Israel's Arab MKs, terror and questions of loyalty - by Nadav Shragai

...The first question is also relatively easy to address: Some Arab MKs are, in fact, considerably more loyal to the Palestinian cause and its emissaries -- who are very often terrorists and murderers of Jews -- than to the Israeli Knesset. Only a country that has gone completely mad and is incapable of drawing a clear line between freedom of expression and democracy, and incitement and terror, allows MKs such as these to continue serving in its legislative branch.

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
19 December '16..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=17915

The allegations Sunday that Joint Arab List MK Basel Ghattas smuggled 12 cellular phones to security prisoners in Ketziot prison, while visiting a member of the terrorist cell that murdered IDF soldier Moshe Tamam, should not exactly come as a surprise.

Ghattas, who in the past has supported boycotts against Israel, is a cousin of former Balad MK Azmi Bashara, who was suspected of spying for Hezbollah and who fled the country. Meanwhile, several of his colleagues in the Israeli Knesset often behave as if they are members of the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah.

Joint Arab List MK Ahmad Tibi, for example, used to be Yasser Arafat's adviser on Israel. Tibi was even reprimanded harshly by the Knesset Ethics Committee after saying, "There is no higher value than Shahada [a declaration of Islamic faith]," and that "the shahid [martyr] is the trailblazer, who draws the path to freedom and liberty with his own blood." To this day, Joint Arab List MK Hanin Zoabi refuses to call the kidnappers and murderers of the three teenage boys from Gush Etzion terrorists. Joint Arab List MK Jamal Zahalka has met with senior Hamas officials.

The problem with some of the Arab MKs is twofold. Like their Jewish Knesset colleagues, upon being sworn in, they vowed to uphold allegiance to the State of Israel and its laws and to faithfully fulfill their duties in the Knesset. But their conduct, and not for the first time, raises two fundamental questions. One, where do their loyalties truly lie? To Israel and its laws? Or to the Palestinians in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and to the terrorists who harm the security of the country and murder Jews?

Pew Polls, Arsonists and Arab MKs - by Evelyn Gordon

...Yet rather than helping to cultivate such a new leadership, both American Jews and Israeli leftists have been enthusiastically supporting the very Israeli Arabs who are doing the most to destroy coexistence. Hadash chairman Ayman Odeh, for instance – who condemned the GCC for declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but won’t condemn Palestinian knife attacks because “I don’t think it’s my place to tell the people how to resist” – was feted by Jewish groups when he visited America last year. Thus, it’s high time for Arabs and Jews alike to realize that supporting arsonists like Odeh is no way to foster coexistence. Otherwise, the “alienation and disgust” reflected in the Pew poll will only keep growing.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
09 March '16..

The Israeli media were virtually unanimous yesterday in headlining a new Pew survey of Israeli opinion. All highlighted the finding that nearly half of Israeli Jews support expelling Arabs. The only reporter who thought to ask an expert what this figure really means was Haaretz’s Ofer Aderet. But to understand the expert’s answer, one other fact is helpful: Just a day before Pew published its survey, two of the Knesset’s three Arab parties publicly condemned the Gulf Cooperation Council for declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organization, on the grounds that this declaration might benefit the country in whose parliament they serve.

Aderet queried Professor Sammy Smooha about the Pew finding because he’s Israel’s leading expert in Jewish-Arab relations, having tracked the subject since 2003 through a series of comprehensive annual polls. Smooha said Pew’s results disagreed with his own polls, which consistently found that about three-quarters of Israeli Jews support coexistence with Arabs. He offered two explanations for this divergence.

First, the Pew question was vague and confusing. Respondents were asked simply whether they agreed or disagreed that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.” That’s easy to answer if you believe that Arabs should either always be expelled or never be expelled. But what if, like many Israelis, you believe the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no?

Many center-rightists, for instance, favor expelling Arabs who openly support terror or seek to undermine Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, but not other Arabs. Many center-leftists believe East Jerusalem Arabs (most of whom are permanent Israeli residents but not citizens) should be forced to become part of the Palestinian Authority whether they want to or not, but not other Arabs. Thus for these respondents, the answer would depend on whether they interpreted the word “Arabs” in Pew’s question to mean “all Arabs” or “some Arabs.”

Smooha argued that most respondents who agreed with the statement interpreted it as meaning “some Arabs,” because if you read it to mean expelling all Arabs, the idea “is unrealistic and unfeasible.” Indeed, no Israeli party advocates expelling all Arabs, and very few individuals do; even diehard anti-Arab racists tend to make exceptions for the Druze, for instance.

His interpretation is reinforced by looking at voting patterns. According to Pew, rightist and religious Jews overwhelmingly support expelling Arabs. But the only right-wing party that actually advocates expelling sizable numbers of Arabs – Yisrael Beiteinu, which wants to swap certain Arab towns for the major settlement blocs under a final-status deal with the Palestinians – won a mere six seats in the last Knesset elections; the other rightist and religious parties, which advocate no such thing, won a combined 51.

In contrast, Pew found little support for expelling Arabs on the left. Yet the leading center-left faction – Zionist Union, with 24 seats – is also the one Israeli faction that advocates expelling large numbers of Arabs right now, as opposed to under some distant final-status agreement: The Labor Party, which accounts for most of Zionist Union’s seats, recently adopted a plan to unilaterally hand East Jerusalem over to the PA, thereby removing hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel.

In short, Pew’s results don’t fit actual voting patterns at all unless you conclude that most center-leftists interpreted its question as meaning “all Arabs,” and therefore disagreed, while most rightists interpreted it as meaning “some Arabs,” and therefore agreed.

This brings us to Smooha’s second explanation: He believes Pew’s finding primarily “reflects alienation and disgust with the Arabs more than it attests to agreement to grant legitimacy to the government to expel them.” In other words, many Israelis chose to interpret the question as meaning “some Arabs” – a position they could support – because they wanted to demonstrate their “alienation and disgust.”

Dear Arab United List MKs of the 34th Government of Israel. What About Taybeh?

The United Arab List will be entering the Knesset with 13 members this time around. Perhaps Taybeh will also capture their attention long enough to do something constructive on behalf of those they were sent to the Knesset to represent?

LOTL..
15 May '15

A special thank you to Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA for re-posting this, and a salute to the courage of the youth of Taybeh who have stepped forward to make their concerns heard, loud and clear. As is commonly known, aside from their rather loud and public stand against the State of Israel,   Israeli Arab Mks also have spent a great deal of time in the past visiting, Libya, Qatar, Lebanon..., visits obviously important to their respective constituencies, but evidently still leaving some work to be done.  The United Arab List will be entering the Knesset with 13 members this time around. Perhaps Taybeh will also capture their attention long enough to do something constructive on behalf of those they were sent to the Knesset to represent? And if they ask their fellow Knesset members to support them, I suspect that support will be forthcoming.



Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvaGeC8qsQY&feature=youtu.be

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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Israeli Arab MKs - Which part of living in a democracy is too difficult for you to understand?

LOTL..
04 October '12..

As should be obvious, context must always be the determining factor when examining incidents that have taken place, hotly contested or otherwise. A yasher-koach to the JPost editorial staff for give the bigger and necessary picture of what occurred during the October 2000 riots, that after 12 years may no longer fresh in many people's memory.

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...It behooves the leadership of Israel’s Arabs to remind its electorate that those who wish to enjoy the perks of Israeli citizenship cannot claim the liberty to abuse that citizenship in order to facilitate the brutal murder of fellow citizens and eventually destroy the state itself...

JPost Editorial: Sakhnin incitement
03 October '12

The country’s Arab parliamentarians managed this week to surpass even their own most strident incitement against the state that bankrolls them and guarantees their rights to subvert it. Speaking in Sakhnin at the 12th memorial to the 13 Arabs shot dead during the October 2000 riots, MKs Ahmed Tibi and Taleb a-Sanaa in effect agitated for violent vengeance, thereby ramping up already inordinately confrontational rhetoric.

This wasn’t just more of their by-now-pervasive in-yourface insolence – the sort to which we’ve already grown inured. This time there were exhortations for an operative translation by fellow Israeli Arabs of the escalated bellicosity.

Not much could be left to the imagination when Sanaa railed: “If the government fails to do justice, we shall. If it fails to punish the criminals, we shall.”

Tibi was hardly more circumspect: “We shall not forget and we shall not forgive. The criminals must be prosecuted and punished. A state which kills its own citizens, and rewards their murderers, is a state which conducts itself with criminal racism.”

This isn’t inconsequential nattering, enunciated today and evaporated tomorrow. Sanaa in effect urged Israeli Arabs to take justice into their own hands – or what they claim to be justice.

Tibi honed a fraudulent sense of victimhood and concomitantly the delegitimization of Israel as both criminal and racist. This follows countless provocative acts and statements, including junkets to Mideastern capitals where Israeli Arab MKs unequivocally sided with the existential enemy of the state whose taxpayers foot their bills and in whose parliament they serve.

THE INFLAMMATORY oratory, moreover, willfully promotes a skewed version of the 2000 riots (which not incidentally coincided with the launching of Yasser Arafat’s intifada just then). Falsehoods are elevated to an axiomatic historiography when all mention is omitted of the fact that rampaging Israeli Arabs besieged dozens of communities within Israel 12 years ago.

A Jewish civilian, Bechor Zhan, driving south from Haifa, was killed by a rock that Jisr e-Zarka youths hurled at his car. Throughout the North, motorists were violently dragged from their vehicles, asked if they were Jews and forced to show their IDs to ascertain their ethnicity. This is what happened to Ya’acov Ben-Hamo of Kibbutz Beit Alfa when driving between Umm el-Fahm and Afula. Fifteen masked Arabs pulled him from his automobile, burned it and kicked him mercilessly. He was barely rescued by a passing bus driver.

The ambulance eventually summoned to treat Gershon Adani’s severe wounds couldn’t get through the Arab mob’s roadblock. Adani was assaulted while driving to his home, near Acre. When his Jewishness was established, a whooping war cry went up: “Yahudi [Jew]!” It was immediately followed by the bloodcurdling “Itbach el-Yahud [slaughter the Jew]!” Adani was pelted with bricks and rocks and beaten to a pulp for being a Jew. He somehow managed to flee, with his attackers in hot pursuit. He hid, bruised and bleeding, in a fruit grove while they prowled about, trying to locate him and finish the job.

Simultaneously other Arabs, in Jaffa – a hop and a skip from Bat Yam and downtown Tel Aviv – singled out Jewish stores to vandalize. They marked the windows of businesses not owned by Arabs, so that only Jewish property would be ransacked.

These weren't isolated incidents. At the Nitzanei Oz Industrial Park in the country’s Center, which provides employment for Arabs from nearby towns, frenzied men burned four plants to a cinder.

It behooves the leadership of Israel’s Arabs to remind its electorate that those who wish to enjoy the perks of Israeli citizenship cannot claim the liberty to abuse that citizenship in order to facilitate the brutal murder of fellow citizens and eventually destroy the state itself.

Incendiary speechifying from Israeli Arab public figures does a grave disservice foremost to their own communities.

Reiterated lies trap ordinary folk in a vicious cycle of self-deception and self-imposed isolation. Disingenuous politicians confine their voters in a subjective counterfeit reality, which provides fertile ground for further incitement, violence and terror.

The radicalization of the Israeli Arab sector becomes a cynical vote-getting formula, and this is foremost that sector’s homemade tragedy.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.
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Marquadt-Bigman - Quote of the day

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
07 February '12..

All these years, Arab MKs have traveled to seek the favor of the Syrian ruler who is now butchering his people. They sat with the killer-leader, soaking up his every word, and after all that, there isn’t a single voice among them saying “Enough bloodshed.” […]

I remember October 2000, when 13 Israeli Arab citizens were shot dead by the security forces. The whole country trembled from the demonstrations in the Galilee and in Wadi Ara […]

And here we are, in the days of “spring” that have turned into a horrifying winter, and all I hear is the most popular MK in Jewish society, Dr. Ahmed Tibi, taking the podium to read, with unusual fervor, a feuilleton about a wacko racist MK from Yisrael Beiteinu. How brave! How sharp!

He knows that this is idle chatter and a distraction, because today another hundred were slaughtered, not by malicious Jews but by the hands of his own people. But there is no outcry. Neither he nor anyone else from the Arab civil leadership took to the podium to add his voice to the world’s demand to stop the killing.

Eliezer Yaari, Syria crisis reveals hypocrisy of Israel’s Arab MKs.

Let me add to this a quote from an article published in May 2010 in The National (Abu Dhabi) by Jonathan Cook, yet another writer who has made a career of demonizing Israel (while residing in Nazareth).

Arab Israeli Representatives: Representing WHO?

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
01 June '10

Some representatives of the Arab citizens of Israel have obviously forgotten that they were elected to the Knesset to serve the interests of their voters in the Galilee, Triangle and the Negev and not those of Hamas, Hizbullah Iran and Libya. One often gets the impression that some of the Arab Knesset members are too busy dealing with the problems of Hamas and the Fatah than with those facing their constituents. By doing so, they are actually shooting themselves in the foot and harming the interests of their people.

Of course the Arab Knesset members have every right to express their opinions on any regional and international issue they wish. They have the right, for instance, to call for lifting the blockade on the Gaza Strip or for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. They even have the right to voice their views on the issue of the Iranian nuclear threat and the growing tensions between Hizbullah and Syria on the one hand, and Israel on the other. But these elected parliamentarians need to know when they should not be crossing red lines.

Earlier this year, a large delegation of Israeli Arabs was invited to Libya for talks with Col. Muammar Qaddafi. It was the first visit of its kind to Libya by Israeli citizens. Not surprisingly, Qaddafi sought to exploit the high-profile visit to improve his reputation and image in international public opinion. The Israeli Arabs, on the other hand, had nothing to gain from the trip to Tripoli.

(Read full article)

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The failure of Israel’s Arab MKs

They have gone from being close advisers to government coalitions to raving, angry extremists.

Seth J. Frantzman
JPost
16 February '10

Israel’s Arab members of the Knesset do not provide their constituents with quality representation. If one were to judge merely by their statements and antics one would conclude that they work more on behalf of Palestinians than they do on behalf of those who elected them. It is one of the great tragedies that Israel’s Arabs participate in a robust democratic system and yet their elected representatives have done them little service over the last 60 years.

According to the Knesset Web site there have been 45 Arab MKs since the establishment of the state (by contrast there have been 13 Druse and 872 Jewish MKs). Three of the Arab MKs have been women, although two of these were elected as members of Jewish parties (Hosniya Jabarra of Meretz and Labor’s Nadia Hilou). There are nine Arab members of the current Knesset. They are Hadash’s Muhammad Barakei, Hanna Sweid (Christian); United Arab List-Ta’al’s Talab a-Sanaa (Beduin), Masud Gnaim, Ibrahim Sarsour and Ahmed Tibi, and Balad’s Said Nafa (actually a Druse who defines himself as an Arab), Jamal Zahalka and Haneen Zoabi. The first Knesset included three Arabs; Tawfik Toubi (an extraordinary individual who was born in 1922 in Haifa and served in 12 Knessets as a Communist), Amin-Salim Jarjura, an Ottoman army soldier and mayor of Nazareth, and Seif e-Din e-Zoubi, who served as an MK from 1949 to 1979 in a variety of parties.

Two of the three Arabs in the first Knesset were members of the Nazareth Democratic Party, which was part of the governing coalition. The Arab party Kidma Ve’avoda served in the second and third Knessets with two members and also participated in the governing coalition. Two other Arab parties, the Democratic List for Israeli Arabs and the Agriculture and Development Party, also supported the government in the state’s early years. In the fourth to eighth Knessets (1959-1977) the Arab party Kidma Ufituah was a member of the coalition. The party Shituf Ve’ahva participated in governments and served in four Knessets. In the eighth Knesset the Arab List for Beduin and Villagers run by Hamad Abu Rabiah joined the coalition.

(Read full article)
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