Chaim Amalek writes: “If only Israel had an Angela Merkel or a Trudeau willing to take the courageous step of opening its borders to the world’s migrant population, the Jews of that land would be so much better off.”
“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say. “It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”
What upset those students more than anything was not that a Palestinian might believe that the Jews are simply the latest wave of Crusaders in this region, and that we, like the Crusaders of old, will one day be forced out. We all know that there are many Palestinians who believe that.
What upset them was that she — an educated woman, getting a graduate degree (which would never happen in a Muslim country) at a world class university (only Israel has those — none of Israel’s neighbors has a single highly rated university) and working at a college filled with Jews who admire her, like her and treat her as they would any other colleague — still believes that when it’s all over, the situation will get resolved by our being tossed out of here once again.
Even she , who lives a life filled with opportunities that she would never have in an Arab country, still thinks at the end of the day the Jews are nothing but colonialists. And colonialists, she believes, don’t last here. The British got rid of the Ottomans, the Jews got rid of the British — and one day, she believes, the Arabs will get rid of the Jews.
That is one of the many reasons that this recent wave of violence, consisting mostly of deadly stabbings carried out by Israeli Arabs (not Palestinians living over the Green Line) and Arab residents of east Jerusalem, has Israelis so unsettled.
Yes, the reality on the ground is frightening. People are being stabbed on the street, on buses, in malls. Those being attacked are elderly men and women and young boys on their bicycles. No one is immune, and unlike the last Intifada, when suicide bombers sought high casualty counts so you felt safe away from crowds, now nowhere feels definitely safe.
But even that is not the most debilitating dimension of this new round of attacks on Jews. What’s most sobering is the fact that this new round of violence has made it clear, once again, that this conflict is simply never going to end.
I take it for granted that no group wants to be ruled by outsiders in land it regards as its own. Blacks in Africa don’t want to be ruled by whites. Arabs don’t want to be ruled by Jews. Whites in America don’t like having a black president.
A Jewish friend says: Hindsight is always better, but even Moshe Dayan recommended after the six day war treading lightly in the West Bank. Palestinian Arabs (both Christian and Muslim) Armenians, Druze and even more minorities than you ever heard of, really had no problem with Israel defeating the Jordanians. They had existed for hundreds of years under the power of others, from the Ottoman Turks (for most of that time) to the British under the mandate, and then under Jordan. If the Israelis had given them more self governing authority, and allowed return to the west bank of Palestinians in other parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, it might have been different.
Israeli Arabs are a different matter. They realize that they will always be a minority in Israel and Gordis paraphrases part of what Meir Kahane said. Israelis point to the fact that they put in modern plumbing and the Arabs should be grateful to live under such benign government. Kahane says that such an attitude by the Jews shows contempt for Arabs who do have pride. Would Jews trade their sovereignty over Israel for a higher standard of living? Gordis talks about that the opportunities this woman has would be restricted in any other Arab controlled country (questionable whether this is in fact true, women in Lebanon, Egypt and even Iraq were not subject to sharia law and often became professionals) yet is surprised that she views the Israelis as temporary colonials.
I do not doubt for a second that many Israeli Arabs appreciate that Israel is mostly a western liberal democratic society plunked down in a region where most people are ruled by autocrats or monarchies. Just because they don’t like Israeli Jews doesn’t mean they want to go back to some sort of medieval kingdom like Saudi Arabia, it means that they don’t like being a (mostly) despised minority in their own native land. The reality as we now know despite decades of Israeli propaganda is that, unless you are a religious person who truly believes God gave Israel to the Jews, the Jews have taken Israel under cover of legality (the Balfour declaration, the U. N. Resolution of 1947) but have been brutally pragmatic in doing so, including expelling Arabs from ancestral homelands, engaging in war crimes and terrorism and in part by playing on guilt over the holocaust.
As the secular Israelis get less influential within Israel, the Arabs see there is not really a future for them there. They see that they are used as demagogic talking points by Netanyahu to get increased voting by Jews in the national elections. They see no prospect in the immediate future for any neighboring state to successfully stage a military attack on Israel, and see that any attempt by Hamas or Hezbollah to disturb the security of the Jewish state results in collective punishment and significant damage to the Palestinians living in Gaza, Lebanon and even the west bank.
Non-violent ways of forcing Israeli citizens to face up the long term effect on the subordinate Arab populations through non-violent protests and the BDS movement are marginalized and seem to be of no consequence.
The Arabs living in Israel who chafe under Israeli rule, understand that the legitimacy of the state lies in providing security for its Jewish citizens. This latest stabbing outbreak is a direct attempt to bring home to Israelis that the state cannot protect them. Although the Arabs who take direct action are a tiny minority, Gordis’s article shows that even the most educated and integrated Arabs are alienated from a Jewish controlled state. The understandable Israeli reaction to the stabbings and car attacks only serves to drive a further wedge between the Jews and Arabs. Gordis suggests there is nothing that can be done to assuage the Arabs so they won’t lash out at the Jews, but this fits the Meir Kahane paradigm that Arabs are a hostile tribe and unless they are willing to accede to being guests in Jewish Israel, they should be “transferred.”
There might be another way, but it will be opposed by both the Israeli hard liners and religious parties and by the PLO and Hamas and by Islamist groups, and that is taking baby steps to give the Palestinians a meaningful say in what happens on a mundane day to day basis. The Israelis will say that the Palestinians are participants in the electorate, some of them serve in Knesset, some in the Army, some on the courts, but if they were given some sort of veto power over internal Israeli decisions which have no impact on security, say the building of hospitals, setting up enterprise zones, building utility infrastructure, building schools, and they proved to be “responsible” that might be a building block since once they have a stake in the nation, they might have a different attitude towards it.