Palestinians of the Naqab make their voice heard

Israel’s Palestinian parties landed 19 seats in last week’s Knesset elections, provoking the ire of hard-liners in the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused them of fraud and of stealing the elections. While everyone was talking about the pleasant surprise of the Palestinian parties’ success, no one looked closely at the dynamic, namely at a particular faction of the Palestinian population of Israel: the people of the south, the Bedouin population of the Naqab.

We are talking about more than 300,000 people in the Naqab, including Bir Al-Saba. According to my source, the people of the Naqab gave 125,000 votes to the United Arab List (Ra’am) led by Mansour Abbas and 20,000 to the Joint List.