Preaching good citizenship to Israeli Arabs, by Larry Derfner
There's no denying it Israeli Arabs, on the whole, have gone too far. Suddenly it's not so shocking, so rare, when a group of them is arrested for plotting or carrying out terror attacks.
The most dynamic political force in the community is the Islamic Movement's northern faction, which spawns terrorists, applauds Palestinian terror in its newspaper, and identifies thoroughly with Hamas.
My guess is that the northern faction's leader, Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, is guilty of what he has just been arrested for funneling money to the families of dead Hamas terrorists.
Why shouldn't he do it? I'm sure he considers it a holy deed.
If Salah and his cohorts are found guilty they should go to jail, and for more than just a few months. As for whether to outlaw the movement, the only question is over practicality would the northern faction be crippled, or strengthened?
This is a genuinely subversive movement that is mixed up in terror, and Israel would be much better off if it didn't exist. (The Islamic Movement's southern faction is a different story; its followers aren't violent, and its founding spiritual leader, Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, is even leading a group of Israeli Arabs on an upcoming visit to Auschwitz.)
Salah is likely the most popular of all Israeli Arab leaders and his arrest has brought only denunciations of Israeli authorities from the community, without a word said out loud, it seems, against him.
Second to Salah is probably MK Azmi Bishara, who once gave a speech in praise of Hizbullah before a Syrian audience that included Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Bashar Assad. When he was indicted for it, Israeli Arabs rallied behind him like they did behind Salah, with no one evidently willing to suggest publicly that Bishara had done something wrong.
None of this says anything good about Israeli Arabs' attitudes towards this country. I'd say the State of Israel, and the Jews who live here, have the right to expect more conciliatory behavior from them. We can expect them, as citizens, not to help terrorist groups that are sworn to destroy this country
BUT IF we know what we don't want from Israeli Arabs, what do we want from them? What can we rightly expect? Most Jews, it seems, expect Arab citizens to willingly accept the fact that Israel is a Jewish state, and learn to live with it.
Yet this is such hypocrisy.
Tell American Jews that the Christian majority in their country has decided that from now on the US will be a Christian state, with a cross on its flag, a reference to the Christian soul in its national anthem, a Law of Return for Christian immigrants, etc., etc. and see how they react.
If they seem put out, tell them not to worry the United Christian States of America will, of course, be a democracy.
How can we expect Arab citizens to grin and bear it in Israel? In so many official ways the state tells them that this country is not for them.
Unofficially, it's even worse. Unofficially they have been the favorite targets of violent Israeli policemen for 55 years. They've had huge swaths of their land expropriated against their will and used for Jewish development never the other way around.
The notion of equality in this country is a terrible joke. Israel has never built a town, a housing project, a factory, a hospital, and hardly even a traffic light in the Arab sector. Even the Arab mayor whom Israeli right-wingers love to point to as an "exception to the rule," Ursan Yassin of Shfaram a Likudnik, a Sharon supporter, a defender of police conduct in the Galilee riots of October 2000 told me a couple of years ago: "Israeli governments know there's discrimination.
We get 70% of the budget that goes to a Jewish municipality of the same size and that's only since the Rabin government. Before that it was 20%. "An old clich about American democracy is that any child can grow up to be president. Under Israeli democracy, not only can't an Arab child grow up to be president, he can't grow up to be a regional superviser in the Israel Electric Corp., or an assistant project manager in virtually any hi-tech company because jobs with even a tangential, remote connection to security and in this country that's quite a few jobs are off-limits to Arabs.
And signs are that things are getting worse. A poll taken last month by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 57% of Israel's Jews want the government to encourage the 1.2 million Arab citizens of this country to emigrate.
So I think it's undeniable that we Israeli Jews, on the whole, have also gone too far. We have a right to expect Arab citizens not to throw in with terrorists, but until we stop keeping them down, until we start keeping our word about democracy, it would be a mistake to expect them to listen to us.
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