both candidates to be on the ballet in March. According to the Israeli government website, one function of the Central Elections Committee (CEC) includes approving the list of candidates for each election.  The orders from the CEC still required the approval of the Supreme Court which denied the ban.

The article briefly discusses each candidates political views and their subsequent reason for the CEC’s attempted ban. Haneen Zuabi is an active member of the Knesset who is running for re election this year and is a representative of the Balad political party. While the committee gave no official reason for the disqualification, her lawyer Hassan Jabareen said that it was because Zuabi was determined to be “hostile to the Jewish State”. This hostility stems from her (and her parties) rejection of Israel as a Jewish State, believing that it should be one single country in which Arabs and Jews have equal rights  Zuabi was also banned ahead of the 2013 election but that decision was also overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court, oddly mirroring the events preceding this years election.

The other candidate that the CEC voted to ban was Baruch Marzel. The article describes Marzel as an extreme right winger and a follower of the right wing political activist Rabbi Meir Kahane who was assassinated back in 1990.  Marzel is a member of the Kahane inspired Otzma Yehudit nationalist political party in Israel.  The article mentions that his disqualification from the CEC was due to alleged racist comments and actions towards Arabs and other migrants. Marzels attorney said the alleged comments and actions either never happened or were misunderstood.

           

The article ends with some background information on the Arab population living in Israel. It mentions that there are 1.3 million Arab-Israelis, composing 20 percent of the overall population of the country. While they constitute 20 percent of the population they are projected to possibly win a mere 10 to 13 seats in the 120 member Knesset, only around 10 percent. The article ends with a history lesson about how the present day 1.3 million Arab-Israelis are descendants of the 160,000 Palestinians who remained despite the mass displacement during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

The authorship of the article summarized above is credited to the “Ma’an Staff”. The Ma’an News Agency is the largest independent media group in the West Bank and Gaza strip. While Ma’an is popular in Palestine the company has been criticized for having an anti-Semitic tone. While there is not blatant anti Semitism in this article, there does exist a heavily pro-Arab/pro-Palestinian viewpoint. This viewpoint is expressed in three main ways. First of all the article is heavily focused on Zuabi (the Arab candidate) and little attention is given to Marzel (the Jewish candidate). His name is not mentioned in the title and only 3 lines of the article are dedicated to his analysis compared to 7 lines for Zuabi. It seems to me that Marzel was just added as an inadequate attempt at representing both sides of the issue, he was thrown in as a side note.

Secondly the only opinion represented in the article is that of Adalah, an Arab-Israeli legal rights group which is a strong pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli advocate.  They are quoted in the article condemning the CEC, calling them racist with improper motives to portray Arab members of the Knesset as terrorist. What this quote fails to mention is that only one of the two candidates banned were Arab which undermines the theory that the CEC is trying to portray strictly Arabs as terrorists. It would be more appropriate to claim that the Committee is trying to portray all radical politicians as terrorists, since both Zuabi and Marzel are considered radical politicians and are not both considered Arabs.

The third aspect of the report that reflects a pro-Arab tone are the final three paragraphs of the article that outline some information about Arab-Israelis. There is no purpose to include this information other than to paint the Palestinians in Israel as victims and are deserving of our sympathy. While the content is reliable, it is one sided and inefficient without posting similar information about the Jewish population of Israel.

The specific data and sources included in this article are all reliable. The Ma’an news agency, while one sided is respected as reliable. The reporting work is also contributed to AFP (Agence France‑Presse) which is one of the oldest international news agencies in the world.  AFP has a respectable history of trustworthy journalism which gives the article and its data legitimacy. In my opinion this article’s downfall is its biased one sided nature not its source or information legitimacy. This is a similar trend that I found in the previous Ma’an article I reviewed concerning Palestinian Cartoonists and a trend that I assume I will run into repeatedly as I continue to research the Arab-Israeli political news.