Israeli Arabs won't vote

The settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Israeli settlers, are the most hated thing to the Palestinians. It's all too familiar; when Palestinian speakers and the Palestinian press mention the settlers, they often contemptuously call them "the herds of settlers," to indicate they are a wild, unrestrained horde. Shedding settler blood is not just permissible in the eyes of Palestinian groups like Hamas, but in the eyes of the entire Palestinian public, including in the eyes of Arafat's regime.

The Palestinian Authority, which regularly publishes its reservations about any terror attacks in Israel that kill civilians, never sees the need to condemn an attack on a settlement. Even if the victims are children on their way to school. In Palestinian eyes, the settlers are part of the occupying army, and moreover, they embody the ugliness of Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

These feelings don't exist only in Palestinian territory, but to a great extent also among Israel's Arab citizens. This might lead one to think that if there were a referendum on the disengagement plan that involves uprooting settlements in Gaza, Israeli Arabs would all turn out to support it and give Ariel Sharon a majority of the popular vote. But that will almost certainly not happen.

Israeli Arabs, like some of the Israeli left, will not come to the polls at all. If it's hard to drum up enthusiasm for voting in favor of Sharon on any matter among supporters of the Labor Party and Meretz, then it's even harder among Israeli Arabs, who don't have the merest spark of such enthusiasm.

Experience with Israeli Arab voting patterns indicates that Arabs throng to the polls when something directly affects them - and are apathetic about wider public issues. The clearest example is the Arab turnout for municipal elections. The Arab turnout in local elections is very high. All the rival parties (most based on the big families) recruit every possible vote in order to take control of the local council. But when it comes to more general things, like the race between Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon for prime minister, Israeli Arab voter turnout dropped substantially to a virtual boycott.

Theoretically the Arabs should vote for disengagement as a blow to the settlers. However, the entire subject that is so traumatic to many Israelis - uprooting Jews from their place of residence - does not speak to Israeli Arab hearts at all. Palestinian nationalism is entirely fed by the tragic experience of the 1948 war, in which half of the Palestinian people lost their homes and land and became refugees. The entire Palestinian ethos is built on them losing their livelihoods, honor and identity, when they were uprooted from land they had settled for generations. So Israeli tears about a few hundred families that will be generously compensated after just a few years of settlement looks like a con.

This phenomenon is probably well-known to Ariel Sharon, who is justifiably worried about a referendum. He could easily lose because the supporters of disengagement, and those indifferent to it - meaning Israeli Arabs - won't come to the polls, while the opponents will wake the dead from their graves to vote en masse. The settlers and their supporters are right, therefore, in demanding a referendum. They most certainly could win, and they could even stick their necks out and not demand an absolute majority to neutralize the Arab vote. Israel's Arab citizens will not go to the polls.