Screencap of Netanyahu video on Facebook 3-17-2015
Israel, Politics

PM Netanyahu: High Arab Voting is Like an Enemy Army Attack

http://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152778935532076
Let’s just make sure that we are digesting that this really happened: the Prime Minister of a country just said explicitly that high voter turnout from a sector of the citizenry he serves is not only bad, but a threat on par with a military attack from an enemy army. About 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab; they generally vote in low numbers and receive disproportionately poor government service. This year, the diverse Arab political parties united to run in a Joint List, leading to projections of significantly higher Arab voter turnout and closer-to-proportional representation in Knesset. Clearly, few to none of those voters will support Likud or any of the parties close to Netanyahu. But partisan number-crunching notwithstanding, Bibi Netanyahu is not a mere party strategist; he’s the Prime Minister and constantly hectors the world about how Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Not that this is news per se, but the racist truth doesn’t get much clearer than this as to who is counted in that democracy: there are real citizens, the Israeli Jews (even if they live in settlements on land Israel has not annexed) and there are citizens in name only who are considered to be a hostile foreign threat (Arab citizens of Israel, who live in land fully under the jurisdiction of Israeli law).
Here’s the desperate, election day video plea, with a translation by Lisa Goldman:
“The government of the Right is in danger. Arab voters are turning out in huge numbers at the polling stations. Left wing NGOs are bringing them in buses. Ladies and gentlemen we don’t have V15 (an anti-Bibi get-out-the-vote campaign). We only have ‘tzav 8’ (the name for an emergency call up notice to army reserve soldiers). Go to the polling stations, bring your relatives and bring your friends, vote ‘mahal’ (the acronym for Likud’s name on the ballot slip), let’s close the gap between us and the Labor party. And with your help, and with God’s help, we will create a nationalist government that will protect the state of Israel.”

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