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ISRAEL’S OWN ARABS EMERGE AS THREAT TO ISRAEL’S SURVIVAL AND JEWISH CHARACTER

JERUSALEM– In the wake of a spate of terrorism in recent months by Arab citizens of Israel, the Arab minority here–long considered loyal to Israel–is increasingly being viewed by Israel’s Jewish majority as a danger to Israel’s future.

The threat is seen in three key areas:

*–Direct involvement in murderous acts of terror by Hebrew-speaking Israeli Arabs who can move easily within Israeli society because of their language skills and their Israeli identification (ID) cards;

*–A growing movement to counter-act the Jewish character of Israel while imposing extremist Islamic values on Arab towns in particular;

*–And a significant push for cultural, political and even geographic autonomy.

“The problem has erupted, and it is no longer possible to sweep it under the carpet,” declared Moti Zaken, advisor on Arab affairs to then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and currently Arab Affairs Advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Public Security.

The new concern, which has been the subject of internal dialogues in Israel’s security community, surfaced publicly after Israeli authorities arrested at least three Israeli Arab terror cells involved in the murder of more than 40 civilians this year, including the attack on the Hebrew University cafeteria in Jerusalem.

“For every guy we catch for terrorism, there are many more who are potential terrorists,” added Arab expert Zaken. He explained, however, that terrorism was only the tip of the iceberg of subversive activity against Israel by its own Arab community.

Indeed, two of the most far-reaching Arab-Israeli clashes in the last decade were ignited by the radical Islamic Movement of Israel’s own Arab community–and a third such clash may be just around the corner:

*–The September 1996 riots and shooting attacks that were ignited by Arab charges that Israel’s re-opening an old tunnel near the Temple Mount was designed to undermine Islamic holy places–the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock– built atop the mountain where Solomon’s Temple once stood;

*–The two-year-long Palestinian-Israeli War of Attrition–which the Arabs call the Al-Aqsa Intifada–that was touched off by Arab charges that Ariel Sharon had desecrated Islamic holy ground by entering the precincts of the Temple Mount area that Muslims call Al-Haram Al-Sharif (Arabic:The Noble Sanctuary);

*–And engineers and archelogists expect a worse upcoming clash if and when part of the Temple Mount itself collapses under the weight of the unsupervised construction of a huge underground mosque funded by Israel’s Islamic Movement. (Displacing tons of earth have already produced a visible sagging bulge in the outer wall of the Temple Mount area, and Israeli officials are sure that a major collapse will be blamed on an “Israeli conspiracy” by Muslim hotheads eager for a clash.)

“The Jews have never had any holy places in the area of Al-Aqsa,” declared Sheikh Hashem Abdel-Rahman, the deputy head of the radical Islamic Movement’s (IM) northern faction.

He and IM director Sheikh Ra’id Salah have repeated accusations that Israeli authorities have manufactured claims about a Jewish temple in Jerusalem merely as an excuse to undermine Islamic holy places.

“Al-Aqsa is in danger” was the main theme of the IM which held a rally for 60,000 of its followers in the Israeli town of Umm el-Fahm (Arabic: “Mother of Coal” for the main product of the region–charcoal).

“Al-Aqsa: You are not alone” read hundreds of banners held aloft by demonstrators at the rally.

The rally specifically challenged the leadership of the United States, saying that it and President George Bush had aggressive designs to occupy the Muslim world.

“The American cowboy, after he strikes Iraq, will strike at Syria or at Saudi Arabia or at Egypt,” declared Sheikh Salah to roars of support from the fist-waving crowd.

“Let us all stand steadfast against the American cowboy who wants to impose his evil occupation on the Islamic world,” continued Salah as he waved his hand in tempo to his words.

Although the rally was supervised and approved by Israeli police, Israeli authorities are very concerned about such demonstrations which they say are designed to fan hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular.

“The whole rally took place as an act of incitement against the very existence of the State of Israel,” observed Dr. Guy Bekhor an expert on Islamic law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

However, many Muslim activists say that the bold political rhetoric still masks an underlying yearning for equality and better treatment inside Israel.

“We are not against the existence of Israel, but we want our rights as citizens,” averred Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darweesh, the head of the Islamic Movement’s more moderate southern faction–which did not take part in the provocative rally this week.

“Unfortunately, Sheikh Abdullah’s views are not representative of the majority of the Islamic Movement,” commented Bekhor, who noted that the Islamicization process was deepening across the region, mainly as a counterpoint to the sense that most Arab regimes and the current Palestinian leadership of Arafat were corrupt.

Almost no month passes without a violent clash between Israel’s police and crowds of Arabs led by radical Islamic preachers or politicians.

Almost no week goes by without a major flare-up in Israel’s parliament between Jewish politicians and between Arab politicians who claim to be more loyal to Yassir Arafat or the Islamic Movement than to Israel’s flag or to its national anthem, Ha-Tikva (“The Hope”).

Documents uncovered by Israel’s police and Israel’s army show that Arafat has indeed been manipulating the Israeli Arab members of parliament, and there is evidence that he has financed many of their activities.

The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv published a report that Arafat has funneled more than nine million dollars to Israeli Arab politicians in the last three years, and another newspaper published a report that Arafat had personally sent half-a-million dollars to the election fund of Azmi Bishara, a militant member of Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Bishara, who is under investigation for subversive activities, has also violated law–exploiting his parliamentary immunity–to visit Syria, a country still officially at war with Israel.

During the visit to Syria, which has also financed and directed ongoing terror against Israel, Bishara publicly charging his own country with aggression in several televised public appearances orchestrated by the highly anti-Israeli Assad regime of Syria.

One document found in the archives of the Orient House (the forward base of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem) shows that PA leader Yassir Arafat had arranged to swing 30,000 Arab Israeli citizens to vote for Shimon Peres in the 1996 election between him and Binyamin Netanyahu.

Other documents suggest strongly that Israeli Arab MKs have coordinated their political initiatives with Arafat, receiving political and monetary support for their efforts.

Sources in Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency (also known as the GSS–General Security Service or SHABAK) say the figures on Israeli Arab involvement in terror speak volumes: 8 Arab terror cells in 2000, 25 in 2001 and already at least 30 in the year 2002 that has not yet ended.

Beyond terror, the political militancy among Israel’s Arabs–who now call themselves “Palestinians”–is emerging as an even worse threat to Israel’s long-term stability, according to a growing number of Arab affairs experts here.

“They are trying to undermine the Jewish character and to substitute Arab character,” asserted Dan Schueftan, a senior fellow at the National Security Studies Center of Haifa University, as well as Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.

“The political leadership of Israel’s Arabs has has adopted in the last decade a policy based primarily on the negation of Israel’s Jewish character,” said Schueftan, who has just completed a book on Israel’s Arab community.

Schueftan rejected what has been a conventional wisdom here until recently that Israeli Arab politicians essentially made a lot of “noise” but were unrepresentative of their more moderate constituents.

“If the democratic leadership–chosen again and again–does this time and again, then it’s the operational stance of the electorate,” said the red-haired scholar.

Until recently, many Israeli academicians such as Elie Rekhess of Tel Aviv University and Majid al-Haq of Hiafa University stressed that Israeli Arabs were primarily interested in “equality” rather than nationalistic goals, although there was clearly a trend of radicalization under way.

Today, however, academics and journalists here are acknowledging that the radicalization process was deeper than many suspected.

“All in all, it’s a gradual process but there were several major watersheds,” observed Professor Raphael Israeli of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who has just published two books on Israel’s Arab community.

Israeli and other experts cited the following milestones in the poltiical development of Israel’s Arabs from outwardly moderate to militantly pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist:

*–the 1967 Arab-Israeli war which reunited the Israeli Arab population with its brothers and sisters in the Palestinian Arab community in Gaza and the West Bank;

*–the 1976 Land Day demonstration in which several Israeli Arabs were killed in violent clashes protesting government expropriation of land for road construction;

*–the rise of the Islamic Movement (IM) in the 1988 municipal elections in which it won five city halls;

*–and the squatting operation at the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth that led to the building of a mosque on Church grounds.

Referring to the Land Day riots, Professor Israeli commented that “from then on it was clear that the Arabs were not just a linguistic minority but viewed themselves as a national minority.

“Since then, the rules of the game have changed,” asserted the Hebrew University professor who added that his pronouncements on the subject were greeted with disdain by many Israeli officials, including members of Israel’s GSS (Shin Bet) internal intelligence agency.

“When I said it (that Isaeli Arabs were radicalizing) in 1976, some people said I was a war monger,” remarked Professor Israeli, who was born in Fez, Morocco.

Many Arab spokesmen insist that the community in Israel is still fundamentally respectful of Israeli law but demands equal treatment, something that candid Israeli officials acknowledge does not yet exist.

“We want equal treatment with the Jews,” asserted Dr. Assad Mghaibeh, head of the municipality of Mrar.

“We want the Arab child in Mrar to have the same per capita investment in education as the Jewish child in Ra’anana,” said Dr. Mghaibeh.

However, lower investments in Arab towns is not just the result of Israeli government decisions or Israeli discrimination, asserted Arab Affairs Advisor Zaken.

He said most Arab communities had adopted a shell of democratic rule while continuing to function along tribal or family lines.

“The most important thing is taking care of your family–your khamula–not taking care of your community,” said Zaken, who visits Arab towns regularly.

“Once they get into power, they put their whole family on the payroll at very high wages, without any regard to talent or need,” he added.

Zaken said Israeli Arab members of Knesset (MKs) also neglected the Arab community’s real needs in terms of infrastructure and education, preferring to deal with high-wattage issues like Palestinian statehood.

“There is a deep gap between the politicians and the Arab population. The politicians speak about politics, but the civilian population cares more about its livelihood, the state of the roads, education and unemployment.”

Nevertheless, continued Zaken, “when the Arab politicians speak in an extreme fashion it encourages political foment, and you can see that most of the parliamentary motions deal with foreign affairs, with Arafat etc.”

This prominent targeting of nationalistic issues then brings an Israeli backlash, even though most Jewish politicians realize that there is justification for Arab claims of neglected infrastructure.

“From the standpoint of Jewish Arab relations it does not mean anything if some individual thinks this or that (that is positive to Israel) because the Jewish collective reacts to the Arab collective,” asserted Haifa University analyst Schueftan.

“The Jewish majority is reacting to the Arab minority that negates the very right to exist, the very raison d’etre of the Jewish state,” declared Schueftan, who has made a detailed synopsis of statements by Israeli Arab politicians over the last two decades.

Among the statements by Israeli Arab MKs, he said he found only one clear repudiation of Arab terror against Israel and a repudiation of the desire to remove Israel from the map.

“I am quite against the attempt to seem that is preferable to us to identify with Hizaballah or the PLO rather than with our Israelness,” asserted Nawaf Massalhah, an MK of the Labor Party.

“They (the Syrians and Hizballah)…they are our people and I love them, but I don’t want to link our fate with Syria or anyone else,” declared MK Massalhah in a speech on September 16, 2001.

Schueftan says he has seen nothing like that statement from other Israeli Arab politicians such as Azmi Bishara, who visited Syria, or Ahmed Tibi, who regularly acts as the Israeli ground agent for Arafat, serving as his Hebrew language spokesman in the Israeli media.

Bishara, Tibi and other Israeli Arab MKs have also been accused by Israeli authorities of trying to incite riots or to convince Israeli Bedouin Arabs or Druze citizens (both of whom serve in the Israeli Army) to refuse to serve.

Schueftan asserted that the MKs regularly made excuses for Arab terror attacks.

“The important thing is not the terror per se, but that Arabs say that they would not stop terror,” said Schueftan.

“Along with the negation of the raison d’etre is the complete identification with almost all of Israel’s enemies–including communists and Christians identifying with Hizballah (the Iranian-directed “party of God”). In other words, what links Azmi Bishara and Hizballah is not Islam, but the anti-Israel program.”

Schueftan described how even pious Islamic leaders had courted the Ba’ath Party of Syria in their visits to Damascus.

“(Abdul-Malik) Dahamshe (an MK from IM) and (Syrian President) Assad are not connected by socialism, but by Syrian enmity to Israel.”

Similarly, the anti-Israeli line of the Israeli Arab MKs has routinely led them to accuse Israel of being “Nazi-like” or “fascistic” even when the Israeli Arab MKs seek out neo-Nazi and Fascist support abroad.

“When the Islamic party invited Heidar and his friends from Austria, they did so because they are seen as enemies of the Jewish people,” said Schueftan.

The staunch anti-Israeli secularists such as Tibi and Bishara regularly link up with the radical Islamists such as Salah and Dahamsheh, noted Arab expert Zaken.

“They (the radical Islamists) have a philosophy that Israel is waqf–Islamic land– and that the Jews are monkeys whom it is legitimate to attack,” asserted Zaken, reading from several Islamic pamphlets and speeches.

“They (Israeli Arabs in general) have demands for autonomy in education and culture, and this could reach demands for geographic autonomy,” continued Zaken.

“The Arab world has reached them with the mass media–television and internet, and this influences them to do things they haven’t done before–to stake out more militant positions and to adopt a separatist stance.”

Rather than looking inward to see if they are doing enough to help themselves, Israeli Arab MKs put all the blame on Israel.

“The relations of the Arab masses in Israel are in a state of constant decay because of Israel’s racist policies,” proclaimed Hashem Mahmid, an Israeli Arab MK in a broadcast interview with Arafat’s Voice of Palestine this summer.

Mahmid and other Israeli Arab parliamentarians-Muhammad Baraka, Bishara Tibi-have become regular features of Palestinian television and radio, making statements they would hesitate to make on the Israeli airwaves.

“The extremist right-wing Jewish members of the Israeli parliament will not stop until they have evicted all Arabs from the parliamentary game,” asserted announcer Al-Ghul as he introduced an interview with Ahmed Tibi, the Israeli Arab MK who has also served as a political advisor to Arafat himself.

The mustachioed Tibi, who likes to strike a pose of “moderation” and “against violence” when on the Israeli airwaves, takes a totally different
stance when he thinks only Arabs are listening.

“We have to assail (Israel’s) ‘democracy’-around in the world and in newspapers– because of its limitations and its inherent racism,” said Tibi, whose first profession was gynecology but who has been accused of being less than delicate in his second profession as politician.

Surveying such comments and activities has led Schueftan, Zaken, Israeli and others to conclude that even if and when Israel parries Arab terror, it will still face a deeper danger from its own Arab citizens.

Zaken said it was important to make clear that the Bedouins, Druze and Circassian tribesemen currently serve in the army and that it was not possible to speak monolithically, as some Arab MKs do, of “20 percent of Israelis being Palestinian Arabs.”

Israeli and Zaken speak openly of the need to demand a kind of “love-it-or-leave-it” approach to Israeli Arabs: offering them improved rights and conditions in return for greater loyalty, such as service in the Israeli army, to which most of Israel’s Arabs are not required to enlist.

But if the bulk of Israel’s Arabs continue to opt for not serving in the army or, worse, for continued support of the PLO, Hizballah and Syria, then, Professor Israeli said, the time would come to think of removing their citizenship rights and offering them rights only as “Israeli residents” who would enjoy civil rights but not vote for the Knesset.

“We don’t have to expel them, but we can repatriate them to Palestine, and I think it will be an incentive for Arabs to show moderation and more loyalty to the state,” said Professor Israeli.

Schueftan and Zaken agreed that fighting terror was important, but it was not Israel’s only task.

“Terror is not the not most important thing, remarked Schueftan. “It is the manifestation of something much deeper.”