‘You need the power of all your votes’: Bedouin women secure success for Arab parties in Israeli election

Umm Khaled Fatoum returned from volunteering in a Jewish-Arab support centre to find bulldozers tearing into her son’s house in the Bedouin village of Azzarnug.

The demolition crew, who arrived under police escort, did not even allow them to remove furniture or solar panels before reducing the home to a pile of rubble.

This week, she took action at the ballot box, targeting the extremist national security minister who ordered the destruction of Palestinian and Arab homes.

“I had one goal, to send [Itamar] Ben-Gvir home,” Fatoum said. “There isn’t a single family in the Bedouin community that hasn’t been hurt by his campaign against us.”

In the weeks before the election, she joined a grassroots campaign to educate other Bedouin women about their rights and potential power.

The campaign, led by the Alnashmiat network, had spectacular results, with voting rates tripling in some Bedouin villages in the southern Negev region.

“We said that even if all the men go to vote, it is only half the community. You need the power of all your votes, because Ben-Gvir has a lot of power,” said Hanan Alsanah, a lawyer and activist.

The rise in Bedouin votes came amid historically high turnout among Arab citizens of Israel, securing an unprecedented 19 seats in the Knesset for Palestinian-led parties.

These votes were critical to stripping the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies of their governing majority.

This year, the lowest turnout in any Bedouin community was 62%, while the highest was more than 93%.

With an estimated 180,000 eligible voters, their turnout was key to the Islamist Ra’am party beating polling expectations.

Targeted by fear and demolition

The Muslim Bedouin are a marginalised minority inside Israel. Before the state was created, they roamed widely across the Negev desert.

Now, although their villages take up only 2.5% of the land in the region, many are deemed “unrecognised” and targeted for demolition.

They are left without basic services including electricity and water supplies, and the majority of the Negev has been designated as military training grounds and firing ranges.

More than 100,000 people live in about 30 unrecognised communities in the Negev, while another 200,000 live in official towns.

Netanyahu’s pursuit of open-ended regional conflicts also drove Bedouin turnout, as war is particularly terrifying in unrecognised villages.

The state does not provide them with bomb shelters or warning sirens ahead of rocket, drone and missile attacks.

Rockets that hit Bedouin villages without shelters killed six of the 36 child victims of the 7 October attacks.

Several adults were also killed that day in the villages and at least four people have been seriously injured by Iranian missiles.

Organised crime is another concern, rising almost unchecked under the current government.

“We had clear goals. Stop the home demolitions, stop the hatred, stop the war. Ben-Gvir talks all the time about security, but we feel no security and no one cares about us,” said Mayada Abu Khweida.

Logistics and cultural barriers

The activists worked to help women understand their rights and tackle logistical and practical obstacles to voting, as well as cultural ones.

“Because [residents of unrecognised villages] can’t vote in the municipal elections, a lot of women don’t know they have a right to vote in national elections,” said Abu Khweida.

There are no polling stations in unrecognised villages, so voters have to travel to nearby towns.

Men went any way they could, including on camel, horse, donkey and bike, on journeys that took up to an hour in each direction.

Jewish women offered lifts to Bedouin women, but because in 2019 Israel’s election committee ruled that organising transport volunteers was illegal, voters and drivers connected individually.

“Hundreds of women volunteers went to help Bedouin women to access the polls, and at the same time about 150 men went to do protective presence at the polling stations,” said Raluca Ganea, the founding executive director of the Jewish-Arab community action group Zazim.

They wanted Jewish men to stand there to de-escalate, in case there was a rightwing provocation of some kind.

“So it would not be the Bedouin men in front of the provocateurs, because if the police come or there is violence, they are much more likely to be arrested or worse,” Ganea said.

A new political expression

Netanyahu’s racist get-out-the-vote campaign on social media included photos of Bedouin women with their faces covered.

Some of these women covered their faces to avoid being seen by strangers from outside their own community.

In recognised towns, where women could vote in their communities, most did not cover their faces, Alsanah said.

Others hid themselves to avoid becoming fodder for Ben-Gvir’s extremist social media feed, which regularly features humiliation of Arab citizens.

“The women were worried the extremists would take photos at the polling stations and covered their faces to protect themselves from being exploited on social media,” Abu Khweida said.

The grassroots mobilisation of Bedouin voters aimed in part to give children back their dreams, one reason why women responded so strongly.

“In the last election in 2022, turnout among women was around 20%. Now in the unrecognised villages, informal data shows more than 60% turnout among women,” Alsanah said.

For a community whose civil rights are policed by racist authorities, the election was a rare opportunity for political expression.

“We can’t protest, because they will arrest us. Voting is the only opportunity we have to make a political protest,” said Amira Habdoubi, an organiser from the village of Abu Talul.

“They are talking about ‘corruption’ [as the reason for high voter turnout]. The correct word is ‘awareness’,” Habdoubi added.

A model for future action

The project built on more than a decade of work with Alnashmiat, based in Arab and Jewish solidarity.

Alsanah said it could set an example for a new government.

“We learned an important lesson from this election campaign. We should work together, men and women, Arab and Jewish citizens, and we should bring this approach to the Israeli parliament to rebuild the state.”