Channels
Photo: Hagai Aharon
Arabs rally in Sakhnin (Archive)
Photo: Hagai Aharon

A case of Arab chutzpa

Arab-Israelis not a separate nation and cannot expect to be treated as such

Saeb Erekat announced that the Arabs have opted for peace. That's wonderful, but peace with which country? Erekat skips that part, because that falls within the realm of Israeli Arabs. The "Haifa document," a list of conditions for reconciliation with the State compiled by prominent Arab intellectuals, has now joined the myriad of visions held by the Arab Israeli leadership.

 

Their bottom line calls for the State of Israel to be defined as a binational state after it recognizes the right of return, restores 400 dilapidated villages, and apologizes for the Nakba (the Arabic term, meaning "catastrophe", for the 1948 War of Indepence).

 

One of the initiators added that he would be willing to compromise if Israel suffices with half the area of the Palestinian mandate. This pretentiousness is reminiscent of the Arab leadership's pretentiousness in 1947.

 

One can understand why the Arabs regret the outcome of 1948. But aggression is a gamble, and the gambler bears the consequences. Germany, for example, paid the price for its 1939 gamble, among other things by losing more than 100,000 square kilometers (roughly 38,000 square miles) of its territory to the east and having some 13 million ethnic Germans turn into refugees in their homeland.

 

The Arabs rejected the partition plan at the time and opted to "wage a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades," as announced by Arab League secretary general Abdul Razek Azzam Pasha. This gamble led to the loss of 5,500 square kilometers (roughly 2,120 square miles) of land designated to the Arabs, and turned some 650,000 Arabs into refugees in their own country or outside of it.

 

However, contrary to the German nation that lost its gamble big time but internalized the fact that its consequences should not be repeated, the Arabs are now trying to turn the annals of history backwards. For this purpose they enlisted a successful propaganda tactic – presenting the loss of the Arab gamble as the expulsion of an entire people.

 

Insult to intelligence  

As it may be recalled, the political conflict began here in 1917 as a conflict with the large Arab nation over a fraction of the territory that it inhabited. Even the inhabitants of that fraction of land didn't claim that they were a separate people, despite their special interest in a war over the realization of the League of Nation's decision to allocate the western part of southern Syria for a Jewish homeland for the Jewish people.

 

In 1947, the UN determined that that same area would be divided between the Jewish and Arab inhabitants. When the gamble that the partition would be foiled by the force of arms failed, the local Arabs paid most of the cost. This toll began to be perceived worldwide as an injustice when the community redefined itself as a separate people.

 

We have already been forced to swallow this trick. What's new is the attempt to repeat it in a pocket book version: Clearly a sub-national community has risen up - the Arabs residing in Israel - and instead of struggling for minority rights, it expects to achieve status in the form of a diplomatic solution, and is demanding what Arab leaders rejected 60 years earlier. Moreover, it is undermining the principle of partition, a delineation that has already taken national rights into consideration.

 

When pretentiousness and insult to intelligence join forces, it is called chutzpah.

 

There's an answer to this: Shall we talk about civilian rights? OkayWhen it comes to the diplomatic issue, it's not you who are the partners; it is the entire people of which you are part of. A people, you should be reminded, is not a Russian doll: There is no people within a people within a people.

 

We shall probably reach an agreement with the Arab states at some point. Perhaps even with the Palestinians. But there is no third national partner here.

 


פרסום ראשון: 06.10.07, 14:15
 new comment
Warning:
This will delete your current comment