Sure it's racist, but is it really that bad? (Spoiler alert: Yes)

Registering to vote in Arizona (the History Channel wrongly says New Mexico), 1948.

So Binyamin Netanyahu made this election-day video where he begged the rightists to come out and defend themselves against the Saracen hordes:

The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out! (text via Politico)

So Bill Maher wants to know, is that really so terrible? I was reading about it at +972 and had to check the fuller text from Haaretz before I could really believe what they were saying:

I guess that is racist, in the strictest sense, he’s bringing race into the equation. But, first of all, like Reagan didn’t win races with racism? Or Nixon? Or Bush? Like they didn’t play the race card? Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, remember that? Remember Willie Horton?

I heard a lot of commentators here say, it would been as if Mitt Romney, in 2012, on the eve of the election said, ‘black voters are coming out in droves to the polls.’ But I don’t know if that’s really a great analogy. I think that would be a good analogy if America was a country that was surrounded by 12 or 13 completely black nations who had militarily attacked us many times, including as recently as last year. Would we let them vote? I don’t know. When we were attacked by the Japanese, we didn’t just not let them vote, we rounded them up and put them in camps.

Yes, yes, and yes. I remember Willie Horton very well. That's not a good way to convince me that Netanyahu was not out of line. I don't accept the Republican race card starting from 1964 at all, and I don't accept Netanyahu either.

I acknowledge that the video wasn't as bad as the internment of Japanese-American citizens after Pearl Harbor, but I don't know if that's the right analogy. Obviously it would be terrible if the Israeli government were to start detaining Arab citizens just on account of their ethnic origin. Has that ever actually happened, like last July or something?

A better analogy might be the one about the relationship between the white settlers and the local people they uprooted from their traditional gardens and hunting grounds over the course of a three-century nakba, in which the native people, I'm not going to lie, attacked the invaders almost as much as they got attacked. Male citizens of the United States got the right to vote regardless of race in 1870, but Native Americans weren't given citizenship, or hence voting rights, until 1924, and many states kept stopping them from voting long after that:

After the passage of the 1924 citizenship bill, it still took over forty years for all fifty states to allow Native Americans to vote. In 1948, the Arizona Supreme Court struck down a provision of its state constitution that kept Indians from voting. Other states eventually followed suit, concluding with New Mexico in 1962, the last state to enfranchise Native Americans.

Even with the lawful right to vote in every state, Native Americans suffered from the same mechanisms and strategies, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, fraud and intimidation, that kept African Americans from exercising that right. In 1965, with passage of the Voting Rights Act and subsequent legislation in 1970, 1975, and 1982, protections for non-English speakers and other citizen voters were reaffirmed and strengthened.

The Obama administration is by the way the first in I don't know how long to take the question of Native voting rights seriously, and is even now pursuing a new set of cases in South Dakota, where the white establishment was still setting things up to force Indians who wanted to vote to drive from the reservations to their county seats, which could be 20 or 30 miles away, as recently as last November. Pretty conservative state most of the time in recent decades, South Dakota, and the Indians tend to vote Democratic, so maybe Maher would think that was a forgivable use of racism—hey, it's just politics.

But not to me. And Netanyahu calling his people to cancel out the votes of the other race was pretty bad, especially in the context of all the much worse ways in which the government humiliates Arabs on a daily basis.