In this village in the hills outside Nazareth that dates to biblical times, Afu and Ruqaya Dawarshe are settling their small restaurant’s accounts for the day while doing some political accounting as well.

“We are part of this country, no? So we too need a voice. Our issues need to be heard at the very top,” says Ms. Dawarshe, sitting with her husband at a table piled high with receipts and bills.

“The Jewish parties don’t always understand us and our needs. So we need an Arab party on the inside so our voice will go far.”

But Ms. Dawarshe is wary of the prospect of an Arab-led party entering the government coalition at any price, especially with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Likud leader has pivoted from demonizing Arab citizens to courting them ahead of Tuesday’s election – an unprecedented fourth trip to the polls in just two years.

Her struggle reflects what the Arab sector as a whole – 21% of the population – is wrestling with: a growing desire to be part of the political process, even possibly inside a ruling coalition for the first time in Israeli history, but not necessarily at the price of abandoning principles and sense of identity.

Product of success

One reason the Arab community is even having this conversation is the electoral success demonstrated by a coalition of Arab parties, the Joint List, in recent rounds of national voting.

Mansour Abbas, leader of Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood movement, is the surprise figure testing these conflicting trends within his own community in this election.

He has said he is open to working with anyone in the messy business of coalition building, even Mr. Netanyahu or other right-wing Jewish party leaders, in exchange for their committing to the issues important to the Arab minority.

The previous three elections ended in deadlock, followed by weak coalitions that quickly collapsed, providing an opening for Ra’am to play the role of coalition kingmaker and for Jewish-led parties from across the political spectrum to seek out Arab votes.

Meanwhile the Arab public is reeling from a double crisis: a surge in violent crime and the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, making the overtures from Jewish politicians offering help more acceptable to some, observers say.

While complications persist, an evolution in Arabs’ and Jews’ attitudes toward the Israeli democratic process and each other appears to be underway.

“These elections could likely be a milestone in the process of Arab integration into Israeli politics,” says Elie Rekhess, an expert on Arab society and a visiting professor of Israel studies at Northwestern University. “The paradigm of exclusion seems to be disintegrating.”

Increased integration

Arab parties traditionally have been excluded from Jewish-led coalitions because of their anti-Zionist views and questions regarding their loyalty, specifically how they would handle security issues. For their part, Arab parties have been wary of being part of a government, in part out of concern their presence would be taken as support for harsh policies toward their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza.

But the shifts in attitudes in the political arena follow a new level of integration by Arabs in the country’s economy, working together with Jewish citizens in hospitals and high-tech firms, and studying in the same classes in universities.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Likud supporters with campaign posters depicting the party leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, march through the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, March 19, 2021.

The pandemic may also be playing a role in shifting the conversation. It was the first national emergency Israel faced that was not part of the broader, regional conflict, and Israeli Arab doctors and nurses were on the front line.

Stories and images of Arab nurses reciting Jewish prayers or performing other final rituals with dying ultra-Orthodox patients whose family could not visit them were shared on social media. In one ad campaign, doctors fighting the pandemic asked not to be forgotten when it came time to include Arab citizens at the political decision-making table.

Mohammad Dawarshe, who founded the first centrist Arab political party in January with the goal of working with Jewish centrist parties, says that just as Jewish society made room for Arabs in medicine and other professions it was time room was also made in the corridors of power.

“I think that the culture that needs to be created in the State of Israel needs to be an inclusive culture and creation,” Mr. Dawarshe says in an interview. “I put this as a challenge [to Israel] to say if you are a responsible majority and not just a technical majority, then you need to create space for me.”

The Abbas gambit

After the last election, in which it won the third most seats in parliament, the Joint List made history as the first Arab party to recommend that a Jewish party form the next government. But it was shaken by what it saw as a betrayal by Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, who joined Mr. Netanyahu in a unity government, and the reverberations weakened the internal cohesion of the Joint List.

Mr. Abbas pulled his party out of the Joint List. His party is projected on Tuesday to win four seats, the Joint List nine.

“There is a positive in our increased power; the issue is how do we organize this power that we have?” says Muhammed Khalaily, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute.

He compares Mr. Abbas’ transactional approach to that of the ultra-Orthodox parties, which for decades have eschewed ideology to secure policies and funding that help their community.

“He is saying we are playing sectoral politics – it does not matter what the prime minister’s agenda is as long as we get what we want,” says Mr. Khalaily.

Yet he has no faith in any right-wing government delivering on promises to the Arab population after the election: “The right in Israel rose to power on putting Arabs down. It’s an exclusive club that is not prepared to accept Arab citizens … and Netanyahu is the architect of this approach.”

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Protesters participate in a weekly demonstration against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's alleged corruption and his handling of the pandemic, in Jerusalem, March 20, 2021.

As Mr. Netanyahu courts Arab voters, promising that only he has the political weight to deliver, he has been traveling the country from the Galilee to the Negev Desert.

In a speech in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, he promised a “new era of Jewish-Arab relations … an age of honor and equality, an age of opportunities and an age of power.”

Yet soon after he spoke, a protest broke out with demonstrators saying he was not welcome in the city and blaming him for oppressive policies that hurt Arab citizens. Mr. Netanyahu is also courting a far-right alliance, one of whose candidates advocates expelling Arab citizens deemed disloyal.

Shifts in thought

A survey of the Israeli public commissioned by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, found that since 2019, support among Jewish Israelis for an Arab party joining a governing coalition rose from 35% to 49%, including from 19% to 31% among those who identify as right wing.

Meanwhile, 46% of the Arab citizens surveyed by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University said an Arab party should join any coalition that is formed after the elections if it benefits the Arab community, while 18% said they would only agree to joining a center-left coalition, and 13% rejected joining any government or supporting it from outside the coalition.

Nevertheless, Raef Zreik, an expert in political philosophy and co-director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University, does not think Arab and Jewish citizens are on the verge of a breakthrough.

“Politics is always about taking risks. I take one step; you take one step. But we are not there,” says Dr. Zreik.

Citing laws like the 2018 Nation State law, which defines Israel as a Jewish state foremost, he concludes: “We are marching in the opposite direction. Israel is becoming more Jewish and less democratic.”

Mohammad Dawarshe, however, says he refuses “to be on the passive side, waiting for someone to determine what the policy toward us is going to be.”

He endorsed the Joint List after withdrawing his fledgling party just days before the election when it became clear it would not clear the threshold for parliament.

“We want in. We want to be part of a future coalition in the State of Israel,” he says.

Steven Senne/AP

Protesters Dana Liu (center front) and Kexin Huang (right), both of Newton, Massachusetts, display placards during a Stop Asian Hate rally on March 21, 2021, in Newton. A long history of discrimination against Asian Americans underscores how many in the community continue to be seen as “other” in America.

Amid the tragedy and heartbreak of the recent shootings in the Atlanta area – including six women of Asian descent – I have hope that out of this murderous act can come an awakening in America. 

I have hope that our leaders in government and in business as well as everyday people of every race, gender, and ethnicity can see that more must be done in our pursuit of a more perfect union. And I have hope that this moment of shared grief and outrage will not be for naught, and that the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in particular will continue to make their voices heard. 

Let us remember all the names of those killed: Suncha Kim, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels. 

Sadly though, I also recognize that the context for these latest killings at three spa and massage businesses is a history of mistreatment and stereotyping of Asians in America, particularly of Asian women, dating to this nation’s earliest decades. In 1834, Nathaniel and Frederick Carne brought Afong Moy to New York from Canton, known now as Guangzhou, in China’s Guangdong province. Reportedly the first Chinese female immigrant to the United States, she was exhibited as “the Chinese lady” for 50 cents a view.  

What could more clearly have foreshadowed the perpetual state of “otherness” and the dehumanizing stereotypes faced by many Asian women today than being exhibited live as a curiosity? A long history of discrimination against Asian American men and women underscores how so many in our community continue to be seen, if not displayed, as “other” in America – interchangeable and perpetual foreigners. 

An endemic virus of hate 

The emergence of a virus of hate in a changing America long preceded the arrival of the novel coronavirus. Nearly 150 years after Ms. Moy’s arrival, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin, also originally from Guangdong province, went with friends to a strip club in Detroit in 1982 to celebrate his upcoming wedding. Two white autoworkers, apparently mistaking him for Japanese and upset over the success of Japanese automakers in the United States, beat him to death. The killers were ordered to pay a $3,000 fine each and given zero prison time.  

The enduring story of violence and otherness continues today, horrifically with the Atlanta killings and also with attacks on often older Asian Americans. This included January’s fatal assault, caught on a security camera, of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco.  

According to Stop AAPI Hate – a reporting center founded a year ago to address discrimination against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community during the pandemic – nearly 3,800 firsthand reports of anti-Asian hate, including physical and verbal assaults, have been made from March 19, 2020, to Feb. 28 of this year. Such attacks are likely underreported, however, due to language and cultural barriers as well as a lack of trust in law enforcement.  

For many of the perpetrators behind these crimes, I suspect they saw their victim not as a fellow American but as a nameless “Asian,” not specifically Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Thai, or of another AAPI heritage. The victim was probably perceived simply as “other” – from a community that would not speak up or fight back, but would simply eat the bitterness and move on. 

Not all attacks are violent, of course, but even subtle, unintended slights suggest an assumption of otherness. I am always struck, for example, when people with, I believe, no ill will, still compliment my English or ask, “Where are you (originally) from?” 

Behind Asian stereotypes: Diversity 

In his national prime-time address marking one year since the pandemic began, President Joe Biden called out “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans who’ve been attacked, harassed, blamed, and scapegoated.” 

“It’s wrong, it’s un-American, and it must stop,” he said.

Welcome words. Yet, particularly in times of hardship and economic uncertainty, the search for a scapegoat endures – and Asian Americans’ diversity remains hidden. The Atlanta shootings came five days after President Biden’s address. 

The U.S. AAPI population accounts for approximately 7% of the nation. More than 22 million Asian Americans trace some part of their roots to countries in East and Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and another 1.6 million have at least some Pacific Islander ancestry. These numbers do not even include those who trace their roots to Central or West Asia. All these AAPI communities are diverse in other ways too – from economic levels to religions.  

Yet this diversity is lost amid the stereotypes – whether of the “model minority” or of those created by Hollywood. Many are surprised, for example, to learn that more than one-fourth of all Asian Americans live under the poverty level in New York City. Millions of Asian Americans are struggling to get by in the pandemic, especially those who speak little English, finished only high school, and had limited job opportunities before the pandemic devastated the small restaurants and businesses where they might have found employment.  

The lives of the Asian women killed in Atlanta were not those of the “crazy rich” but like those of many other immigrant women before them, traveling a difficult path and working toward a better life and their own American dreams. 

In January, the National Women’s Law Center reported that 44% of unemployed Asian American women had been out of work six months or more – higher than the rate for Black women (40.8%), Latinas (38.3%), and women overall (39.9%). A report by the New York-based Asian American Federation – a nonprofit group on whose board I once served – found that Asian American unemployment in New York City jumped from 3.4% in February 2020 to 25.6% in May 2020. That was the biggest increase of all the city’s major racial and ethnic groups.   

Just as it should not have taken the horrific death of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor to bring attention to the long-standing issues called out by the Black Lives Matter movement, it should not have taken a mass shooting to bring the very real plight of Asian Americans and especially Asian American women into focus.  

So, what is to be done?  

Building resilient communities

Government, businesses, nonprofit groups, and, importantly, everyday citizens have a role to play in building and uniting communities to stop hate. Commitments of time, funds, and engagement are all critical.  

More information is needed as well. In America, it is typically only what gets measured that gets managed. That’s one reason the lack of research and data on the Asian American community can be so harmful when it comes to city, state, and federal government budget allocations. And when data is collected by businesses or government, it should be done in a way to allow for greater data disaggregation, helping to build understanding of the specific needs of a diverse Asian American community.  

The need for culturally sensitive and community- and language-specific programs has once again been made clear during the pandemic. Numerous Asian American small-business owners struggled to understand the support offered by the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the federal government’s response to the pandemic. And some older Asian Americans are having trouble accessing vaccinations – a challenge made maddeningly worse for non-English speaking, non-tech savvy-individuals who are now fearful about anti-Asian hate crimes.  

Yet there are signs of hope beyond President Biden’s and others’ important, tone-setting messages against racism. These have included demonstrations in major cities across the country bringing together activists, officials, and individuals from across races and community groups.  

Importantly, many Asian Americans who might well have silently endured racism also have begun to speak up and to push for greater AAPI civic engagement. So, too, have some of America’s leading corporations and brands, from Apple to WarnerMedia, adding their voices to ensure that “Stop Asian Hate” is not a call to action embraced by Asian Americans alone. 

Toward a more perfect union  

Over a decade ago, I was sworn in by unanimous consent of the Senate as U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank, becoming only the fourth U.S. ambassador of Chinese heritage and going on to serve under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  

Those days and that role – along with its U.S. embassy-provided security detail in the Philippines – are long past. Now, when I take yet another pandemic-era walk in America, I am cognizant as I never was before of those around me. In the back of my mind, I wonder what that next passerby might be thinking of me. Do I appear simply as an “other”?   

The reality is that this pandemic will pass. And I believe so, too, will this latest wave in a long history of attacks on Asian Americans. Yet history suggests a new wave may lie ahead, amid tensions between the U.S. and China, and important questions about China’s transparency with regards to the origins of the coronavirus.   

That is all the more reason we must not just call out anti-Asian discrimination and violence today, as well as the persistent, harmful stereotyping of both Asian American men and women. To make hope real and push back against hate, we must also continue to learn from our history and get America’s house in order. We must continue to build community and common ground in our shared pursuit of a more perfect union for all.  

Curtis S. Chin is a former U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank. Follow him on Twitter at @CurtisSChin. 

The dense green expanse of Mawphlang Forest in northeast India is dotted with orchids, ferns, mushrooms, butterflies, and medicinal plants. Monoliths, a human intervention, represent the spirits of the ancestors of the local Khasi people. Donkit Lyngdoh is a guide to this sacred grove and has been familiar with the forest since he was a child. “I played here with my brothers and sisters, and we were always told to tread carefully, not picking up as much as a twig, so as not to disturb the forest deity. The deity never fails to protect the forest,” says Mr. Lyngdoh. 

These sacred groves are present in almost every village in the state of Meghalaya. Experts say there are 100,000 or more of these biodiverse habitats across India, though their numbers and size have been shrinking. But a combination of tradition of care for these spaces and new efforts to emphasize their value, in both a cultural and environmental sense, are giving hope that they can be preserved.   

“Sacred groves are useful in innumerable ways – from soil and water conservation to being reservoirs of important, rare, and endangered species,” says Delhi-based ecologist Pia Sethi, senior fellow at the Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR). “They are critical wildlife corridors and refuges in a fragmented landscape.” 

Yogesh Gokhale, a senior fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, says “sacred groves have existed in cultures and communities across the world, in the pre-Christian era, related to animist beliefs. The advent of monotheism led to a loss of nature-based systems, that used worship to protect nature. But in India the existence of multiple gods and deities have helped preserve these pockets of biodiversity.”

Courtesy of the Keystone Foundation

The Banagudi sacred grove in Tamil Nadu is a 55-acre, temperate evergreen forest surrounded by tea plantations, and it's important to the Kurumba and Badaga communities, according to the Keystone Foundation. The thatched structure is a shrine.

Treasured sites

With a thick canopy overhead and a carpet of leaves, twigs, and moss underfoot, Mawphlang feels untouched and primeval. Mr. Lyngdoh says that in the past, Khasi kings and leaders held important meetings and new chiefs of clans were anointed here.

India has a long history of a reverence for nature, from trees and rivers to animals and birds, dating back to the times of the Rig Veda, an ancient collection of sacred Sanskrit hymns. Trees have always been considered to be an abode of gods and ancestral spirits. 

Sacred groves reflect an example of what’s known as social fencing, a collective action and sense of responsibility, that protects the forests. From the rain forest of the Western Ghats, to the scrub forests of the deserts of Rajasthan, sacred groves range from a few square meters to many hectares and can be associated with a caste, village, or larger geographical area.

Today, many people – mostly urban dwellers – view the practices of the Indigenous and tribal communities who guard the sacred groves as superstitious. But underlying them is a logic of ecological sustainability. “The local myths and legends, as well as folk tales associated with sacred groves, go a long way in preserving the forests from destruction,” says Dr. Sethi.  

Fostering these traditions is also an example of the growing recognition around the world that Indigenous peoples are often the best protectors of natural resources. India’s Forest Rights Act of 2006 was intended to help guard against the displacement of Indigenous peoples, but it doesn’t directly address sacred groves.

Annual rituals, folk dances, and ceremonies to appease the presiding folk deities or tree spirits are common in sacred groves, says the Keystone Foundation’s Anita Varghese. Lamps are lit to ward off evil spirits. Some sacred groves host altars to deities. In the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India, Dr. Varghese works with Indigenous people on community-based conservation programs to sustain traditional practices. “In this area the tribal communities like Todas, Irulas, and Kurumbas have forest gods and deities that guard over their sacred groves, with memory stones for ancestors and life-giving streams and springs,” says Dr. Varghese. 

Sacred groves are protected by certain unwritten, orally transmitted taboos and rules. Felling of trees, harming animals, and plucking leaves or flowers are usually forbidden. If anyone offends the grove, it is believed that the deities will punish him or her by illness, retribution, or crop failure. Minimal foraging and resource use like collection of firewood, fodder, drinking water, and medicinal plants by local people is usually allowed.

What’s it worth

The pressures of development – by agriculture or industry – mean that degradation threatens these areas that often contain virgin forest and are repositories of rare, endemic, or threatened species that have disappeared outside the grove. But tradition itself is also vulnerable. “With cultural and religious beliefs weakening, we have to bring in science to motivate people to protect the sacred groves,” says K.C. Malhotra, an anthropologist and human ecologist. 

In 2012, the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change began a project with more than a dozen universities and research institutes “to evaluate all the ecosystem services provided by sacred groves, from fresh water to carbon sequestration,” says Dr. Malhotra. 

In the Western Ghats mountain range, the nonprofit Maharashtra Vriksha Samvardhini is working to identify devrais, as the sacred groves are known here, using drones and satellite imagery. Gurudas Nulkar of the Ecological Society in Pune says that his organization arranges devrai visits for school students. The society is trying to replicate species found in these sacred pockets by collecting seeds and replanting a different area to mimic a sacred grove.

“Economic aspirations have eroded sacred groves in many areas, but cultural traditions and strong community leadership are still helping preserve many of them,” says Dr. Gokhale.

AP

People wait at a foreign currency exchange shop in Istanbul March 22 after the firing of the central bank governor.

One relatively new pillar among democratic nations, cemented as a global norm only in the 1990s, is an independent central bank. These official guardians of market stability are deliberative bodies of experts with long-term views, wielding financial tools such as the setting of interest rates. For elected leaders with an eye on the next election, interfering in a central bank’s work is akin to meddling in a case before a court. Both rule of law and rule of accepted economic truth are seen as ballasts of modern democracy.

This helps explain the shock in both financial markets and Western capitals over the firing of Naci Ağbal, Turkey’s central bank governor, by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on March 19 after less than five months on the job. Turkey now has its fourth central bank chief in less than two years, yet another indicator of its drift toward authoritarian rule.

Mr. Ağbal, a former finance minister, was ousted after trying to tame Turkey’s rampant inflation by raising interest rates. Against all conventional economic logic, President Erdoğan says high interest rates actually cause inflation. He calls them the “mother and father of all evil.” His new appointee is a newspaper columnist who agrees with his view. The markets obviously do not. After the announcement, Turkey’s currency and main stock index plunged.

Another reason for global concern about Turkey is that many other central banks could be under pressure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, most of them effectively coordinated across borders to lessen the financial fallout from the coronavirus. They fulfilled their role as “lenders of last resort” to the financial system. And for the first time, those in emerging-market and developing economies resorted to large-scale market interventions, notes economist Olivier Jeanne at John Hopkins University.

But now many politicians may want central banks to take actions that risk long-term inflation, such as absorbing huge loans from failing businesses. “Political pressures are likely to rise in favor of rolling back central bank independence in all countries,” says Mr. Jeanne. “Central banks should not just lay low and wait for threats to their independence to pass.” Based on numerous studies, countries with more independent central banks experience less inflation.

Central banks are not only high-level institutions of economic expertise. They are also usually models of deliberation and patient reflection. They test data, enjoy wide debate and dissent, and ask questions before giving answers. They look for light through individual contemplation and shared reasoning. Lately, to become more accountable to the public, many have been transparent about their thinking and forecasts.

For decades, democracies have set up central banks in large part because of those qualities of deliberation. The sudden dismissal of any central bank chief is seen as a setback to democracy. Such drastic action rarely reflects a dispute over economics. It hints at whether leaders want to seek out opposing views and respectfully listen to them. What’s more democratic than that?