Philadelphia — Recently, I took part in a discussion with a group of community leaders about tolerance. Some people are worried that after the Sept. 11 terror attacks Muslims are experiencing a prejudicial backlash.
The concern is appropriate; but the good news is that here, as in most of the United States, the feared rise of anti-Muslim fervor has simply not occurred. The very few local incidents ascribed to such a bias have been roundly and rightly condemned by virtually everyone in town.
Indeed, the real story about this is that the entire country has united to make sure such a thing does not happen. From the president on down, the dominant sentiment has been one of inclusiveness toward Muslims and refusal to allow our anger to spill into hate-filled rhetoric or action.
This has even led the White House and some in the media to grant recognition to Muslim and Arab-American groups that don’t deserve it. Extremists like those at the Council on American-Islamic Relations have been given a legitimacy that their support for anti-Israel terrorism should have denied them.
When some Philadelphians expressed fear that a backlash against Muslims was immanent, I expressed skepticism. That said, those who want to promote tolerance are to be applauded, even if their fears are exaggerated.
But similar fears for the communal peace of the State of Israel are all too real. The rising tensions between the Israeli Arab minority and the Jewish majority of the country can no longer be ignored.
The latest focal point for this problem is the conduct of Azmi Beshara, an Arab member of Israel’s Knesset.
Flaunts his contempt
Beshara is the embodiment of the dilemma of the approximately 15 percent of Israeli citizens who are Arabs. He wants all the benefits of citizenship in the Middle East’s only democracy but isn’t willing to give loyalty to the state in return.
Beshara, who was first elected to the Knesset in 1996 on a Communist Party ticket, has made a habit of flaunting his contempt for the democracy in whose parliament he serves.
During a visit last June to Syria, a country at war against Israel, Beshara gave a speech in which he praised Hezbollah terrorists who have attacked Israel.
Beshara has also arranged illegal visits for Israeli Arabs to Syria in contravention of Israeli law and despite legal channels being available for family reunions.
Recently, Israeli authorities have come to feel enough is enough and have initiated a prosecution of Beshara for support of a terrorist organization. The Knesset voted 61-30 on Nov. 7 to lift his parliamentary immunity, enabling the case to proceed.
Beshara is brazen in his contempt. He told The New York Times that he is “not an Israeli patriot.” He advocates dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state and wants it to drop its flag, national anthem and the right of Jews to come home to Israel as immigrants.
Worse, he has the chutzpah to depict himself as a victim of oppression. He has gained sympathetic coverage in American newspapers like The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Others among the Knesset’s Arab caucus, including those who despise Beshara as a publicity hound, have expressed the same beliefs. Indeed, Talab El-Sana, a Knesset member from a rival Israeli Arab party, publicly justified a Palestinian terror attack in August on innocent pedestrians outside the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.
Last year, Israeli Arab rioting in sympathy with the violence launched by the Palestinian Authority shocked Israel. The nation’s answer was to vow that inequities in funding between Jewish and Arab townships would be erased.
But increasingly the problem facing Israel is no longer whether its Arab minority receives fair treatment in the division of patronage and school funding. Rather, the minority feels itself sufficiently powerful that it can put itself on the side of those who are at war with the state.
Ironically, tensions between Jews and Arabs within Israel have grown worse since the signing of the Oslo peace accords. Far from satisfying Palestinian ambitions, empowerment of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority seemed only to heighten a sense of Palestinian identity among Israeli Arabs.
This disintegration of loyalty on the part of the Arab minority makes the prospect of any final peace agreement between Israel and the P.A. even more perilous.
It does not take much imagination to conjure the possibility of increased anti-Israel agitation by Arab Israelis, even in the unlikely event of a peace settlement. But the difference then will be that the next “intifada” will not take place in those parts of Judea and Samaria where Arafat’s rule will be sovereign.
Instead, it will be in the Galilee. At that point, Beshara’s current calls for “cultural autonomy” of Israeli Arabs may become a demand for Israel to cede areas inside its pre-1967 borders to the new state of Palestine.
Anyone who thinks this a fantasy should think back just a few years to when it was unimaginable for Israel even to contemplate giving up all of the “West Bank,” not to mention parts of Jerusalem as both former prime minister Ehud Barak and former President Bill Clinton advocated last year.
Tolerance is always imperative; but no state or people is required to be tolerant of those who wish to destroy them.
In the United States, where no minority can conceivably threaten the security of the majority, tolerance of differing cultures — even those antithetical to democracy — is possible. Multiculturalism may be a foolish goal that undermines national unity, but the price of such folly here is cheap. Israel has no such margin for error.
The dilemma is keen for Israeli civil libertarians. Israel envisions itself as a mosaic of different cultures with equal rights. Hopefully, it will always be able to live up to the ideals of equality expressed in its declaration of independence.
However, if the ultimate agenda of Israeli Arab leaders is not equal rights in a democratic Israel but the end of the Jewish state itself, then what hope is there for tolerance or peace?
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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