From the 'Dado vantage point" you get a wonderful view of the Hula Valley, Upper Galilee and a peep across the border into Lebanon. Perched on a hill above Metulla in the "the finger of Galilee," a narrow enclave wedged between Lebanon and Syria, it's a not-to-be-missed stop when touring the north of Israel.
It's named in memory of David Alazar, IDF chief of staff during the Yom Kippur War, known by his cognomen Dado. On Saturday morning we took in the view from the shade provided by the pergola at the the vantage point. Marj Ayun and the Beaufort fortress
Our hosts Sarah and Razi, old friends from Kibbutz Manara had included a stop at Dado's point in our drive around their territory. While Razi pointed out places of interest in the landscape I noticed that two couples seated on the benches next to us were "hanging on his words." The circumstances created a brief social bond. After all we were occupying the same pergola and before long our neighbours, Arabs unacquainted with this part of the country joined in the conversation.
Razi was born in Baghdad and speaks fluent Arabic, so from time to time he elaborated in his mother tongue. However for the most part the conversation took place in the lingua franca – Hebrew. At some stage he pointed in the direction of Lebanon at Marj Ayun a village/town a few kilometers inside Lebanon and the Beaufort fortress towering behind it, barely seen through the morning haze. Both places and others too aroused memories. Our pergola partners certainly were familiar with the names, after all battles were fought there in the Lebanon wars. However mention of the Crusaders in the context of battles fought at the same sights might have caused them some mental discomfort. The Crusades are a dark period in the history of Islam.
Admittedly their heroes Saladin and the Mamluke Sultan Baibars made amends for the devastation wreaked by the Christian armies, nevertheless the trauma still remains hundreds of years after the last crusader left the Holy Land. Arab leaders frequently refer to the U.S and Israel as the Latter Day Crusaders. We of course distance ourselves from the Crusader analogy. Some of our neighbours have reluctantly accepted Israel as a fait accompli, others continue to regard us as a foreign implant.
Razi's panoramic description ended, we said goodbye to the two Arab couples and left. The brief encounter ended and we continued our separate ways.
Two days earlier Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed a mass rally at Bint Jbeil not far from Marj Ayun and repeated his prophetic message about Israel disappearing from the map of the region. By and large Israelis remain unperturbed by Ahmadinejad's bellicose threats, but not unprepared. An array of anti-rocket and anti-missile defence systems have been designed to face every contingency.
Some people say we tend to ignore the potential threat that Israeli Arabs pose.
Middle East expert Dr. Guy Bechor claims that over the past decade the leaders of Israel's Arab minority have progressively adopted a more radical stance towards the policies of successive Israeli governments. In fact today they are more radical than the Palestinian leadership
Bechor says that Israel's Arab minority no longer fills the hoped for bridge-builder role..
At one time their leaders said that they would be the bridge to peace. and many people in the "Israeli left" spoke of the historic role of the Israeli Arabs.
Dr. Bechor claims that the trend to support a more radical leadership stems from the stigma attached to the very existence of the Arab minority in Israel.
The fact that in 1948 they remained behind while the great majority of the Arabs in the area that became the state of Israel either fled or were forced to leave caused the Arab states to regard them as traitors who surrendered to the Jews.
Ever conscious of that stigma they feel the need to prove that they did not betray the Palestinian cause.
"The so-called ‘Arabs of 1948’ are forced to fend off the accusations levelled against them. These accusations define them, and instead of shaking them off they double their efforts to prove their loyalty. The Palestinians don’t need to prove anything, while Arab Israelis do.”
In many respects Khaled Abu Toameh is an exception to the stereotype that Guy Bechor describes. Abu Toameh is an "Israeli-Arab-Palestinian" journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is the West Bank and Gaza correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and U.S News and World Report, and has been the Palestinian affairs producer for NBC News since 1988. His articles have appeared in The Sunday Times, DailyExpress and many other newspapers . He also writes for the Hudson Institute think-tank in New York.
Last year Abu Toameh commented on the Israeli Arabs' dilemma in the Hudson New York blog:
“As far as many Israeli Jews are concerned today, we are all just a bunch of Arabs who seek Israel's destruction. Some see us as a 'fifth column' and an 'enemy from within.' Others, such as right-wing politician Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel Beitenu, have even been talking about the possibility of getting rid of the 1.3 million Arab citizens by redrawing the border so that we would end up under the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state.”
Well up to this point he seems to be toeing the line with other Arab journalists, but then surprisingly he takes the Arab politicians to task:
“The Arab Knesset members are often elected on a platform that promises their constituents better services and equal rights. But once they come to the Knesset, most of them start acting as if they had been elected by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
Instead of focusing their efforts on improving the living conditions of the Arab citizens, many of the Arab representatives prefer to deal with the Palestinian issue as a way of drawing the attention of the media. A Knesset member who deals only with schools and unpaved roads knows that he will never appear in the mainstream media.
But a Knesset member who travels to Beirut or Damascus to meet with Hezbollah and Hamas leaders is fully aware of the fact that he will appear on the front-page of one of Israel's leading newspapers. The same applies to those Arab Knesset members who have been issuing fiery statements against Israel or expressing sympathy and understanding for suicide bombings. In this case, they are following the saying, ‘I don't care what you write about me as long as you spell my name right.’ “
Just the same Abu Toameh isn't prepared to absolve Israel's governments from blame. He quotes Ehud Olmert who claimed there has been a policy of systematic discrimination against the Arab minority. This situation has to change. He urges the government to do more to improve the lot of the Arab minority.
For their part the Israeli Arabs are advised to, "Start searching for new leaders who would put their interests at the top of their list of priorities. We need representatives who would spend more time fighting Israeli bureaucracy than meeting with Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar al-Assad and Khaled Mashaal.
Hezbollah and Hamas are not going to build schools and hospitals in Nazareth and Umm al-Fahem. Nor is the Ba'athist regime in Damascus going to solve the problem of the bankrupt Arab municipalities inside Israel. Assad, Nasrallah and Mashaal hardly care about the interests of their own people.
What is needed today is a new leadership for the Israeli Arabs that would work hard to repair the damage done to relations with the Jewish public. The good news is that there's still a majority of Arab citizens who are loyal to Israel and would rather live in the Jewish state than in Ramallah or Cairo or Amman. We must start working toward persuading the Israeli Jews that the Arabs are seeking integration, not separation, from Israel. It's the Palestinians on the other side of the border who are fighting for separation. "
When I wrote about the proposed amendment to Israel’s citizenship law last week I omitted to use quotation marks in the following phrase,
“The proposed change further antagonizes Israeli Arabs, is unnecessary, provocative and racist.” It was in fact a direct quotation from an article by Isabel Kershner that appeared in the New York Times. Reconsidering what I wrote I think I should have acknowledged the source or avoided the term racist.
This week I want to quote directly from an article that appeared in the Economist :
“Privately, Palestinians say that anyone seeking citizenship will take the oath anyway. The definition ‘Jewish and democratic’ appears, after all, in several existing Israeli laws.
Privately, too, PA officials explain that they might consider recognising Israel as the Jewish state—thereby effectively forgoing the Palestinian Right of Return—but only in the context of a comprehensive peace package, not in exchange for a tiny step forward in the form of a two-month extension of the settlement-building freeze.”
The proposed change in the law is unnecessary and provocative. The demand for the settlement building freeze is also unnecessary. It wasn’t required in the past and shouldn’t be now.
Have a good weekend
Beni 21st of October, 2010.
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