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Here’s the Truth About How Israel Treats Its Arab Citizens
A general view picture shows part of Givat Hamatos, an area near eastern Jerusalem, November 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun.
The media has reported that Palestinians in the West Bank (85%) and Gaza (52%) support Hamas’ October 7th actions. However, there has been less mention of the attitudes of the almost two million Arab living in Israel and East Jerusalem. More troubling, the little that has been mentioned, gives a false view of their estrangement from the state, ignoring the strong evidence that they are more sympathetic to the current plight of their Jewish neighbors than reported.
Recently, Ragjad Jaraisy and Ofer Dagam, directors of Sikkuy-Aufoq, an Israeli NGO doing constructive work in the Arab sector, pointed to the current risks Arab citizens face. They mentioned systemic discrimination and the repression experienced after the October 7th massacre:
A Palestinian doctor was suspended from his position, Palestinian students at colleges and universities have been punished, and other people have been arrested for social media posts that were often simply misunderstood by those who don’t speak Arabic.
As to the Gaza civilian casualties, they stated that Arab citizens “are connected by family ties, language, culture and history to their fellow Palestinians in Gaza — while living, working and studying side-by-side with Jewish Israelis in the very country that caused their people’s misfortune.” (emphasis added)
Unfortunately, Jaraisy and Dagan projected their mistaken beliefs onto Arab citizens. Survey data demonstrated that the war has brought Arab citizens closer to the Israeli state. For each year, 2016-2022, the share of Arab citizens who felt a part of Israel fluctuated between 39% and 43%. But directly after the Hamas attack, it increased to 70%; and even during November as the death and destruction in Gaza mounted, it only declined to 65%. This positive assessment was largest among Druze respondents (80%), followed by Christians (73%), and Muslims (62%). Indeed, the only subgroup for which it was less than 60% was those who voted for the ultra-nationalist Balad party (43%).
At the eight-week mark of the IDF offensive, a survey indicated that a minority of Arabs held the IDF solely responsible for the harm to Gazan civilians. Among Muslims, 60% held the IDF and Hamas equally responsible with 15.5% holding the IDF solely responsible, compared to 12% who held Hamas solely responsible. This reflected the fact that among Balad supporters, none held Hamas solely responsible but 29% held the IDF solely responsible. Among Christians and Druze, more than three times as many held Hamas solely responsible as those holding the IDF solely responsible.
Over the next five months, as war continued without an IDF victory or the return of more hostages, attitudes are interesting. An April survey asked, “Who has come off better in the war in Gaza — Israel or Hamas?” More Arab respondents think that Hamas, rather than Israel, has gained the upper hand (20% versus 14%, respectively). One-quarter thought both equally but 41% didn’t know. Interestingly, the only other group that thought Hamas had gained the upper hand were left-wing Jews (29% to 25.5%).
What Jaraisy and Dagan and others refuse to admit is that substantial improvements in the lives of Arab citizens have led them to be more willing to separate themselves from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. This is most illustrated by the improving situation of eastern Jerusalem Palestinians.
Mayor Nir Barkat changed decades of benign neglect by beginning to provide some needed reforms and improved services to eastern Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s new mayor, Moshe Lion, accelerated these changes. He began by cleaning up the streets and then improving basic infrastructure: the sidewalks, potholes in the streets, and community gardens. A particularly important improvement was made to the postal system. In 2010, postal services in eastern Jerusalem were barely functioning. A significant portion of the mail did not reach its destination, while much of what did arrive was delivered late. However, Leon added post offices, street signs, and house numbers, substantially improving service.
Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem have seen the benefits. Between 2010 and 2022, the share satisfied with garbage collection increased from 44% to 60%; with fire protection from 42% to 70%; and with ambulance responses from 46% to 59%. More than three-quarters of Arabs are satisfied with healthcare services, sewerage, water, and electricity.
Leon’s efforts also focused on providing an educational system that would prepare students for the matriculation exam (bagrut), required for entrance into Israeli colleges. This required switching away from the Jordanian curriculum that dominated the eastern Jerusalem educational system. No less than 32 educational institutions offering the Israeli system have been established since 2016. The effects on college enrollment have been dramatic. At the Hebrew University alone, 710 Arab students from eastern Jerusalem were studying in 2022, compared with only 36 five years earlier.
Arab women dominated this expansion. Leyla was sitting one morning with two friends in one of the cafés favored by college students. She does not cover her hair, but her two girlfriends were wearing hijabs. All three were studying at an academic college in the city. Asked what she liked the most about her studies, Leyla burst out laughing and said, “That as long as I study, my parents do not pressure me to get married.”
A major focus has been bringing jobs to eastern Jerusalem. The Silicon Wadi project will be one of the biggest public investments ever made in eastern Jerusalem. A total of 200,000 square meters will be devoted to high-tech businesses, 50,000 to hotels, and another 50,000 to commercial space. The project includes increased public transportation, green space, a new technical college for training “thousands of East Jerusalemites in advanced technology,” and incentives to “increase the integration of women in the workforce in the city’s East.”
Jerusalem City Council member Laura Wharton of the left-wing Meretz party said: “The thinking here now is to develop high-tech and other industries that will allow people from East Jerusalem to find employment in Jerusalem.” These are the reasons why in 2022, more eastern Jerusalem Palestinians preferred Israeli citizenship than living under the control of the Palestinian Authority; more than double the share five years earlier.
While eastern Jerusalem residents, as well as Arab citizens, still face significant obstacles, it is increasingly inaccurate to see them as victims of a repression that is squelching their desires to maintain solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is only an unwillingness to appreciate the positive government efforts that perpetuates false narratives.
Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far They Have Come; How Much Further They Need to Go, to be released fall 2024.
The post Here’s the Truth About How Israel Treats Its Arab Citizens first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Elite Universities Deliver Ultimatum to Anti-Israel Demonstrators as School Year Draws to a Close
A drone view shows a pro-Hamas encampment at Harvard University where students protest in support of Palestinians, during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, April 25, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have formally told anti-Israel protesters that they will be suspended from school if they refuse to end unauthorized demonstrations in which sections of campus have been commandeered and occupied for the past two weeks, according to statements issued on Monday.
“The continuation of the encampment presents a significant risk to the educational environment of the university,” interim Harvard president Alan Garber said in a note to the school community. “Those who participate or perpetuate its continuation will be referred for involuntary leave from their schools. Among other implications, students placed on involuntary leave may not be able to sit for exams, may not continue to reside in Harvard housing, and must cease to be present on campus until reinstated.”
Garber noted that students residing in tents on Harvard Yard — a collection of structures that has been described as an “encampment” — has forced the rescheduling of exams and disrupted the academic lives of those who have continued doing their homework and studying for final exams, responsibilities that the protesters have seemingly abdicated.
“There are many ways for our community to engage constructively in reasoned discussion of complex issues, but initiating these difficult and crucial conversations does not require, or justify, interfering with the educational environment and Harvard’s academic mission,” Garber continued. “Our disagreements are most effectively addressed through candid, constructive dialogue, building not on disruption, but on facts and reason.”
MIT delivered a similar ultimatum to anti-Zionist protesters there, even promising not to severely discipline students against whom the school has already filed disciplinary charges if they leave by 2:30 pm. That deadline expired and, according to the Daily Wire, the protesters formed a human chain and resolved to continue on.
“You must swipe you ID as you leave the encampment, and we will keep on file the stamp from your exit swipe showing you departed by 2:30 pm,” MIT chancellor Melissa Nobles said in a school-wide notice. “For those who do not leave the encampment voluntarily by 2:30 pm … if you either have been sanctioned by COD [the Committee on Discipline] or have a pending COD case related to events since Oct. 7 but choose to stay in the encampment past the deadline, you will be placed on an immediate interim full suspension lasting at least through [MIT] commencement activities, and you will be referred to the COD.”
Nobles continued, “This means you will be prohibited from participating in any academic activities — including classes, exams, or research — for the remainder of the semester. You will also not be permitted to reside in your assigned residence hall or use MIT dining halls.”
As the deadline approached, the pro-Hamas activists shouted “We are intifada,” according to numerous reports, while officers reportedly dressed in riot gear arrived at the scene. Further reports indicated that the encampment was later dissolved without issue.
“Looks like this worked! Encampment being cleared out as we speak!” MIT student Talia Khan tweeted. “These folks will be suspended according to MIT.”
Khan later told The Algemeiner: “I hope MIT goes through with their promised suspensions.”
At Harvard, some faculty have encouraged students to remain non-compliant with Garber’s directive. Remarks of Professor Walter Johnson — whose anti-Zionist faculty group posted an antisemitic cartoon on social media in February — surfaced on X/Twitter after its publishing in which he accused the university of deception.
“There’s no room for reasoned discussion about this action!” Johnson bellowed while amplifying his voice with a megaphone. “If Harvard will not disclose its investments in the occupied territories, in the Israeli military, and in Gaza it does not make sense to repeat the words ‘civil discourse and reasoned interchange.’ It does not make sense to repeat the word ‘veritas!’”
For nearly three weeks, college students have been amassing in the hundreds at a growing number of schools, taking over sections of campuses by setting up “Gaza Solidarity Encampments” and refusing to leave unless administrators condemn and boycott Israel. Footage of the protests has shown demonstrators chanting in support of Hamas, calling for the destruction of Israel, and even threatening to harm members of the Jewish community on campus. In many cases, activists have also lambasted the US and Western civilization more broadly.
On many campuses — including George Washington University in Washington, DC, New York University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan, and University of Southern California, among others — members of the faculty have attached themselves to demonstrations, encouraging students to support terrorism, antisemitism, and further violent convulsions aimed at overthrowing the US government.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Elite Universities Deliver Ultimatum to Anti-Israel Demonstrators as School Year Draws to a Close first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Approves Rafah Operation to Pressure Hamas as Ceasefire Talks Continue
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Feb. 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said that his war cabinet approved continuing a military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah in order to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages kidnapped by the Palestinian terrorist group last fall.
“The war cabinet unanimously decided that Israel continue the operation in Rafah to exert military pressure on Hamas in order to advance the release of our hostages and the other goals of the war,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.
Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza, the neighboring Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas, on Oct. 7, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping over 250 others as hostages. Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and incapacitating Hamas to the point that it can no longer pose a major threat to the Israeli people.
White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Monday that US President Joe Biden spoke on the phone with Netanyahu for 30 minutes about Rafah and other matters, reiterating his position that the Biden administration does “not support ground operations in Rafah.”
The US has sought to pressure Israel to forgo a significant military operation in Rafah, citing the potential for civilian casualties; Jerusalem has countered that a ground offensive is necessary to eliminate Hamas’ remaining battalions in the southern Gaza city.
Experts have told The Algemeiner that Israel must operate in Rafah, which Israeli officials have described as Hamas’ last bastion in Gaza, if the Jewish state wishes to achieve its war objective of eliminating the threat posed by the Palestinian terrorist group.
Amid the conflict in Gaza, mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the US have been seeking to broker a ceasefire in Gaza that would involve the release of the hostages.
The US State Department has chided Hamas for rejecting several truce proposals and being a “the barrier and the obstacle” to a ceasefire in Gaza, while noting that Israel has moved in a “significant way” to try and make a deal possible.
Israel has said any ceasefire must include the release of all remaining hostages and be temporary, warning that a long-term truce would allow Hamas to regroup and strengthen its position to continue attacking the Jewish state. Hamas leaders have pledged to carry out massacres against Israel like the one on Oct. 7 “again and again.”
Meanwhile, Hamas has demanded that any truce must include a permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.
On Monday, however, Hamas said in a brief statement that its chief, Ismail Haniyeh, had told Qatari and Egyptian mediators that the terrorist group accepted their proposal for a ceasefire. The exact details of the truce were not immediately available.
US officials have said they are reviewing Hamas’ response.
“We want to get these hostages out, we want to get a ceasefire in place for six weeks, we want to increase humanitarian assistance,” Kirby said, adding that reaching an agreement would be the “absolute best outcome.”
CIA Director Williams Burns was in the Middle East meeting with officials to discuss the proposal.
Israeli officials are also reviewing the proposal, although Jerusalem views some of the terms as unacceptable, according to media reports.
“This would appear to be a ruse intended to make Israel look like the side refusing a deal,” an anonymous Israeli official told Reuters.
According to Netanyahu’s office, Israel will continue working to reach a ceasefire while targeting Hamas in Rafah.
“In parallel, even though the Hamas proposal is far from Israel’s necessary demands, Israel will send a working delegation to the mediators in order to exhaust the possibility of reaching an agreement under conditions acceptable to Israel,” the office said in its statement.
Reuters contributed to this report.
The post Israel Approves Rafah Operation to Pressure Hamas as Ceasefire Talks Continue first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Israel Protesters Disrupt Holocaust Remembrance Day Event at Auschwitz
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
Anti-Israel protesters on Monday disrupted an event at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland, commemorating the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis.
The International March of the Living, an annual Holocaust education program founded in 1988, brings people from around the world to Poland each year for Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day — known as Yom HaShoah — to march on the path leading from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the Nazis’ largest death camp where 1 million Jews were murdered during World War II.
Survivors of the Hamas terror group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel joined 55 Holocaust survivors in this year’s march. However, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the coinciding record surge in global antisemitism, anti-Israel protesters gathered near the grounds of Auschwitz, sparking outrage.
Local police put up a barricade to prevent dozens of demonstrators from approaching the marchers, who passed by as the protesters shouted slogans including “stop the genocide.”
Anti-Israel protesters hold flags on the route of the annual International March of the Living, outside former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
Marchers, many of whom carried Israeli flags, responded by changing, “Free Gaza from Hamas!” and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
If you would have told me a year ago, that there would be protesters outside Auschwitz while Holocaust survivors are commemorating the Holocaust Memorial Day I would say you’re crazy.
pic.twitter.com/vASGX7llxE
— Elad Simchayoff (@Elad_Si) May 6, 2024
Danit Ben David, 87, said she was “outraged” at the scene.
“How dare they come here, on this day,” she told The Algemeiner.
For many of the thousands of marchers this year, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day has taken on less of a historic tone and more of a current one, in light of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel that launched the war in Gaza.
“I have always feared for Jewish existence in the face of antisemitism,” Phylis Greenberg Heiderman, president of the International March of the Living, told The Algemeiner. “But never has the fear and dread of the Holocaust been more palpable in our times.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 253 others during their invasion of Israel in what was the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Following the onslaught, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, antisemitism incidents skyrocketed to record highs in the US and several other countries, especially in Europe.
Doron Almog, chairman of the Jewish Agency, noted in a briefing with media from Israel that the scenes the Jewish state witnessed on Oct. 7 amounted to nothing less than a “pogrom.”
Others were more reluctant to draw direct comparisons.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog told the crowd in a video message: “Although the Holocaust stands alone in the history of human crimes, we have been grieving deep tragedy over the past months. The sickness of blind hatred has been unleashed once again, in our own world and time.”
Hershel Greenblat, an 83-year-old survivor from Atlanta, GA who accompanies students and highschoolers on the march, said he would not visit Auschwitz if it wasn’t for a sense of duty to educate the next generation.
“I don’t come to relive the past. The only reason I come is to be here with the students. To try to educate.”
Greenblat’s parents — from Poland and Ukraine, respectively — were both in the resistance against the Nazis. The octogenarian found his grandmother, for whom he was named, listed in Auschwitz.
Beyond survivors of the Holocaust and Oct. 7, several Arab and Muslim delegations from Israel and around the world also joined the march. Among them was a delegation organized by Sharaka (“Partnership” in Arabic), a nonprofit organization founded by leaders from Israel and the Gulf following the signing of the Abraham Accords, a series of historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab states brokered with the help of the United States.
The post Anti-Israel Protesters Disrupt Holocaust Remembrance Day Event at Auschwitz first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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