Loyal to whom?

A Muslim woman whose children serve in the army calls on all Israeli Arabs to enlist.

By ARIEL ZILBER
Soldier (photo credit: Courtesy)
Soldier
(photo credit: Courtesy)
‘All of this media attention is tiring,” says Anet Haskia, sounding more like a pampered pop diva and less like a divorced, 40-something hairdresser from Acre, a Muslim woman from the ancient town’s Old City.
Just a few days earlier, Haskia burst onto the public scene and garnered the adulation of thousands when she took to the stage during a rally held by reservist soldiers demanding that the government apply compulsory conscription laws to all Israeli citizens, not just non-haredi Jews and the Druse minority.
“I am a proud Israeli-Arab Muslim woman,” she told throngs of attendees who descended on the plaza of Tel Aviv Museum last Saturday, which roared in approval after nearly every utterance delivered by this charismatic woman with bleached-blonde hair and a cheery disposition.
Haskia proudly and unapologetically boasted to the crowd of her three children’s decision to volunteer – including her daughter’s decision to sign up for officer training as well as her youngest son’s intention to enlist into the Golani infantry brigade upon completing a year of national service. Her 15 minutes of fame continues apace, with appearances on nationally broadcast television and radio shows. She was even featured by the monthly women’s magazine La’sha.
The backlash from her fellow Arabs was not long in coming.
“I’ve been waging this struggle [on behalf of universal conscription for Arabs] for three months now,” she says indignantly. “Until [last week], no Arab-language media outlet came near me. No newspaper or radio station. It was Tuesday when a reporter from Kul el-Arab [one of the most widely read Arabic-language weekly newspapers in the country] called me.”
“I was asked all sorts of questions,” she says. “They asked if I [had] converted to Judaism. They asked if my children even knew that the Arabic language existed. They asked if I celebrate Islamic holy days. They thought I was totally unrealistic.
They asked if my children knew that they were Muslims. They couldn’t comprehend how I could stand in the middle of Tel Aviv and call on other Arabs to enlist in the army. How could I do such a thing?” Haskia revels in the notoriety, which befits her self-image as a woman who has gone against the grain her entire life.
She remembers her “primitive” childhood, part of which was spent growing up in the Old City of Acre.
Playing with children in the adjacent neighborhood was forbidden, as was leaving the house in a skirt. These rules mattered little to Haskia.
“I was very rebellious, in virtually every way imaginable,” she says. “I did everything that the Arab mentality forbade me to do, like walking around with a pierced nose, getting tattoos, divorcing my husband, living alone, deciding whether I even wanted to get married, moving out of my family’s home and living far away. It doesn’t matter where I live. Like I said, the Jews won’t determine if I’m a whore or a bimbo. I’m the one who decides what lifestyle I’m going to lead. Throughout the years, I’ve proved [to the Arabs] that everything they’ve been taught their whole lives is a lie.
“The reporter from Kul al-Arab asked me, ‘Why do you choose to live among the Jews? Why did you run away?’ So I said to him, ‘Do you think if I still lived in Arab society, I’d be left alone? You know what Arab society is like. Don’t you know what Arabs think about divorced women? Would they allow me to work as a self-employed woman? Would they let me raise my children in the way that I want to raise my children? They would’ve immediately put a price tag on me as a ‘divorced whore.’ They wouldn’t let me be.”
“I came to the Jews, I live [in the upscale suburb of Kfar Vradim], where I am loved and accepted, I am making a living, and they couldn’t care less whom I date. On the contrary, they encourage me to go out, meet people, and find a romantic companion. When I need to confide in someone or a shoulder to cry on or to get advice from someone, I don’t call my mother or my sisters. I call my clients.”
Haskia has reached out to the Jewish public, which has embraced her in kind. She makes numerous speaking engagements at universities and think tanks, schools and town halls. Her message is a conciliatory one, though to Arab ears it is delivered bluntly and without equivocation.
“I speak because it’s important to get the message across, that there be greater awareness of the issue of performing national service and shouldering a fair share of the burden,” she says. “It’s important [for Israeli Arabs] to take responsibility.”
Haskia rejects long-held Arab assumptions that agreeing to perform national service is tantamount to de facto capitulation to Jewish lordship over the indigenous Palestinian population.
On the contrary, she is adamant that having Arab youths volunteer in their communities would pave the way for their social mobilization.
“I don’t care about all the attention,” she says. “The only thing that’s important to me is to achieve my goal, which is to see every Arab and Muslim enlist in the army and to serve the country. I want to see the Muslim community rise onward and upward, and for it to change its attitudes and opinions so that it can belong. The perception of Muslims is a bad one. People look at them as terrorists, and this tugs at my heart, because not all of them are like that. There are also good people, people who want to live quietly, people who were unhappy about the suicide bombings. The Arab sector needs to pull its weight so that it can feel part of this country.”
When asked if it was appropriate to call her a Zionist, she says: “I consider myself a proud Israeli-Arab Muslim woman. I’m not trying to be Jewish.”
Some may have difficult grasping Haskia’s rationale, but she seems unperturbed.
“Let them think whatever they want,” she says. “I really don’t care what other people think. I’m at peace with the opinions I hold, and the decisions that I’ve made.”
AYMAN ODEH would beg to differ. A lawyer by profession, the Nazarethbased Odeh is the secretary-general of the Jewish-Arab Hadash Party. He also sits as a representative of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee’s response team on the issue of national service for Israeli Arabs.
“Of course I am opposed, and I am opposed to this whole idea for a number of reasons,” he says. “The army has been an occupying army in the occupied territories since the ’67 war. This is an army that is likely to fight our brothers, but not just our brothers. The army is occupying the ground of another people.”
According to Odeh’s figures, less than 4 percent of the Beduin of the South serve in the military. The number is slightly higher among the northern Beduin. As of now, only 350 Christians and Muslims serve in the military.
Odeh says there are 2,400 Israeli Arabs who do national service, including a third of this number volunteering with auxiliary police in their communities.
Odeh scoffs at the notion that Israeli Arabs would gain equality by agreeing to enlist in the military. He points out that Druse and Beduin who perform army service frequently face discrimination in civilian life. In addition, he takes issue with the Israeli authorities’ insistence on associating national or civil service with defense-related agencies like the army and the police.
In 2005, the government appointed a panel headed by former air force chief and ambassador to the US David Ivry.
The committee recommended the formation of an Administration for Civic- National Service, which was designed to offer an alternative, non-military track for Israelis who by law were exempt from conscription. The Ivry committee’s recommendations were adopted by the government in 2007.
The committee headed by Kadima MK Yohanan Plesner, which seeks to increase ultra-Orthodox enlistment in the military, recommends that the government continue to encourage Israeli Arabs to volunteer for civic service.
Plesner suggests that the state aim to reach a quota of 600 Arab volunteers a year, which would push the number of total volunteers from the Arab sector to 6,000 by the year 2017.
“In the past 10 years, there have been three government-appointed panels that have looked into the issue of national service – the Lapid commission, the Ivry commission and the Plesner commission,” Odeh says. “All of these bodies were composed entirely of Jews. There wasn’t one Arab on any of these committees. This attitude of having other people decide what is best for us is unacceptable. We demand full partnership in decisions and in building everything that relates to us.”
Odeh says that as full-fledged citizens, the rights of Arabs should not be contingent on performing national service. “I’m in favor of anyone getting benefits for serving in the army, but not rights,” he says. “If the army wants to give tuition or a supplementary salary to soldiers, that’s fine. But to make it a condition for granting us rights is absurd. In the State of Israel, we are discriminated against, and it’s not because we don’t serve in the army.”
Haskia’s next goal is to rally Arab public opinion to her side and eventually replace the lawmakers in the Knesset whom she accuses of causing damage to their constituents’ cause.
“For all the muscle-flexing that they do in public when it comes to refusing to recognize the state, many Arabs have told me that they have had it with the Arab Knesset members, who in their view do not represent their constituency and thus should be removed,” she says. “Everybody told me this. There is a feeling that the time has come to organize a movement that would displace them. After all, they were elected due to the goodwill of the public. They weren’t hand-picked by the government, just like the prime minister was elected by the public.”
Haskia was coy when asked if she planned to enter politics or form a party, though it is easy to envision such a scenario, particularly given her fondness for engaging the public and her gift for holding an audience.
“Let’s form our own organization,” she tells her fellow Arabs. “Let’s be a force, and let’s make a change. We can change a lot of things and gain even more rights the moment we become loyal to the state and the moment when we really feel that we belong, and not when we come with the attitude of ‘I’m an Arab, and I’m persecuted.’ Nobody was willing to take the plunge and join me. They said, ‘Well, when you get other people to join, then I’ll sign on.’”
Should they serve?
Ariel Tamir, a 24-year-old from Bat Yam, served three years in the IDF’s Land Forces Headquarters in Kiryat Malachi. He says he would have no problem serving alongside an Israeli Arab, though he would be hesitant to allow him to hold high rank in a sensitive unit such as military intelligence.
“If an Israeli Arab is in the army, and he does everything that is required, then I see no problem with it,” Tamir says. “But in today’s climate, there’s no way I would allow him to serve in intelligence. Naturally, he would seek to exploit his position to the Arabs’ advantage and harm state security.”
Tamir says it is unrealistic for Jewish Israelis to expect Arabs to enlist, given the socioeconomic gaps and discriminatory government policies that have alienated the country’s largest minority.
“As long as an Arab city receives a third of the budget of a Jewish city of the same size, there is no reason for them to enlist in the army,” he says.
“First they should get equal rights, and only then should they be asked to bear an equal share of the burden.
“You can’t demand that they do something while this is the situation,” he says. “If they had budgets that were equal, then sure.”
Alex Bebayev, a resident of south Tel Aviv, is a self-described “far-rightist.”
He says he would have no problem serving alongside an Israeli Arab.
“The state needs to give them the option of serving in the military,” says Bebayev, who completed his three years of compulsory service in the air force. “The state doesn’t really allow them to serve. There is a certain fear of, ‘How will they cope? How will they deal with the fact that we are at war against the Arabs?’” Bebayev, who currently works as a bank receptionist in Tel Aviv, says that Arab readiness to serve in the armed forces would move him to look upon them differently.
“It shows they want to get legitimacy, to contribute, to be a part of us, to integrate with us,” he says. “It looks different, because it proves that we can choose something else besides war and hostility, and that goes for both sides [Jews and Arabs]. It shows that they care about the country they live in, they want to connect with the Jewish citizens of this country, they want to be part of the Israeli nation, to give of themselves, and make an effort for the good of society at large.”
Bebayev takes aim at Israeli-Arab leaders and Knesset members, whom he accuses of “constantly selling us stories about occupation and racism.”
“Arabs have been fighting each other in the Middle East for years,” he says. “Saddam invaded Kuwait, and that pitted Arabs against each other.
In Syria, Arabs fight other Arabs. If Arabs can fight in wars against each other, then they could also fight wars against other Arabs in our country.”
Michal Rahamim, a Herzliya lawyer and mother of two, has no desire to see Arabs enlist in the IDF.
“As painful as it is, they are our enemies,” she says. “As long as this is the case, we mustn’t trust them, at least not for the moment.”
Rahamim believes Israeli Arabs need to prove their loyalty to the state, “although I’m doubtful it will ever be possible to trust them.”
On the other hand, she acknowledges that she would view Arabs who served in the IDF differently than those who hadn’t.
“I would have much more respect for them if they did serve, and I would trust them more, just like I did the Beduin with whom I worked,” she says.
Rahamim was once employed at the Hiriya waste management site, where she worked alongside Beduin from the South.
“At first, I was afraid to work with them,” she says. “But when I found out they served in the army, I was able to trust them more.”
“I don’t like wars,” she says. “I just want everybody to live together peacefully.”
Daniel Niknazar, a nursing attendant from Herzliya, takes issue with the argument that Arabs should be exempt from military service until they are treated more equitably by the state.
“Before they ask for their rights to be respected, they should serve the country,” he says. “In my opinion, everyone who lives in this country should enlist in the army, except for those with disabilities.”
Niknazar thinks that Arabs who do perform army service should be precluded from combat units.
“They should be given jobs that are supportive of their communities and that serve the public,” he says.