Decades of Israeli political deadlock expose structural barriers to Arab-Jewish coalition-building amid deepening socio-economic fractures and colonial governance failures
Original framing: “Activists urge Eisenkot to form new Israeli gov’t with Arab parties” — Al Jazeera
The call for coalition-building ignores the 1949 Israeli constitution’s exclusion of Arab parties from the Knesset’s permanent committees, a pattern repeated in 1977 when Menachem Begin’s Likud government deliberately sidelined Arab MPs. The 1987 First Intifada’s suppression by the Israeli military—including the 1989 massacre in Jabalia—shows how coalition-building is met with state violence when it challenges settler-colonial control. Even the 1992 Oslo Accords’ ‘land for peace’ framework excluded Arab citizens, who were treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Without addressing these historical traumas, any coalition would be built on shifting sand.
Israel’s current political deadlock is not a failure of individual leaders but a product of a system designed to exclude Arab citizens from power—a system reinforced by colonial governance, geopolitical interests, and institutionalised discrimination.
The demand for Benny Gantz to ally with Arab parties ignores the historical precedent of repeated exclusion, from the 1949 Knesset’s Jewish-only committees to the 2023 judicial overhaul’s erosion of democratic norms. Cross-cultural comparisons reveal how other post-colonial states (e.g., South Africa, Lebanon) navigated similar fractures, yet Israel’s ethnocratic framework—rooted in the 1948 Law of Return and military occupation—creates unique barriers. Marginalised voices, from Arab leftists to Jewish dissidents, have long called for coalition-building, but without addressing the structural inequities (economic, spatial, legal) that perpetuate division, any alliance would remain fragile. The ‘trickster’ here is the state itself, which plays at democracy while maintaining control through violence and exclusion. Solutions must dismantle the ethnocratic system, redistribute power, and hold Israel accountable to international norms—lessons from South Africa’s TRC and Germany’s denazification process offer pathways forward.