Daliyat Al-Karmel, Israel (Reuters) :
With Israel’s election just over a month away, a Druze former television news anchor is poised to become the first woman from her Arabic-speaking minority to serve in the Israeli parliament.
Gadeer Mreeh, who is running for the centrist Blue and White party led by former armed forces chief Benny Gantz, is all but guaranteed a seat in the Knesset in an election system where voters choose from a list of candidates. Gantz is the main opponent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mreeh, a former anchor with Israel’s public broadcaster, said her life has been a series of firsts for minority women in the country. “I was the first non-Jewish woman to anchor a Hebrew-language news broadcast,” Mreeh, 34, said from her village of Daliyat al-Karmel, a major population center for the Druze, who practise an offshoot of Islam and are one of Israel’s most integrated minorities.
