Maj. Ala Wahib - An officer and a Muslim Zionist

Photo Credit: Osnat Krasnansky

Michal Yaakov Yitzhaki..
Israel Hayom..
07 September '12..

“I am the operations officer at the IDF ground forces training base at Tze’elim,” Ala Wahib says at the start of our conversation, his eyes twinkling with excitement. “I am like the mother and father of that place,” he adds. “The only thing is that I don’t really have anyone to share it with, so I make sure to pat myself on the back every now and again, and say ‘dude, you’re awesome. Look how far you’ve come.’”

The truth is that he deserves these accolades. It is not every day that a Muslim Arab, hailing from a village whose residents largely do not recognize Israel’s right to exist, comes to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. And he doesn’t only serve: Major Wahib, 32, is currently the highest ranking Muslim officer in the IDF. He is enormously patriotic, a true Zionist. Precisely the kind of person we like to see lighting the torches during the national Independence Day ceremony every year.

But still, Wahib came to this interview with immense trepidation. Even today, after 12 years in the Israeli military, he still doesn’t feel comfortable openly discussing his views. For years he struggled on all fronts: he fought against the residents of his village, who to this day refer to him as a traitor, and he fought the military institution that never fully understood his motives.

“In my village, they can’t understand what could possibly motivate me to protect a country that is not my own. In the army there are people who know me and would go all the way with me, but there are those who don’t know me and don’t really know how to relate to me,” he says.

So why did he decide to give this interview, with his face exposed and his full name in print? “Because it is important to me to show the Arab public what they are missing. There are quite a lot of people [in the Arab community] who want to enlist, but they are afraid and they don’t know if they will be accepted by their environment. It is important to me to show them the road I’ve traveled, and to make them understand that it is possible.” Regardless, he doesn’t take his hand off his gun for a second during the entire interview. “It is my security. It is my only means of protecting myself,” he says.

His Hebrew is fluent, without a hint of an accent, and he could easily be mistaken for an average Tel Avivian. A map of the training grounds hangs on his office wall, and his green eyes constantly sweep it, making sure again and again that everything is under control. Every once in a while a soldier will knock on the door, asking permission for this or that mission, and one of them, noticing the newspaper crew, can’t resist and says “write that he is the best commander there is.” Wahib tries to hide an embarrassed smile and tells the soldier to get his backside back to the field.

He describes himself as a “Zionist Israeli Arab.” Four years ago he went on a tour of Nazi extermination camps in Poland, together with his fellow officers, as part of the IDF’s Witnesses in Uniform program. “As a child,” he says, “I grew up in a society that denies the Holocaust. When I arrived in Poland I was shocked. I cried a lot. It was difficult to contain this thing called genocide. There was something very powerful in the fact that I was standing on Polish soil, holding an Israeli flag and donning the uniform of the Israeli army, but this time from a position of power. It was proof that we can’t be broken.”

When Wahib says “we” he means the Jewish people. “I believe in the Muslim faith, and I will never abandon it, but I think that Zionism is more than a religion. It is something that fully represents my sense of belonging to the State of Israel and to Israeli society, and the immense commitment I have to protecting and guarding the country of which I am part.”

A Campaign of Incitement - The Re-Islamification of Beersheba

Seth J. Frantzman..
Terra Incogniita/JPost..
05 September 12..

A week ago it was reported that political leaders among the Israeli-Arab and Beduin community were gearing up to protest a wine festival in Beersheba.

Both Adalah, a legal aid center for Arabs, and the southern branch of the Islamic Movement petitioned courts to intervene to stop the festival. In the end the municipality caved and moved the festival slightly to accommodate the protesters.

Ostensibly the dispute was about the location of the event: In proximity to an old Ottoman-era Mosque. But throughout the discussion about the event there was always a hidden current of a larger struggle. According to reports, Adalah claimed that not only the wine festival was a problem but other events at the site, which is a museum, “constitute a continuous offense to local Muslim residents, Beduin in particular.”

Background to the current issue is a court ruling from 2011 that declared that the mosque could not be used by Muslims for prayers but should be a museum related to the Islamic culture of the Negev.

The battle has to be understood as a struggle to re-Islamify unused sites in Israel.This is actually part of a global struggle by Muslims to re-assert their claims to former places of worship that were once in the Dar al-Islam, or the “domain of Islam.” Bernard Lewis in his most recent book, Notes on a Century, recalls visiting Spain with Turkish Muslims for a conference in the 1970s. After going to see the Cathedral of Cordoba, which had once been a mosque in the 13th century, a colleague confided to him “when I come into this ancient shrine I feel that I should recite the afternoon prayer.”

But one of the other Turkish scholars cautioned the man, reminding him how it would hurt Turkish sensibilities if a Greek Christian came into Hagia Sophia, a former church that became a mosque, and wanted to pray. The Turk gave up.

However in April of 2010 things turned violent when Muslim tourists entered the church and began to pray.

Guards were called by the Catholic priests and the Muslim worshipers attacked the guards, two of whom suffered serious injury. The status quo has been maintained at Cordoba’s cathedral, but at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul a different sort of story has played itself out.

The secularist Turkish government turned the giant mosque into a museum in 1934. As Turkey has become more religious, numerous radical groups have held group prayers outside the museum, demanding that it be used as a mosque.

In Israel the campaign to ignite a religious struggle has included attempts to Islamicize other sites. There have been claims and petitions against Tel Aviv University for supposedly building dorms atop a Muslim cemetery that once belonged to the Arab village of Sheikh Muannis.

In Jerusalem protests and petitions have been signed against the Museum of Tolerance, which was likewise accused of unearthing Muslim graves. In Nazareth Muslims miraculously discovered the holy grave of Shihab A-Din, a nephew of Saladin, in the 1990s and demanded the right to build a giant mosque next to the Church of the Annunciation. The tensions resulted in anti-Christian riots in 1999 until an Israeli court ruled that the illegally constructed mosque be torn down.

THE SUDDEN interest in the Beersheba mosque is similar to these other battles. Does it reflect a true feeling that the mosque is being threatened with desecration and that it is a site that is deeply connected to the Beduin population, or is the mosque simply an issue that politicians know they can get people to rally around to whip up sentiment and world opinion in order to expand their power base and test the commitment of the state to maintaining a free and secular environment in the public space? Let’s examine some of the particulars of this case to weigh the claims.

Charcoal Kilns, the High Court, Risk to Life vs. Human Rights NGOs

Ari Briggs..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
15 July '12..

Illegal and unregulated production of charcoal, in some cases on government land, is causing severe health consequences for our children. It is illegal due to the fact that the businesses are not registered and take place on land zoned for agriculture. Most disturbing is that the government and the Supreme Court don’t seem to care.

Most of us, when grilling the meat on our BBQs, have no idea what it takes to make the charcoal fuel used to achieve that perfect steak. We would be surprised to find out that our insatiable appetite to BBQ is feeding an NIS 50 million a year underground charcoal industry that is totally illegal, unregulated and terribly damaging to the environment.

The massive amounts of air pollution released into the environment during the production of the charcoal has ruined the lives of many families whose only wish was to live in the pastoral northern Sharon region.

We do know that air quality is a high priority of the Environmental Protection Ministry. One only has to recall the hullabaloo caused by the smell of chlorine in the Dan region recently. Months ago, the smell of chlorine in the streets of Tel Aviv drew dozens of vehicles specially equipped to test the air quality out on to the streets.

The sight of the white-suited scientists doing their tests was proof of the seriousness with which the issue is dealt.

But this level of care is not being applied equally.

Israel's Unwavering Guardsmen

Caroline Glick
Carolineglick.com
26 March '10

As the local and international press corps converged on Jerusalem's Old City to cover the Arab riots at the Temple Mount two weeks ago, little mention was made of the fact that Jerusalem was not the only flashpoint. In Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israeli Arab rioters supported by far-left protesters stoned buses. Israeli Arabs firebombed motorists on Highway 443 and on the roads to Beersheba. In the North, cars were stoned.

These little-reported attacks are the consequence of one of the most dangerous emerging threats to Israel's national survival: the rapidly escalating radicalization of Israel's Arab citizens.

Over the past decade and at a frenzied pace since the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, acting at least partially at the direction of the Israeli Islamic Movement and with the active support of the far left, Israeli Arabs and Beduin have launched a massive assault on the state. The relevant national authorities including the courts, the state prosecution, the police, the IDF, the Jewish National Fund, the Israel Lands Authority and the Ministry of Interior have failed to defend against it.

Firebombing Jewish-owned vehicles is small potatoes in comparison to developments at the center of mass of the Israeli Arab onslaught: state land. Over the past decade, Israeli Arabs have seized millions of dunams of state land.

The dimensions of this phenomenon were spelled out in last year's State Comptroller's Report. While the local and international Left pillories Israel when the state tries to demolish a handful of the thousands of illegal Arab buildings in Jerusalem, what goes unmentioned is that by the end of 2007 there were more than 100,000 illegally built structures in Israel. The overwhelming majority were constructed on state land seized by Arab land thieves in the Negev and the Galilee. By the end of 2009, the number of illegal buildings grew to an estimated 150,000. The scope of the theft is so vast that the Comptroller's Report referred to it as a "national scourge."

(Read full article)

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