'The Knesset Symbolizes Everything I've Fought Against. I Don't Want to Be There. I Want to Fight It'
Sliman in the market in Acre, where she lives. "I am a citizen and I have the right to influence what this country will look like."
After a decade in the Knesset, Arab Israeli lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman says she can no longer serve in a place that 'embodies oppression, silencing and Jewish supremacy' – and she doesn't hide her anger toward Israel's so-called liberal camp
Spring 2020, not long after the Knesset election. The relations between the liberal mainstream and the country's Arab community are confronting a formative moment. The Joint List, representing the four Arab parties, has just won 15 seats in the incoming Knesset, a record number. Benny Gantz's Blue and White party might get the nod from the president to form a government, if the Arab representatives recommend to the president that Gantz be tasked with that role. Eleven years after Benjamin Netanyahu returned to the Prime Minister's Office, the end of his rule looks closer than ever.
The Jewish center-left is jubilant and sees no need to hesitate regarding support of Gantz, but in the Joint List – comprising the Balad, Hadash, Ra'am (United Arab List) and Ta'al parties – they are not sure: After all, he is a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff and his politics are right of center. True, he's an antithesis to Netanyahu when it comes to manners and conduct, and will respect the rules of the game and the state's institutions. But he's not someone who's determined to end the occupation or to reboot relations with Israel's Arab citizens.
MK Aida Touma-Sliman represented Hadash in meetings that were held at the time between the Joint List and Blue and White. She was there when the die was cast, in favor of the historic recommendation of the Arab MKs that was supposed to pave the way for Gantz to become premier. But, it emerges now, she objected to it.
"I didn't support it. Now it's possible to tell it like it was," Sliman tells Haaretz in an interview marking 10 years since she entered the Knesset – and just before she leaves parliamentary life. "I didn't feel there was anyone to support."
In the end, despite the recommendation to President Isaac Herzog by the Joint List, Gantz teamed up with Netanyahu. The opportunity for Jewish-Arab partnership in the House was lost. "What could be more [harmful] than to recommend Gantz? Rabak – for God's sake – do you know what Gantz is for us? So there you go, the party decided to try to stop Bibi, but for me the issue is not to stop someone, but to change politics. I want to topple the whole system that produces people like Bibi. It's not just that Bibi is leading this politics – this politics is also leading Bibi."
The question is whether, in the situation that was created, pragmatism should have been preferred over rigid ideology.
Sliman: "I personally didn't believe that Gantz was bringing something better to the table; that's the whole point. The people with him in the party – Avi Nissenkorn and Ofer Shelah – were more progressive in their views than him and Yair Lapid [whose Yesh Atid party at one point joined forces with Gantz]. They were also more pragmatic, and understood that it was also necessary to give something and not just request something from us. Still, the expectation was that we would mobilize and help get rid of Bibi without asking questions and without making demands."
Did the Blue and White people have reservations about a partnership with the Joint List?
"Look, it was obvious to me that they couldn't distance themselves from the Zionist consensus yet. But it's not only that they were afraid of losing votes – it's deeper than that with them."
They're not there? There's no partner?
"I'm not saying there's no partner. They are not a partner. We can agree on many points, but they are not the partners I am looking for to bring about substantive, long-term change."
Maybe not a socialist revolution, but to bring about a Jewish-Arab partnership.
"There are people among them with whom I could take a few steps, but they couldn't do the marathon."
Like who?
"[Yesh Atid MK] Yoav Segalovitz, for example, on the crime issue [in the Arab community]. He's perhaps one of the few whom I never felt, in conversations, was being condescending and that is very important to me. Also [Labor MK] Gilad Kariv, who I feel sees me as a person. Maybe [Labor MK] Efrat Rayten. The moments when I explode are when I feel that the person across from me is treating me as though I am inferior to them. Even those who think that they are liberal and enlightened, and want to cooperate with the Arab population, still look at us with a type of superiority."
Even so, you have tried to create bridges.
"I worked with Shuli Moalem and Ayelet Shaked [former MK and minister, respectively, in the New Right party] on the subject of incriminating clients of prostitution. That doesn't mean that I believe it's possible to build a true partnership with them, in which I stop waiting for them to preach Zionism to me. That is something else entirely. That kind of partnership exists for me only with the members of my own party."
Only with your party?
"For the time being, yes. Especially in these [last] two years. I have a moral partnership with those who sounded a clear voice against the war in Gaza, and not only because they wanted to liberate the hostages, but because they were against everything that happened. Against the annihilation."
On the eve of the 2019 election, Hadash leader Ayman Odeh issued a solemn declaration about being prepared to join a left-center coalition. Did you know about that beforehand?
"No, but that willingness wasn't exceptional – the question was under what conditions. People are always trying to present us as though we are against being part of the government. Yet we were the ones who at the time conceived the idea of the so-called obstructive bloc for [Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin]. Rabin, who said, 'Break their [the Palestinians'] arms and legs.' We told him: We will give you a safety net under two conditions: progress toward a diplomatic solution [in the territories] and equality for the Arab population [in Israel]. Not only for supporting the basic right to a budget. That would have been [selling ourselves] very cheap, you know."
In her decade as a lawmaker, Sliman stood out as a trenchant, sometimes hawkish voice. In 2022, for example, she published a post of farewell from those she dubbed the shahids (martyrs) who belonged to the militant Den of Lions squad in Nablus. She doesn't regret it. Among other things, she is proud of the legislation she sponsored (electronic ankle bracelets for men convicted of domestic violence), in a cooperative effort that crossed political lines, and of the way she managed the Knesset's Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality – as the first MK from an Arab party to chair a parliamentary committee.
Still, something is gnawing at her heart today. "It is as if everything has faded in the past two years," she told me in our conversation, in early September. "It's as though everything that was there before has been erased from memory."
Turmoil over the war informed many of her subsequent interviews with Haaretz. "It's heavy," she admitted. "I am in a type of schizophrenia. I embrace the families of the hostages. I cry with the mothers of the soldiers, because I am a mother, even though I know what they did there. And on the other hand, I see what is happening in Gaza, and it's intolerable. It's above and beyond. Israeli society will look in the mirror on the day after – and it's not that I was fond of what Israeli society was beforehand – but it won't recognize itself."
Everything she built, the war shattered, Sliman emphasizes now. A chasm opened up between her and those she had once seen as partners on the Jewish side. The Knesset has changed beyond recognition. "Not that it was the peak of democracy, but it made things possible," she says. "Now the space we were once given is increasingly closing in on us. Either you toe the line or you're cast out."
Despite her image as a provocative parliamentarian, she often did toe the line, against her gut instincts. "I always regretted it afterward," she admits. Now the lawmaker's gut instinct is telling her that the time has come to leave.
No little anger surfaced in her comments – about the war, about Israel's so-called liberal camp. But behind the anger and distress, the persistent clinging to her ideology and way of thinking – there was something very personal and flexible in the conversations with Sliman, something open-ended that enabled a dialogue that isn't just an exchange of words. "I'm not a great talker when it comes to processes that I undergo," she admitted. "I stew in my own juices."
But now that the parliamentary chapter of her life is about to end, she wants to explain how she sees things.
A tense atmosphere prevailed in the meeting of the Joint List's Knesset faction in the summer of 2020. Not long before, a bill banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ people had come up for its first vote. Sliman, Odeh and MK Ofer Cassif of Hadash voted in favor (the bill was never enacted); the MKs from the conservative, Islamist Ra'am party, led by MK Mansour Abbas, were against; all their other colleagues absented themselves.
"We agreed to having the freedom to vote as we wished," she recalls. "Now, Mansour was there. Ten minutes after the vote, Ra'am already issued an announcement to the press. It stated that the supporters of the bill were encouraging abomination. I asked him, 'Mansour, did your party make a decision to dismantle the cooperation agreement [with the other three Arab parties]?' He looked at me and said, 'No way.' I told him that in his place I would find it difficult to run in an election with people who promote abomination, saying, 'You weren't sparing in your words.'
"So he says to me, 'What happened to you, Aida? I don't think of your party in that way.' A month or two later, we started to hear that he had already been holding contacts with Netanyahu."
She was fed up with Abbas. "There was euphoria during the tenure of the Joint List, our chests were puffed out – and then Ra'am decided on a split with the other parties. They undermined the attempt to create substantive change in Arab politics."
Sliman's criticisms are based on principle, but she is also enraged specifically by a sensational campaign led by Ra'am, focused on religion. Sliman – Christian, secular, feminist – was marked out as a target. It was said that she hates Muslims, harbored contempt for the hijab and would bring about a takeover by the LGBTQ community. Her crucifiers didn't bat an eyelash.
"The whole campaign was waged at my expense," Sliman says of Ra'am's divisive move. In the preceding years, she and Abbas appeared everywhere together – the liberal communist and the Islamist, who together personified the depth of the partnership. She hasn't spoken to him since.
In our conversations, you mentioned pragmatic cooperation with the Zionist mainstream as a first step toward Jewish-Arab cooperation. So maybe, in terms of substance, Mansour Abbas was right.
"No! Because Mansour doesn't argue with them about substantive issues."
But wait, he is trying to create a pragmatic process.
"No. Our politics is built on two basic foundations: the national affiliation of our people, which is under occupation, and our citizenship. I believe that it's possible to live harmoniously between those two foundations. The problem with Zionism is that it always wanted to give us individual citizenship, but not collective citizenship – along the lines of take what they give you, but in political matters you won't have a say. Mansour agreed to that format."
Wasn't that just one a stage along the way?
"Some things can't be done in stages. Once you forgo substantive ideological issues in order to advance pragmatic issues, you have a problem. The Family Unification Law is not just any old thing: When you forgo that, you are saying that it's alright not to treat you as an equal citizen, who can marry someone who is not a citizen but belongs to your nation. Don't ask me to forgo basic things."
Did Abbas set Arab politics back?
"In my view, yes, because the claim that our situation is the way it is because we didn't know how to play politics, and now there is someone [i.e., him] who does know, removes the responsibility from the governments of Israel and distorts reality. What it says, in effect, is that the connection between the Arab minority and the state is only a matter of budgets.
"The truth is that what's needed is a broader and more substantive change. Insular, niche politics will not help – just the opposite. And it will not hurt only Arabs. Today, when the liberal camp is a minority, it needs us to be more vocal in the realm of general politics. Without us, that camp will continue to be swept toward the right. It needs to make a U-turn, to ask the Arab population to demand more than budgets. The thing is that I don't know whether there is anyone who has that courage now."
I'm returning for a moment to cooperation with the Zionist mainstream. When the "government of change" fell, in June 2022, wasn't the right thing to take the plunge and try to block Netanyahu's return to office?
"[Ta'al MK] Ahmad Tibi sent a message to Lapid that we were ready to examine the possibility of supporting [the government] from outside. Lapid didn't want that. I wasn't informed."
The idea didn't come up for discussion among you?
"No. I am apparently considered one of those who don't cooperate with the Zionist parties. It was important for me to reach an agreement on that offer before it was proposed."
Were you angry that they decided on the proposal without consulting you?
"What difference does it make whether it made me angry or not? I heard about it from the media."
Sliman, 61, was born in Nazareth, the sixth of seven sisters. "That whole story about the Nakba and the uprooting – I wasn't raised on that," she says, referring to the fleeing and expulsion of over 700,000 Arabs during Israel's War of Independence. Her father, who was educated at the German Protestant Schneller Orphanage in Jerusalem, was fluent in five languages, including Yiddish. "He was a very special person, quite unusual in the Palestinian landscape. A man of the world."
A construction worker all his life, she adds, "He was perhaps the only one who was bold enough to take Al-Ittihad, the newspaper of the [Israeli] Communist Party, which was quietly disseminated, and to read it on a bus owned by Solel Boneh [the construction arm of the Histadrut federation of labor]." Sliman herself went on to become the daily's editor in chief.
When she was in fourth grade, her father fell from scaffolding and was left paralyzed. Her mother was compelled to provide for the family, working from home for a textile factory. "She had seven female workers," Sliman recalls. "And do you know what's great? I look at it now not as something oppressive, but as a lovely family experience. Dad is sitting, sometimes reading, and we're working." Sliman worked with her mother at home and at factories during school vacations. "That's how I acquired my class sensitivity. I'm not one of the communists who grew up in the party."
Sliman was the first in her household to enroll in university. "You have to remember that you're going there to study, not to do politics," her mother cautioned her. Two months later she was elected to the Student Union. Her father was proud. She would later discover that he had enlisted in the British Army in World War II, and asked him how a patriot like him could have volunteered for an occupation army.
"I thought I had raised a smarter girl," he replied. "You had to choose then: Either you were with humanity or with the Nazis. I chose to be on the side of humanity."
Sliman: "I didn't have to hear the story of the Holocaust as per the Zionist approach. I heard it from my father."
So at home you learned about the Holocaust but not about the Nakba.
"I read about the Nakba, but my parents didn't tell stories about people being dislocated and killed. I always thought that they hadn't seen things like that. Only when my daughters were 12, I sat once with my mother and asked her whether she remembered what happened in the Nakba. She started to tell shocking things about the conquest of Nazareth. It turned out that people were killed before her eyes. I asked why she had never told us, and she replied, 'How would it have helped you?' I remembered stories I heard from Jews – about how Holocaust survivors didn't talk [about their experiences] at first. The members of the Nakba generation who live here didn't open their mouth for years, in contrast to the refugees who are outside the country's borders and raised their children on those stories."
How do you explain that?
"They [the refugees] needed the connection with the place, we didn't. We needed to find ways to live with the new reality. The processes we are undergoing are similar to those of migrants who arrive in a foreign land, only in our case the state 'migrated' to us. The first generation accepts the situation and understands that they are being discriminated against because they are strangers, they don't know the language, they're not educated enough. So they work hard at keeping a low profile in order to assimilate, to be accepted.
"The second generation starts to understand – I studied, I am educated, but I am still discriminated against. Then the political disillusionment starts, and they start to search for their roots and to grasp the situation. The third generation rebels."
Do you see that happening now, in the third generation?
"No, because the state understood that. It implemented an individualistic approach, on the one hand, and the terror of crime [the rampant murders and other lawlessness in the Arab community] on the other. So, anyone who wants to save themselves either embarks on the path of seeking personal success or, out of fear of the crime and out of individualistic thinking, simply leaves the country. Very unfortunately, many of our young people, especially from the middle class, are searching for themselves in the big, wide world out there. Like the Jews."
Are you hinting that the state is encouraging crime in Arab society?
"I am not hinting. There's no other way to understand it. I'm not saying that it created the crime organizations, but it is making use of them. I cannot believe that the Israeli establishment doesn't know how to deal with crime. The state is allowing the organizations to have control, and through them it controls the Arab population, splits it, tears apart its social fabric and makes Arabs hate life here."
In what way is the state encouraging these organizations?
"By giving them freedom of action. If armed individuals were wandering around in a Jewish city and spraying [gunfire] left and right, photographing themselves and posting the images in Facebook – would that pass quietly? That happens in Arab communities every night."
In your city, Acre, too?
"No. What's with you? There are Jews here. An iron fist."
The state's impotence is obvious, but isn't there also something for which Arab society must take responsibility?
"There is a difference between social violence – a dispute between neighbors, violence in the family, violence between adolescents – and organized crime. [Dealing with] violence, yes, is part of our responsibility, and I come from struggles of that kind. Organized crime is something else. Society can't deal with it. They are organized militias; ordinary citizens can't stand up to armed men. And you have to understand: There is no one among us whose life is not affected by this."
How is your life affected?
"My family is afraid. You live constantly in the fear that they will get to you and demand protection money. And if they show up, what will you do? The agonizing is very real, because the police don't protect me. I personally know families who were shot at a first time, a second time, and one fine morning the whole family got up and moved elsewhere. Their houses are shuttered, their businesses closed down; there is no one left in the country. I'm talking not about one case and not about two."
You insist on dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Palestinian politics. In making collective demands. Wouldn't it be preferable to lay off all that for a while, to focus on civil rights and to integrate? You live in a thriving country that offers abundant opportunities. You could assimilate and enjoy the fruits of that. Isn't that preferable?
"Why forget the issue of collective rights? As if we are actually getting equal individual rights? Did the Jews, who established a state for themselves, forgo collective rights? Forgo their identity? Why should we have to forgo them? Collective rights also mean that the state will not treat people [i.e., Bedouin] in the Negev as interlopers. It's astonishing that liberals still have the effrontery to come and tell us to forgo that and accept this. I can't understand how anyone demands of me to be a citizen who is worth less."
But that is not the issue. For civil rights, for access to resources, you have to struggle. The thing is that in addition, you are emphasizing the rights of the Palestinian people in the territories and trying to preserve national symbols within the state's borders. Wouldn't it be better to take a different route? Not for Israel, not for the Jews, not for the liberals in Tel Aviv – but for Arab citizens?
"No!"
Maybe that's what the Arabs want.
"It's very interesting that you people always know better than us what we want."
I am suggesting a possibility. It's not like Mansour Abbas doesn't enjoy public support. Maybe, after all, he's right.
"You know what? I don't want to talk about Mansour Abbas. I want to talk about what I want. You put your finger on the difference between two very clear streams in Arab society. One stream says: Let's leave the big issues and try to obtain rights which, in the end, add up to budgets. But that's an approach that does not actually take equal citizenship seriously. That's the approach of [the ultra-Orthodox] Shas and United Torah Judaism: Don't bother me with the state, give me the money and leave me in peace. I say no. I am a citizen and I have the right to influence what this country will look like. [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich can talk about the West Bank, but Aida is forbidden to do that?"
I understand what you want, but look where Shas is and where your population is.
"I am not the type of person who thinks that our solution comes down solely to budgets."
But maybe that would be better for your public.
"Who decides what is better? I was elected by the public! The public knows what I am saying!"
Maybe you and your colleagues are pushing this idea [of Palestinian politics] at them too hard.
"Why do you treat my public like a group at which someone has to push something? The public chose!"
You are leaving after a decade in the Knesset. Have you been doing any soul-searching? I understand your approach completely, but it has failed.
"It didn't fail! What – must I have to yield and declare that the Zionist way is the right way? I am a human being no less than any Zionist! I want to exert influence, and because of that the entire political spectrum is fighting me so forcefully."
But you're not succeeding. You are sidelined and not entering the coalition.
"That's not correct! Who said I need to enter the coalition at any price?"
That's where the key to wielding influence is.
"No. Look – Mansour entered the government. In what way did he exert influence? He voted for a law banning family unification, he voted for budgets earmarked for settlements, so who influenced whom? Did he influence the government or did the government influence him? What did he achieve? We achieved Government Resolution 922 [a five-year plan devised in 2016, which called for allocating 13 billion shekels to Arab communities but was not fully implemented], he achieved Resolution 550, which opens by stating that it's a continuation of Resolution 922. Your assessment of what constitutes success is different from mine."
What is your assessment?
"I am the daughter of a movement that strove all its life for the two-state solution. We are the first who proposed it, the public followed us. We led the struggles of the Arab population at many important junctures in history, such as Land Day, such as October 2000."
You're confusing me. Is that a success or a failure? You told me a story about a society that is falling apart, between organized crime, mass emigration and the war in Gaza.
"True, but that's not because of our failure. It's because the power lies with those who want us to be only individuals, for each of us to save himself. Look at Arab society. We have amazing representation when it comes to medical teams. We now have young people in high-tech and young people who have succeeded in business. Has that advanced our society and heightened its influence overall? Personal successes don't in themselves add up to the success of the collective."
Maybe we are in an era in which collective success doesn't interest anyone. Maybe all those physicians are satisfied.
"I'm not sure they are satisfied. During the pandemic, people talked about the heroic doctors, about there not being Arabs and Jews per se, but all of us together. And what happened during the war? The Arab doctors became a target for silencing and persecution. Awful fear. I am the presentative of a minority, and the minority needs to develop self-defense mechanisms."
Which are collective?
"Some of them. Do we have the right to decide what our children learn? To manage our religious institutions? To demand that people who were expelled from their villages and whose houses are still standing will return to their lands?"
The right of return?
"What right of return? They are citizens of the state. Uprooted citizens."
I am asking about soul-searching, but it sound like you are sticking to your party line.
"Yes, I still believe in my line. I think that the Zionist parties are the ones that need to do soul-searching about the way they treat us. My soul-searching is [based on the fact] that we do not forgo basic things. The ideological element is very strong within me. There are things I will not relinquish in order to cooperate."
Is it possible that you are leaving political life because Hadash may be tending to cooperate with the Zionist parties?
"I don't think there has been a substantive change in the party from that point of view, and the distance between me and the Knesset faction isn't all that great. So, yes, I was never one of the rank-and-file, but it irks me that I am always looked at in relation to others. I was elected and I decide where I stand, and it's not something that's based on my distance from Ayman Odeh or from Ofer Cassif. What, is it because I am an Arab woman?"
Last month Odeh said at a parlor meeting that Hadash will do everything to topple Netanyahu. When someone in the audience asked him whether that includes recommending [former premier and current party leader and candidate] Naftali Bennett, he smiled and fell silent.
"I agree that toppling Netanyahu is a goal we should strive for, but that doesn't mean recommending Bennett [to form a coalition]. I am not willing to recommend Bennett, but I won't be there by then."
So there you go: You have distanced yourself from the party line.
"That's not my feeling. Maybe it's they who have distanced themselves. What difference does it make? Let them move wherever they want. I understand now that the Knesset no longer simply symbolizes the power structure in Israel, but also [embodies] all the things I have fought against throughout my life: oppression, silencing, Jewish supremacy. I don't want to be there. I want to fight it – to really fight it. And I think that it's impossible to dismantle this system from within the Knesset. And as [the Black American poet] Audre Lord says, 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.' That place [the Knesset] is becoming more and more aggressive. I am a stranger there."
But there is also a matter of adjusting oneself to reality, not descending into dogmatism.
"I think that I applied my pragmatism in the Knesset. For 10 years I promoted things along with others, I tried to shape a different citizenship, partnership. With the war it all evaporated in a second. It turned out that everything stood on flimsy foundations, and now it's necessary to strengthen them."
The problem is that Jewish society is moving away from the partnership you are looking for.
"The partnerships that I am talking about are sealed in fire and water, with people who are ready to take the hard way to reach a better world. And there are such people. There are Jewish men and women who went on a hunger strike with us. Those are the partnerships I am building on, not on Lapid."
So you don't think the same about the public as you do about the politicians.
"No. One of the key problems today in Israel is that there is a public that is better than some of the politicians. Yesterday I saw a clip in which 200 teachers – men and women – call for a stop to the killing in Gaza, because a child is a child. I stood on the [Knesset] podium in November 2023 and said that, and it was actually the liberals who screamed then. [MK] Merav Ben Ari, from Yesh Atid, shouted at me: Don't create symmetry between our children and their children. I said to her: Do you hear yourself? A child is a child – what do mean, 'symmetry'? I wrote to the teachers. People like that give me hope."
Does it disappoint you that it took people two years to say that?
"Clearly. That's what's known as too little, too late. But I have to continue, no? In terms of the trauma and the existential questions, the only time I was like this was when my partner died. That was a love story with true partnership. I had to ask myself whether I can go on, and who will be by my side. Today I am asking myself those questions again."
Sliman met Jiris, her longtime partner, in the mid-1980s when she was studying psychology and Arab literature at the University of Haifa. One day the police showed up on campus to disperse a protest by an organization of Arab students, and Sliman ran ahead of the police to warn the demonstrators. For that she was given a slap by one of the officers. "And I, with a basic instinct of someone who was never slapped in her life, punched him back," she laughs. "No one had ever hit me. I grew up in a home without violence, a home that gave me a very strong feeling of self-respect. What did that guy think he's doing slapping me?"
She led the next demonstration alone, because most of the members of the group had been arrested. "They didn't want to arrest me, they didn't know what to make of this young woman who behaved like men," she says, laughing again. Jiris and his friends arrived from the nearby Technion – Israel Institute of Technology to support the protesters and shouted slogans that departed form the agreed line. Sliman shouted and threatened; Jiris fell in love. "He looked for me. We sat up one entire night, talking endlessly, and after that we never parted – even for a day."
The couple had two daughters and lived in Acre. Jiris died in 2011, from cancer. Struggling with her grief, Sliman moved to a rented apartment in the city. Here, in her den, a quick glance at the spectacular panorama of the bay outside is enough to fill her lungs. In the evenings, when the lights of the Old City are illuminated, it reminds her of Istanbul. A living room wall features a collection of tragic artwork: portraits of Syrian women from the start of the civil war, an oil painting of prewar Gaza, a 1930s photograph of women next to a spring in Nazareth. On the refrigerator are photographs of her daughters and her twin grandchildren, the children of her daughter and her daughter's Dutch partner. "They live here," Sliman says. "The children are half Dutch but more Palestinian."
A few hours before we met in her apartment one day in September, police raided the home of former Joint List MK Haneen Zoabi, detaining her for a day on suspicion of inciting to terrorism and interrogating her for six hours because of a speech she gave last year. "Scary? No. But concerning," Sliman says.
She says she is being cautious these days because of threats directed at her personally as well as at other Arab figures. She avoids public transportation and prefers to fly abroad via Amman to spare herself a confrontation with the public at large ("I don't fly with El Al in any case – one time they put me through hell: two and a half hours of invasive interrogation, why did I go to that movie, who did I visit. Harassment.").
Even though she lives opposite the Mediterranean, she didn't go for a swim all summer. She only goes out with the grandchildren in the late evening. "I am ashamed to talk about myself when children and women are being killed in Gaza," she says, "but the feeling that you aren't allowed to talk about your suffering when people from your nation are suffering so much – that isn't human, either."
What frightens her more than Zoabi's detention is the silence and indifference with which it was met. "That doesn't attest to a good future, if we continue to divide the struggles," she says.
You call for Arabs and Jews to unify their struggles, but what about the struggle against the judicial coup [fomented by the coalition in 2023]? The Arab public wasn't there.
"Here and there some Arabs took part in it. But why is it expected that the Arab population will turn out en masse? At the [anti-coup] protests they didn't let us so much as mention the word 'occupation.' Besides which, there were symbols there that alienated the Arab community."
Israeli flags?
"We've taken part in demonstrations where there were Israeli flags, but masses of them constitutes a statement. That protest movement said: 'We're good with the status quo and proud of what there is – don't shatter our illusion.' That's not what we thought. Excuse me, this is a democracy of the Jewish elite. I would have liked to see the protest against the regime coup as an opportunity to build something else – not to return to the previous situation."
Even so, you claim that struggles have to be combined, and that's a struggle you could have joined.
"No, they wanted us to split off from the struggle."
Who wanted? You could have taken to the streets.
"Just a second, calm down. We must take to the streets and we must save the country, and we must give the feeble opposition power in order to contain fascism – but we are not allowed to express an opinion as to how that's to be done and with which messages."
You also thought that the judicial overhaul needs to be stopped. You could have enlarged the bloc against the occupation during the protests. You could have brought the inhabitants of Wadi Ara [a predominantly Arab region in the north] out into the street.
"Why should people in Wadi Ara go into the street? To defend the Supreme Court? Remind me of one time when the court did right by the Arab population. On the contrary: The High Court of Justice took part in the injustice many times. Every time the Jews' ethnic democracy runs into a problem, it's expected that the Arabs will come to save it. And the moment after they do the work, they're tossed into the trash. Now everyone wants us to run [in the next election] in a joint list so we will help them get rid of Netanyahu, but in the meantime they're supporting oppressive bills that discriminate against the Arab population."
Which of those initiatives do you find most grating?
"The bans on the activity of student cells in the universities, on the education system employing people who studied in the territories. Those are bills that part of the opposition supported, or whose MKs left the chamber and didn't vote."
It sounds like you're angrier at them and at the liberal camp more than at the right.
"No. The right is the right, but don't prettify things. Expose the true views. Besides which, you get angrier at people from whom you expect something."
So you had expectations and were disappointed?
"If I were active in Mapai [forerunner of Labor], I would have been disappointed, but I understood the story from the start. The liberals need to decide at this juncture what sort of future this country has, in terms of all its citizens."
You're angry at them for standing in [the anti-coup] demonstrations for a year and a half and…
"I am not angry at them. I really love the possibility of getting the public out [in the streets]. But I think that they didn't do the right politicizing during this process in order to include everyone. They are still in a state of mind of supremacy: We will tell you what's best and you will subscribe to our conditions. They weren't ready to compromise on anything in order to include us."
Did you take part in some of the demonstrations?
"I took part in a demonstration or two with the Bloc Against the Occupation. In Jerusalem I was stunned by the energy there; it was very empowering. But I felt alienated."
Maybe the Arab population didn't demonstrate because this situation was a fulfillment of their wishes. Like, "We'll let the Jews topple themselves."
"Anyone who thinks that can do so. What, we'll let fascism take over? We don't have that privilege."
* * *
Our last conversation took place the morning after the cease-fire in Gaza was announced. I found Sliman enchanted by U.S. President Donald Trump's ability to say whatever pops into his mind. She too represents a public but is averse to doing that, believing that if she loosens her tongue she will endanger her party, the young Arabs at universities, in the train stations.
"It's what's called restraining your anger," she says. "To think a thousand times about what you want to say. We have been stifled."
She wants to say, for example, that just as tears welled up the morning we met when she heard activist Einav Zangauker talking about her hostage son's possible release, she also thought about the mothers of Palestinian prisoners. "I am forbidden to feel compassion for them," she says. "And hell, if that's the price of being an MK, then for me it's not worth it. In the long run, it's a surrender to the attempt to leave us without an identity."
That's why you're leaving the Knesset?
"Part of the reason, yes. I would like to invest my energy in a place that will produce better results. I feel that in the Knesset I'm not succeeding in getting across what I believe in, that I no longer find myself after these two years. Do you know how many times I wanted to stand at the podium and speak out about everything I feel? And I wasn't silent. I spoke, and paid a price for saying what I did, but it's nothing compared to what I wanted to say."
Say it now.
"How is that possible? How is it possible for a society to bury its head in the sand, in the mud, and pretend it sees nothing? We are at the advent of the day after, and we will need to live with the fact that we were not treated like human beings – with the fact that people who work with us became informants and vilifiers and persecutors. I would like to tell people who strike a pose of being modern and humane and wear suits, that they behaved in this period like animals. Why am I able to feel the pain of both sides and you are limited to one side?"
You couldn't say all that in the Knesset?
"Not like that. I didn't allow myself to vent all the anger, I didn't want to stand at the podium and break into tears – like I am almost doing now. And I think to myself: These are the people we now have to crown so that they will redeem us from fascism? They were part of the festivities. It's not a matter of how many seats this bloc has or how many the other bloc has. How many seats does compassion have in this Knesset? How many seats do human rights have? No one asks questions like that, and I no longer want to play that game. Halas – enough."
My Comment :
A shockingly patronizing interview by Haaretz. Especially given the
fact, that the interviewee in her analyses of the political situation, is
constantly indicating, that the jewsupremacist attitude towards the
Palestinians, is an endemic (mis)behavioural pattern by Zionist Jews.!
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