Likud cameras ‘won’t stop me,’ says Arab man at Sakhnin ballot station
Young and old residents of Sakhnin, a large Arab town in the Galilee, trickle into classrooms in a small school on Tuesday to cast ballots in Israel’s second national elections in 2019.
It was a slow morning. Two hours after the voting booths at the Al-Salam Elementary School opened at 9 a.m., only some 30 voters had cast ballots in the center of town. Sahknin is home to approximately 30,500 people.
Hamad Khalailah, a 28-year-old lawyer, who said he voted for the Joint List, an alliance of the four largest Arab-majority parties, remarks that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party’s efforts to send activists armed with cameras to polling stations in Arab communities did not make him think twice about casting a ballot.
“I wasn’t scared to come here,” he says. “It is my right to vote and Netanyahu will not stop me from doing that.”
— Adam Rasgon