Which Of These Is The Greater Threat To Israel?

Taken from the Daily Mail, UK, 16th June 2007
By Peter Hitchens

Could this be the way the Middle East conflict ends, not with a mushroom cloud or a peace deal but with the slow disappearance of the Jewish state? It seems a real possibility.

Israel must cope with two far deeper dangers than Iran’s amateur atom bomb, or even unending waves of suicide bombers.

Those perils come instead from maternity wards, where Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews – and from Israel’s own foolishly forgotten Arab people, finally beginning to pump up their political muscle.

One sign of the way things are going is that in Israel itself – not even counting the occupied Arab zones of the West Bank and Gaza – the most popular boy’s name is now Muhammad.

There are also quite a few Vladimirs, thanks to the arrival during the last days of the Soviet Union of nearly one million not-very-Jewish Russians, with very few questions asked.

As many as 500,000 of these – experts disagree on how big the problem is – are either not Jewish at all, nothing in particular, or actively Christian.

Recently, to the annoyance of Orthodox Jews, several hundred Russian recruits to the Israeli army insisted on swearing their oath of allegiance on the Christian New Testament alone.

Russian is an unofficial third language, and there is even a Russian TV station, though (madly) there is not one for Arabs.

Abstemious, kosher-observing Israelis have had to get used to having large numbers of Slav neighbours who cannot be persuaded to give up pork sausage or vodka, or even to be discreet about guzzling them.

Russian-language bookshops have even been discovered selling neo-Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

The Israeli Arabs, meanwhile, have begun to ask why – if they are a fifth of the population – they must salute a wholly Jewish flag or stand to attention for a wholly Jewish national anthem, or vote for Jewish political leaders, or support an immigration policy that favours Jews and blocks the borders to Arabs.

Their leaders have issued a new manifesto demanding deep change, and wise Israelis are trying – quite possibly too late – to give it to them.

One Arab Israeli said gloomily to me that while the first and second intifadas (Arab uprisings) had been in the West Bank and Gaza, "the third intifada will be on the streets of Nazareth and Jaffa, right inside Israel itself".

If he is right, then there is no end to the misery. Israel’s Arabs are here, and not going away. If their discontent were to turn to anger, if their leaders were to urge them on the streets, there is no saying where things might end.

It is, of course, unthinkable. But then, not so long ago, the appalling violence of the Occupied Territories was also in an unknown future.

I have been coming here for more than 20 years, and the shabby, semi-socialist, idealist Israel of those days has been buried under a layer of shiny new wealth and apparent confidence in a settled future.

Motorways, mirror-glass office blocks and billionaire suburbs have made the Tel Aviv coastal strip look as complacent, secular and secure as California.

There is a great gulf between the Americanised shore-dwellers and the determined religious Jews who increasingly dominate Jerusalem, believing – with history on their side – that bad things happen to the Jewish people when they neglect their faith.

Brainy, drily witty politicians – some ex-terrorists, some war criminals, some genuine warriors – have been replaced by dud mediocrities burbling cliches and slogans and almost all under investigation for one grubby thing or another.

In the same period the unattainable fantasy of peace with the Arab world has come, proved to be a false hope, and gone. As a result a chilly cynicism has hardened the hearts of all but an unrealistic few.

The open civil war among Arabs in Gaza is an illustration of the old saying that the most savage quarrels arise over the smallest stakes.

For control of this suppurating slum, grown men murder each other for belonging to the wrong gang and throw fellow creatures to their deaths from high buildings.

Who can now seriously believe that a Palestinian state would do any good for its inhabitants, or remove a threat from Israel’s borders?

So – since things cannot continue like this for ever – what is going to give? It is 40 years since the Six-Day War squelched Arab dreams of crushing Israel by force, nearly as long since the 1973 war proved the point again.

The alternative Arab strategy, of undermining the Jewish state by riot and bomb, maddening it into stupid, self-destructive retaliation, seems to have ended too – with the incredibly costly decision to build a great barricade between Jew and Arab.

The monstrous, ugly thing curves across the rocky hills of the Holy Land, a shocking and distressing sight. I don’t dispute the argument for it. It is a rather civilised response to the repeated horrors of suicide bombing.

It simply isn’t, as its critics claim, a new Berlin Wall – that kept people in.

But, looking across it from Arab olive groves to smart Jewish suburbs, it occurs to me that this must be the greatest and most costly human barricade since the Great Wall of China, and that it will one day be a puzzling ruin, just like the Great Wall, though less picturesque.

It cannot possibly last. No country can afford to maintain such a defence for long. All its enemies need to do is wait for Israeli will to wilt and fail.

And then, in the increasingly realistic dreams of the cleverer Arabs, will come a "Joint Palestinian State" in which Jews will be a minority and the great Zionist project will be at an end.

The wall is a reminder that the Jewish State, or "the Zionist Entity", as its many enemies call it, exists in defiance of the law of gravity.

Only thanks to exceptional determination, exceptional valour, exceptional nerve, exceptional stubbornness, has Israel managed to survive at all. And now?

Thanks to exceptional ineptitude, Israel has lost, probably for ever, another even more important war, the war of the TV screen. Maybe it was lost from the start.

Nobody in Israel likes to mention the fact that this country is, in many ways, the last Western colony. As such, it came at least a century too late.

Australia and New Zealand just got away with seizing their territory from people who were there before. And America’s crushing and displacement of its native peoples is so long ago that it is now accepted as a kind of romantic legend.

But Israel’s attempt to shove the Arabs out of the way was made in the era of the United Nations, of anti-colonial campaigns, of political correctness and of 24-hour TV news and its greedy appetite for manufactured, self-indulgent pity.

And the great stage army of the good, who polish their consciences by attacking the misdeeds of others abroad, have now chosen Israel as their main hate-object.

This is not because it is specially bad in the league of wicked nations. It is because it is an easy, sensitive target – which, unlike Burma or China or Iran, freely allows journalists to operate on its territory.

A country that once lived by good public relations – plucky little Israel defies the Arab hordes – is now likely to perish thanks to bad public relations: brutal Israel persecutes the poor Palestinians.

And I think it is now possible to see how that slow death may happen. I should add at this point that what I write here does not please me.

I happen to think Israel is in many ways a noble enterprise, worth defending and supporting, and that Israel’s fashionable enemies in the West have allied themselves with some of the nastiest and most bigoted forces now loose in the world.

If the "anti-Zionists" were really concerned about the fate of the Palestinian refugees, as they claim to be, then they have utterly failed, since the refugees’ misery is greater than ever after 30 years of "solidarity".

But reason has little to do with this. In modern TV democracies, while you’re explaining, you’re losing. And Israel’s explanations are brushed aside in the self-righteousness of Western condemnation.

The wholly false idea that Israel is another South Africa, a country founded on racial bigotry, is being spread – by respectable people such as former President Jimmy Carter.

Even more insidious are the whispered insinuations that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is not much different from the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

Many people believe this stuff, perhaps tired of being guilty about the Holocaust and wanting an excuse to stop. This is not the place to argue with it, always assuming facts and logic would do any good.

I simply mention it as a reason to believe that this is a country in serious trouble, that cannot long survive as it is. First comes the demographic problem.

In the area of Israel and the Occupied Territories together, there are nearly 11million people: about 6.5million in Israel, of which 1.25million are Arabs, and almost four million in the Occupied Territories.

That means that only half of Israel’s population is Jewish. If Israel cannot find some way of making the territories independent, it will either have to rule them with the sword or grant them civil rights, losing its Jewish majority.

But even inside Israel, the non-Jews are breeding faster, so that some sensitive parts of the country may soon be as Arab as they are Jewish. Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, may have an Arab majority by 2040.

And elsewhere, too, the balance is shifting most significantly. I went to Beersheba in the south, on the edge of the Negev desert.

Here, a once-tiny population of Bedouin Arabs has grown hugely, so that Arabs are expected to be the majority in that region by 2020. And it will be an angry majority.

There I visited a Bedouin ‘unrecognised village’, a place so nasty that it is hard to believe it is in the same country as Tel Aviv.

The service entrance to Hell must be something like this. On one side the two squat chimneys of a power station poke above the sandy hills.

On the other a chemical factory exhales nameless filth into the hot sky. A few melancholy camels stand about waiting to be milked (or eaten), and flocks of sheep hunt for rare blades of grass.

The village, in reality a scattered, untidy archipelago of sordid, cramped hutments and tents, is criss-crossed by power-lines but has no mains electricity.

Water is supplied via a feeble one-inch pipe, for several hundred people.

Ibrahim al Afash, the village headman, tells me an immensely long story of injustice, unfairness and mistreatment stretching back almost 60 years, before pausing for prayers in a spartan mosque made of corrugated iron.

His complaint is made worse by the fact that the Bedouin Arabs, unlike their city-dwelling brothers, served willingly in the Israeli army. They mostly do not do so any more.

The old man, who looks strikingly like Osama Bin Laden, said: "I served in the army. They told me that if I did so I would receive all the rights given to any other Israeli.

"I did not receive a single one of those rights. My children saw this and drew their own conclusions."

Actually, while most Israelis concede that the Bedouin have been foolishly mistreated, it is not that simple. Here, unlike in any Arab country, a Bedouin gets a real vote in a contested election and has freedom of speech and thought.

A minority of Bedouins live a great deal better in ‘recognised villages’, though nothing like as many as should do.

But this is the general problem of Israeli Arabs. By Arab standards they are well off. By Israeli standards they are abominably mistreated.

Some Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza.

A plan to shift the border so a group of Arab towns in central Israel could be switched to Palestinian control was rejected with haggard horror by Arab leaders in Israel.

They all ritually praise the Palestinian cause, but none wishes to live under its lawless rule. One Arab journalist told me he had been asked by friends in the West Bank if he knew how to get them Israeli passports.

Meanwhile, after years of foot-dragging, Israel has finally begun to treat at least some of its Arabs as equals.

Recently a Muslim Arab, Ra’leb Majadleh, became – as Minister of Science – the first Arab member of an Israeli government.

The Israeli flag stands in the corner of his office. He greets suggestions that there is anything strange about his appointment by retorting: "Why should it be? Does my being a member of a Jewish and Zionist party [he belongs to Labour] make me a Jew or a Zionist?" He remains an Arab and a Muslim. And, he jokes: "I pray more now than I used to before I was a Minister."

More seriously, he adds: "And I have not given up my Arabness, either." Just before we met, a Labour primary had chosen Ehud Barak as the party’s new leader – and Arab votes had been decisive in Barak’s narrow victory.

Another example of the new mood is the appointment to Israel’s diplomatic service of Rania Joubran, a 26-year-old Christian Arab, a minority of a minority.

Rania, whose father just happens to be the first Arab in the Israeli Supreme Court, is privately educated and hardly typical of the Arab masses.

The Israeli government is plainly pleased to be able to show her off, and she effortlessly fends off questions about divided loyalties, insisting her selection will serve the greater cause of peace.

I shall be surprised if she is not a full ambassador fairly soon.

But she still faces grave problems of loyalty and allegiance. She candidly admits she cannot sing, and has never learned, the national anthem, and at a recent public ceremony stood in silence as others sang it around her.

She has asked that she not be sent to Arab countries, where she would be pestered with constant questions about whether she had let down her people.

She is Israeli in a particular way. She recalls the feeling of shared danger when her brother’s home in the northern city of Haifa was within range of Hezbollah rockets (which killed several Arab Israelis) last summer.

She has already experienced the bafflement that many feel over the very existence of Arab Israelis, and of Arab Christians.

Many of her Foreign Ministry colleagues had never before met an Arab of any kind, such is the barrier between the communities.

"People ask me why I don’t wear anything on my head," she laughs, "and when I was abroad recently I was asked how I could be an Arab and a Christian, and one person wanted to know if I had any camels."

In fact, she is one of a new class of university-educated Arabs who live at ease alongside Jews, mostly in the giant, more anonymous city of Tel Aviv.

Unlike many of her schoolfellows, she has not married or had children, a huge cultural break with normal Arab tradition.

The Israeli Arab radio presenter Iman Al Kassem, much loved by Arabs inside and outside Israel for her lively and controversial broadcasts, sums up their position well:

"We are stuck in the middle. We cannot leave Israel. It is our land, and our villages are our families.

"But we are also Palestinians, separated from our relatives by the war of 1948, when Israel was set up. I know of no other country where people are in such a situation."

Iman could easily be a Jewish Israeli. She dresses in Western clothes and speaks rapid Hebrew into her mobile. But she and Rania, as they both know and admit, are not typical.

Go to the mainly Arab city of Nazareth and you will see immediately how much poorer and shabbier the streets are than in Jewish towns.

It is not, as one Arab acquaintance claimed, "like Gaza", but the average Arab child can expect a worse education, more threadbare hopes and a general attitude that he doesn’t belong.

Some have responded by abandoning Western clothes and dressing like Osama Bin Laden, while their wives increasingly adopt the headscarf and the Muslim shroud.

And here lies the danger. The Arabs, at 1.25 million, are 19 per cent of the Israeli population but have access to only seven per cent of the land.

As their population increases that means the amount of land per Arab, already small, is expected to shrink by half. Many jobs are closed to Arabs on the grounds that they have not done military service.

University entrance is generally thought to be harder for Arabs. Their schools are more crowded and less well equipped. Arabic, although an official language, has second-class status.
And while almost all Israeli Arabs speak Hebrew out of necessity, very few Israelis learn Arabic, even the basic Arabic needed for good manners.

A vision of what might have been can be found in the very basic Arab town of Sakhnin in the far north.

Turn off the smooth main road, pass neat Israeli towns and you come down a steep valley into Sakhnin which – like so many Arab places in Israel – is instantly recognisable as greyer, more untidy, more economically depressed than its Jewish neighbours, and yet also more free and more wealthy than almost any Arab town in any Arab country.

But there is nothing depressed about Mazen Ghnaim, manager of the Sons of Sakhnin football team which won the Israeli FA Cup in 2004.

Generally, I loathe football, but Mazen’s glowing enthusiasm and delight illuminate his pleasant, friendly home – decorated by the cup, which he has somehow managed to hang on to.

The victory gave Israel’s Arabs a giant, irrational moment of joy and triumph. They finally belonged, they had beaten Jewish teams at their own game on their own ground, they had a right to respect.

He looks a little like the young Egyptian President Gamal Nasser as he recalls: "The mood was indescribable. As we made our way homewards through the Arab part of Haifa, there were men and women in their 60s, dancing in the street at two o’ clock in the morning.

"Everywhere we tried to go, the roads were blocked with cheering people. When we finally got back to Sakhnin, the crowds were so dense that we had to get out of the bus and walk the last three miles home."

Mazen also saw a political message: "We are prepared to treat you as equals, if you are prepared to treat us as equals."

Many Jewish Israelis felt a similar wave of emotion, one describing it to me as "like the pride an older brother feels for a younger brother’s success". But the opportunity drained away with the euphoria, as a nation distracted by violence forgot its concerns at home, and the same old promises were broken in the same old way by the same old people.

Meanwhile, disillusionment and division grew among Israelis, with the children of several former leaders rumoured to have left for America, along with many thousands of more ordinary citizens who have given up on the Zionist dream and prefer life in the multi-cultural, post-modern West where nobody cares who is a Jew.

Here in Jerusalem, they still care like anything. And we shall have to care too, since the continued existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East is the central strategic quarrel of our time, around which the policies of the White House and of Islamic terrorism both revolve.

Largely thanks to the West’s long, slow loss of nerve, and of the Western public’s acceptance of only one side of a complicated story, it seems to me that Israel is in the process of losing that argument.

What remains to be seen is exactly how and when defeat will come, and what shape it will take.

-----------------------------------------------
This is a good article as it illustrates a lot of misleading facts in it's report?

Firstly, it states that Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews in Israel. Well, firstly Israel is a Jewish state and before it was created by Britain, it was part of the Ottoman Empire and had Muslims and Jews living peacefully. When it became a Zionist state a lot of Muslims were forced out by the Israeli administration, generations after generation are still in Refuge camps in neighbouring countries (where they have been kept hoping to return to their homes).

Secondly the population growth figures are in fact equal. With Jews from around the world emigrating to Israel, it is in fact increasing. Jews from London, Moscow, New York can come and live in Israel, but those forced out and living, as refugees cannot come back. On a good day most of them can see their properties in neighbour Lebanon being occupied in Haifa by foreigners.

The writer states that The most popular boy’s name is now Muhammad. The name Mohammed is popular and most Muslims will have it as their first name followed by their middle name. Their middle name is the one they are most commonly known. If every Jew was called Moses or Christians named Jesus then it would give an accurate reading of statistics.

The problem is that Israel is a Jewish state where European and American Jews are first class citizens, followed by Middle Eastern/ Israeli Jews (or those that have live din the lands generation after generation), followed by Arab Christian, Followed by Druze community and then it's the Muslim community. According to the CIA world fact book, the population of Israel is 6,426,679 this includes about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem. Israel is Jewish 76.4%, Muslim 16%, Arab Christians 1.7%, other Christian 0.4%, Druze 1.6%, unspecified 3.9%. The treatment of Muslims in terms of Healthcare and Education is very bad and Jimmy Carter was right to state that Israel is another South Africa, a country founded on racial bigotry.
The writer also states that some "Israeli Arabs told me in private that of course they would not want to live in an Arab country, let alone in the West Bank or Gaza". Well Israel is the occupying force in those lands and has a responsibility to look after the citizens of the occupying lands. Israel withholds money taken from taxes, it controls the amounts of electricity and water and lets just say they are not used sparingly. So why would anyone want to move to a place of chaos and lawlessness?