Op-Ed: The Wild Card: Arabs in Israel as a Hostage Population

They falsely accused us of expelling them in 1948, but now, the writer says, pushing the Arabs eastward is a viable solution - if necessary.

Dr. Mordechai Nisan

Dr. Mordechai Nisan, author and expert of the Arab-Israeli conflict, lectures on the Middle East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Let us be forthright:

Israel is facing a life-and-death struggle against Muslim and Arab forces whose declared and intended goal is to destroy the Jewish State.

A unified pseudo-Islamic Caliphate alliance, as an indomitable Muslim ambition, could be closing in on Israel, uniting the Sunni states Egypt, Syria after Assad falls, and Saudi Arabia, along with Iraq and Turkey interlaced in the fold. Jordan’s place in this coalition remains unknown.

The Palestinians, like the Lebanese Shiites, are undeniably a militantly critical and contiguous factor.

Of Iran and her nuclear potential and genocidal intent toward Israel - any word is superfluous.

As has happened in the past, in 1948 and 1967, the Arabs could find themselves enthusiastically responding to the gripping call of ‘saving Palestine’ or ‘liberating Palestine’ from the Zionists. As is clear, the Muslims cannot accept Israel ensconced in a land that their religion considers sacred Islamic territory.

A lucid realization of the stakes is required. The Muslims have tried and are trying, with the help of major powers like Russia and China, to prepare for Israel’s physical elimination and the murder of her Jews. The military panoply includes non-conventional weapons of mass destruction and terrorism at short-range, tactically surrounding Israel from all sides with the surge of a simultaneous multi-front assault.

Add the role of local Arabs within Israel, that is Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line, to foment instability and sedition, sowing chaos and fear, sabotaging Israel’s military mobilization and damaging Israel’s national morale, while initiating insurgency in the Galilee and the Negev, in all mixed Jewish-Arab towns, and raining fire-power and buoyed by terrorist infiltration from the mountains of Judea and Samaria, and from the Gaza enclave, upon Israeli cities on the narrow coastal plane, the northern Negev, and the area of Jerusalem.

The scenario of warfare along Israel’s borders, within her borders, and into the heart of the country, is a life-threatening and dreadful outlook. The Leftist elements of defeatism and treachery in Israel will cry for capitulation and the enemy will see total victory within its reach.

Rules Of War

There is one noteworthy asset that Israel has never yet explicitly employed in dealing with mortal dangers.

From the beginning, the Arabs wrote the rules of warfare in this tortuous conflict.

Muslim countries sanitized their declared goal of annihilating a sovereign state - Israel – to the point it became a legitimate international issue.

They have refused to recognize a United Nations member-state. They slaughtered Jewish civilians as a routine mode of warfare.

However, Israel has the ability to compel the logic of deterrence to enter the calculations of the Muslim world; and to demonstrate that Israel is not just a victim of Arab machinations and Muslim aggression, but holds a hand of cards that can throw the enemy’s plans to the wind.

It is now high-time for Israel to state her new rule of the game. If deterred by this new rule, the Muslim war is aborted. If, however, the Arabs doggedly pursue the war-path, their warmongering will exact a monumental historical price.

The Arabs of Israel, especially the citizen population from 1948, but the residents in Judea and Samaria as well, supply Israel with a paramount political card. Their value in the complex conflict was defined in the past as a bridge of peace to the Arab world; but this was an infantile hope and a misunderstanding of the national and religious networks absorbing and binding the Palestinian narrative.

They burn forests, smuggle explosives from Lebanon, stockpile weapons, and revile Zionism. Their religion and desire for people-hood far override their statehood as anchors of identity and loyalty. They can never be trusted.
The Arabs in Israel have affirmed themselves as an alien element in the Israeli body politic, waving the Palestinian flag, demanding refugee return and recovery of lost lands from 1948, and ending “the occupation;” ideologically dissident while politically hostile to the Jewish state of Israel.

They burn forests, smuggle explosives from Lebanon, stockpile weapons, and revile Zionism. On Monday of Sukkot, thousands marched in the Israeli Arab town of Sakhnin carrying Palestinian flags to protest what they called the Israeli government's non-action against those who killed eleven Arabs in riots 12 years ago. 

Their religion and desire for people-hood far override their statehood as anchors of identity and loyalty. They can never be trusted.

The relentless and sacred Muslim war against Israel, recruiting Palestinian Hamas, Jihad, and Fatah, includes in its ranks the Arabs of Israel. It is they in particular who bemoan Israel’s founding as a daily humiliation in the Jewish Hebrew-speaking country.

What they have received from Israel in the way of civil rights and social benefits, physical security and political representation has not assuaged the stinging pain in their history of defeat and downgrading since 1948. The Jewish/Arab co-habitation in Israel has been a strain on both sides, and is a perennial menace to the integrity of the state.

Regarding the Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and no less so for those in Gaza, hatred of Israel has not been tempered by the Oslo Accords. While some yearn for an Israeli ID card, they revile the Jewish state. The Palestinian war against Israel reverberates in their media and school curriculum, with no sign of reconciliation between the Jews and the Arabs.

Stoning Jewish cars and buses, attempts at kidnapping and lynching Jewish drivers, poisoning and murdering Jewish employers, and seizing state land, are some of the tried-and-tested forms of Arab political criminality.

Therefore, a realistic Israeli assessment of the strategic options points to using the Arab population in Eretz-Israel, from the sea to the river, as the essential political card to turn the tide in the struggle.

The ultimate weapon in Israel’s arsenal is to push Arabs eastward into Jordan, at the appropriate moment. This will be the consequence of ongoing Arab aggression and bellicosity: of Palestinian Arab grad attacks from Gaza against Ashkelon and Sderot, of Palestinian Arab terrorism and murder in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, of Hizbullah’s subversive operations in Israel with its tremendous missile armaments poised for release in south Lebanon against Israel, from Nahariya to Be’er Sheva.

Needless to say that, as in 1948, those communities and villages who joined with the Jews and demonstrated loyalty to Israel will be safe from harm and expulsion.

Israel's Best Weapon

Israel is in need of a clear consciousness to internalize the reality of her abnormal politico-strategic situation. Israelis have been maligned, bullied and battered, defamed and despised for so long, that Israel hardly sustains a sense of her rights and needs – or dignity.

Suffering border infiltration and loss of life from enemy assaults for over 60 successive years is not an acceptable state of affairs for peoples and countries. Israel, like most states, should enjoy calm and security within her borders. It is not normal to face incursions from Sinai and threats from Lebanon as daily realities, nor sufferable to be the target of Iran’s objective to destroy Israel in an imminent military cataclysm.

The Arabs in Israel are a hostage population. Although a grave problem, they are also the solution.

Israel will place the Arabs on notice that the dynamic of conflict will lead to their expulsion. The de-Arabization of the area they call Palestine is unmistakably the most appalling nightmare for the Muslim world, because worse than Arab death and its cultic value is the definitive banishment of Arabs from the land.

The demographics within Israel will change dramatically. The dialectic of history will transform Arab warfare against Israel – as in 1948 –into the dynamic catalyst for delivering Israel from the hands of her enemies.

Israel cannot wait until after the next war, as did the unfortunate Czechs in dealing with their German minority only after the horrors of Second World War, because Israel may not be here after the next war.

It is the anticipated upcoming war that counts, whose opportunity must be exploited by creating an atmosphere of panic and dread to compel Arab flight from the country.

As the final balancing of the moral equation approaches, and justifiably so, there is no place for sentimentality, softness, and sham morality in facing the Islamic jihad and in assuring Israel’s war of survival.

Dr. Mordechai Nisan’s latest book is Only Israel West of the River, available at amazon.com