Tags
Democracy, Election Boycott, Elections, Elections 2013, palestine, Popular Campaign, Zionist Knesset
Press Release
October 18, 2012
In fast response to the setting of the date of the Knesset elections to January 22, 2013, some of the youth activists published an invitation on Facebook and on Sunday October 14 there was a first meeting in Haifa Al-Ghad club. A group of activists gathered to discuss ways to mobilize for the boycott of the elections. They stressed the need to forward the boycott as an independent political alternative, as part of a political program of popular struggle outside the Parliament. This is in contrast to the claims of the parties that take part in the elections to the Zionist Knesset, which describe the boycott as avoidance of politics and isolation from the political struggle.
The participants in the meeting discussed their positions toward the Knesset and toward the participation in the elections. They agreed that the Knesset is not a real Parliament and that the election process in Israel is not a real democratic process. The Zionist movement, as a colonial settlements movement, established the state of Israel, the state of the “Jewish Majority”, by consciously promoting the forced migration and the denial of the Palestinian majority in its homeland by means of massacres, raising the specter of genocide, spreading terror and death. After achieving this, it acted to conceal the minority that remained in its homeland in the Diaspora of national denial. It all sums up to the political extermination of the Palestinian people. The Knesset is the source of legitimacy to these ethnic cleansing, occupation, oppression and racial discrimination. The permission that is given to some Palestinian Arabs to take part in the elections is designed to exploit them to strengthen the legitimacy of all these brutal practices, in order to convert the racist colonialist state, through their recognition, to “Jewish and Democratic”!!
The participants related to the experience of the previous elections and the popular boycott campaigns. They noted the public sympathy and the accumulation of awareness, which make the boycott position, to some extent, the majority position. The people are conscious to the alienation that they experience under Zionist rule. The participants defined, accordingly, the goals of the boycott campaign, including increasing the proportion of boycotters, and transforming the raw public feeling of distrust toward the Zionist state and its organs, and the sense of futility in the presence of the Arab MPS in the Knesset den, into a clearly expressed patriotic political position, and from it to advanced step in the struggle, which would express the unity of the struggle and the destiny of the Palestinian people.
The participants decided to appeal to the media not to marginalize the voice of the boycott, as this is the voice with the widest presence among the public. They decided to act to highlight the boycott position on all the stages where the elections are discussed.
They also called on all participants in the election campaign, the contesting parties and the boycott activists, to preserve the spirit of real democracy. This spirit is a basic requirement and necessity between our masses in their battle to stay on the land of the homeland, confronting the policies of the Zionist regime. They called for sticking to the debate about the real issues, in view of the service of the public interest, keeping away from defamation and cramping.
At the end of the meeting, an initiating committee was formed in order to communicate with supporters of the boycott across the country, with the aim of organizing the widest popular campaign for boycotting the Zionist Knesset elections
You can also read the original text in Arabic or the Hebrew translation.