At Radio Nas, a popular Arabic-language station in Nazareth, I meet news anchor Mohammed Magadli, who is also an analyst for Israel’s Channel 12. His father, Raleb Magadli, served as Israel’s first Muslim minister between 2007 and 2009, representing the Labour party.
I ask the younger Magadli what he makes of Change Bloc leaders refusing to join forces with Arab parties.
“In a word it’s racism. But if we’re trying to explain why, it’s because of the political interests of Benjamin Netanyahu,” he says. “He’s trying all the time to pull the legitimacy of the Arab parties – because they’re Arab, because they’re Palestinian. This is affecting the majority of the Jewish parties in Israel.”
Polls this week have suggested that both Eisenkot’s bloc and Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist bloc could each win around 50 seats of the 120 in Israel’s parliament while 13 or 14 seats in total could go to Arab-majority groupings.
These are the Joint Arab List, a coalition of Hadash, Balad and Taal, and the smaller United Arab List, an Islamist party headed by politician Mansour Abbas.
