New Book May Further the Rift Between Israeli Arabs And Jews
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - An Israeli Arab organization distributed at Arab schools throughout northern Israel on Wednesday 20,000 copies of a booklet aimed at promoting Arab unity around the popular idea that the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948 was a catastrophe, or what is widely referred to in Arabic as the "nakba."
The booklet contains stories written by 150 Arab children in Israel, the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories, Syria and Lebanon that are harshly critical of and even hostile toward Israel.
It was produced by the Ibn Khaldun Association in northern Israel, whose director Asad Ghanem told Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper that he hoped the booklet would "reaffirm Palestinian consciousness, and maintain and reinforce it among future generations" of Israeli Arabs. Ghanem is also head of the political science department at Israel's Haifa University.
In remarks to Cybercast News Service, Israeli Arab affairs expert Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a research associate with the Begin-Sadat Center, stressed his view that Ghanem and other Israeli Arabs like him do not view the booklet as a threat to Israel.
"They see this book as designed to strengthen national awareness and to promote a connection between Palestinians who are Israeli and those living in other Arab countries in order to consolidate the Palestinian spirit," said Kedar.
That national awareness and struggle is more commonly known as the "Palestinian cause," which today is largely taken to mean the effort to establish a sovereign Palestinian Arab state in the Gaza Strip and the areas known collectively around the world as the "West Bank," but which many Israelis refer to by their biblical names of Judea and Samaria.
The problem for most Israelis is that the Palestinian cause as formulated by late PLO founder Yasser Arafat does not stop with Judea and Samaria. Even after signing the so-called "Oslo Accords" with Israel, Arafat repeatedly told Arab media that the PLO's "phased plan" remained in effect, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would be only the first step toward the destruction of Israel.
Despite the threat inherent in the Palestinian cause and the "nakba" narrative that fuels it, Kedar said he remains convinced most Israeli Arabs and Jews want to "live together instead of fight each other." Unfortunately, Ghanem's booklet is poised to widen the rift between the two communities by further antagonizing the more hardened elements in Israeli society, whose reaction will be used by Islamists to further radicalize Israeli Arab youth.
This book "will definitely pour more oil on the fire against the Arabs within certain Israeli circles, which will in turn pour even more oil on the fire created by extremist elements on the Arab side," said Kedar.The publication of Ghanem's booklet comes at a time of already markedly increased tension between Israeli Arabs and Jews, a phenomenon that was highlighted last month as Israeli Jews and a slew of visiting foreign dignitaries celebrated Israel's 60th Independence Day while most of the nation's Arabs spoke out against the state or were cowed into silence by extremists.
Israeli media commentators have asserted that national ethnic divisions can be at least partially blamed on an Israeli government establishment that has beholden itself to the principles of political correctness and now refuses to be seen as interfering with its Arab minority by countering negative trends in that community.
Jerusalem Post columnist Carolyn Glick wrote earlier this year that "the natural pull of Israeli Arabs is toward the Palestinians," and that Israel has to make a concerted effort to win the hearts and minds of its Arab citizens, or risk facing an internal explosion in addition to numerous regional threats.
So the Israeli establishment wants to stick to politically correctness and allow free circulation of this piece of inflammatory propaganda (150 stories) rather than interfere (provoke riots) with our ever so hostile and treacherous Arab minority. But the same Israeli establishment does allow the Arab minority to interfere with the Israeli majority in a blatant attempt to shut us up. Said Israeli establishment has just given in to the extortion of a Yaffo-based terrorist sympathiser going by the name of Ibrahim Abu-Shindi, who regularly appears on Israeli TV in order to bash the State of Israel while pretending to work for peace. The man is even the director of an Arab-Jewish Community Center. Well, if it's peace he wants, I'll accept nothing less than the publication of the "bone of contention" poem written by one ten-year-old Israeli boy from Ness Ziona. Please also note that the State of Israel can only afford to publish 500 copies of the poetry contest booklet, while an Israeli Arab organization has the funds to come up with 20,000 copies of their revised "Arabian Nights". Good grief! Fortunately, I am not bound by any multi-crappy-culti PC nonsense. So here's the offending poem:
Ahmed's bunker has surprises galore: Grenades, rifles
are hung on the wall. Ahmed is planning another bomb!
What a bunker Ahmed has, who causes daily harm.
Ahmed knows how to make a bomb. Ahmed is Ahmed, that's
who he is, so don't forget to be careful of him.
We get blasted while they have a blast!
Ahmed and his friends could be wealthy and sunny, if only
they wouldn't buy rockets with all their money.
Anyway, in an extraordinary instance of poetic justice, a mishap seems to have befallen one of Ahmed's bunkers and it is no longer operational. Nor are the houses around it habitable.I am pleased to see that the saga of Ahmad's bunker, the innocent little poem, has made it to several blogs:
B'nai Elim
Double Tapper
Esser Agaroth
Freerepublic
Infidel Blogger's Alliance
Muqata
1 comment:
there goes the neighborhood...
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