A Jewish State

"Certainly, anyone who's voting for a joint slate will probably be holding their nose at some elements of what is a fairly diverse slate."
Historically, the Arab parties have never been invited into a coalition with the government of the day. There's a sense of mutual de-legitimacy, between the Arab parties, on one hand, and the openly Zionist parties -- which is pretty much every other party, except perhaps some of the ultra-Orthodox parties -- on the other."
"On the larger symbolic point, I think any time there's a uniting of parties you get renewed energy. Even some Jewish Israelis, admittedly ones on the far left, are writing blogs and op-eds saying all Israelis should vote for the Joint List. I think it's really a cri de coeur about what it means to be part of a Jewish state."
"[Their concerns : the Joint List coalition] are as broad as any other party in Israel; ameliorating the socioeconomic and cultural status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. That mostly comes in the form of ensuring that their towns and villages and school systems are being adequately funded."
Mira Sucharov, political scientist specializing in Israeli politics, Carleton University, Ottawa

Praying at the Western Wall

That isn't the entire story, of course. Elected Israeli Arab members of the Knesset often openly support the terrorist group Hamas and its actions. Some MKs have been known to throw their lot in with terrorist Palestinians. And the very fact that Palestinian Israelis are anti-Zionist speaks volumes of their presence within the Jewish State as a third column in the sense that the land that represents Israel has always been declared a Jewish state, a homeland for Jews to find haven from anywhere in the world. This is Zionism.

The need for that haven is all the more so in a world that appears increasingly threatening to Jews wherever they live. The threat to the State of Israel within the Middle East has never disappeared; it has merely been muted. Its traditional enemies no longer seek to actively annihilate it as they did in the years following its resurrection as a nation. Now it is the non-state terrorist militias and the Islamic Republic of Iran, its client-states Syria and Qatar, and the proxy Hezbollah militia that present an acute existential danger to Israel.

And with the increasing migration of Arab Middle-Easterners to the countries of Europe and North America, that hatred has been exported to those countries. The incidence of anti-Semitism has risen exponentially, with sometimes lethal attacks against Jews erupting within Europe, with slander and threats and active anti-Semitic acts of violence and more muted smouldering resentments feeding hatred becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the world as Muslim populations increase. 

Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives

Israeli Palestinians have famously rejected the very idea that part of Israel could be carved out where majority-Arabs live, to be transferred to a a Palestinian state, in exchange for the Palestinians agreeing to carve out that equal portion where Jewish settlements have been installed. Israeli Palestinians prefer to live under Israeli rule, not under a Palestinian government. Yet with some exceptions they resent and chafe at their lives mandated by a Jewish government.

Even while Palestinian Israelis claim that they are treated as inferiors, and that they are not financially equally endowed, they are citizens of the country to which they are not quite loyal, and Israeli Jews also happen to represent large segments of the county who live in poverty or live with inadequate resources. And just as Palestinian Israelis are exempt from military duty other than as volunteers, ultra-Orthodox Jews have exempted themselves from military duty, a condition scheduled for change.

Church of St.Peter

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his cabinet decided to pass a law that would officially designate Israel a Jewish state, a great outcry arose that doing any such thing would impair the secular nature of its democratic government and imperil the status of Arabs. Israel is, in fact, a country meant to be respected and regarded as a Jewish state. It extends equality to non-Jews as citizens, as lawmakers, as justices and on occasion cabinet members.

To deny Israel the right to formally designate itself a Jewish state is an absurdity. Would any Arab country agree to removing the formal designation of its identity as an Arab state? Why should Israel defy reality? A recent change in election law requiring that parties be capable of receiving 3.25% of the vote over the former 2%, led to Arab parties coalescing under an umbrella Joint List. That Joint list embraces Palestinian nationalists, communists, socialists, feminists, Islamists, and far-left Israelis.

The coalition now looks set to assemble unto itself sufficient votes from the Palestinian-Israeli population to give it more political clout in the national assembly, the Knesset. One of their goals would be to enact legislation making Nakba Day an official day of commemoration of the 'displacement' of Palestinians resulting from the founding of Israel. Nakba Day is a Palestinian commemoration of what is to them a tragedy.

What kind of moral sense would it make for a Jewish state founded through the auspices of the United Nations seeing the utility and justice in dividing the land left over from Jordan's founding through Partition between Jews and Arabs, to mourn alongside the 20 percent of non-Jews at the founding of the State of Israel? As a Jewish state, the founding of Israel is a logical emotional matter of celebration at the long-lost recovery of their heritage.

Those Israeli Palestinians who view the founding of the State of Israel which they insist in retaining citizenship within, yet see the need to grieve its founding, more than adequately display the kind of alienation from the country that marks them as unfit to be granted citizenship and an equal place in the one society of the Middle East where that equality is freely granted them.