MK Zoabi On Likud Payroll; Helps Solidify Jewish Support For Bibi

She has consistently expressed support for Palestinian ambitions to remove Jewish sovereignty from the land.

Umm El Fahm, April 22 – Investigators are examining reports that MK Hanin Zoabi, a firebrand member of the United Arab List delegation, is actually working for a right-wing party, making headlines with her anti-Zionist rhetoric as a ploy to frighten Jewish Israelis into keeping a right-wing government in power. The reports emerged Wednesday afternoon amid continuing tensions over Israeli Arab loyalties in the context of Yom Hazikaron, the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

Zoabi has attracted attention for years, most notably for her participation in the 2010 Freedom Flotilla, an attempt to break Israel’s control of Gaza Strip maritime passages that the Israeli Navy intercepted, resulting in the deaths of 13 and injuries to dozens more. Zoabi characterized the IDF actions as unprovoked, and has consistently expressed support for Palestinian ambitions to remove Jewish sovereignty from the land.

Last year, after three Jewish teenagers were abducted and murdered by Hamas operatives, Zoabi adamantly refused to call the act terrorism, prompting fellow legislators to call for the revocation of her parliamentary immunity and her arrest on treason charges. She was suspended for the duration of the last parliamentary session, and her candidacy for the current Knesset, elected last month, was first disqualified, then reinstated on appeal.

This week, MK Zoabi will address a gathering at New York University to discuss her “insider’s perspective on Israeli Apartheid,” using her status – a democratically elected representative of a minority – to accuse Israel of engaging in a policy that, if it existed, would prevent her from holding the position.

Her creation and exploitation of political drama, to the apparent detriment of everyday concerns for her constituency, induced colleagues to wonder whether Zoabi’s activities, which had reached the point of becoming caricature, were in fact the work of parties with an interest in painting her and her Arab List cohorts – and possibly Israeli Arab society as a whole – as irredeemably opposed to Israel, stoking fear of Israeli Arabs as a Fifth Column and thus pushing Jewish citizens to vote Likud.

Investigators declined to identify which legislators requested that the case be opened, but aides to several Labor Party delegates told reporters that Opposition leader Isaac Herzog himself had suggested that Zoabi’s behavior was so extreme as to warrant suspicion that she was in fact a double agent of right-wing parties. Zoabi’s outrageous reputation contributed to the uncertainty over whether that remark was made in jest, leading several Labor and Hatnua lawmakers to take it at face value and request the investigation.

“[Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu’s last-minute call to his constituency to vote because Arabs were going to polling places in ‘droves,’ though untrue, raised our suspicions that something deeper was at play here,” said MK Tzipi Livni, who stood to serve as Prime Minister in the second half of the term had the Labor-Hatnua Zionist Union alliance prevailed. “There’s something really odd about the way Hanin Zoabi lives up to every right-wing fear.”