Summary
An Arab political party in Israel founded by Abd el-Wahhab Darawshe to contest the 1988 elections, presenting itself, on Dowty’s account, as a potential coalition partner within the broad Israeli consensus while supporting Palestinian statehood in the territories (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
Details
- Darawshe, a Labor Knesset member, resigned from his party in protest over the army’s handling of the intifada and formed the party; its strategy was to organize a truly independent but moderate Arab list that could win enough seats to bargain as a potential member of a governing coalition — if such a party were to gain half a dozen seats, less than half of the potential Arab vote, it could conceivably put Israeli Arabs in an unprecedented position to bargain in consociational style, and the party’s platform stressed this strategy (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
- It won one seat in 1988 and two in 1992; during the 1990 governmental crisis Shimon Peres invited Darawshe to join a projected Labor-led government, but in 1992 Yitzhak Rabin formed a government without it, counting on its two votes, with the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality’s three, as a “blocking majority” and for peace-process votes such as the 61 to 59 approval of the Interim Peace Agreement on October 6, 1995 (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
- In coalition with the Islamic Movement it won four seats in 1996; the Islamic Movement, which had not entered Knesset elections before 1996, had by some estimates the allegiance of one-quarter to one-third of Israeli Muslims, though an Israeli Arab researcher reported in 1995 that Islamism among Israeli Muslims had peaked and was waning (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4193-4260, lines 4261-4325).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Abd el-Wahhab Darawshe, First Intifada