How Israel Became Al Nakba

...To many the move was a desperate lunge that had no chance of succeeding, for the Hamas-dominated Parliament was unlikely to dissolve itself and the Hamas-dominated civil service was unlikely to organize elections that Hamas claims are unconstitutional...

...The leaders of the Arab minority in Israel have declared war on the Jewish national state,” wrote columnist Avraham Tal in the Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz in response to the Mossawa paper...

...The unit was to reinforce his elite Presidential Guard and other Fatah-dominated security services...

...Jews and Arabs have been working together and patronizing each other’s enterprises for generations...

...The rampaging was halted briefly after desperate calls for calm by Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas...

...They further called for the right of Israeli Arabs to return to villages they abandoned in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, as well as Arab educational autonomy and the granting of veto power to the Arab minority on decisions of national import...

...Some Israeli leaders advocate ceding parts of sovereign Israeli territory that are densely inhabited by Arabs to a future Palestinian state—in exchange for equivalent territory in the West Bank—to ensure that the Jewish state continues to have a Jewish majority...

...From Nazareth’s mayor I learned that scores of Arab men in the area had volunteered to work on farms and factories in nearby kibbutzim, replacing Jewish men who had been called up to their reserve military units...

...During Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, military government was imposed in Israeli Arab regions and residents were required to obtain passes whenever they wished to travel outside their areas...

...Israeli police reacted with force, including gunfire, and 13 Arabs were killed...

...But a poll by the same institute before the last elections also predicted a Fatah victory...

...In any event, if elections are indeed held in the near future, the Palestinian public will have a clearer choice than before...

...Hamas maintains that if elections are held it will come away with a bigger majority than it now has...

...In addition to random shooting, which Gaza has seen often enough in the past, fire was directed at leaders of the two contending camps...

...The rapport of those days now seems like fantasy...

...If there were border police units in the area, they were not visible and clearly not needed...

...While Hamas is radical in its stance toward Israel, it has attempted since its election victory to behave as a responsible governing party and its leaders clearly wish to avoid civil war...

...None occurred...

...That would reduce the flow of money and arms to Hamas from Sinai, but the flow through tunnels beneath the border will not easily be terminated...

...The Bush Administration is seeking Congressional approval for the allocation of $86 million to augment the Presidential Guard and expand its control over border crossings...

...If Yasir Arafat was the impish cousin who seemed capable of setting off firecrackers at a family dinner party to liven it up, his successor as president of the Palestinian Authority and leader of the Fatah political faction, Mahmoud Abbas, is the droning uncle who threatens to put everybody to sleep before dessert...

...If push came to shove and the argument was left to Fatah and Hamas gunmen to settle on the streets, most observers would put their money on Hamas, whose forces are more disciplined and better armed...

...Still, man remains a political animal whose allegiance is primarily to his own kind...

...The creation of the Jewish state, they were saying, was the Arabs’ tragedy...

...The two spoke regularly, the mayor told me afterward...

...In the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, meanwhile, allegiances are a more complicated matter...

...The Arabs also see themselves as victims of discrimination, a view supported in 2003 by an Israeli commission that found the government “did not show sufficient sensitivity to the needs of the Arab population, and did not take enough action to allocate state resources in an equal manner...

...Moreover, with the backing of Islamic Jihad and other militant groups, Hamas appears to have the upper hand in Gaza in the event of a serious confrontation, although not in the West Bank...

...Thus, if things got bad enough—as they threatened to after Abbas’ election call—Hamas might be open to a reasonable compromise...

...Hamas says the uniformed security force it has created since assuming office, known as the Executive Force, numbers close to 6,000, and that it will be expanded to 12,000, mainly with funding from Iran...

...This despite a poll published by a Palestinian research institute last month that showed Fatah besting Hamas, 42 per cent to 36...

...There have been recent suggestions in the media that not Machiavelli but Washington lay behind Abbas’ bold move...

...We don’t want to become part of the [Palestinian] territories,” he said, “but rather to prove our legitimacy here...

...The Presidential Guard currently has 3,700 fighters and is to be expanded by Abbas to 4,700 within 18 months, with assistance from Western nations...

...They blocked major roads in Israel’s North for days and hurled stones and firebombs at security forces that tried to open them...

...The Arabs have 22 countries, the Palestinians will soon have their own state and eventually they will control Jordan as well,” said Professor Rafi Israeli of Hebrew University in a public debate with an Arab colleague...

...Such a compromise, calling for a national unity government, has been on the table for months, but Fatah and Hamas have been unable to agree on the distribution of ministerial portfolios and on a stance toward Israel that would enable the international community to resume its funding of the Palestinian Authority...

...Tellingly, the judgment was made by American and European Union officials who visited the Badr training camp in Jordan...

...Others had donated blood for the wounded...

...But they say the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, with whom Israeli Arabs identify, makes it difficult to bridge these gaps at present...

...Israeli Arabs, however, are firmly opposed to exchanging Israeli for Palestinian citizenship, even though they would not have to leave their land...

...The late Israeli Arab newspaper editor from Nazareth, Lufti Mash’ur, stressed that Israeli Arabs craved equality, not separation...

...Some called for opening Israel’s gates to the millions of Palestinian refugees living abroad, a move that would bring quick demographic demise to the Jewish state and that Israel would clearly never accept...

...As we talked, the Arab mayor received a phone call from his Jewish counterpart in the city of Upper Nazareth about a mile away...

...Now, he said, the Palestinians outside Israel’s borders and the Arabs inside Israel are trying to reverse that failed attempt “with terror from the outside and by nurturing a separatist Palestinian narrative from within...

...Although tensions declined in the past couple of years as the intifada waned, they revived with a bang in December when an Israeli Arab advocacy group, Mossawa, backed by Israeli Arab leaders, issued a position paper demanding changes in Israel’s national anthem and flag in a way that would give expression to Arab sentiment...

...In their demands for virtual autonomy, they add, Israel’s Arabs have gone too far...

...As Olmert put it last month, the Palestinians will be free to choose their direction, but they will have to bear the consequences of their choices...

...There were some who saw a Machiavellian calculation in Abbas’ election ploy...

...So is the pledge by Olmert to ease passage for Palestinians through the ubiquitous Israeli roadblocks on the West Bank by making searches of vehicles and people selective rather than universal, thus reducing the lengths of the queues...

...The eventual transfer of the Badr Brigade to Gaza would therefore still not create parity between Fatah and Hamas in terms of organized manpower...

...They began referring to themselves as Israeli Palestinians, rather than Israeli Arabs, to identify more closely with the Palestinians in the West Bank...

...Yet it was Abbas who tossed the firecracker at the end of 2006 that brought Palestinians to the edge of civil war...

...Abraham Rabinovich writes frequently for the NEW LEADER on the Middle East...

...His call for new elections, made less than a year after elections put the radical Hamas group into power, touched off intra-Palestinian street battles after Hamas accused him of attempting a political coup...

...Locked into an impossible bind by Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel’s refusal to deal with a Palestinian regime dedicated to its demise, the 71-year-old Abbas hoped the Palestinian electorate would offer a way out by unseating Hamas...

...His latest book, The Yom Kippur War, is now available in paperback...

...the brigade was judged to be insufficiently trained or equipped to carry out the mission...

...Many here acknowledge that Israeli Arabs, who number 1.4 million, have not enjoyed full equality in areas like government funding...

...Instead, they tried to drown the Jewish state in blood and fire” as local Arabs rose up and the armies of neighboring Arab states invaded...

...During the war they were in contact several times a day to deal with emergencies...

...The great bulk of Israel’s Arabs took no part in the suicide bombings and other attacks inside Israel during the latest intifada, but a few dozen were arrested and found guilty of guiding Palestinian bombers to targets inside Israel or otherwise assisting them, reinforcing Jewish rage...

...In the end, the transfer was put off...

...The intention is clear: to ensure that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians does not abate even after an independent Palestinian state rises alongside the State of Israel...

...Intelligence officers on both sides also were kidnapped and executed...

...This scenario appeared to take on substance Christmas week, when Israel agreed to let trucks carrying 2,000 rifles and abundant ammunition pass through its territory on the way from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, where they were distributed to security forces loyal to Abbas...

...A year later, the Six Day War broke out and Israel deployed paramilitary border police units in the Arab hinterland to suppress any uprising...

...Why can’t you accept Israel as a Jewish state...

...Even more remarkable, Israel agreed to Washington’s request that it allow the transfer from Jordan to Gaza through Israeli territory of at least 1,000 members of the Badr Brigade, a Palestinian unit serving within the framework of the Jordanian Army that is said to be loyal to Abbas...

...But it flared again even more intensely in the first week of January, and Gaza remains dangerously perched on the edge of the abyss...

...The following year, the leaders of Israel’s Arab community declared that Israel’s Independence Day would henceforth be marked in the Arab sector as al Nakba, the Catastrophe...

...According to these reports, Washington wants to bolster his security forces to the point where they are a match for Hamas, and to have Israel make demonstrative concessions that would upgrade his support among the Palestinian populace...

...This time, a vote for Hamas would indisputably be a vote for confrontation with Israel, while a vote for Fatah would offer the hope, at least, of negotiations and the beginning of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank...

...Abbas’ election call was stunning because it came from a man who had built a career on nonconfrontation...

...Challenging its legitimacy, Israeli Arab intellectuals called openly for its replacement by a binational state...

...ToincreaseAbbas’popularityat home, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already released to him $100 million of the $500 million in Palestinian revenues frozen by Israel since Hamas assumed power last year...

...Such scenes were taking place at roadsides all over Israel, but to my astonishment these women, by their dress and headscarves, were clearly Arabs...

...The war plainly created a strain on Israel’s Arabs, who constitute 20 per cent of this country’s population...

...Given the predictions of a Fatah victory last year, voting for Hamas might have been seen by some as sticking out a tongue at Israel without having to bear the consequences an actual victory would bring...

...The nation they are citizens of was in a life-or-death struggle with fellow Arabs across Israel’s borders, and it was not clear how they would react...

...These funds, to be distributed at Abbas’ discretion, are expected to win him friends...

...The United Nations decision in 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Tal noted, was accepted by the Jews but rejected by the Arabs...

...The ongoing Israeli-Arab dispute, particularly Israel’s confrontation with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in response to two long and bloody intifadas, has alienated many Israeli Arabs from the Jewish state and rendered them a potential fifth column in the eyes of many Israeli Jews...

...What makes the situation particularly sad is that while their political positions are growing increasingly irreconcilable, Israeli Jews and Arabs get along well personally— two different, if distantly related, cultures that find interest in each other and complement each other...

...Military government was lifted only in 1966...

...Alienation was given dramatic expression after the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, when thousands of Israeli Arab youths, many demonstratively wearing kaffiyas, rioted in emulation of their kin in the Palestinian territories...

...Now, approaching Nazareth in 1973, I saw women at a junction handing out soft drinks and cake to soldiers on the way to the front...

...Matters of Allegiance How Israel Became Al Nakba By Abraham Rabinovich JERUSALEM Returning from the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, which I was covering as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, I noticed a road sign in the Galilee Hills pointing to Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, and decided to detour...