‘You need the power of all your votes’: Bedouin women secure success for Arab parties in Israeli election

Hanan Alsanah and Amira Habdoubi from Abu Talul at a meeting of the women’s group Alashniat. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Hanan Alsanah and Amira Habdoubi from Abu Talul at a meeting of the women’s group Alashniat. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian ‘You need the power of all your votes’: Bedouin women secure success for Arab parties in Israeli election With 180,000 eligible voters, Bedouin turnout was key in Palestinian-led parties winning unprecedented 19 seats Last year, Umm Khaled Fatoun returned from volunteering in a Jewish-Arab support centre for victims of war to find bulldozers tearing into her son’s house in the Bedouin village of Azzarnug. The demolition crew, who arrived under police escort, did not even allow them to remove furniture or solar panels before reducing the home and its contents to a pile of rubble. This week, she took action of her own at the ballot box, targeting the extremist national security minister who ordered – and boasts about – the mass destruction of Palestinian and Arab homes. “I had one goal, to send [Itamar] Ben-Gvir home,” Fatoun said. “There isn’t a single family in the Bedouin community that hasn’t been hurt .” In the weeks before election day, she joined a grassroots campaign to educate other Bedouin women about their rights and potential power. It had spectacular results, with voting rates tripling in some Bedouin villages in the southern Negev region in Tuesday’s election, amid a broader surge in turnout among Bedouin voters. Graphic of projected seats in the KnessetYears of violent, racist government opened the door for change in conservative communities, said lawyer Hanan Alsanah, who founded the Alnashmiat network that led the grassroots programme. “We said that even if all the men go to vote, it is only half the community. You need the power of all your votes, because Ben-Gvir has a lot of power,” she said. Alsanah is also co-director of Itach-Ma’aki, female lawyers for social justice. The rise in Bedouin votes came amid a historically high turnout among Arab citizens of Israel. Their votes secured an unprecedented 19 seats in the Knesset for Palestinian-led parties and were critical to stripping the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies of their governing majority. This year, the lowest turnout in any Bedouin community was 62%. The highest was more than 93%. With an estimated 180,000 eligible voters, their turnout was key to the Islamist Ra’am party beating polling expectations.