JERUSALEM (VINnews) — There are two million Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. That is 20% of the country, one in every five people in Israel. They work with Jews, travel freely (even in the Palestinian Authority, a region forbidden to Israelis), speak the same Hebrew language, some without a discernible accent, and interact with Jewish people on a daily basis. For example, the head doctor of the Hillel Yaffe hospital who treated the victims of Wednesday’s brutal terrorist attack in Hadera is an Arab himself, and he reported to the media on the condition of the victims.
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It is hard to define the feelings of Arabs towards Israel. They range from sympathy and identification to malevolance and hostility. Most Arabs are resigned to living in a Jewish state, do not harbor malice towards Jewish Israelis and are even willing to develop social interaction with Jews. Most were horrified at the Hamas massacre, do not identify with terrorist groups and their murderous aspirations, and wish to live their lives in peace in their villages and towns while maintaining a standard of living far above their counterparts in Middle Eastern countries and even across the Green Line. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett once famously declared that “99.9% of Arabs are loyal to the state of Israel.”
Yet if there is one exception to this rule, it would clearly be Umm Al-Fahm, a town of 55,000 located east of Hadera and just a short distance from the Arab towns of Samaria. The town has spawned numerous terrorists over the years, notably the terrorists who perpetrated the Temple Mount attack in 2017, the terrorist attack in Tel Aviv in 2021 and an attack in Hadera itself in March 2022 in which two border police were murdered.
Just 11 months ago, when the entire nation was reeling at the barbarity of the Hamas butchers from Gaza, two youths in Umm Al-Fahm organized a solidarity march with Hamas, leading to their arrest for incitement. The irredentist tendencies of the youth of Umm Al-Fahm have led them not only to passively identify with the Palestinian cause, but to actively use their Israeli ID to promote that cause via terror and violence.
The warning signs are loud and clear but for some reason (mainly its attempt to maintain warped democratic values in the Middle East’s belligerent atmosphere), Israel constantly fails to take the requisite action against the terrorists: Destruction of their homes and deportation of all first-degree family members to the Palestinian Authority after they are stripped of their citizenship. If they so identify with the Palestinian cause, let them live in the Palestinian Authority, let them forfeit their homes in Israel. This would soon serve as a deterrent to any terrorist activism and would also force the Israeli Arabs to realize that they cannot continue to act as fifth columnists in a democratic state where they have now lived with Israelis for nearly a century.
If the right measures are implemented, even Umm Al-Fahm will be forced to come to terms with Israel. If not, the country could face further attacks by those emboldened by the weakness of resolve that Israel has shown towards crushing internal terrorist threats.
VIN not posting the comments?? Hmm?