The Tower Magazine has an interesting piece about an Israeli who has a restaurant in Ohio:
Hany Baransi has been serving authentic hummus and falafel in his central Ohio eatery for 27 years, proudly giving diners a taste of his Israeli Christian Arab heritage between bites of rich Mediterranean fare.
Yup, that’s right he proudly calls himself an Israeli Christian Arab and rejects the Palestinian identity that some would thrust upon him.
“I am a very outspoken Israeli, and I have an Israeli flag in my restaurant,” added Baransi, who moved to the United States from Haifa in 1983 and said he tries to visit Israel as often as he can. “When people [from the Arab community] ask me where I am from, I tell them I am Israeli, I am an Israeli Christian Arab, it’s not like I am Palestinian, and then they start arguing and fighting with me.”
Unfortunately the only reason he’s in the news is because a Somali man came into the restaurant and started hacking at people with a machete.
The assailant, identified by police as Mohamed Barry, a 30-year-old of Somali heritage, “came in and asked where I was from,” Baransi told The Tower. While Baransi was at home nursing a headache at the time, one of his employees– a young waitress– told Barry that the owner is from Israel. The man left after he determined that Baransi wasn’t at the restaurant, only to return around 30 minutes later with a machete and start hacking people.
Read the whole piece here but I wanted to make a point.
The entire, modern Palestinian identity was created specifically to supersede and push out the indigenous Jewish identity of Israel. That has been discussed at length by others on Israellycool. That’s not to say there aren’t now millions of Arabs in Israel. They don’t just disappear if we refuse to grant legitimacy to the identity they created specifically because it has a supersessionist agenda of destroying Jewish Israel.
But here is an example of an Arab who really understood what was done and chose not to go along with it. I wish more Jews would have the sense to understand his point of view. He knows that a Jewish Israel is inherently a multi-faith friendly place in a way that a Muslim Palestine can never, ever be. He’s shrugged off centuries of Dhimmitude that his people (Christian Arabs) endured alongside the Jews who were ever present in Israel and other lands conquered by the Arabs.
Anyone who has supported such nonsense as “competing narratives” or lent credence to embellished histories of externally imposed suffering, has granted legitimacy to those who seek to destroy Israel.
At first it was the Arab world keeping these poor people as refugee pawns: this was joined by a world industry and then the rise of Israelis searching for an impossible “peace” when their definition of “peace” is completely at odds with submission of Jews required before the other side will ever stop fighting.
There’s been a power struggle over the last 50 years: everyone who helped drive forward the existence of the fake “Palestinian” identity and presented that as an alternative identity for Israeli Arabs to adopt has been steadily sticking knives in any future co-existance.
And the result of this granting of legitimacy to the entire “Palestinian narrative” is the perpetuation of war. Well done.
