The hoary two-state solution assumes that there will be a Muslim Arab state ethnically cleansed of Jews and then there will be another state but comprised of whom?
By AMIEL UNGARUpdated: AUGUST 22, 2018 10:47Aharon Barak.(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
The Knesset's passage of the Nation-State Law on July 19 touched off criticism both in Israel and abroad. This criticism is misplaced and betrays Western gullibility to the arguments of those who garb the national struggle in the sheep's clothing of civil rights. In terms of their civil rights, the law will not impinge on the civil rights of any Israeli minority. It will only be invoked when it is necessary to defend the Jewish character of the State of Israel. However disappointing or politically incorrect, it should be stated that from the 19th century to this date, the Arabs on both sides of the Green Line have not reconciled themselves to Israel as a Jewish state.The hoary two-state solution assumes that there will be a Muslim Arab state ethnically cleansed of Jews and then there will be another state but comprised of whom? The most you will get out of Mahmoud Abbas is that it will be a state of the Israeli people but he will never concede the term Jewish state. This is because the Palestinian leadership has never renounced the “right of return” and the hope that such an inundation together with the “Palestinians of 1948,” the term that the PLO applies to the Arabs who did not flee pre-1967 Israel and are Israeli citizens, will gradually expunge Israel’s Jewish identity. In the interim they can carve out autonomies in the Galilee and the Negev that will eventually seek reunification with the Palestinian state. To expedite this goal, Jewish Israeli agriculture is pillaged and burned in a throwback to the days of the Ottomans. This produced a new edition of HaShomer – the Watchman – an organization that arose in the early 20th century to protect Jewish agriculture.Obviously this sentiment is not true of all Arabs and particularly Christian Arabs, who have witnessed the fate of Christian communities in the region that antedate the Muslim arrival and which have now been decimated. There is only one country where the Christian Arab population has grown and that is Israel.Unfortunately, they are outliers in the Arab community. Arab voters keep electing Knesset representatives who march in lock step with Ramallah. They join flotillas to Gaza, or have been caught passing cellphones to Arab security prisoners or even spying for Syria. One moonlighted as Arafat’s adviser while serving in the Knesset. In the current wave of assaults on the border with Gaza, followed by the wave of incendiary kites and balloons, the Joint Arab List made it quite plain that it sided with the infiltrators and arsonists and not with the country in whose parliament they sit.During the Second Lebanon War, when some of Hezbollah’s missiles went awry and caused fatalities in Arab villages, the leadership was quick to accept Nasrallah’s apologies and his bestowal of the term shahids or martyrs in a holy war against the Jews. When Israelis celebrate Independence Day the Arabs demonstrate with Palestinian flags as they remember the Naqba or the disaster in Arabic. Western countries do not face similar threats. If the immigrant wave from Mexico to the United States was not comprised of economic migrants but was designed to reverse the Texas War of Independence and the Mexican war, and restore the American southwest to Mexico, that would be an analogous situation. The calls to use Muslim immigration to replace a demographically indolent population and restore (Al-Andalus) Spain to Dar al Islam is not yet on the radar but it will get there. The best analogy is provided in the BalkansAnother tactic exploited by the Arabs to change the demographic balance was the family reunion scheme under which 113,000 Arabs were admitted to Israel because they had married Israeli Arabs. Curiously these reunions hardly ever involved the reverse case, where an Israeli Arab left Israel to build the love nest abroad. The new Israeli citizen would then reunite with his children from a previous marriage, his parents and perhaps even his former wife. In the best of circumstances, it merely allowed access to milk welfare benefits; in the worst cases, it allowed Arabs to commit terror atrocities using the “invisibility cloak” of an Israeli ID card. The government belatedly moved to block this loophole and passed a temporary citizenship law that stopped conferring automatic citizenship. The usual suspects Adala, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and others petitioned the High Court of Justice to invalidate the temporary law.Common sense prevailed in the 2006 case but only barely in a razor thin 6-5 decision. In the minority was former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the prime mover of Israel’s constitutional revolution, who believed the law impaired equality and family rights “more than necessary.” Also in the minority was the current Chief Justice Esther Hayut. Barak’s deputy, the late Mishael Heshin, who wrote the majority opinion, subsequently commented, “He [Barak] was prepared that 30 or 50 people should be blown up, but there should be civil rights.” It is fair to say that not only the fear of Arab separatism and irredentism prompted the drafters of the law but also the fear of an uber-liberal activist Supreme Court.It is a pity that the Druze community was caught in the backwash and hopefully that can be remedied. The new Nation-State Law will not prevent a member of an Israeli minority from heading a hospital or becoming the dean of the Hebrew University. It will float over Israeli society almost unnoticed until a crisis hits and it will then be invoked in defense of Israel’s security and the preservation of its Jewish character.
