Progressive List for Peace
Encyclopedia
The Progressive List for Peace was a left-wing political party in Israel
formed from an alliance of both Arab
and Jewish left-wing activists.
-based Progressive Movement, as well as other individuals. It contested the 1984 Knesset elections
, winning two seats, taken by Mohammed Miari
and Mattityahu Peled
.
dealing with the Knesset was amended to add section 7a, "Prevention of Participation of Candidates List." This provision included:
A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following... negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.
The primary motivation for this amendment was to outlaw racist parties such as Kach
, whose members had been involved in terrorism. However, to provide what was viewed as balance, the authors also sought to outlaw left-wing parties which they viewed as threatening the Jewish character
of the state of Israel.
Although it is unclear exactly what might constitute "negation of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people", conceivably positions such as support for the one-state solution – creating a single state in Israel the West Bank and Gaza Stroip, both Jewish and Arab – or support for granting Arabs the same rights to settle in Israel which Jews enjoy, might be included.
On 17 June 1988 prior to the 1988 elections
, the Central Elections Committee
used this provision as a justification for banning the Progressive List for Peace from running in the election. The party appealed to the Supreme Court
, which overruled the Central Elections Committee decision and permitted the PLP to run in the election. However, the Supreme Court did not overturn section 7(a): it merely held that the policies of the PLP did not fall under it.
According to the brief presented by Yossi Bard, himself a prominent member of the party, the PLP did not dispute the Jewish character of Israel, but asserted that that character must be interpreted as subject to Israel being a democracy - i.e., the Jewish character of Israel could not mean any discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, since such discrimination would by definition mean that Israel was not a democracy. Rather, the PLP held that since the majority of Israeli citizens were Jews, their culture and traditions would naturally greatly influence the overall culture of the country, and the PLP had no objection to that.
The Kach lawyers presented what they claimed was a kind of "mirror image brief", in which they asserted that Kach had no objection to the democratic character of Israel, but asserted that that character must be interpreted as subject to Israel being a Jewish State - i.e., the democratic character of Israel could not mean any infringement of the pre-eminent position of Jews in all spheres of Israeli life, since such infringement would mean that Israel was not a Jewish state (at least, not what Kach regarded as "a Jewish state"). Rather, Kach held that it had no objection to state officials being elected in free elections and that political parties and organizations be granted freedom of speech, as long as political and economic power was kept exclusively in the hands of Jews.
The Supreme Court broke the "symmetry" by accepting the PLP brief and rejecting that of Kach, that overturning the banning of the former and upholding that of latter. That ruling created a milestone precedent in Israeli constitutional jurisprudence by establishing that supporting equal rights for Israeli Arabs does not consist of denying Israel's character as a Jewish democratic state, while opposing equality for Israeli Arabs is a violation.
, the PLP Spokesperson, was arrested by military police while on a term of the reserve military duty obligatory to all Israeli Jewish males. He was charged with having written graffiti on 117 tanks and other military vehicles, exhorting soldiers to refuse service in the Occupied Territories, and with having taken down the standing orders from a military billboard and replaced them with PLP leaflets expressing "anger and protest" at "the systematic killing of Palestinian unarmed demonstrators" and calling for "the creation of an independent Palestinian state, side-by-side with Israel". Keller admitted the acts attributed to him and actually took pride in them and declared them to be praiseworthy rather than a criminal offence. Both under interrogation and at his trial, Keller repeatedly reiterated that he had acted completely alone, without any involvement by other members of the party or of the party as such, that the PLP leaflets were left over in his bag from a meeting which he attended on the night before his call-up order, and that he had not brought them to the army with any premeditated intention of exposing soldiers to them but rather had placed them on the military billboard as a sudden reaction to radio news of especially harsh acts of oppression by soldiers on the West Bank.
Keller's testimony on this was accepted, and no legal steps were taken against any other members of the PLP or against the party as a whole, though some right-wing columnists and politicians urged such steps to be taken. However, Keller's wife Beate Zilversmidt was received with a standing ovation at the PLP's conference, held in Nazareth
during the second month of his incarceration, and the party members - even though not consulted in advance - clearly approved of his act.
the party won only one seat, taken by Miari. Prior to the 1992 elections
the electoral threshold was raised to 1.5%. The PLP won only 0.9% of the vote, losing its Knesset representation.
stated:
"When we formed the Progressive List for Peace, we hoped to create a political force composed of Jews and Arabs together, which would become a permanent feature of the Israeli political scene. Unfortunately, this did not happen. But we did achieve something quite important: to make Israel more of a democracy, by letting its Arab citizens have more of a real exercise of the ballot box. (...) In the Israeli political system as designed under Ben Gurion
and continued until 1984, Arab citizens had in practice only two electoral opitions: either to support one of the satellite parties set up by the ruling Mapai
party and completely subserivient to it, or to support the Israeli Communist Party which did do quite a bit of good things for the Arabs - but its Secretary General was invariably a Jew. Any group of Arabs which tried to set up a party which was neither government-subservient nor Communist got immediately banned, like Al Ard.(...) Now, though the PLP is gone, its legacy remains. We have irrevocably broken the barrier. Now, just as a Jewish nationalist can form a party and get elected to the Knesset, so can an Arab nationalist. Just as a Jewish religious party can be represented in the Knesset (several of them, in fact) so can an Islamic religious party. You don't have to like all the parties which now can get into the Knesset to appreciate that a basic democratic right can now be exercised."
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
formed from an alliance of both Arab
Arab
Arab people, also known as Arabs , are a panethnicity primarily living in the Arab world, which is located in Western Asia and North Africa. They are identified as such on one or more of genealogical, linguistic, or cultural grounds, with tribal affiliations, and intra-tribal relationships playing...
and Jewish left-wing activists.
History
The party was formed in 1984 by a merger of the Jewish Alternativa movement, the NazarethNazareth
Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel...
-based Progressive Movement, as well as other individuals. It contested the 1984 Knesset elections
Israeli legislative election, 1984
Elections for the eleventh Knesset were held in Israel on 23 July 1984. Voter turnout was 78.8%. The results saw the Alignment return to being the largest party in the Knesset, a status it had lost in 1977...
, winning two seats, taken by Mohammed Miari
Mohammed Miari
Mohammed Miari is an Israeli Arab former politician who headed the Progressive List for Peace during the 1980s and early 1990s.-Biography:Miari was born during the Mandate era in al-Birwa, a village which was depopulated as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He grew up in Makr and attended...
and Mattityahu Peled
Mattityahu Peled
Mattityahu "Matti" Peled was a well-known Israeli public figure who was at various periods of his life a professional military man who reached the rank of Aluf in the IDF and was a member of the General Staff during the Six Day War of 1967; a notable scholar who headed the Arabic Language and...
.
Attempted banning
In 1985, the Basic LawBasic Laws of Israel
The Basic Laws of Israel are a key component of Israel's constitutional law. These laws deal with the formation and role of the principal state's institutions, and the relations between the state's authorities. Some of them also protect civil rights...
dealing with the Knesset was amended to add section 7a, "Prevention of Participation of Candidates List." This provision included:
A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following... negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.
The primary motivation for this amendment was to outlaw racist parties such as Kach
Kach and Kahane Chai
Kach was a far-right political party in Israel. Founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane in the early 1970s, and following his Jewish nationalist ideology , the party entered the Knesset in 1984 after several electoral failures...
, whose members had been involved in terrorism. However, to provide what was viewed as balance, the authors also sought to outlaw left-wing parties which they viewed as threatening the Jewish character
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
of the state of Israel.
Although it is unclear exactly what might constitute "negation of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people", conceivably positions such as support for the one-state solution – creating a single state in Israel the West Bank and Gaza Stroip, both Jewish and Arab – or support for granting Arabs the same rights to settle in Israel which Jews enjoy, might be included.
On 17 June 1988 prior to the 1988 elections
Israeli legislative election, 1988
Elections for the twelfth Knesset were held in Israel on 1 November 1988. Voter turnout was 79.7%.-Results:1 Five members of the Likud left to form the Party for the Advancement of the Zionist Idea; after two returned, the party was renamed the New Liberal Party...
, the Central Elections Committee
Israeli Central Elections Committee
The Israeli Central Elections Committee is the body charged under the Knesset Elections Law of 1969 to carry out the elections for the upcoming Knesset. The committee is composed of Knesset members representating various parliamentary groups and is chaired by a Supreme Court Justice...
used this provision as a justification for banning the Progressive List for Peace from running in the election. The party appealed to the Supreme Court
Supreme Court of Israel
The Supreme Court is at the head of the court system and highest judicial instance in Israel. The Supreme Court sits in Jerusalem.The area of its jurisdiction is all of Israel and the Israeli-occupied territories. A ruling of the Supreme Court is binding upon every court, other than the Supreme...
, which overruled the Central Elections Committee decision and permitted the PLP to run in the election. However, the Supreme Court did not overturn section 7(a): it merely held that the policies of the PLP did not fall under it.
According to the brief presented by Yossi Bard, himself a prominent member of the party, the PLP did not dispute the Jewish character of Israel, but asserted that that character must be interpreted as subject to Israel being a democracy - i.e., the Jewish character of Israel could not mean any discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, since such discrimination would by definition mean that Israel was not a democracy. Rather, the PLP held that since the majority of Israeli citizens were Jews, their culture and traditions would naturally greatly influence the overall culture of the country, and the PLP had no objection to that.
The Kach lawyers presented what they claimed was a kind of "mirror image brief", in which they asserted that Kach had no objection to the democratic character of Israel, but asserted that that character must be interpreted as subject to Israel being a Jewish State - i.e., the democratic character of Israel could not mean any infringement of the pre-eminent position of Jews in all spheres of Israeli life, since such infringement would mean that Israel was not a Jewish state (at least, not what Kach regarded as "a Jewish state"). Rather, Kach held that it had no objection to state officials being elected in free elections and that political parties and organizations be granted freedom of speech, as long as political and economic power was kept exclusively in the hands of Jews.
The Supreme Court broke the "symmetry" by accepting the PLP brief and rejecting that of Kach, that overturning the banning of the former and upholding that of latter. That ruling created a milestone precedent in Israeli constitutional jurisprudence by establishing that supporting equal rights for Israeli Arabs does not consist of denying Israel's character as a Jewish democratic state, while opposing equality for Israeli Arabs is a violation.
Adam Keller Court Martial
In April 1988, Adam KellerAdam Keller
Adam Keller is an Israeli peace activist who was among the founders of Gush Shalom, of which he is a spokesperson.-Political views:...
, the PLP Spokesperson, was arrested by military police while on a term of the reserve military duty obligatory to all Israeli Jewish males. He was charged with having written graffiti on 117 tanks and other military vehicles, exhorting soldiers to refuse service in the Occupied Territories, and with having taken down the standing orders from a military billboard and replaced them with PLP leaflets expressing "anger and protest" at "the systematic killing of Palestinian unarmed demonstrators" and calling for "the creation of an independent Palestinian state, side-by-side with Israel". Keller admitted the acts attributed to him and actually took pride in them and declared them to be praiseworthy rather than a criminal offence. Both under interrogation and at his trial, Keller repeatedly reiterated that he had acted completely alone, without any involvement by other members of the party or of the party as such, that the PLP leaflets were left over in his bag from a meeting which he attended on the night before his call-up order, and that he had not brought them to the army with any premeditated intention of exposing soldiers to them but rather had placed them on the military billboard as a sudden reaction to radio news of especially harsh acts of oppression by soldiers on the West Bank.
Keller's testimony on this was accepted, and no legal steps were taken against any other members of the PLP or against the party as a whole, though some right-wing columnists and politicians urged such steps to be taken. However, Keller's wife Beate Zilversmidt was received with a standing ovation at the PLP's conference, held in Nazareth
Nazareth
Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel...
during the second month of his incarceration, and the party members - even though not consulted in advance - clearly approved of his act.
Decline
In the November 1988 Knesset electionsIsraeli legislative election, 1988
Elections for the twelfth Knesset were held in Israel on 1 November 1988. Voter turnout was 79.7%.-Results:1 Five members of the Likud left to form the Party for the Advancement of the Zionist Idea; after two returned, the party was renamed the New Liberal Party...
the party won only one seat, taken by Miari. Prior to the 1992 elections
Israeli legislative election, 1992
Elections for the thirteenth Knesset were held in Israel on 23 June 1992. The result was a victory for the left, led by Yitzhak Rabin's Labor Party, though their win was at least partially due to several small right-wing parties narrowly failing to cross the electoral threshold and thus effectively...
the electoral threshold was raised to 1.5%. The PLP won only 0.9% of the vote, losing its Knesset representation.
Historical Perspective
In a meeting held in Tel Aviv on April 22, 1994 - to mark ten years since the formation of the PLP - the party's former spokesperson Adam KellerAdam Keller
Adam Keller is an Israeli peace activist who was among the founders of Gush Shalom, of which he is a spokesperson.-Political views:...
stated:
"When we formed the Progressive List for Peace, we hoped to create a political force composed of Jews and Arabs together, which would become a permanent feature of the Israeli political scene. Unfortunately, this did not happen. But we did achieve something quite important: to make Israel more of a democracy, by letting its Arab citizens have more of a real exercise of the ballot box. (...) In the Israeli political system as designed under Ben Gurion
Ben Gurion
Ben Gurion can refer to the following persons:* Nicodemus ben Gurion, a Biblical figure, probably a rich Jewish member of the Sanhedrin that felt sympathetic to Jesus Christ...
and continued until 1984, Arab citizens had in practice only two electoral opitions: either to support one of the satellite parties set up by the ruling Mapai
Mapai
Mapai was a left-wing political party in Israel, and was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968...
party and completely subserivient to it, or to support the Israeli Communist Party which did do quite a bit of good things for the Arabs - but its Secretary General was invariably a Jew. Any group of Arabs which tried to set up a party which was neither government-subservient nor Communist got immediately banned, like Al Ard.(...) Now, though the PLP is gone, its legacy remains. We have irrevocably broken the barrier. Now, just as a Jewish nationalist can form a party and get elected to the Knesset, so can an Arab nationalist. Just as a Jewish religious party can be represented in the Knesset (several of them, in fact) so can an Islamic religious party. You don't have to like all the parties which now can get into the Knesset to appreciate that a basic democratic right can now be exercised."