NAZARETH, Israel — Lounging in the doorway of a dress shop just down the street from the towering Basilica of the Annunciation, Majdoline Mimo shook her curly head and clucked her tongue at the mention of Israel's elections Tuesday.
"I'll cast a blank ballot," the young Israeli Arab woman said, as her girlfriends nodded in agreement. "I don't see any party that really represents my goals."
Arab citizens of Israel make up 13% of the country's eligible voters, and if numbers alone were what counted, they would be a powerful political bloc, eagerly courted by all sides. Instead, the mood among the Arab electorate is largely one of listlessness. Pollsters are forecasting that their turnout will be low, and those who do vote are likely to divide their support among a number of small Arab parties.
In Nazareth, Israel's largest Arab-dominated city and the town where Jesus is believed to have spent his boyhood, nearly all those asked said they felt cut off from the Jewish state and its institutions. But according to the polls, up to one-fifth of Arab voters will nonetheless cast ballots for one of the mainstream Israeli parties.
Israel's left-leaning Labor Party is expected to attract considerable numbers of Arab voters, in part because of its leftist platform and in part because it is headed by Amir Peretz, a Moroccan-born Jew whose native language is Arabic.
"Everyone is saying we should vote for the Arab parties, because they are our own people, but to me it is throwing the vote away," said Azhar abu Hamad, 19, in Nazareth. She said she would vote for Meretz, the most leftist of what people here call the "Zionist" parties.
Three Arab parties are likely to divide the rest of the Arab vote among themselves, for a total of about 10 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, or parliament.
A political bloc of that size can often wield disproportionate clout under Israel's parliamentary system by positioning itself as a swing vote. But the Arab parties tend to be sidetracked by their differing ideologies, which run from Islamist to communist.
"If we ran a single Arab list of candidates, everyone would have to pay more attention to us in the parliament," said Yusef Habiballah, a student from a village outside Nazareth. "But it seems we can't find a way to unite."
