Israel: the fraud accusation as a weapon against the Arab vote

According to Courrier international, the committee charged with overseeing Israel's elections has asked the Shin Bet, the domestic security service, to investigate allegations of Qatari funding that allegedly benefited the Arab parties in the parliamentary vote. Still according to the magazine, the outgoing prime minister and his allies are using this to demonize those parties, cry election theft and delegitimise any alliance with them, an alliance the opposition, led by Gadi Eisenkot, would need to secure a majority.

What we still don't know is considerable: the dispatch says nothing about the precise nature of the allegations, any evidence behind them, or the timetable of the inquiry. Courrier international itself speaks of "vague suspicions". What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

Yet a suspicion does not need to be proven to produce its effects. It only needs to circulate. An inquiry handed to the security services, a word like "theft" thrown in the middle of coalition talks, and suddenly elected representatives, chosen by voters, are filed in advance among the suspects. The method is an old one: you do not fight an opponent, you contest the very right of his voters to be counted. That it is the body supervising the ballot that opens the door to this staging should worry everyone who still believes in the neutrality of referees.

The trap also closes on the opposition. If it needs Arab votes to govern, the temptation will be strong to keep them at arm's length, to back them without saying so, or to thank them with silence. This is where Rosa Luxemburg's old lesson on coalitions and parliamentary compromises regains its edge: the test is not the arithmetic of seats, but whether an arrangement strengthens the confidence and power of those at the bottom, or demobilises them in the name of respectability. An anti-Netanyahu front built on the exclusion of Palestinian citizens would be nothing more than a more polite management of the same order.

Luxemburg also argued that democracy is indispensable to the working class, because it is by exercising its rights, and fighting for them, that it becomes aware of its interests. What is being sought here is to discredit precisely that exercise: voting, electing, weighing in. To those one wants to send back to the antechamber, the answer will not come from commissions or general staffs, but from the street, the neighbourhoods, and the patient organisation of their own forces.

An inquiry into funding is the least one can expect. But when the inquiry serves mainly as a curtain, it is the stage behind it that deserves watching, not the curtain.