Wednesday, July 01, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Umm El-Fahm, July 1 - A team of researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have proven that at least theoretically, it is possible for elected representatives of Israel's Arab political parties to work to better the lives of their constituencies, as opposed to their current focus on furthering the interests of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its subsidiary, the Palestinian National Authority. Results of the study, with some analysis, will be published in the July issue of the journal Political Science, due out next week.
The researchers studied the voting patterns and relevant legal and cultural principles that govern parliamentarian behavior in Israel and elsewhere, and found reason to conclude that while the current group of 12 Arab MKs has shown no desire, ability, or need to represent the people who actually elected them, and to make the lives of those people better instead of holding them and their quality of life hostage to a dream of negating Israel as a Jewish state, it nevertheless remains in the realm of human possibility that those elected officials might choose to perform what elected officials are supposed to do, specifically, working to improve, in measurable ways, the lives of the constituencies who elected them.
Lead study author Professor Albert Facepalm of Tel Aviv University explained in a telephone interview that his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers looked for all known impediments to an MKs' involvement in the pursuit of the actual welfare for Arab citizens of Israel, and found none. "We made a thorough examination of the circumstances of each of the twelve Arab MKs. That included an analysis of their access to information and their ability to comprehend it, as well as the availability of data indicating the most pressing needs of Israel's Arab citizens," he said. "But there was nothing to explain why the most they have done for those citizens is to denounce the system that employs those selfsame politicians as inherently racist and to declare that it has no right to continue existing."
Facepalm said the team was similarly unable to find an explanation for why those MKs appear not to focus on genuine issues within the Arab community in Israel that do not require an impassioned litany of real or imagined Zionist offenses. "Underage marriage, domestic violence, lack of women's empowerment, honor killings - the only context in which you can count on an Arab MK to mention these ills plaguing Israeli Arab society is if the issues can be framed as the fault of Israeli policy," he noted. "We are at a loss as to a scientific basis for explaining that phenomenon, because, at least theoretically, there's nothing preventing these political figures from trying to accomplish something constructive."
The study also found that MK Basel Ghattas had a sick tan for someone who is supposed to be a legislator in the Knesset, a mostly indoor facility.
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