“I’m not entirely sure how long she intends to play this, but eventually it will get old and she’ll go back to undermining the state that pays her salary.”
Nazareth, April 3 – April Fools Day ended at midnight as Friday became Saturday last week, but local residents are reporting that MK Haneen Zoabi of the Joint Arab List delegation to the parliament has not yet let go of the pretense that she represents or serves the interests of Arab citizens of Israel.
Residents of this northern town, traditionally accepted as the birthplace of Jesus, depend economically on good relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel, and have made plain their disgust at various members of the Joint List – including its leader, MK Ayman Odeh – for exacerbating the ethnic tensions and jeopardizing both the coexistence and prosperity that anchors Nazareth. On April Fools Day, Ms. Zoabi, known for threading the fine line between free speech and treason, claimed to be serving as the duly elected representative of her constituency, a farce that amused hundreds of thousands of Israelis, in keeping with the date. However, as April 1 turned into April 2, and then to the third, Israelis noticed that Zoabi had yet to bring the joke to an end.
“I’m not entirely sure how long she intends to play this, but eventually it will get old and she’ll go back to undermining the state that pays her salary,” predicted Nazareth resident Yousef Jabri, the proprietor of a tourist kitsch establishment. “For now, it’s still pretty funny.”
Zoabi, 46, rejects Israel as a Jewish state and considers its current leadership fascist. Despite questioning the legitimacy of the state however, and defending Palestinian terrorism as legitimate resistance no matter how violent or how many civilians it targets, she draws a salary from its coffers and has throughout her career participated in the official institutions and processes of that state. Observers note that her sudden professed concern for discharging her duties as an elected official of Israel helped make the gag that much funnier.
“It would be one thing for Zoabi to go even more extreme and actually call for bombings, stabbings, and other violence against Israel – that would have been eminently believable as an April Fools gag,” explained commentator Hussein a-Sailem. “But the subtlety might have been lost on the society, which isn’t so big on nuance. With exquisite comedic sense, Zoabi went the other way and pretended to be invested in the system she wants to undermine.”
A-sailem also wondered why Zoabi continued with the prank even beyond April Fools Day, but surmised that perhaps she thought that the residents of her hometown were also only pretending to get along with Jews as they continued to pursue peaceful coexistence beyond the first of April, and she therefore decided to continue her gag.
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