Best place an arab could ever live, Israel

[Zhukov]

Picking one home over another

BY ERIK N. NELSON
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

March 7, 2004


UMM AL-FAHM, Israel - When Ahmed Jabarin was 12, his family's ancestral farm and grazing lands were absorbed into the young State of Israel.

For more than five decades, Jabarin and tens of thousands of other ethnic Arabs in Umm al-Fahm and nearby towns have lived an uncomfortable dichotomy: citizens of Israel, but brothers, sisters and sympathizers of the Palestinians whom Israel fights.

As Israel built its West Bank security fence here about a year ago, it planned a route to separate Jabarin's family from Israel, leaving them and their land to the prospect of future rule by a Palestinian state.

Jabarin said no.

"We fought them to be inside of the fence, and they moved it so we are still in Israel," he explained, pointing out a line of razor wire at the southern edge of his pastures, where the fence runs. "We have many links to Israel," said Jabarin, now 67. "What have we to do with the Palestinian Authority?"

In a reversal of norms for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel recently has contemplated giving up slices of Arab-populated land, while the Palestinian Arabs living on them have demanded to stay under Israeli governance.

Israeli Arabs prefer to stay

This oddity starkly bares fears and weaknesses of both sides. Israeli Arabs feel more secure under Israel's democracy than under a Palestinian state they expect will be authoritarian and corrupt. Israel, which declares itself both democratic and Jewish, may have to discard one of those attributes as its Arab minority, now 20 percent of the population, keeps growing.

In February, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suggested that Israel might join Umm al-Fahm and some other Arab towns to the adjacent West Bank as part of a unilateral "settlement" of border issues in the conflict.

The start of the current Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in 2000 was accompanied by riots in Umm al-Fahm and other Arab towns in which Israeli police shot dead 13 Arab Israelis. Since then, the towns' estrangement from Israel's mainstream has continued.

Jewish motorists used to stop in Umm al-Fahm to shop and have lunch with Arab residents.

These days, Jews steer clear. The town's entrance is marked with green flags of the leading Islamic Movement party and with a billboard denouncing Israel's rule over East Jerusalem.

Umm al-Fahm's people prefer to be called Palestinians. But for reasons of jobs and political freedoms, they insist on living in Israel. The point was underscored last month by reaction to Sharon's suggestion. "Despite the discrimination and injustice faced by Arab citizens, the democracy and justice in Israel is better than the democracy and justice in Arab and Islamic countries," said Hashem Abdel Rahman, who is Umm al-Fahm's mayor and local head of the Islamic Movement.

"We are citizens of the Israeli state and we could not be hostages for any Israeli politicians who find us to be a solution to the Middle East problem," said Rahman, who attended a meeting of Arab mayors opposed to having their towns excluded from Israel. "I will continue struggling for my rights under this state," he said.

A poll of Arabs in towns near here last month found that 90 percent preferred to remain in Israel, and 73 percent said they would violently resist being forced out. The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, based in Haifa, said 43 percent of those polled preferred to remain Israeli because Israel is their homeland and 33 percent because of the country's higher standard of living.

Raja Ighbarieh, head of Umm al-Fahm's second-largest party, the Abna al-Balad [Sons of the Land] Movement, said he believes Arabs want to stay in Israel to keep benefits such as pensions and health care.

Amid the Arab opposition, Sharon announced he will not force Arab towns out of Israel..

Such a trade would have posed problems, said Sharon foreign policy adviser Zalman Shoval. "I don't see how Israel could tell Israeli citizens, whether they're Arab or not, that they are no longer going to be citizens of Israel," Shoval said. "They claim they're disadvantaged, and maybe some of them are, but they're still much better off than they would be in any Arab country."



Changing demographics

Ighbarieh's party favors one democratic state for all Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. That idea, espoused by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, is seen by most Israelis as a threat to maintaining a Jewish state. Scholars and politicians across Israel's political spectrum have proposed that Israel dump heavily Arab zones to defuse Israel's Arab population explosion.

According to demographers such as Haifa University Prof. Arnon Sover, a higher birth rate among Arabs will produce an overall Arab majority within 16 years in the combined lands of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. By 2030, demographers say, Arabs will form the majority even within Israel's current borders.

Fear of this has given momentum to Sharon's suggestions that Israel act unilaterally, and has agitated the political right. Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister, has declared that the birthrate of Arab Israelis is more of threat to the Jewish state than are the Palestinians. Others have urged a boost in government programs aimed at encouraging Jewish mothers to have more children.

"It's a shame the people are sitting and counting how many [Jewish] people are born and my daughter and her son are an 'explosion,'" said Hashem Mahameed, a former Umm al-Fahm mayor and member of Israel's parliament. "You have lots of blacks in Washington. Imagine if someone said, "Let's whiten Washington. What would the world say? What would Israel say?"

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[William Joyce]

This is because Arabs are racially inferior, and prefer the work opportunities provided by Jews to the company of their Arab "brothers."

This does NOT mean that I have changed my position on our support of the criminal state of Israel.

 

[Zhukov]

I thought Aryan and Iranian were derivatives of the same word and the master race of teutonic knights were decendants from "racially inferior" Arabs. At least that's what Hitler (probably a Jew by his own definition) said.

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/aryan_movement.php

 

[William Joyce]

I've heard of this. It is hard to look at the physical appearance of some higher-caste Indians, with blue and green eyes, and not wonder about that.

But, my point is that however it has come to pass, the Arabs are to Jews a little like blacks are to whites: they hate them, but they aren't about to leave their territories, because they get employment from them. That does make Arabs look a little silly. Death to the Jews, oh, and by the way, can I get a job?

Life sure is confusing, isn't it?

 

[Zebra]

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best place, yes!