Run, habibi, run. The cuddly, lovable dentist. A walking advertisement for getting children to brush their teeth before bedtime. Run, and keep bursting the balloons of our dreams, our hopes and our innocent hearts, one by one. There is no one left to wipe away the tears of my brothers who believed in you.
I believe Eisenkot, Golan, Lapid and their supporters. They are genuine patriots who love Israel and sincerely believed in coexistence. But Mansour Abbas? I never believed him for a moment.
Mansour Abbas
(Photo: AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
How easily he sold us that broad smile and his moderate rhetoric, delivered in Arabic sprinkled with polished, academic Hebrew. He became Israel's national sweetheart. The good Arab. The pragmatist. The man who had supposedly abandoned the Palestinian narrative in favor of integration into Israeli society.
I oppose the Prime minister. He was wrong. But, as it turns out, perhaps the best thing that ever happened to Zionism was the Arabs turning out in droves to vote.
The Jewish people have finally begun to understand that coexistence, as presented by Israel's Arab political leadership, is merely another version of the Palestinian strategy of stages, known as tadrijiyya. Its close relative is taqiyya, an Islamic legal concept associated with concealing one's beliefs under certain circumstances, which critics interpret as a license to deceive an enemy and lull him into complacency.
And when the Jew finally awakens, he discovers that the promised coexistence was never meant to be mutual. It was about the existence of the Muslim alone.
In my view, the historical narratives surrounding Islam reveal a long tradition of deception and calculated appearances designed to secure advantages for Muslims. Egyptian scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad captured this criticism in particularly blunt terms, describing Islam as one enormous balloon of lies, filled with countless smaller ones.
So, dear Mansour, and your friends in The Joint List, here is your problem: You succeeded too well.
Iran made precisely the same mistake.
On the eve of October 7, Israel stood, I believe, dangerously close to destruction. Iran and its proxies had succeeded in lulling us into a false sense of security. They had built up terrifying military capabilities, preparing for the slaughter of Jews while waiting for the nuclear bomb that had not yet materialized.
But then Hamas, drunk on its own confidence, broke ranks and launched its attack. Hezbollah and Iran were furious at the timing and hesitated to join the assault.
Israel, which had fallen into the trap of believing that the Palestinians genuinely sought coexistence, eventually recovered and rose like a lion. Today, its forces are operating deep inside Gaza, Syria and Lebanon, tightening their grip around the throats of its enemies.
Yet since the elections, Israel has been plunged into political uncertainty, made worse by childish proposals to establish a fragile government dependent on Arab parties whose representatives openly and unapologetically identify as Palestinians.
It is a dangerous proposition, particularly as Israel approaches what could be a decisive confrontation aimed at eliminating the Iranian threat.
But there is one positive development in all of this: The masks have finally fallen.
For decades, the Arab parties exercised restraint in how they presented their ambitions. Now they have become victims of their own success.
They dedicated their electoral victory to the Palestinians in Gaza and what they call occupied Jerusalem. And we, in our innocence, thought they wanted greater political power to improve the quality of life of their own communities.
Then came the revelations and allegations surrounding mysterious financial transfers under investigation by the Shin Bet, the tangled connections to Hamas through supposedly charitable organizations, and the artificial distinction between the northern and southern branches of the Islamic Movement, the parent movement of Ra'am, both rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The implications, to me, are breathtaking.
These are not the actions of citizens who seek to strengthen the Zionist dream and enjoy its achievements. They are, in my eyes, the actions of enemies operating from within.
And all this in a country where Arab citizens enjoy a standard of living that is the envy of much of the Arab world, while their political representatives continue to accuse Israel of apartheid.
If the Islamic Movement is the ideological foundation of these political parties, and if Palestinian identity is defined as their primary national identity, then perhaps it is time to abandon the comforting fiction.
There are no Israeli Arabs, at least not in the political sense these movements would have us believe. The blue Israeli identity card is merely a mask. They are Palestinian Arabs, part of the same national body, the same national fabric, pursuing the same dream.
In Hebrew, they sell us the language of civic integration, budgets for roads and affirmative action. But listen to their speeches in Arabic, and an entirely different tune emerges.
It is a familiar pattern, reminiscent of Yasser Arafat's rhetoric. And have we already forgotten Ahmad Tibi?
What we are witnessing, I believe, is a Hamas foothold inside Israel itself.
I see their rhetoric as providing political cover for the very forces behind the October 7 atrocities, including the terrorists who murdered our sister Vivian Silver and so many other righteous souls.
Silver and her fellow peace activists devoted themselves to helping Palestinians, driving people from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for medical treatment. They believed that compassion could build bridges. The bitterest tragedy is that the same society they sought to help produced the terrorists who came to murder their rescuers.
That is the unbearable betrayal at the heart of this story.
But that chapter is over.
Listen to Avigdor "Yvette" Liberman, the voice of reason within the opposition bloc, a man who understands what it means for the lion to roar.
He has effectively demolished the foolish possibility of establishing a government dependent either on Arab political parties or on the primitive, exile-minded politics represented by United Torah Judaism.
The Jewish people have awakened.
You are not here merely to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state. I believe the Muslim Brotherhood's ultimate ambition is far greater: an Islamic caliphate connected to its ideological brethren across Europe and the United States.
And we, who wanted a friendly dentist to cure our national pain, ended up with a surgical extraction, without anesthesia.
But perhaps that is exactly what it takes to make a lion roar.
Just ask the people of Gaza.