Commentator and journalist Dr. Avishai Ben Haim has sharply criticized efforts to form a government that would exclude the right-wing parties, arguing that such a boycott amounts to sidelining Israel’s Mizrahi public and the residents of the country’s periphery.
“The hegemony prefers Umm al-Fahm over Dimona,” Ben Haim wrote in a social media post. “And Sakhnin over Yeruham. And Taibe over Ashkelon, Kiryat Shmona, Tiberias, Beit Shean, Sderot, Ofakim, Shlomi, Or Akiva, Avivim, Zavdiel, Patish and the periphery within the center.”
Ben Haim said the communities he listed are home to the Mizrahi public that bears much of the burden of military service. “This is the Zionist, serving Mizrahi public, and the Mizrahi middle class wherever it lives,” he wrote. “Countless families of soldiers and reservists whom the hegemony continues to boycott, even after three years of fighting together, shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.”
He pointed out that many of these towns show high levels of support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and accused his opponents of being willing to rely on Arab parties while refusing to sit with the right. “The hegemony announces that it will lean on the Islamic Movement but will not sit with them,” he wrote. “Arab partnership could be a beautiful thing, but this is not partnership. This is using Arabs to suppress the Mizrahim.”
Ben Haim closed by invoking Menachem Begin, whose 1977 victory brought Mizrahi voters into the political mainstream. “Begin brought us into Israeliness. The goal of the hegemony in this election is to push us back out,” he wrote. “That is what the boycott means. This election is one of the gravest events in the history of Mizrahi suppression in Israel. It can still be fixed.”
