Back To Zionism

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Though he has no chance of becoming Prime Minister, Mitzna remains quixotically determined to limit Labor's expected losses, so he can hold onto the party leadership after the election. New to the job and already stalked by party rivals, the former mayor of Haifa released his first campaign spots last week — and they didn't even mention his plan to restart negotiations with the Palestinians and evacuate Israeli settlements in Gaza. Instead, he went with the New Zionist flow and showed photos from his days as an army general, including a video clip in which assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an old-time Zionist hero if ever there was one, heaped praise on Mitzna.

The price for this return to Zionism is being paid by Israel's 1.2 million Arab citizens. During Israel's first two decades, the country's Arabs lived under martial law. Sharon's not there yet, but he's overseeing a divisive crackdown on the Arabs, who prefer to be called "Palestinians inside Israel," almost as much of a throwback as Lahav's songs.

Even before the crackdown, life was tough for Israel's Arabs. The 10 Israeli communities with the highest unemployment rates are all Arab. They're dilapidated assortments of cinderblock homes, often standing near neat, clean Jewish towns. Over 50 Arab hamlets aren't even recognized as villages by the Israeli government and, therefore, don't get municipal funding. Israeli Arabs are much less likely to go to college and, in a security-conscious country, they're constantly questioned by police on the streets. Others complain that it takes them much longer to get through Tel Aviv airport security checks than their Jewish fellow citizens. And when they do elect the handful of Arabs who sit in the Knesset, Israeli Arab voters complain the legislators spend more time gabbing about their cousins in the West Bank and Gaza than they do focusing on domestic discrimination.

The crackdown is also limiting freedom of expression by Palestinian media. A month ago, censors banned an Israeli Arab's documentary on last spring's fighting in Jenin because they said it slandered the nation's military. A week later, the newspaper of Israel's Islamic Movement was banned. Two weeks ago, the party hacks who sit on the Central Elections Committee voted to ban two top Israeli Arab politicians from running in the election on the basis of evidence submitted by the Shin Bet security service, which accused them of calling for violent attacks on the Israelis. At the same time, they approved the candidacy of the former leader of Kach, the banned anti-Arab movement founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Israel's Supreme Court overruled the ban on the two Arab politicians, but Arab leaders aren't impressed. "This Zionist mentality does not recognize our presence in the country," says Sheik Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement's radical wing. Salah and his deputy were interrogated by the Shin Bet last week, in what the sheik believes was an attempt to intimidate them into silence before the election. If the Shin Bet was making a veiled threat to Salah, it's the overt and violent Palestinian threat that dominates the election for Israel's Jews.

Back at the Yellow Submarine, it's 2:30 a.m. and a fat, middle-aged man joins Lahav on stage to sing about the Zionist philanthropist Moses Montefiore, who built the first Jewish neighborhood outside Jerusalem's Old City in the 19th century. "I must help the Jews in Israel," he croons, as the clubbers sway and sing, "for there are pogroms in Russia." Those were the days.