It doesn't feel good or empowering to give up my right to vote. It feels mostly shitty, and maybe that is how it is supposed to feel. But as long as it is not an inalienable right for those who live under the same governmental roof, it is absolutely alienable to me. I just returned from the voting booth in Tel Aviv. Voting is such a private matter, and at the end of the day, nobody except the person voting knows who he/she voted for. My voting experience today, however, wasn't a private matter. And it wasn't an enjoyable or empowering…

The actual right-wing bloc looks set to win over 100 of the Knesset's 120 seats in Tuesday's election. There's only one reason to vote against it: the future.  "Right-wing bloc's majority slashed," read the headline over today's election poll in Haaretz. "The gap is closing," according to the poll in today's Yedioth Aharonoth. Both surveys showed the right-religious bloc getting 63 Knesset seats and the center-left-Arab bloc getting 57, and both showed the steadily weakening Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu down to 32. Even if it is still clear to everyone that Netanyahu will lead the next government, many people will likely gather…

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post sharing my personal grappling with the question of whether to vote or not in the election in 12 days. I'm still not sure if I will end up voting, as it feels to me in principal like conceding to Israel's farcical democracy and a direct affront to all the disenfranchised Palestinians who live under the same governmental roof. But if I do vote, I know who I will vote for: Da'am, the Arab-Jewish workers' party. I'm not going to elaborate much more, at least not in this post (you can read their platform…

Just as an American wouldn't imagine voting for a party that does not accept blacks, progressive Israelis should only consider voting for parties that challenge the separation between Palestinian and Jews. This is a translation, with minor changes, of my weekly column for Time Out Tel Aviv. The Hebrew original can be read here. A couple of weeks ago, the Knesset's Central Elections Committee forbade media outlets from referring to Hadash, Balad and Ra'am-Ta'al as "Arab parties" in their polling results, and called on outlets to refer to each party individually. Nobody would think to publish a poll in which…