Happy Birthday, Israel: A wake-up call to remain asleep

What should have been a week of celebrating, amongst other things, 73 years of co-existence of Jews and Arabs, as the dominant Israeli narrative would have it, instead descended into its very opposite. Co-existence with Arabs is certainly possible, provided they are Christians, Druze, atheists or anything else besides Muslims; co-existence with Muslims, whether Arab or not, is not possible. No one wants to know this, so no one sees it, and those who know but don't want to see, remain quiet.

Over the last five years, those interested in truthful reporting and honest analysis have been appalled by how hard it has been in the United Kingdom to get anyone to refer to the organised groups of Muslim men holding captive, drugging and raping non-Muslim girls as Muslim rape gangs, which is exactly what they are. At times it seemed as if as much effort went into avoiding saying “Muslim” as went into concealing the scandal. At first they were “Asian grooming gangs”. After much unseemly haggling, they became “Pakistani grooming gangs”. A long and bitter argument eventually led to a partial and grudging admission that they were “Muslim grooming gangs”—but never without the top-priority caveat that not all Muslims do this. What these developments never reached was the truth: that these were Muslim rape gangs. They rape because they are Muslim. Because of the jihad that they wage against the West, they are entitled to rape captive women, according to Qur’an 4:24.

And all married women (are forbidden) unto you save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.

The British knew that they were engaged in a battle of semantic obfuscation. The Israelis with their “Arabs” are not anywhere near even playing such games with themselves. If only one could say that they are deluded, but one cannot even say that, except for a tiny minority. Most Israelis are simply in denial. There are small numbers of Israelis who are, indeed, deluded: those who got taken with the notion that Israeli Arabs are Arab Israelis. “They are Israeli citizens”, is the logical outcome of that idea. But it is false.

"There was a good story to tell"

Mark Regev, Senior Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,[1] expressed his determination to maintain the "Arab citizen of Israel" delusion in these terms:

We were actually hopeful that we were on a more optimistic trajectory here with Israel's Arabs. We were seeing everyone was talking about the Israeli Arab community being more involved in Israel, wanting to become more Israeli, being part of Israeli democracy in a full way, even them voting for Zionist political parties. In other words, there was a good story to tell. Unfortunately, this current internal problem with Israeli Arabs, and the fact that we've seen this violence, is something that is very depressing and disappointing. It doesn't mean that we give up on our vision of integration  and of seeing the Israeli Arab citizens as full citizens of this country, contributing. We can't give up on that goal.

On paper, yes, Israel's Arab Muslims might well be citizens, but to attach any more meaning to such "citizenship" is delusional, for they themselves have insisted, certainly since 1967, that they are “Palestinian” or “Israeli Palestinian” or even "Arab Palestinian", or some other expression of a dissimulated identity. For the Jews, “Arabs” avoids this quagmire. It is neat, it is simple, 1948-simple. The only relevant distinction for Jews has been between those who want to co-exist with “the Arabs”, and those who do not. And the only reason any Israeli Jew could be against co-existence would be because they are "rightwing religious extremists", "settlers" (Jews who made their homes in Judea and Samaria) or racists. The possibility is never conceded that the Jews skeptical of the ideological juggernaut of land-for-peace/co-existence might understand something that their self-righteous detractors do not.

So, onto the 2021 Jerusalem Day riots. Everyone is shocked, dismayed, disappointed or sad that the Israeli Arabs, whom they all thought they were getting along with so handsomely, should have taken to the streets and unleashed a pogrom against their Jewish neighbours. It is as if nothing like this has ever happened before. There's been no calm before the storm that struck anyone as too good to be true. "Even them voting for Zionist political parties," wasn't seen for the blindingly obvious taqiyya that it was, a red alert that something big was "going down". Yet the question that no one seems to be asking is: how many of those rioting “Arabs” are Christian or Druze or atheist? If they cared to look into it, they will find them all to be Muslim, and guided by the Muslim Brotherhood outpost Islamic Movement.

That is a problem for the Jews. No one wants to go there, for it would mean looking a different reality in the face, one that they have managed for over seventy years to convince themselves is no longer there. There is a people that wants to exterminate them. Those people are Muslims, and they are living amongst them.

O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends. They are friends one to another. He among you who taketh them for friends is (one) of them. Lo! Allah guideth not wrongdoing folk. And thou seest those in whose heart is a disease race toward them, saying: We fear lest a change of fortune befall us. And it may happen that Allah will vouchsafe (unto thee) the victory, or a commandment from His presence. Then will they repent them of their secret thoughts.
— Qur’an 5:51-52

Western people tend not to appreciate the hold that religion has over the mind of the Muslim, for such a relation to God (being his slave, and living to hear and obey) does not exist amongst other religious peoples, not even the “God-fearing.” This Qur'an commandment that Muslims not take Jews and Christians as friends, also condemns those Muslims who do integrate to have a better life. Have any of the people clinging to their "vision of integration" taken account of this?

“Decades of coexistence efforts were going down the drain,” one Mayor of a mixed Jewish-Arab town is reported as saying. No. There was never co-existence. Jews might have co-existed with Muslims, but Muslims never coexisted with Jews. Muslims never co-exist with anyone. It was just a matter of time before they stopped humouring the Jews.

None beheld the wall. It had writing upon it.

David Horovitz, in an op-ed in the Times of Israel, headlines, “Israel’s leadership taken by surprise, in a conflict it failed to see coming.” This is certainly true, from the very top all the way down. The President of the State of Israel, Reuven Rivlin himself, was reduced to making “an urgent phone call” in which he literally begged Arab leaders to speak out, "being part of Israeli democracy in a full way" proved to be slow in coming. In a heart-breaking statement, Rivlin implored Mudar Younes, chair of the Arab Councils Mayors Committee, to do everything in his power to calm things down.

The people of Israel, Jews and Arabs alike, must hear the Arab leadership sounding a clear and strident voice against this wild violence, against damage to synagogues, against this wild behavior. The police will do all that is required to restore the peace. I ask for cooperation from the Arab leadership to restore calm and law and order to our streets.

“We must not let those sights recur,” beseeched Rivlin, “We must not become hostages to the terrorist murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who fire on Israel’s citizens indiscriminately.” Whether the Head of the State of Israel mentioned the Islamic Movement isn't clear; what is clear is that he was brought to his knees before Arab Muslims, even without a Muslim in the Israeli government. There are Israelis who feel guilty that there has never been a Muslim party in a ruling coalition. They are even prepared to erode their own democracy to bring such a catastrophe about. When things have come to such a pass, then clearly, taqiyya is no longer required. The Muslims feel free to launch not only their pogroms, but their genocide of the Jews, as their religion requires.

The President’s pleas for calm came four days too late, as the very "terrorist murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad" that President Rivlin is so desperate for “the people of Israel, Jews and Arabs alike,” to "not become hostages" of had already put out their own call to murder what were already hostages — hostages to their own delusion. What did the Israeli leadership, security establishment, think tanks and co-existing Jews imagine would happen when Senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad urged “the people of Jerusalem,” live on Al-Aqsa TV, to “cut off the heads of the Jews”? The nice co-existing "Arabs" got the party started, what else? It's their Qur'an, too.

People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state. “You shall find the strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” The Jews have spread corruption and acted with arrogance, and their moment of reckoning has come. The moment of destruction at your hands has arrived.

Even the IDF shows the above video so everyone will understand just what a ghastly lot Hamas is. If you ignore, as the Israeli leadership does, that Hamas sits in the Knesset in the form of Ra’am, and ignore that Hamas was on the verge of winning the now-cancelled Palestinian elections by a landslide (Gaza II), and ignore that Ra’am came within a whisker of a seat in the Israeli government, then you are very likely also to ignore that when Hamas called for the pogrom against Jews, they were quoting Qur’an 5:82, “Of all men you will find the Jews and those who associate others with Allah in His divinity [the Christians, AP] to be the most hostile to those who believe [i.e., the Muslims, AP]," and to ignore that, “the moment of reckoning, …the moment of destruction at your hands,” invokes the genocide hadith:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
— Sahih Muslim/Book 41/6985.

Had President Rivlin and the rest of Israel’s "progressive" Jews not been in such unshakeable denial, they might have known that their co-existence partners would be silent when they needed them to speak up; the “Israeli Arab” leaders were not about to commit either treason by helping Israel, or sin by going against Islam, at least not until there was a compelling reason to do so. Their allegiance lies elsewhere. Any ex-Muslim who hasn't buckled under the pressure to support the "Palestinians" could have told them that. It is a rude awakening, but rather now, rather now…

President Rivlin's disillusionment was as tragic as it was palpable:

The sight of the pogrom in Lod and the disturbances across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob, injuring people, damaging property, and even attacking sacred Jewish spaces is unforgivable. Tearing down the Israeli flag by Arab rioters and replacing it with the Palestinian flag is a brutal assault on shared existence in the State of Israel.

When the Israeli police confronted the rioters at Al-Aqsa Mosque, were there any Druze Arabs or Christian Arabs or atheist Arabs amongst the rioters? Did atheist, Christian or Druze Arabs outside Israel take to the streets for their Arab brethren? There was widespread response from Turkish Muslims, Pakistani Muslims, Indian Muslims, Somali Muslims, Indonesian Muslims, Malaysian Muslims, Bangladeshi Muslims and more. The people rioting across Israel are not rioting because they are Arabs; they are rioting because they are Muslims. In an interview, Ami Horowitz asks a Hamas leader, Abdurrahman Zeydan, "Is it the duty of every Muslim Palestinian to redeem the land through jihad"? Zeydan replied, "It is the duty of every Muslim, not only Palestinian, to redeem this land." (Emphasis by AP).

When the leader of Hamas, Ismael Haniyyeh, on 12 May tweeted Qur’an 2:191, “Kill them wherever you find them,” out into the world, he was not addressing “Israeli Arabs”, or even Arab Muslims, but the world’s Muslims. And the “Arab MKs” and other “Arab” leaders will not call the rioters off, because they are Muslim, too, as is Mahmoud Abbas, as was Yasser Arafat, as was Jerusalem’s former Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who collaborated with the Nazis on exterminating the Jews. We might call it genocide synergy.

"I am a religious Muslim"

Yet, more dangerous than Hamas's open genocide mongers is Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas, whom Israeli leaders and far too many Jews in their impaired judgement, look to as the Arab leader who says the things they want to hear. On 12 May, he gave them what they wanted. "I call on everyone to behave responsibly and to adhere to the rule of law," he said. "I call on our leadership to act accordingly and to call on everyone to calm down and protect public order." If Muslims are going to take control of Israel, it will not be through a Hamas victory on the field of battle, but through the electoral process, with the help of Jewish votes. There are even Jews in positions of influence who feel that it reflects badly on Israel that none of these jihad fifth column parties have yet been part of a governing coalition, that there is no good story to tell. Father forgive them, for they know not what they wish for.

When Mansour Abbas stood before the Knesset on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, last year and described himself as an, “Arab-Palestinian and religious Muslim”, a proud co-existence glow descended on some of the Jewish Members there assembled. Little did they know that he was actually saying, “I am a foreign occupier in your Knesset. We have nothing in common, and we are coming for you; besides, I take the Qur’an very seriously, and the Qur'an commands me to hate you and kill you.” Every Muslim will have understood it that way. No Muslim MK, regardless of which party they belong to, will expose Abbas.

At the start of the Ami Horowitz interview of Zeydan, quoted above, after his guide had explicitly warned him not to mention that he is Jewish, Ami starts his interview with, "You know, I'm Jewish." With the camera on him, the clearly furious terrorist killer knew he'd been snookered and took a full 18 seconds before he spoke, "I am a devout Muslim," he said, very deliberately, pointing at himself with both hands. If Ami understood what Zeydan had just said, he has to be a specially trained agent to have remained that cool and start teasing the terrorist about his austere lifestyle. If he didn't understand, then he is the luckiest fool in the world. Zeydan was saying to the Jew who had tricked him exactly what Mansour Abbas had said to the Jews in the Knesset, "I am a religious Muslim."

The Great War filled most of its survivors in Britain and France with an unshakable determination to never see war again, including when it was looming inexorably before them. After such an incredible traumatising experience, who would want to be told that they are about to go through the same thing all over again? Jews cannot be blamed for what is an all too human reaction. But what is leadership for, if not to lead? Time is running out for the Israeli leadership to lead their people to safety, and there is no safety in delusion.

Instead, let’s find “Islamist jihadists” to filter out from “the moderates”. Let’s do more about socio-economic issues and “Arab” youth unemployment. Let’s look at more education, training, skills. It’s our fault. We are responsible that “our Arab citizens” are frustrated and angry. Let’s not notice that the Christian Arabs and Druze Arabs and atheist Arabs are no less educated than their Jewish counterparts, that it is only the Muslim Arabs who lag behind. Let’s instead notice the “extremist Jews”. They, too, are to blame, and probably set the whole thing off in Jerusalem, so the recriminations go. Let's blame the "Crime Minister" that the majority just won't stop electing. We must stand firm and guarantee worship for all religions in Jerusalem, insists even Bibi, while Muslims use every opportunity to drive Jewish worshippers from their own holy places and even torched several synagogues in Israel, the one place on earth where Jews are supposed to be safe. There are some seriously tough decisions ahead.

I assert here that Jews are also culpable. It cannot be the case that a people singularly and rightly famous for their intellectual accomplishments are all incapable of seeing and understanding that Muslims the world over make common cause even as they fight amongst themselves, and that that common cause, subjugation of the entire world to Islam, is predicated on Muslims fighting and killing the Jews. Ron Jager[2] sees the historical  pattern in the week's events:

For the past few days, gangs of Israeli Arab rioters have roamed the streets of the City of Lod (a mixed city of both Jewish and Arab residents), physically attacking Jewish bystanders, damaging property belonging to Jews including the burning of a Synagogue and pelting vehicles with rocks. We are not talking solely of hooligans, but of Arabs who lived in the same buildings as Jewish families, helping each other and enjoying friendly and neighborly relations. Israelis could not help recalling the Hevron massacre of 1929, when Arab mobs murdered and tortured the Jews with whom they had lived peacefully for years.

How many times have we not been warned about this? How many historical accounts have we not read about exactly this? Muslims turning on their Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian neighbours amongst whom the have lived cheek by jowl for generations. How much have those who warned not been vilified and abused for being racist, "Islamophobic", bigoted and the like? Will they now be listened to? Are they likely to be consulted? Are their forbidden scribblings likely to be dug out, dusted off and finally properly read? Or is there likely to be only a fallback to a more defensible position, still denying what Islam is and what Muslims are? Will Jews continue to look at their "Israeli Arabs" and not see Muslims, not hear Muslims and not say Muslims, until Lod 2.0 takes the whole fantasy down in catastrophic flames?

This is not rocket science, to use a colloquialism that bears extra poignancy in the current context. Yet, where are the public intellectuals, Jewish experts on Islam, whether academics or security analysts, who warn the Jewish people of what Muslims have in store for them? Zvi Mazel wrote an outstanding overview of what happens when Muslims surface and set about dismantling civilisation, his canvas being Europe, where Muslims have been imposing Shari'a on the countries they had overrun. "Penetration of Islam on the Continent: For Whom the Bells Toll" is a veritable tally of the body blows that have landed on European culture since the multicultural ("pluricultural") pill was administered. Mazel's excellent essay strongly draws attention to the contradictory objectives of a priori accepting all cultures as equal, and at the same time aspiring to integration of immigrants with a radically antithetical culture. This point needs to be made at every opportunity, for its opposite, that some cultures are more advanced than others, has become a heresy.

Nonetheless, it is important to highlight that Mazel's paper makes three related assumptions that weaken its explanatory power, in my opinion. These are important because each throws light on the Israeli conundrum with its "Israeli Arabs". The first assumption is that integration is universally held to be desirable. The second is that Muslims impose Shari'a because they are not integrated. Finally, the third assumption is that Europe is responsible for the Muslims not integrating.

All three assumptions result from one blind spot in Mazel's approach: the absence of any examination of the role of Islam itself in the question of Muslim behaviour both amongst themselves and towards others. One assumes that Mazel a priori excludes the Muslims' religion as of no relevance at all, where it is, in fact, central to everything pertaining to Muslims. Andrew Bostom republished his copious The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (Updated): From Sacred Texts to Solemn History early in 2020. it would be a great service to Israel if this book were available in Hebrew. Israelis in general tend to have the same blind spot.

Where are the intellectuals?

Obfuscation of the Jew-hatred at the heart of Islam is a serious dereliction of intellectual responsibility. It is made worse when those who know the problem pose as brave messengers of truth in the face of falsehood by proposing other falsehoods in their place, such as Caroline B. Glick, writing in Israel Hayom. In an article entitled “Facing the real cause of the long Arab war” 14 May, Glick urges her readers,

After 75 years of making excuses and denying the plain fact that antisemitism is the root and the branch of the Arab conflict with Israel, Israelis of all walks of life and across the political spectrum need to accept that it is true. The time has come for Israel to stop giving a pass to Arab Jew hatred.

She further correctly points out:

All of these things [the construction of the global anti-Israel narrative] occurred because the post-1967 leftist narrative of Israeli avariciousness for “Arab” land, like the 1949 Soviet narrative of anti-Zionism is entirely wrong. Yet despite its obvious absurdity, the left's land-for-peace/two-state solution narrative dominated the international and domestic Israeli discourse on the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israel conflict for the past half century. …This week it disintegrated.

And here’s the rub:

The dominant – indeed leading – role Israeli Arabs are playing in the current round of the Palestinian war against Israel puts paid [to] the notion that the Palestinian war on the Jews has something to do with specific territories Israel controls. Israeli Arabs are not burning synagogues, schools, yeshivot, Jewish-owned stores, cars and homes because of the so-called "occupation." They are not lynching Jews that fall in their paths because of the so-called "settlements." They are assaulting the citizens and institutions and symbols of the Jewish state because they seek to destroy the Jewish state.

Having come within point blank range of her target, Glick reneges on her promise to “face the real cause.” Taking a closer look at anti-semitism might have helped. Jews face two kinds of anti-semitism. The first is communal envy at their success, that can come from all sides. This is the good old-fashioned kind that includes everything from distasteful looks to extermination camps. It can be random and arbitrary, or a systematic programme. This kind of anti-semitism we are all familiar with, and it can be escaped if Jews have a country of your own in which they make your own laws and keep their own order, leaving anti-semitism from beyond their borders with diplomatic and propaganda campaigns, such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). Alternatively, they could curb their industriousness and reign in their succeed so the gap between them and those who envy them is not so large. The latter alternative does not commend itself.

Unfortunately for Israel, this is the only kind of anti-semitism that the overwhelming majority of Jews recognise. When Arab armies attack Israel, communal envy is the anti-semitism they see. When Turkey or Iran or Malaysia let rip against Israel, this is the anti-semitism the Jews see. Sadly, they are very much mistaken, and their seven-decades long vain hope finally lies shattered in shards on the streets of Lod. “Decades of coexistence efforts were going down the drain.” Their decades of efforts had no effect on the kind of anti-semitism they were dealing with.

The second kind of anti-semitism is comprehensive, self-contained, immutable and permanent. It is the doctrinal anti-semitism all over Islam. So fundamental is hatred of the Jews to Islam that no matter how devout a life a Muslim might lead, the Day of Judgement will not come, unless the Muslims have killed every last Jew on earth. This they teach their children not because the are Hamas, but because it is taught in the religion they share with Hamas. It has been regularly preached in mosques for the last 1400 years. It is taught to children in madrassas from the age of six. It is regular dinner table talk in so many Muslim households. On almost every few pages of the Qur'an there is some commandment or exhortation to hate Jews or harm Jews. Decades of coexistence efforts have not gone down the drain in Lot a few nights ago, those efforts have been going down the drain every single night for decades.

It speaks to the resilience of our innate sense of ethics that not every Muslim feels fulfilled in this condition. The tragedy is that most feel proud of being Muslim, but it is a grim pride, unconvinced of itself. When frenzied Muslim mobs attack Israeli missions abroad, or Iran arms to wipe Israel off the map, or Erdogan rants that he will liberate Jerusalem, it is not because Jews are Jews, but because Muslims are Muslims. They hate and want to kill whom the Qur'an tells them to hate and kill, and the Qur'an tells them to hate and kill the Jews. Any Jews anywhere are fair game ("Kill them wherever you find them"). Israel attracts malicious Muslim attention partly because it contains in its capital a piece of real estate that a ludicrous Muslim myth tells them belongs to them, and partly because it offers a convenient concentration of Jews in one place. Many sheikhs interpret Israel's existence as Allah making jihad easy for them.

Looking reality straight in the face, it cannot be beyond the wit of the cleverest people on earth to figure out how to solve the biggest crisis they will ever have confronted, especially since their very existence as a people is at stake. Solutions that I might propose centre on reducing the presence of Islam within Israel with the aim of eliminating it from the country altogether. It is quite wrong to see Arabs as the problem. When they practise another religion or none at all, they tend to be exemplary Israelis. No one should be denied the opportunity to leave Islam and become a positive member of the society. All encouragement must be given, all facilities provided, all impediments removed.

Ron Jager, quoted above, arrives at the following insight, "The sudden outburst of street violence by Israeli Arab rioters surprised the general Jewish population but in actuality, the writing has been on the wall for some time." This looks promising, until you read on:

We just refused to acknowledge the basic facts of Islamic radicalization. In most Western countries, this blindness towards Islamic radicalization is widespread and is not just a problem for Israel.

It gets worse:

Israeli Arabs also feel resentment, frustration, and inferiority at their inability to retrieve what they unwarrantedly consider theirs, including Jerusalem.

To his credit, Jager acknowledges that the "Israeli Arab" claim to the land is invalid. This is good; we are not in land-for-peace territory here. there is more cause for hope as Jager continues:

As Muslims,

"As Muslims"? This is major! The m-word so studiously avoided. But, alas, it did not last. President Rivlin might have been chasing a pipe dream, but he is now an angry man, perhaps as much with himself as with the "bloodthirsty Arab mob". Rivlin is disgusted and in no mood to find excuses. "Bloodthirsty Arab mob, injuring people, damaging property, and even attacking sacred Jewish spaces is unforgivable." Well, Jager has already excused and forgiven:

Israeli Arabs cannot remain indifferent to the enflamed anti-Israeli arguments advanced by radical Islam all around them here in Israel and from the Islamic countries surrounding Israel.

Jager has written his own rebuttal. If they are Israeli Arabs, why were they not reacting against the anti-Israel arguments, instead of confirming them? If these arguments are advanced by "radical Islam", then they are religious arguments, and the target is not Israel, but Jews. The "Israeli Arabs" confirmed those arguments because those arguments are Islamic anti-Semitic arguments, argument that resonate with them because they are Muslims. But even here, Rivlin does better than Jager, for unlike Jager, Rivlin knows that it is not about arguments, but about incitement, and Muslims are incited against Jews from the age of six. Jager continues:

Despite the full integration of Israel’s Arab citizens into Israeli society enjoying the full benefits of a free and democratic society, working in every sphere, and despite the great economic prosperity that Israel has given to all of her citizens including Israeli Arabs;

If they were fully integrated, they would not be Israeli Arabs, but Arab Israelis. Clearly, they were not "enjoying the full benefits of a free and democratic society"; they resented it, and they resented it long before "radical Islam" came along. Of course, having grown up in Israel, they would not quite want to give up "great economic prosperity", not to mention the functioning governance of the Israeli state, for the economic insecurity and dysfunctional "Palestinian state". So what keeps them tied to something outside Israel? Jager sees it this way:

The Israeli Arabs cannot free themselves of the self-imposed belief that they are being deprived of the accepted norms of equality from Israel’s Jewish majority, coupled with the hostility and suspicion of their Palestinian Arab neighbors for being so well integrated into Israeli society.

Again, they cannot be "well integrated" and feel themselves "deprived of the accepted norms of equality". Considering that their feeling themselves deprived is a self-imposed belief is a useful analytical device, the logical outcome of which is readily on display in large swathes of African Americans. The have the same freedoms and legal protections as all Americans, yet complain endlessly about racism and "white privilege". Yet, as Jager suggests, there is an added layer of complexity. It seems to me as if the Arab part of the "Israeli Arab" identity is overplayed, not only by Jager, but by all Israelis. Jager observes:

For many of the younger generation among Israeli Arabs, Islamization was the way out from this suffocating dilemma. This became the vehicle from which the younger generation could escape their historical failures to retrieve what they see as holy Muslim land.

Dilemma, perhaps, but suffocating would be overstating the point. Life is too good in Israel and too bad under the Palestinian Authority for the dilemma to be suffocating, although this might well be so for the Arab Muslims of the eastern part part of Jerusalem, many of whom are sufficiently conflicted to shun Israeli citizenship, a situation that obtained since the reunification of the city and well pre-dates Jager's "radical Islam" phenomenon.

Jager's asssessment is to be commended for at least drawing Islam into the frame, albeit it in the limited and distorted form of "radical Islam" and located principally outside Israel. The compulsion "to retrieve what they unwarrantedly consider theirs, including Jerusalem," is the same compulsion that drove the Arab Muslims to attempt to prevent the return of the Jews to their homeland in the first place, the establishment of Israel being a compounding of the problem as they saw it, and a serious worsening at that. "Radical Islam" had nothing to do with this. Islam had everything to do with it.

The Arabs couldn't unite for an Arab state on what came to be Israel, since various Arab states wanted different bits or all of it for themselves, quite apart from post-war pan-Arabism never getting off the ground. Arab emirs aspired to Kingdoms of tribal confederations, while kings aspired to be leader of the Muslims and military officers dreamt of being President of a large Arab republic. They unified, split, reunified and split again every which way imaginable. The Arab identity carried into the modern world the Bedouin lore of "I am against my brother, my brother and I are against my cousin, my cousin and I are against the stranger."

However, they could and can unify against the Jews, for which Islam supplied a ready-made template: "Kill them wherever you find them", "drive them out from where they drove you out" and so forth. What keeps the "Israeli Arabs", i.e., Arab Muslims,  conflicted is neither that they are Arab, nor that they are Palestinian, but that they are Muslim and Israeli. They are forced to pledge allegiance to Jews. This is too much. All it needed was for someone to add a spark to the tinderbox that was "co-existence", and the rest, as they say, is history. Jager tries to account for the implosion of the Israeli co-existence myth through an elaborate, but unconvincing, argument based on a conflicted and  disaffected "Israeli Arab" youth relatively recently "radicalised" by "radical Islam", thereby avoiding Islam, the real cause. Nonetheless, Jager offer sobering advice to those still entertaining dreams of coexistence with Israel's "Arab citizens":

The current atmosphere of insurrection coupled with nightly street violence should raise a red flag concerning the pervasive misconception that Israeli Arabs are loyal to Israel, because clearly they are not.

Caroline Glick, despite her protestations, does not want to face the real cause of the riots either. She wants to get around it, and in Daniel Pipes she sees a way to evade the problem while seeming to deal with it. Summarising Pipes, Glick says:

Pipes explained that just as there are Judeophobic and philosemitic versions of Christianity, so the Quran includes two approaches to Judaism and Jews. The first and most familiar approach is the jihadist approach. The jihadist approach rejects the Jews, the Torah and Jewish rights to Israel. The second approach embraces all three. Pipes said that the only way to include the United Arab List in a government, or to base a government on its support, is by first demanding that the party's members publicly declare that they uphold the Quranic approach that celebrates Jews and the Torah and recognizes that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews.

I have not read the particular source that Glick relies on, but if this is an accurate representation of Pipes, then he makes the same mistake that so many Western commentators on Islam  (including many Western ex-Muslims) make. They assume that Muslims relate to the Islamic texts, particularly the Qur’an, as a text in which anyone is free to search for interpretations that might underpin policies and actions more civilised than those normally based on those texts. Sure, Pipes can do that. But Muslims cannot, will not and do not. Many have tried; most of those who happen to find themselves in the West are either still alive, or died deaths unrelated to Islam. The rest had no hope of making it that far. The mob has no time for interpretation.

Muslims have had more than a thousand years to “uphold the Quranic approach that celebrates Jews and the Torah and recognizes that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews.” It was never done because it contradicts what Pipes describes as “the Jihadist approach”. The jihadist approach to what, exactly? “To Judaism and Jews”, says Glick/Pipes. This “approach to Judaism and Jews” is a means to an end. That end is to reach the Afterlife in Allah’s favour. Reaching the Afterlife in this exalted state means doing everything that pleases Allah in this life, including loving what Allah loves and hating what Allah hates, and Allah hates nothing more than he hates the Jews.

The “real cause”, strongly hinted at in what Glick takes from Pipes, but nonetheless evaded, is Muslims. It is a real cause too ghastly even for Glick to contemplate. “As a society,” Glick says, “We must demand that Israel's Arab citizens and their leaders recognize the legitimacy and justice of the existence of the State of Israel. And we must not accept no for an answer any more.” Seriously? They've torched synagogues, smashed shops, lynched Jews in the street, and openly called for Jews' heads to be cut off, and still Glick doesn't have an answer?

Ron Jager's equivalent demand is:

They can no longer have it both ways. Every year, while Israel celebrates Independence Day, the Israeli Arabs commemorate the Nakbah (the Arab term for catastrophe), that’s their way of rejecting the State of Israel. The time has come to not ignore this refusal to recognize the establishment of the State of Israel.

The most prominent co-existence advocates have been "liberal and progressive NGO’s and donors", according to Jager, and that their "lavishly funded coexistence programs" have been readily exploited by "Israeli Arab" youths. Much more worrisome is the head in the sand determination of Mark Regev, Prime Minister Netanyahu's Senior Advisor, to keep the scam going:

Unfortunately, this current internal problem with Israeli Arabs, and the fact that we've seen this violence, is something that is very depressing and disappointing. It doesn't mean that we give up on our vision of integration  and of seeing the Israeli Arab citizens as full citizens of this country, contributing. We can't give up on that goal.

Israeli leaders and intellectuals who will not speak of what Muslims intend to do with the Jewish people remind me of the French and British security services that were well aware that Hitler was secretly rearming and preparing for war, but did not inform their nations because in the traumatised climate of post-WW1 disarmament obsession, the last thing people wanted to hear was that they needed to rearm. So the leaders remained silent!

There are Jews who know the Islamic scriptures, who are aware that their country has been under jihad attack since before its birth, who know exactly what the Muslim MKs are there for, who have known all along that it was just a matter of time before “Israeli Arabs” dropped their pretence of peaceful co-existence. Yet they said  and say nothing. They rather pretend that the problem is “Islamist jihadists”, "radical Islam", "Iran", or in the case of Glick, “Arab anti-semitism”, so the fantasy of co-existence can still be predicated on Israeli Arabs, albeit now reduced to “moderate Israeli Arabs”, whatever that might mean.

"We want Hamas to understand that their missile attacks on Israel are unacceptable, and that they will think twice or three times before ever doing it again." If there is going to be any Hamas left after this war, they will do it again. No fewer than five times in a six-minute interview Regev says that, "We want Hamas to understand." Does he seriously think that Hamas does what it does because there is something it doesn't "understand"? What does Hamas have to do to make Regev understand that the Qur'an exhorts them to kill and be killed in the cause of Allah, and that they will not get any reward for such killing and being killed until the Muslims kill all the Jews. It is quite literally as insane as that. Somehow the Senior Advisor to the Israeli prime Minister must be made to understand that a Muslim attacking a lone Jew in New York is no different to a Muslim attacking a lone Jew in Johannesburg to a Muslim attacking a lone Jew in Lod. These attacks have something in common, and it isn't a conflicted identity.

Both Hamas and the "moderate" PA value deaths, especially civilian deaths, very highly, and pay handsomely for each such death. It is even too simplistic to say that Hamas puts their own civilians in harms way. Those very civilians make great shows of their grief at the same time as they celebrate those civilian deaths. They are lauded worldwide for their faith. Twitter abounds with Muslims wishing they had such faith. The ones who don't understand here are Mark Regev and, apparently, most Jews in Israel.

Many insisted, “We will not allow another Kristallnacht,” and this after Lod had already happened. Besides, it is not about whether there is or is not another Kristallnacht; it is about whether there are or are not people in your midst who would perpetrate a Kristallnacht if they got the chance. Quite evidently, there are, and a substantial number, at that. They’ve been in Israel all the time since 1948, while you were asleep. By all accounts, the events of the past week have been a wake-up call to remain asleep.

1. Mark Regev, Senior Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, i24 news, "Senior Advisor to Netanyahu: 'We are hitting Hamas hard, a ceasefire solves nothing", YouTube, 13 May 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ESTFCJV18
2. Ron Jager, "Co-existence 2.0, what was will no longer be", Arutz Sheva 7, 13 May 2021. https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/306131