A campaign group called “Save Jewish Jerusalem” has attracted criticism for racist depictions of Palestinians, after it released a video depicting the “nightmare scenario” of an Arab majority vote in Jerusalem.
The video, highlighted by blogger Mairav Zonszein in the left-leaning 972 magazine, depicts a hypothetical future in which Arab residents of Jerusalem – a growing demographic who currently comprise 40% of the city’s population – vote in its Municipal elections, securing a Palestinian Mayor in Israel’s official capital.
Currently, Palestinians residents of Jerusalem often boycott municipal elections. Though the Israeli state claims the whole city as its own, Palestinians and most UN member states don’t recognise Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, where most Arab residents live. Today these neighborhoods of the city are controlled by Israel, but often suffer from neglect, fuelling feelings of disenfranchisement, despair and unrest among the population.
The group that commissioned the video is regarded as a “peacenik” group, according to Zonszein, and seeks to ensure Jewish control over Jerusalem by “disengaging” from the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods, denying their residents voting rights and imposing military-type rule, much like that which exists in the West Bank today.
Its video depicts all the Palestinians that feature in it as terrorists, who apparently exchange violent struggle to control of Jerusalem for democratic rights when they realise it will give them dominance over the city.
“Other than its explicit racism, the video — and the initiative as a whole — is a total affront to the notions of civil and democratic rights, treating the right of individuals to have a say in who represents them as a privilege to be given or taken away,” Zonszein commented.
