Venom in a Vacuum?

"I was pleased that she did not respond [to the provocations and jeers as she showed up for work wearing her police uniform]. She has thick skin, just like an elephant, and that's important in our society. Silence is the best response."
"We are part of this society [as Israeli citizens], so we should serve it. The people attacking her are a gang of wild kids with nothing better to do with their lives. They should go find themselves and think about what, if anything, they have actually done on behalf of their community [in a predominately Arab town in Israel]."
Ali Saadi, Arab Israeli, Bedouin village of Basmat Tabun

"The new generation that has grown up sees the truth and feels a sense of belonging and identification. It understands the mood in the community much better than you and realizes that many of the problems facing Arab society are the result of those slogans, lies, and conspiracy theories that you have been peddling to us to benefit yourselves."

Mohammad Kabiya, Israel Defense Forces air force member, from the Bedouin northern Israeli village of Kaabiyye

Sabrin Saadi, Facebook

The Injaz Center for Professional Arab Local Governance in Israel conducted a comprehensive study published in 2015 on the scope of crime and violence in Israel's Arab sector. It found that a dramatic rise in that sector in crime occurred since 2007, in parallel with an associated rise in incarcerated Arabs. Arabs made up 42% of all prisoners in Israeli jails in 2010. That figure rose by 2014 to 49% and statistics further showed an over-representation of youthful Arabs between the ages of twelve and eighteen, when Arabs represent 20% of the total population of Israel.

In response to that very real problem, new police stations were positioned in two Arab villages in the north of Israel; Jisr az-Zarqa, and Kafr Kanna. In an effort to assure the population of a shoring up of the presence of police to address the situation, the two stations were properly staffed and prepared to act as required to protect the towns' populations. A swift response erupted mere days later when a short video showed up on Facebook.

In the video a young policewoman from a nearby Bedouin village was shown in uniform wearing a hijab on her way to the Kafr Kanna station. Assembled around her was a group of young demonstrators, loudly cursing her and spitting their contempt toward her. Policewoman Sabrin Saadi appeared to take no notice, continued on her way, and entered the police station to begin her day's work.

She may not have visibly reacted to the virulently hateful provocation, calling her a traitor to the Palestinian 'cause', aiding the 'occupation' in the vilest of taunting terms, but when she returned home after her shift, she spoke with her father, telling him how she had been affected by the demonstration. He encouraged her to continue on just as she was doing, that her aspiration to become a police officer spoke to her dedication to her country, and her wish to represent it in the critical maintenance of law and order.

Ms. Saadi and other Bedouin, Arab and Druze citizens of Israel who choose to serve their country's military and police services are in the minority, but they represent Israelis who value their citizenship and the nation that promotes their place in society as equals even while the majority choose to oppose the very notion of a Jewish state. The irony here is that most Arab Israelis prefer to live within Israel rather than under the Palestinian Authority, and they oppose any notion of transferring their villages to Palestinian rule under a nascent Arab state.

A Palestinian protestor lights a tire on fire during clashes with Israeli security forces in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on December 29, 2017, following the weekly Muslim Friday prayers (AFP / Musa al Shaer)

With the American declaration of the recognition of east Jerusalem as Israel's capital meriting the official move of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem where all Israel government offices are located, the Palestinian 'resistance' and anti-'normalization' went into overdrive. Outrage and resistance to the U.S. administration's controversial move was instant and virulent, with promises of violent reaction materializing in a new intifada, incited by fiery defiance speeches by President Mahmoud Abbas, and echoed by Hamas.

Palestinian youth nursed and nourished from the cradle through their formative and educational years on hatred and opposition to Israel and the presence of a Jewish State took to the new intifada with enthusiasm as more reason to riot, storm the streets and enact their opposition in time-honoured Palestinian flourishes of burning tires, rocket barrages and rock-throwing along with Molotov cocktails at Israeli security.

The exception was those among the Arab population who have recognized and sought out their futures with Israel. For Sabrin Saadi it meant she is not on her own, there are friends who will support her and defend her, among them Mohammad Kabiyya who had enlisted in the IDF and who takes pains to speak with her almost daily with the promise that he and his friends are determined to do all they are able to reassuring her she has chosen to do the right thing. Those led by the Islamic Movement will be restrained from harming her or other young Arabs following her example.


According to IDF airman Kabiyya, activists from the Arab Balad party joined their opposition with the Islamist demonstrators who speak of the new police stations as an Israeli plot to gain control over Arab villages. A member of the Israeli Knesset, Jamal Zahalka, who is the Balad party chairman, took part in one of those demonstrations reviling Sabrin. Arab Israelis are able to elect their own representatives to reflect their interests in Israel's Parliament, and as parliamentary members go out of their way to suborn the state, serving the anti-'normalization' interests of Islamists.

 

"This is no friendly hello. The Israel Police are spreading lies. We have seen that there has been no drop in crime rates in those settlements in which a police station has already been established", claimed Zahalka, that the stations have been placed in Arab villages for one purpose; to track young Arabs for security purposes, and not the stated reason linked to community safety. His purpose, to condemn the initiative of Israeli Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan.

In point of fact, when public safety and security violations take place with impunity in villages and towns it is the residents who suffer from crime and violence. And since most of the violence is done at the hands of those youth, it makes eminent good sense to 'track' them for 'security purposes', since tracking them is completely linked to the goal of achieving community safety. But this MK's purpose in condemning the initiative and slandering its purpose spurns logic and courts a backlash of the very type of violence he claims to be non-existent.

Palestinian protesters run for cover as tear gas is fired towards them by Israeli security forces during clashes in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on December 29, 2017, following the weekly Muslim Friday prayers. (AFP / Musa al Shaer)

In the village of Salem, in northern Israel, children there are bedded down in bathroom bathtubs at night so they won't be hit by random gunfire. Violence in the Arab sector continues. A report published in Haaretz described the gun battles that take place each night in the village of Salem. Policewoman Saadi's father feels that the verbal assaults his daughter copes will won't evolve into physical violence, since there are many from his village and from Kafr Kanna who have offered support and encouragement to his daughter.

Several lawyers from the Arab sector have offered to represent her pro bono, to help her and any other young people, should she decide to bring charges of defamation against those who attack her.
In the greater scheme of things, there are so many loud voices calling for 'resistance' against the 'oppressor', in the process of winning influence and control over the young and the malleable who want to believe that a great wrong has been done their community, the uphill battle of Mr. Saada and his daughter seems impossible.

A young boy insults US President Donald Trump and threatens Israel during a Hamas rally in Gaza, December 2017. (Screen capture: MEMRI video)

In a shocking display of just how influential Palestinian groups like Fatah (the PLO group of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority) and Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip are in their mind-control over vulnerable young Palestinians, a boy of no more than eight years of age, fully dressed in Hamas military gear complete with face mask, screamed a diatribe at a December 15 Hamas rally in Gaza threatening "Trump the idiot", and "Netanyahu, son of Jewish woman". The video clip has been shared widely on Palestinian social media.

"This is a message to Trump the idiot. You idiot, your promise to Israel will not be successful. You idiot, Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine for all eternity."
“I say to that idiot Benjamin Netanyahu, you son of a Jewish woman, you don’t know your own origins. Here in Gaza, we will trample the heads of your soldiers underfoot, like we did in Nahal Oz [A Hamas gunmen attack from a tunnel, infiltrating an Israeli army base, killing five soldiers in 2014]."
"Here in Gaza there are men who do not fear death. Get it, you son of a Jewish woman? You have no source in history. Get it, you son of a Jewish woman? Jerusalem is ours, it is our capital. We will not relinquish a single inch of the land of Palestine. Get it, you son of a Jewish woman? Get it, you son of a Jewish woman?"
"You have never existed in history. Get it, you idiot? If you don’t get it, we, the children of Gaza, will trample you underfoot until you get it. Get it, you son of a Jewish woman? Peace and Allah’s mercy and blessings upon you."
Ahmad Idriss, Gaza

Palestinian Muslim worshipers take part in a demonstration against the US president’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, outside the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City’s al-Aqsa mosque compound on December 29, 2017. (AFP / Musa al Shaer)AFP / Ahmad Gharabli)

From Gaza, groups like Islamic Jihad fire missiles over the border into Israel in an expression of their cordial respects for the Jewish State. Hamas repeatedly emphasizes a new intifada, inciting all Palestinians to violently confront soldiers and settlers. At the Gaza border fence where Gazan Palestinians cross into Israel -- including family members of the leaders of Hamas -- for expert medical care at Israeli hospitals, Ismail Haniyeh the Hamas leader, gives high praise to the "blessed intifada", urging that Jerusalem be liberated.

One young mother dressed in a black burqa, her face mask etched with the Hamas emblem, brought her baby to the rally, so he would come "to love Hamas and the Al-Qassam Brigades" (the terrorist armed wing of Hamas). "We bring our small children to teach them to love Hamas. No matter what the Jews or the Arab world do to Hamas, we will support it", she said to an interviewer, above the screams of her baby.