By Stan Goodenough
Dec 22, 2005
Israel?s Muslim Arabs are on the move. Apparently sensing that progress towards the creation of a Palestinian state for their brothers is now unstoppable, they have begun to voice their expectations more brazenly; to give more aggressive vent to their demands.
In a gathering in Nazareth last Saturday, leaders in the Israeli Arab community called for an aligning of Israel?s Arab organizations with the organizations in the Palestinian Authority ? i.e. with the avowed enemies of Israel.
They demanded that the ?right of return? be granted to all Arabs who fled during Israel?s War of Independence in 1948-49.
And they insisted that those Arabs should be given ownership of kibbutz lands.
The war that brought independence to their country, speakers told the gathering, had been a nakba, a tragedy for the Arab residents of Palestine.
It was time to hold Israel responsible for that catastrophe and to insist that the Jews pay to resolve it.
One of the featured speakers was Knesset Member Azmi Bishara. This man, who enjoys all the privileges of an elected Israeli official, (and who has enjoyed a higher standard of living as an Israeli citizen than ordinary men and women experience anywhere in the Arab world) had just returned from making an illegal trip to Lebanon ? an enemy state.
While there, Bishara publicly knifed into Israel whose establishment in 1948, he said, had been the ?biggest act of robbery? of the 20th Century.
The approximately 1.3 million Israeli Arabs were ?like all Arabs? but had had ?Israeli citizenship forced upon them.?
?We are the original inhabitants of Palestine, not those who came from Poland and Russia,? he said.
Vintage Arab, his allegation accused Israel of doing precisely what the Arab umma is out to do. For by creating a State of Palestine in Israel?s historic heartland, where no Arab state has ever existed before, it is the Arabs who will be stealing land from the Jews.
Ninety-eight percent of Israel?s Arabs are Muslim. According to a poll released this week, 80 percent of them support the return of their brethren (and offspring) that fled in 1948. The return of those Arabs would spell the end of the Jewish majority in Israel and, thereby, the end of Israel.
And Israel?s Muslims know it.