Jews Among Arabs, Arabs Among Jews

By Jeff Jacoby 
The Boston Globe
July 18, 2002

The proposed law was denounced everywhere, above all in Israel, 
where it set off a wave of outrage. Voices across the political
spectrum denounced it -- from right-wingers like former Cabinet 
minister Benny Begin, who condemned it as "undemocratic" and 
"unworthy," to Yossi Sarid of the hard-left Meretz party, 
who said that adopting it would be tantamount to "turning Israel 
into a racist state." 

Countless Israelis observed that such a law could only promote 
the antisemitic slander that Zionism -- the national independence 
movement of the Jewish people -- is racist. Many agreed with 
Dan Meridor, a minister from the Center Party, who said it is 
precisely because Israel is a Jewish state that it must never 
commit the kind of discrimination against minorities to which 
Jews have so often been subjected themselves. 

Shamed by the public's reaction, the Cabinet reversed itself. 
On Sunday it buried the bill by a vote of 22-2. And in truth, 
it would have been surprising if the bill had met any other fate. 

Bigoted schemes and intolerant proposals are not unheard of in 
even the most decent democracies; the mark of their decency is not 
that such schemes and proposals are never floated, but that they 
are usually shot down. What made the anti-Arab bill so newsworthy 
was how out of character it was. One of Israel's greatest 
distinctions, after all, is that despite the Arab world's long 
history of anti-Israel enmity and violence, the Jewish state has 
always guaranteed the equality and freedom of its Arab minority. 

Israeli Arabs have the right to vote and to hold public office. 
Nearly one-10th of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is Arab; 
there is even a mosque in the Knesset building for those who are 
Muslim. One of the justices of Israel's supreme court is an Arab; 
so is a minister in Ariel Sharon's cabinet. Arabs are active in 
Israeli commerce, media, education, and law. A few years ago, 
a young Arab woman was even named Miss Israel. 

The vast majority of Israelis regard all this as normal and 
desirable. It is true -- and most Israelis would acknowledge -- 
that Arabs do not enjoy full social or economic equality and are 
at times discriminated against in ways that Jews are not. Often 
there are tensions and flare-ups; how could there not be, given 
the thousands of Jews who have been killed or crippled by Arab 
terrorists? 

And yet for all that, few Israelis dispute the right of their 
Arab countrymen to justice, dignity, and equity. The spirit of 
Israel's Declaration of Independence, which appealed "to the Arab 
inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and 
participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full 
and equal citizenship," is still a core ideal of mainstream Israeli 
society. Nearly one Israeli in five is an Arab, and the consensus 
across Israeli society is clear: Arabs have every right to live 
among Jews. 

If only there were an equally clear consensus that Jews have every 
right to live among Arabs. 

Sadly, there is anything but. 

Is there any group of people in this world more roundly despised 
than the 225,000 Jews who have settled in Judea and Samaria over 
the past 25 years? (Judea and Samaria are the age-old names for 
the territory Jordan renamed "the West Bank" after invading it in 
1948.) If there is one thing that Europe, the State Department, 
the United Nations, and most of America's media Bigfeet agree on, 
it is that the settlers are an intolerable affront who must be 
uprooted and removed if there is ever to be peace in the Middle 
East. 

Yet why should that be? If it was repugnant to propose that Arabs 
be kept from moving into certain Jewish towns, it is even more 
repugnant to demand that hundreds of thousands of Jews be ethnically 
"cleansed" from their homes and communities. The Nazis had a word 
for this: judenrein. And as Palestinian terrorists make clear 
every time they commit an atrocity like Tuesday's slaughter of 
passengers on the Tel Aviv-Emmanuel bus, the Nazi comparison is 
entirely apt. Anyone who called for expelling every Arab from 
Israel would be seen as a bigoted extremist. Those who call for 
kicking the Jews out of Judea invite the same description. 

The claim that the settlements are illegal is bogus. Israel took 
the West Bank in self defense in 1967, and nothing in international 
law prohibits Jews from moving there. Or rather, moving back there: 
Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria since antiquity. The only time 
they didn't was during the Jordanian occupation of 1948-67, when 
the occupiers insisted that the territory be judenrein. Far from 
condemning the settlements, the world should applaud the return of 
the Jews to their ancient lands -- especially since their goal is 
not to displace the Arabs living there but to dwell among them. 

If there is room in Israel for a million Arab citizens, there is 
surely room in Palestine for a few hundred thousand Jews. It is 
time we began to say so.