of the Israeli public is willing to vote for and endorse the hate and racism of the Likud and its allies? Or will
this too be blamed on Palestinians for not being “peaceful” and “kind” enough to change the hearts of
millions of Israelis?
For the past year, Palestinians in Gaza have been marching peacefully to the border in order to demand
their right to live with freedom and dignity. While the Israeli government did its part to smear these
protesters as terrorists, it cannot be discounted that average Israelis in the media, online and in their
communities did so as well. They claimed that hundreds of everyday Gazans were human shields, that they
were terrorists, that they were being paid, and that they were feigning for foreign cameras.
The truth is that the culture of encouraged ignorance in Israel over Palestinians has led the Israeli public to
so severely dehumanise them that any disruption of the bubble in which Israelis live is seen as an attack, any
reminder that the Palestinians exist in the backyard is an affront, and any political platform that doesn’t
promise to quell the Palestinian people will not be viable.
For Palestinians, this third round of elections only reinforced what we already knew: that the Israeli
government is racist and cannot be negotiated with. For Israelis, I hope this third round of elections serves
as a mirror to the society at large: how much of a blind eye do you turn to institutionalised hate, the
continuation of the status quo, the acceleration of the occupation, the demonisation of Palestinians, and the
nail in the coffin of any sort of political solution? For the rest of the world, this third round of elections
proves my point: Palestinians have been right all along.
Nooran Hamdan is a recent graduate from the University of New Hampshire, where she studied economics and
political science, and minored in Middle Eastern studies