Introducing our latest weapon: Zionist Arabs of Death.TM
Move over Balad, Hadash and the United Arab List-Ta’al.
In the next general election, there will be a new Arab party. But what is tentatively labeled the Israeli-Arab Nationalist Party will be very different from the current Arab factions in the Knesset.
While those factions’ MKs have been criticized for being too extreme and vocal in their criticism of the Jewish state, the new party will be unabashedly pro-Israel and take a very different approach.
“Most Arab citizens are in favor of coexisting, cooperating and living in harmony with Jewish Israelis,” the party’s founder, Sarhan Bader, told The Jerusalem Post. “The other Arab parties place too much emphasis on the Palestinians and external Arabs. But it’s more important to serve the Arabs inside Israel who want to live here in peace with our Jewish cousins. After we solve the problems of internal Arabs, we can help the Palestinians.”
Bader said he would fight for the rights of Israeli Arabs and fair expression for his sector, which he said totaled 22 percent of the population. He said his party would represent its constituency better than the current Arab parties, in part because he intends to join the coalition, which no Arab party has ever done.
“To serve the Arabs properly, it’s important to work together with the ruling party in the coalition,” he said. “The Druse MKs who are part of the coalition [in Likud, Yisrael Beytenu and the Independence Party] help their constituency a hundred times more than every Arab MK in the opposition. I will dramatically improve things for the Arab sector.”
Bader, 36, has been involved in local politics for many years in Nahaf, his Upper Galilee village.
Out of a belief that large ruling parties can be more effective, he was a member of the Likud before deciding that the formation of a pro-Israel Arab party was more urgent.
Asked if backing Likud caused him problems, he admitted that he had encountered hostility but said he always resolutely defended his politics.
Bader’s behavior reached the Prime Minister’s Office, which encouraged him to form the party that may end up acting as an Arab satellite party of Likud.
“Only a strong party like Likud can bring peace,” he said. “It’s true historically.
The Left won’t bring peace. Labor never did anything for the Arab sector. It’s time to give a chance to the Right.”
Bader described the party as six months away from being ready.
Mocking the current Arab lawmakers again, he blasted their visits to Libya and Lebanon.
“They went to Gaddafi and called him a king to get money from him for a soccer stadium and a few months later they called him a murderer,” he said.
In a recent interview with journalist Shalom Yerushalmi, Bader predicted that his party would win three seats in the next election. Yerushalmi asked how the party would mark “Nakba Day,” the anniversary of Israel’s founding that Palestinians and some Israeli Arabs observe with anti-Israel rallies.
“We won’t officially mark the day,” he said. “But I am not responsible for what each person feels in his heart.”
And on a related note:
I am a Zionist, a proud Muslim Zionist, and I love Israel, but this was not always the case. In fact, for many years I was quite the extreme opposite. I experienced the high levels of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activity taking place on British university campuses, because I was the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel activist.
Growing up in the Muslim community in the UK I was exposed to materials and opinions at best condemning Israel, painting Jews as usurpers and murderers, and at worse calling for the wholesale destruction of the “Zionist Entity” and all Jews. In short, there was no accommodating a Jewish State in the Middle East.
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My father, however, was much more brazen in his hatred, boasting of how Adolf Hitler was a hero, his only failing being that he didn’t kill enough Jews.
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So what changed? How could I go from all this hatred to the great love for and affinity with Israel and the Jewish people? I found myself in the Israel and Palestine section of a local bookstore and picked up a copy of Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel. Given my worldview, the Jews and Americans controlled the media, so after brief look at the back, I scoffed thinking “vile Zionist propaganda.”
I did, however, decide to buy it, content that I would shortly be deconstructing this propaganda piece, showing that Israel had no case and claiming my findings as a personal victory for the Palestinian cause.
As I read Dershowitz’s arguments and deconstruction of many lies I saw as unquestionable truths, I searched despairingly for counter arguments, but found more hollow rhetoric that I’d believed for many years. I felt a real crisis of conscience, and thus began a period of unbiased research. Up until that point I had not been exposed to anything remotely positive about Israel.
Now, I didn’t know what to believe. I’d blindly followed others for so long, yet here I was questioning whether I had been wrong. I reached a point where I felt I had no other choice but to see Israel for myself; only that way I’d really know the truth. At the risk of sounding cliché, it was a life-changing visit.
I did not encounter an apartheid racist state, but rather, quite the opposite. I was confronted by synagogues, mosques and churches, by Jews and Arabs living together, by minorities playing huge parts in all areas of Israeli life, from the military to the judiciary. It was shocking and eye-opening. This wasn’t the evil Zionist Israel that I had been told about.
After much soul searching, I knew what I had once believed was wrong. I had been confronted with the truth and had to accept it. But I had a bigger question to confront, what now? I’d for years campaigned against Israel, but now I knew the truth.
The choice was obvious: I had to stand with Israel, with this tiny nation, free, democratic, making huge strides in medicine, research and development, yet the victim of the same lies and hatred that nearly consumed me.
Doing this is not easy and that’s something that has become very obvious. I have faced hostility from my own community and even some within the Jewish community in the UK, but that’s the reality of standing up for Israel in Europe today. It is not easy, and that’s what makes it so necessary.
This isn’t about religion and politics; it’s about the truth.
When it comes to Israel, the truth is not being heard, the ranks of those filed with blind hatred continue to swell, yet many have not been exposed to the reality, away from the empty rhetoric and politically charged slogans they are so fond of.
Read the whole thing.
