The infatuation with Mansour Abbas: déjà vu all over again

Some who should know better seem to be coming under the spell of Muslim Brotherhood Member of Knesset (MK) Mansour Abbas. Why? Because he took his political party, United Arab List (also known by its Hebrew acronym Ra'am), into the current Israeli coalition government. What a wonderful thing for an Arab to do. It shows that Israel's Arabs are changing. They don't want to be Palestinians anymore. They are embracing Israel as their country. At least, that's how the swan song goes.

Let's just back up a little here. This haste is unseemly. "Israel's Arab are shedding their Palestinian identity and embracing an Israeli identity," is a claim that cannot be dismissed out of hand as untrue, but it is also lavishly lathered with delusion, wishful thinking and readiness to overlook everything. Less than a year has passed since May 2021, when Muslims in Israel (not Arabs – it was neither a Christian nor a Druze thing) launched pogroms against Jews in Be'er Sheva, Rahat, Ramla, Lod, Nasiriyah, Tiberias, Jerusalem, Haifa and Acre. There is no way of whitewashing this. It was naked, it was ugly and it was aimed specifically at Jews. The party most supportive of this anti-Semitic hatred and violence at the time was Ra'am.

In June, Ra'am entered the Israeli government, and we are asked to believe that within one month, after a nationwide frenzy of hatred, destruction and killing, the Muslim Brotherhood, aka the Islamic Movement, aka United Arab List, aka Ra'am, had embraced Israel and will now coexist peacefully with their Jewish compatriots. Here is a recent Jewish Press report on Ra'am's embrace of Israel. The occasion was chairman of the Knesset Interior Committee, Walid Taha (Ra’am), showing Jews how it's going to be:

Taha’s behavior at the helm was reminiscent of King Solomon’s remark (Proverbs 30:22) about “a slave who becomes a king, a nasty man who prospers.” Clearly, after spending a lifetime under the yoke of Jewish governments, the life-long member of the Islamic Movement was enjoying the bits of authority his party’s privileged position in the coalition government rewarded him. He was showing the Jews what it’s like to be governed by a hostile Arab – and the point came across with unerring accuracy.

They are wasting no time in destroying the state, and they will not suffer dhimmis who don't know their place. But far more chillingly, we've seen the same fatal delusion with respect to Hezbollah. In an uncannily prescient reminder, Modechai Kedar, just five weeks before the pogroms warned:

This state of affairs is highly reminiscent of the process experienced by Lebanon from its independence in 1943 to the present. What destroyed “the Switzerland of the Middle East” and caused it to slide into the arms of Hezbollah and Iran was the choice by politicians—Christian, Druze, and Sunni Muslim—to subordinate the national interest to personal and sectorial interests. ...Worst of all, they spent 40 years reconciling themselves to Hezbollah’s presence as a military organization, then accepted its entry into the political arena and even formed political coalitions with the Islamist terror group. This is despite the fact that everyone knows with absolute certainty that Hezbollah’s whole purpose is to facilitate Lebanon’s takeover by Iran.

Anyone who has been following Israeli politics in recent years, and particularly over the past few months, cannot escape the dismal impression that the Lebanese experience is repeating itself in Israel. Parties are established and run on a personal basis, and politicians delegitimize each other on a personal level without even minimal concern for the country’s well-being. Worst of all, everyone—from both right and left—is eager to be aided by the Islamic Movement, the ideology of which centers on the elimination of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The organization does not even try to conceal this aspiration.

I have previously warned about misreading Mansour Abbas here, here and here, and also published another warning from Dr Kedar here. Mansour Abbas has been praised to the rafters for his mendacious Holocaust Remembrance speech before the Knesset in April 2020, in which everyone heard only what they wanted to hear and ignored what they didn't want to hear. Thus, for example, many Jews took to twitter with flourishing tweets over, "I have empathy for the pain and suffering over the years of Holocaust survivors and the families of the murdered," completely deaf to the first half of the sentence: "As a religious Palestinian Muslim Arab, who was raised on the legacy of Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, who founded the Islamic Movement."

When a Muslim makes a point of expressly informing a kafir that he is a religious, devout or pious Muslim, he is saying "I hate you as my religion tells me I must, and I aspire to kill you, as my religion tells me I must." In Mansour Abbas's Knesset speech case, with these same words he was also communicating to his Muslim constituents, "Don't worry, everything you are about to hear me say is a lie." It does not help us to see good news where there is none, especially if it's bad news. Being desperate for Muslims to make peace with does not produce Muslims to make peace with. Worse, no amount of gushing over Arab Muslims who call themselves Israelis, of whom there are, by all accounts, a growing number, gives reason to see in them the transformation of an Arab Nazi organisation that exists expressly to crush Zionism into one on which to pin one's dreams of coexistence:

We aim to smash modernism in government and society. In Palestine our first duty as Moslems is to crush Zionism, which is Jewish modernism. It is our patriotic duty. The Koran commands it.

A few seats in the Knesset does not change that; it reinforces it.