Interesting article carried by Arab media highlights Bedouin Arab army trackers as ‘gatekeepers’ of the Jewish state, shows that Arabs have high standard of living in Israel

Continuing with the theme of debunking accusations that Israel imposes institutional racism and apartheid on the Arabs of the region is a story by the AFP on a senior Bedouin tracker in the Israeli army.

Lt.-Col. Magdi Mazarib, the highest ranking Israeli Bedouin army tracker, is featured in the story. He tells the news agency that compared with neighboring countries, the status and position of Arabs in Israel “is better…It’s a different league.”

When asked if, as a Muslim, he is bothered serving an overtly Jewish state, Mazarib responds, “The flag of England also has a cross on it, and the Jews there are fine with it.”

The article highlights the fact that, despite their Arab Muslim background, Mazarib and other Bedouin trackers are the “gatekeepers” of the Jewish state. It is they who guard against infiltration and who guide every Jewish-dominated military patrol defending the borders.

There are currently thousands of Israeli Bedouin serving in the IDF, and like Mazarib, they proudly lend their expertise and risk their lives to protect the Jewish state.

Interestingly, the AFP article was carried by the typically anti-Israel Saudi-owned news agency Al Arabiya, demonstrating that many Arabs around the region are fully aware that the claims of apartheid are nothing but a propaganda ploy.

For decades there has been an international drumbeat of concern for the Palestinians, their victimhood, their welfare and their human rights. But how much does the world really care about the Palestinians? We are learning now they don’t care at all as Assad slaughters them in Syria.

Where are the front-page headlines? Where are the UN condemnations? Where is the U.S. State Department? Where are the sponsors of flotillas to bring aid to the refugees? Where are the campus protests? Where are the Christian organizations? Where are the peace groups? Where are the pro-Palestinian organizations?

The answer is they are all silent.

Just two months ago, 180 countries voted in favor of Palestinian statehood at the UN, but they have not adopted a resolution condemning the brutal slaughter of Palestinians by Syria. Imagine if Israel were responsible for what is happening to the Palestinians. The UN would have acted immediately and all the groups mentioned above would be in an uproar.

How do we explain the difference?

The answer lies in a simple but inconvenient truth — no one really cares about the Palestinians – unless Jews are involved.

Deir Yassin lies

The complexity Israel has with Palestinians revolves around security rather than ideological issues; Israel does not have an aim to enslave the Palestinians for life or purposely degrade their humanity. While many Arab countries have designed their systems to discriminate and humiliate the Palestinians, squeezing them into illiteracy and poverty while milking them for tax money.

This has become most visible recently with calls in some Arab countries to revoke citizenships of all Palestinians there and actually to force them to seek local guarantors to obtain residency, thus enslaving them for life.

This comes as a deeper shock for Palestinians when they see Israeli Arabs, with many of them describing themselves as “Palestinians in Israel”; those are full citizens of Israel with access to all privileges.  Israeli Arabs are fully represented inside the Knesset while Palestinians, in their Arab homeland, are allowed only symbolic presence in parliaments, even at countries where they are the majority.  And while some Arab countries selectively withdraw citizenships from Palestinians, many Arab Knesset members do not hesitate to speak against Israel with no fear of losing their citizenships or entitlements.

Still, while the world is most vocal about Israeli military operations, it fails to recognize that Israel has been dealing with non-stop unrest on its soil since the breakout of the Intifada in 1987.  Has that Intifada taken place in any Arab country; it would have ended within the first couple of weeks with an Arab army killing more than ten thousands Palestinians, most being civilians.  Examples of this are countless and in all Arab countries hosting Palestinians; yet the world seems to think this reality is too overrated to recognize.

The reasons for the concern are deeper than this, and stem from the cultural mindset of the region. An Israel that has a strong character and is confident of itself and the justice of its cause, might stop behaving like a dishrag, as it has done in the past, more than once, under the irresponsible leadership of the bleeding hearts who are the “Pursuers of Peace”, and might adopt a pattern of behavior typical to the Middle East. More than a few Israeli politicians, some of them prime ministers, who sought “a solution now” have earned for Israel the image of “peace seekers”, according to their point of view, but which the Middle East understood as “Obsequious beggars pleading for a little peace and quiet”. In the Middle East only the vanquished, pleading for his life to be spared, begs for peace, and usually he will get a big, strong kick that will hurl him all the way down the stairs. Peace is the last thing you get when you beg for it.

In the embattled region where Israel is situated, the weak individual gets beaten up: he is shot at, missiles rain down upon him, his buses are blown up, he is de-legitimized, marginalized diplomatically, sued in international courts, states are established on his back that threaten him and declare their violent struggle against him again and again, and he – the weak one – must take all of this garbage that is rained down upon him and say, “It’s only words”. Sometimes he issues a warning but few take him seriously because he is weak and obsequious; he “seeks peace”.

In contrast, only the strong and self-confident, he who can pose a threat, who does not restrain himself at all from utilizing full force, who will not surrender anything due to him, will have peace and tranquility. Everyone else will leave him be because they fear him, and this is the only peace that is recognized in the Middle East. Peace belongs to the one who responds with great power to the first missile that falls into his territory, even if it falls in an open area; who doesn’t say on the radio, “no damage was caused”, because the truth of the matter is that indeed great damage was caused to his sovereignty, and nothing is more important than his sovereignty.  Would a normal person accept someone shooting at his house, even if “no damage was caused”?

“Occupied Palestinian Territory” (OPT) is a thing of smoke and mirrors.  Historically, it never happened; legally, there never was Palestinian territory for Israel to occupy.  Israel took the territories from Egypt and Jordan in 1967, and there’s no getting away from that.  So today Israel has more right than Jordan to be occupying the West Bank, and more right than Egypt to be occupying Gaza (if Israel’s blockade may be called occupation).  ”Palestine” never enters the equation.  Turn Middle East wars and laws upside-down and any way you like, but if the territories belong to any U.N. member, or quasi-member, they belong to Israel.

Not even the famous U.N. Resolution 242 can help.  It told Israel to withdraw from territories once held by Jordan, illegally, and Egypt, and it envisaged those territories’ return to those two countries.  ”Palestine” never got a mention in Resolution 242 — for a couple of good reasons.

Palestinians were not among the belligerents involved in the Six-Day War.  Anyway, the people who were going to stake claim to a nation they would call Palestine were a year away from being born.

Arab protest at Hebrew U ends when sirens sound

I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned ancient Aleppo souk in Syria, the under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the destroyed buildings in Libya. The photos and the reports were shown on the Al-Arabiya network, which is the most watched and respected news outlet in the Middle East.
The common thing among all what I saw is that the destruction and the atrocities are not done by an outside enemy. The starvation, the killings and the destruction in these Arab countries are done by the same hands that are supposed to protect and build the unity of these countries and safeguard the people of these countries. So, the question now is that who is the real enemy of the Arab world?
The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.
These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.

Boshra’s appearances on campus made waves, and, among her many radio appearances, she was interviewed by an Islamic, Arabic-language radio station in Johannesburg. The interviewer, a religious Saudi man, asked her questions which revealed a disheartening level of ignorance about Israel, the most over-scrutinized and documented country in the world — an ignorance that is unfortunately all too common.

“He asked why Israel doesn’t let Muslims pray or go to Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem; why only Jews are allowed to pray [in the State of Israel]. I told them that in my own small village in the Galilee there are not only one but two mosques and two imams who both get a monthly salary from the state. The interviewer was in shock. I added that I could go pray at Al Aqsa mosque at will, freely. Sure, sometimes there are security concerns and they limit entrance temporarily, but that’s it.”

The host was receptive to Boshra’s story and as the conversation turned to the rights of Arabs in Israel, her assertiveness grew.

“I said to him: ‘In Saudi Arabia, can a woman drive a car?’ He said no. I said: ‘I can.’ And he was silent. I asked: ‘Can a woman in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia meet a man and get to know him before getting married or is she just forced into marriage at a young age?’ He said no, she can’t. I said: ‘I can.’ And I would answer his questions with my own questions…and each time he would be stunned silent.”

Boshra went on to correct other popular misconceptions that the host had, including ideas about the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. She informed him of the supplies that Israel provides to the strip on a monthly basis, and she reminded him that Egypt also enforces the embargo. She asked him why it was Israel and not Egypt, an Arab county, that provided for the territory’s necessities. “He was speechless. He was often speechless during our interview.”

The host’s silence, and the reception she got from many if not all of the Arab students that she met, stood in stark contrast to my experience at Berkeley. Boshra’s interviewer, a religious Saudi, was more receptive to new facts than the “liberal” Ivy league students that I faced. “He saw me; I spoke Arabic, I was liberal and secular. This made him quite open-minded, actually.”

“I sent three of my boys to military service with full conviction,” Juhja tells me over muddy coffee and cigarettes in his home. “For an Arab, sending one’s sons into the army is a brave decision. I’m a trailblazer.”

In 2004 one of those sons, 19-year-old Staff Sgt. Sa’id Juhja, paid the ultimate price for the Jewish state when he was killed in a bomb attack in Gaza. Shortly after, the bereaved father built a memorial to his son and seven other Arab soldiers killed in uniform over the years. The site—built on Juhja’s own initiative, property, and dime—is the only one of its kind in Israel.

The memorial is housed in a modest red-roofed edifice adjacent to Juhja’s home. Two large Israeli flags fly at its entrance, and inside an even bigger one stretches along the back wall facing a vista of stony, undulating terrain. On the side wall are marble memorial plaques—in Hebrew and Arabic—for eight soldiers, Muslim and Christian, killed between 1989 and the present. Juhja says he plans to add additional plaques if, “God forbid,” he hastens to add, the list of fallen Arab soldiers grows.

April 5, 2012

Explosions heard in Eilat. Following security checks 2 rockets found fired from Sinai into Eilat

Near Alumot Hill in Itamar about a hundred Arabs rioted and threw rocks injuring 3 Israelis including the security coordinator of the community

April 6, 2012

Rock attacks against Israeli vehicles near Chawara south of Shechem. 1 Jewish woman moderately injured from rocks thrown from passing Arab car

Road 55 near Nebe Elias - Israeli moderately injured in head from glass fragments after rock attacks

April 7, 2012

Rock attack on Israeli vehicles near Betar Illit cause moderate injury to Israeli

Submachine guns and 500 bullets found by IDF in Arab vehicle at security check-post south of Tul Karem. The Arab driver was arrested

April 8, 2012

Rock attacks in several sections of the Jewish Quarter of Hebron

Molotov cocktails thrown at Bet Hadassah in Hebron

Rock attacks on Jewish bus in southern Hebron Hills near El Fuar causing damage to vehicles

Rockets launched from Gaza to south of Israel landed in open field in one of the Jewish communities near Israel-Gaza border

Rock attack on Road 443 causing moderate injury to Israeli