Brad Lander has Israel’s election backward

Throughout October, prediction markets gave Democrat Brad Lander a better than 96% chance of winning New York’s 10th Congressional District. With that cushion, you’d think he might spend the campaign’s closing days with the New Yorkers he’s about to represent, or knock on doors for Democrats in tighter races.You’d be wrong.Instead, Lander spent time lecturing Israelis about how to form a government. If members of Israel’s opposition were serious about replacing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lander wrote, they’d do “the obvious, strategic, and non-racist thing” and form a government with the Arab parties. I’m a gay Israeli whose parents’ families came to Israel from North Africa and Iraq. I’ve spent years listening to politicians and activists Westsplain my country to me. Lander’s might be the simplest, most confident version yet.In Israel, political parties band together to reach 61 seats out of the 120 in our parliament, called the Knesset. Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief, leads a promising coalition of willing parties that collectively won about 48 seats.Has Eisenkot held Israel’s Arab parties to a different standard? Readers of Lander’s post might think so.He hasn’t. Eisenkot has clearly laid out his coalition principles, and they are the same for any party that wants to join. Recognize Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Accept national service for all citizens. Treat Hamas as a terrorist organization that has to be dismantled. And commit to the values of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which promises “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”Did you catch that last line?One of Eisenkot’s conditions is a pledge to racial equality. Any party, Jewish or Arab, can meet it.Lander lumps the Arab parties together by identity instead of stances, while Eisenkot applies an equal standard to all. So who’s judging by race here?Race isn’t even the right lens. “Jewish” is an ethnoreligion — “Arab” is an ethnicity. “Israeli” and “Palestinian” are nationalities, which each include many religions and skin colors. Whether a Jewish family came from Baghdad or from Warsaw, its roots are in the same land: Israel. Try to read Israel through the United States’s view of race, and you’ll quickly find yourself spinning in circles.What actually stands between Eisenkot and the Arab parties is policy, not identity. Take equality. Ra’am’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has spoken favorably of conversion therapy for LGBT youth. Would Lander ask a fellow Democrat to share power with a party such as that?The bigger gap lies with Hamas. The Joint List’s platform calls Israel an apartheid state and the war against Hamas a genocide. Even Abbas, who has condemned Oct. 7, 2023, in the past, dodged a question last week about whether Hamas should be dismantled. Earlier in October, a fellow Ra’am lawmaker claimed part of Hamas does “charity.”Lander has no trouble drawing this line in his own campaign. Earlier this year, he fired his highest-paid consultant after an investigation found posts praising Hamas. Nobody labeled that racist.That’s what makes this post so hard to excuse. Lander calls himself a liberal Zionist. Yet he laundered a core argument of the anti-Israel movement, implying that Israelis who don’t follow his advice are racist. His evidence? A democracy in the throes of delicate coalition building. That isn’t the ordinary criticism other democracies face. It’s a double standard reserved for the Jewish state.Arab citizens turned out in record numbers last week. Their votes count, and their representation matters. Their elected lawmakers will serve in the Knesset whether or not they enter the ruling coalition. The argument that Eisenkot’s bloc, plus the Arab parties, could be a way to finally oust Netanyahu is understandable.BIBI ON THE BRINK: DOES NETANYAHU STILL HAVE TIME TO FINISH THE JOB IN IRAN?But the onus isn’t entirely on Eisenkot. If the Arab parties want to be in power, they should be open to reevaluating their own positions. Hamas murdered and kidnapped Arab Israelis just as it did Jewish ones. The parties that represent Arab Israelis should condemn not just what Hamas did that day, but its existence as a whole. It’s not a high bar. Clearing it has nothing to do with race.Lander once told the New York Times he felt “queasy” attacking the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, given the antisemitic tropes at play, but said he had to. He clearly knows charged rhetoric wins votes. I’d suggest he focus on the health of the democracy in the country where he hopes to govern, not the one he’s bashing on the campaign trail.Hen Mazzig is a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute.