78 chapter two Most observers in Arab political parties and civil society viewed this vote as an extension of the racist and discriminatory laws targeting Arab citizens which were introduced by the right-wing Netanyahu-Lieberman administration, and various Jewish-Israeli litigators, scholars and newspapers also spoke against disqualification.65 By December 30, the vote of the CEC was unanimously overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court to allow Zoabi to run in the January 2013 elections. Arab Civil Society: A Non-State Alternative Contradictions in the self-designation of the State of Israel as ‘Jewish and democratic’ render genuine representation of the Arab citizenry an impossible venture. Questions of representation were particularly heightened among the Palestinians in Israel after the 1993 Oslo Accords. The failed results of the Oslo process targeted the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel from two angles. On the one hand, the violent intensification of the broader conflict fuelled a heightened sense of existential threat among Israeli Jews, placing the Arabs in Israel under a marginalizing and repressive security discourse. For a variety of political and ideological reasons, PalestinianArabs in Israel were directly associated with the actions and reactions of Palestinian-Arabs in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip – prompting the state to exert a similar crushing system of control over its Arab citizenry.66 At the same time, the historic peace talks that began between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993 completely ignored the status of the Arabs in Israel (Rouhana and Ghanem 1998, 330). The Palestinians in Israel were not allies in building Palestinian national right to dignity, in case their positions are deliberately misconstrued as a negation of the state or as support for terrorism.” See Hassan Jabareen, “Commentary on the Central Elections Committee Session,”Adalah Newsletter 99 (December 2012), http://adalah.org/ Public/files/English/Newsletter/99-December2012/Commentary-Central-Elections -Committee-Jabareen-December2012.pdf. 65 Responding to the CEC ruling, Attorney Hassan Jabareen remarked that “Israel is the only country in the world in which members of the minority must justify their struggle for full equality” (ibid.). Further, even prior to the Israeli Supreme Court ruling, AttorneyGeneral Yehuda Weinstein voiced his opposition to the CEC ban on MK Zoabi, as well as the barring of any other political parties. Also see Sammy Smooha, “Expert Opinion: Repercussions of disqualifying an Arab political party or one of its candidates in the elections for the 19th Knesset,” [December 16, 2012] Adalah Newsletter 99 (December 2012), http://adalah.org/Public/files/English/Newsletter/99-December2012/Expert-Opinion -Smooha-2012-Elections-Disqualifications.pdf and Haaretz, “An unacceptable dis­­ qua­ lifi­ cation,” December 21, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/an-unacceptable -disqualification-1.486242. 66 For more on this, see Rouhana (1997) and Zureik (1979).