Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of B’Tselem, writes in The New York Times:
‘..Does that mean nobody in the occupied territories has a meaningful vote? No. In fact, some people do: Israeli settlers.
In August 1970, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, discussed amending the Knesset Election Law, which stipulated that Israelis — with few exceptions like diplomats on duty abroad — had to be inside Israel to vote. The amendment sought to expand the exception to include Israelis “residing in the territories held by the Israel Defense Force.” In other words, Israeli settlers could vote for the Knesset from outside Israel; their Palestinian neighbors could not participate from anywhere.
In a Knesset session discussing the amendment before it passed, one legislator and peace activist, Uri Avnery, expressed a widely held belief that peace initiatives would soon make the amendment obsolete. He expressed the hope that “it won’t be long — a year, a year and a half, two at most — before the thing called ‘the held territories’ is no more, and the I.D.F. pulls back into Israel’s borders.”
More than four decades later, what has become obsolete is not the amendment, but rather the accuracy of a description of Knesset elections often heard here: general, national, direct, equal, confidential and proportional.
How can elections be “general” when millions of people under Israel’s control for almost 50 years cannot take part in electing the institutions that hold sway over them? Let’s face it. Only the first six of Israel’s parliamentary elections — those held before 1967 — were truly “general.” Even though the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel proper were under military rule inside its borders at the time, they could vote.
Settlers now have voted in their communities in 14 Knesset elections. Over time, their numbers rose from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands. Yet one thing remained constant: Millions of Palestinians could not cast a meaningful vote, even as the voting of their settler neighbors — citizens of an occupying power — helped decide the fate of the disenfranchised.
via Israel’s Charade of Democracy – NYTimes.com.