Chapter 4

Chapter 4 Israeli Arabs: Fathers and Sons (and Daughters) January 28, 1980. Wise Auditorium at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Some fifty-five years after its founding, with emotional speeches and a deep sense of Jewish historical import, the first Jewish university in the Land of Israel, and the largest, watches as its students gather for a "cultural event." The hall is packed to overflowing with more than 600 students who are on their feet, singing the anthem. The auditorium fairly shakes as the loud, proud voices sing: In the name of freedom, we shall give our lives, Arab Palestine is the land of our struggle We will accomplish the impossible ... We have seen the path from the Negev to the Galilee Our front will be triumphant. The "anthem." No, not "Hatikva." The anthem. Of Fatah, the guerilla arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The students of Hebrew University sit. On the stage a pantomime is being performed. A soldier -- an Israeli -- is torturing "Palestinians." Suddenly, three figures, faces covered by red kafias, leap upon him. As he lies on the stage, prostrate, hands outstretched, the three heroes strangle and stab him to death. As the pantomime reaches a climax, the students of Hebrew University are on their feet, cheering and applauding wildly. The cultural evening ends with the moderator thanking the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine for its contribution of IL 10,000. ... The place is Hebrew University and the students do indeed study there, most with generous scholarships. But they are Arabs -- Israeli Arabs, and the vast majority are citizens of the state. They are studying to be attorneys and physicians and engineers and professors. But mostly they are studying to be the future leaders of the PLO and the "revolution." And, of course, they owe their education to the generosity and liberality of the Jews of Israel and the world. On June 20, 1976, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stood before his colleagues, members of the Labor Party, and spoke concerning the 57 problems and future of the Arabs of Israel. In his hands he held papers -- statistics -- detailing the immense "progress" made by the Arabs of Israel since 1948. Among the figures that Rabin threw out to prove his contention of Arab advancement were those that dealt with education: In 1948, only 32.5 percent of Israeli Arab children were attending schools. Now the figure was 92 percent, compared with 60 percent in Jordan; 40 percent in Egypt, Iraq, and Lybia; 20 percent in Algeria; and 15 percent in Yemen. Whereas the number of Jewish students had risen sixfold since 1948, the number of Arabs now studying in state schools had jumped twelvefold. More than 1,500 were now studying in Israeli universities (and several hundred were studying outside the country). In 1948 there were only 300 Arab teachers; in 1976, said Rabin, there were more than 5,000. Thanks to Israeli generosity, there were 241 kindergartens, 295 primary schools, 28 intermediate schools, and 80 high schools for Arab children. In Premier Rabin's self-satisfaction one sees the bitter reality of Israeli self-delusion. Was Rabin seriously telling Jews that educational advancement would satisfy the Arabs and make them more sympathetic to the Jewish state? More to the point: Did the prime minister of Israel not understand that it was precisely the educated Arabs of Israel who would be the most extreme, the most dangerous, the future leaders of the nationalistic revolution? Did he not comprehend the tragic irony in the fact that the Israeli government and Jewish money were creating the Arab intellectual who would lead the revolt against Israel? The self-evident truth is that the figures that show the growth of Arab education are far greater cause for Jewish mourning than joy. The Jerusalem Post (February 26, 1979) interviewed an Arab university graduate, a member of the PLO-supporting Abna-el-balad group in the West Galilee village of Kabul. He is the perfect example of the product that Israel's "head-and-stomach" policy makers helped to produce. Rabin and Begin would surely point with pride to the young Israeli Arab, a graduate of Haifa's Ironi Aleph High School (the only Jewish-Arab high school in the land), as well as Haifa University's Department of Middle East History. Says this well-educated Israeli Arab: "A Palestinian state in the West Bank will not solve my problems. The PLO is the only body that fights for me. ... I do not feel this is my country. I don't care if I have more materially here than Arabs elsewhere. I am willing to be poor if it is my country. ... "I don't know where a Palestinian state should be, but ... of course I hope it will include my village. 58 Let it be noted that his village is in the Galilee. On Israeli campuses, Jewish students wear T-shirts that read "UCLA" or "Boston Celtics." But in May 1980 a group of Arab students took off their shirts to reveal their own brand of T-shirt which read: "The PLO represents us." That is the fundamental belief of all the Israeli Arab students, and if there are Jews who are shocked it is merely because of their own refusal to see. The Arab students and intellectuals are the representatives of a new generation of Israeli Arabs, one that rejects that very description. In a Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) article (May 5, 1977) Gil Sedan wrote "Nor do they trouble to conceal their increasingly negative attitude toward the government of Israel, the country of which they are citizens. In the Arab village of Kfar Kana, just north of Nazareth, this reporter asked a young shopkeeper if he was Muslim or Christian. 'We are all Arab,' was his reply.” A perceptive article in Maariv was titled: "From Israeli Arabs to Palestinians." That is the nub of the issue. These people now consider themselves Palestinian Arabs who, through tragedy, happen to live in Israel. It is not a situation they are happy with, and many are trying to change it. The pity is that for years, the leaders of Israel (and, of course, the American Jewish Establishment) pointed to Israeli Arab passivity and acquiescence as proof of their loyalty to, and acceptance of, the Jewish state. Either they were fools or preferred to act as such. The real reason for Israeli Arab passivity lay in the very natural results of the events of history. With the approval in 1947 by the United Nations of the Partition Plan, creating Jewish and Arab states in "Palestine," the Arabs, both within the land and without, prepared for what an Arab League official called "a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and Crusades." With British troops leaving, the Arabs were confident that they would decimate the Jews and establish Arab rule over the entire country. But while Allah proposed, the G-d of the Jews disposed, and the outcome of the fighting was quite different. The Arab armies were thrown back, and not only did the State of Israel come into being, but an incredible panic swept the Arabs in the country, causing hundreds of thousands to flee. As the dust settled, entire formerly Arab villages and cities and regions stood empty of inhabitants and were now part of the new Jewish state. That which the Arabs could 59 have had, were they prepared to accept the UN plan, was now lost to them. Instead of a tiny, grotesque Jewish state - in three sections, joined by two narrow checkpoints and with an Arab population constituting 40 percent of its citizens - there was now a much larger and more stable Israel with only 150,000 shell-shocked Arabs as its citizens. But it was not only the quantitative loss that was so brutal. It was more than just the shock of being transformed from a majority into a minority. The few Arabs of Israel who were left were now a people without leadership. The panicky mass exodus had seen the disappearance of the higher social classes. To quote a report by Uri Standel, issued by the prime minister's office: "The wealthy Arab landlords and rich merchants, the religious dignitaries, lawyers, doctors, engineers, writers, and journalists were the first to take flight, depriving the population of all centers of initiative.” The Arabs who were left were for the most part fellahin, feudal peasants, ignorant and illiterate. The last thing in the world they wanted was a political struggle. Knowing what they would have done to the Jews had the Arabs won the war (the rape of Jewish women and the severed sexual organs stuffed into murdered Jews' mouths were not isolated incidents in the riots of the twenties and thirties), they huddled fearfully, hoping just to live. They did that, and more. From a group that faced unemployment in the cities, and famine and no source of credit in the villages, they evolved -- with the help of the Israeli government -- into the comfortable and selfassured Israeli Arab community of today (nearly 700,000 strong). But this took time, and for many years the Arab of Israel assumed a low profile. He was ignorant -- he wished only to make a living. Not that he loved the Jews or their state. Hardly. It was rather that he was traumatized by defeat, a simple person without leadership, living (until 1966) under military rule that prevented him from freely moving about. More importantly, he was part of the rural, feudal family structure known as the hamulla. Until recently -- and it is still a powerful factor in many villages -- the Arab knew little individualism. Essentially rural, he belonged to a basic social village unit, known as ahal or dar, that can best be explained as "the extended family." This included the father, mother, all unmarried daughters, and all the sons with their wives and children. They all lived in the same village, in adjacent houses and sometimes under the same roof. 60 Since the father owned the land that his children cultivated, he had complete control over them. They would hand over their earnings, and he supplied their wants. The second factor that went into the de-individualizing of the Israeli Arab was the fact that even beyond the immediate "extended family," the Arab village was part of a structure based on kinship ties. Related families often lived in the same neighborhood and shared common economic and social problems. The heads of the hamullas were its oldest members, their authority determined by their wealth and immediate family size. These elderly hamulla heads held well-nigh dictatorial powers over the members of their clans. They determined who would receive land and who would progress up the socioeconomic ladder. And because, in the first years of the state, these patriarchs ruled the lives of their people, there reigned an illusory acceptance of Israel by its Arab citizens. The truth is that the Jewish government understood from the first the venality and corruption of the old hamulla patriarchs. They were conservative, suspicious people, interested only in their own welfare and position. For money and a promise of local power they were prepared to give the Jews what they wanted: Knesset votes and submission. Of course, the old men hated the Jews, but their guiding light was "What is good for me?" They had little patience with and less understanding of national aspirations, and, of course, any talk of social and economic reform was anathema to them. The Israeli authorities in those years followed a two-pronged policy: a military administration that severely restricted movement and unauthorized political activity, and, on the other hand, a close working relationship with the old men of the hamullas. Large amounts of money went into patriarchal pockets, and development funds were generously granted to "deserving" villages. The Labor Party ingeniously created two Arab "parties," both faithful hamullas led puppets, known as Progress and Development and the List of Bedouins and Villagers. But all Israeli parties tried their hand at buying Arab votes through the venal old men. Thus, few found it odd that the Jewish National Religious Party was able to garner votes in Arab villages. It was hardly ideology but rather a clear indication of the real reason for the apparent Arab "acceptance of" and "identification with" the state of the Jews. It was not loyalty to Israel but an "Uncle Ahmed" mentality typical of early stages of minority submission. Of course, it had to end. The fraud of Israeli Arab acceptance of Israel was built on the fact of the feudal structure of the Arab villages. But the 61 days of that reactionary anachronism were numbered, and ironically, it was the Israeli government that, having the most to gain from its perpetuation, destroyed it. There is nothing more menacing to entrenched, conservative feudalists than social and economic change, but that is precisely what Israeli society and governmental policies brought about in the villages. The very Arab educational revolutions of which Israel boasts have destroyed the authority of the hamulla heads by creating an educated, radical class that questions all the social, political, and economic axioms upon which the ruling patriarchs based their authority. It is not only that education opened up windows to the world and allowed the young Arab to see a vast spectrum of other social structures. It is not only that education exposed young Arabs to radical, leftist, revolutionary views that called for the overthrow of feudal privilege. It is deeper than that. Education -- along with the fact that the young Arab was Israeli-born and not a personal witness to the shattering trauma of defeat and fear of the Jews -- led to a vicarious deep sense of shame and anger directed against the older generation of Arabs. The Arab who survived the 1948 debacle that permanently affected his thinking and drove him to collaborate with the Jews was now looked upon by his Israeli-born son as a traitor and boot-licking lackey. Born free, taking his citizenship and general rights for granted, educated, and open to radical ideas, he looked with contempt on his own father for kowtowing to the Israelis. Thus, in February 1978, Israeli radio interviewer Edna Peer offered a live exchange between an Israeli Arab university student and his father. The son, a budding actor who told of having broken with his Jewish girl friend because she called Arafat a "murderer," was bitter toward his father. The latter is a quiet Arab, the kind of whom Israelis are fond. His local village's Histadrut (Israeli trade union) chairman, he is typically trotted out by all the Israelis who refuse to see the Arab reality. He is presented as "proof" of Arab loyalty. The son, knowing this and knowing, too, that his father's father was killed in Acre during the 1948 war, bitterly asked the father: "Do you know what I would have done if the Jews had murdered you the way your father was killed?" The son, not the father, is the representative of today's Israeli Arab. Every Arab school which Rabin and Begin and all the rest boast Israel has established will produce hundreds and thousands of such haters of Jews. The hamulla patriarch is an anachronism; the Israeli government saw him as a dam to stop the waters of Arab nationalism, but the dam has already burst. The Israelis might have gained twenty years had they attempted to preserve the Arab feudal structure. But since they chose to bring education and progress to 62 the Arabs, they guaranteed the creation of an immediate generation of those dedicated to the active destruction of the Jewish state. Of course, education is only part of the total revolution that has taken place in the Israeli Arab community. The Israeli government, which at first really believed that a well-fed Arab is a quiet, happy Arab, and which was also determined to show the world how liberal it was, consciously set about to raise the Arab standard of living. Two five-year plans, designed to develop the villages, succeeded in transforming the entire social, economic, and political structure of Arab life, at a cost of more than $50 million. Electricity was brought to almost every village, along with water and sewerage. New roads, houses, and clinics went up. Agriculture was revolutionized as the irrigated areas were expanded, especially in the villages of the Little Triangle along the Mekorot pipeline. New water sources were developed, old springs restored, and pipes laid to the individual villages. Long-term loans and easy terms for agriculture were made available, and as a result mechanization developed rapidly. Tractors and combines replaced the old wooden plow and donkey and promoted the transition from subsistence to market crops. Israelis taught Arab farmers the latest methods of farming, diversification of crops, and land conservation. The Arab standard of living skyrocketed. Easy credit and other government help saw a spectacular rise in new, spacious stone homes, equipped with modern sanitation, running water, gas cookers, refrigerators, and television sets. Close to 90 percent of all Arabs have electric lighting, and every village now is blessed with paved roads and easy access to the national highway system. Life was made better than the Arabs had ever dreamed, thanks to Jewish money and efforts. And the inevitable happened. The rapid economic change that joined the educational advances brought about a social revolution. The difference between the young Arab and his parents is not measured in years but centuries. The rural revolution sharply weakened the old feudal structure, as young Arabs were now able to apply for loans themselves and were no longer dependent on either fathers or hamullas. In addition, the sharp rise in living standards only brought forth rising expectations, whetting both the economic and political appetites, so that the young Israeli Arab stands like some modern-day Oliver Twist, facing his Jewish "benefactor" and demanding: more! 63 Israeli economic and educational advancement also led to a major social change -- the rapid growth of the number of Arabs who daily leave their villages to work in Jewish towns and cities as well as the steady growth of an urban Arab population, with all the radicalism that this implies. It is the town and city that produce unrest. Revolution, Marx to the contrary, is not created by the rural numb and dumb. This is true even in advanced countries, and it is a hundred times truer in societies in which backward, conservative, feudal members of rural areas are suddenly thrown into the open, liberal, modern world of the city. When the Arab was exclusively an agricultural worker, he remained in his village. Mornings he awoke in his village; during the day he worked in his village; and as the sun set, he slept in his village. His world was circumscribed by it, his thoughts and actions molded by it and its hamulla heads. No agitator showed his head there for fear of losing it, and the ignorant Israeli Arab of 1948 had his wife (or wives), his children, his sheep, his field, his religion. Those, for him, were all that he needed, and he fully expected that his son would follow his life-style exactly, just as he had followed his father's, who had followed his father's. But Israeli society could not be kept away. The growth of urban industry called for hands, laborers. The pay offered was far better than what might have been earned in the village, and gradually -- and then not so gradually -- the Arab began to leave each morning to work in Tel Aviv or Hadera or Haifa or Netanya. Today, well over 50 percent of Israel's Arabs work in towns -- Jewish towns and cities. They see a different lifestyle, one that is quicker, more exciting. They see the stores and the clothing and the appliances. They see the women in short skirts and skimpy halters. The conflict between conservative and religious values and modern ones begins. The traditional value givers, the hamulla heads, are undermined. Moreover, as the opportunity for employment outside the village grows, the power and authority of the father diminishes. This is true even when the son is not an intellectual but merely makes more money than his father, thanks to a job in the Jewish city. How much more so for the high school graduate, for the university student, whose dismay at his father's backwardness is reinforced by contempt for the corruption of the hamulla heads and deep shame at the readiness of the old generation to sell the national heritage for the pottage of Israeli lentils. Today, under the impact of Israeli-induced modernization, there is a steady trend from the villages to the towns and cities. Probably some 40 percent of Israel's Arabs are now urban dwellers. Of course, in the cities the radicalization is even more rapid. In the cities there is no closed 64 society, no ever-present father, no stifling hamulla. In the cities there are opportunities to meet Jewish girls, leftists, and intellectuals. In the cities one can see the Jewish world that runs Israel, the land to which the Arab is supposed to be loyal. Israeli Arabs. Fathers and sons - and increasingly daughters. For the Israelis have liberated the Arab woman, too, in order that she may also vote for anti-Zionists and teach anti-Israel hatred. Thus, when the prime minister's office boasts that "the expansion of the educational system has helped to raise the standard of education of the younger generation of women" and "the fact that Arab women are coming into closer contact with the Jewish population is opening up new horizons," one gropes for an explanation for the smug satisfaction. The most that can be said for Israel's liberal policy is that it has created a new generation of Jew haters with due care to ensure that the source of the hate is equal, without discrimination because of sex. To quote once again the young university graduate from the western Galilee village of Kabul who heads the PLO Group Abna-el-balad: "We have very good young people in our village. The father no longer rules here. Now, each voter has his own ideas. We are trying to get rid of the hamulla lists. Ninety percent of the young people voted for us in the local elections. ... My father wants to be left alone in peace and quiet.” The generation of the fathers, the Uncle Ahmeds, is dying, destroyed by the Israeli government's "head-and-stomach" policy. The father is dead; long live the son, and daughter, whom Israel created. They will do their best to destroy the Jewish state, and, of course, the Jewish state will continue to produce them. The very first generation of Israeli Arab university graduates immediately produced the E Ard antiIsrael movement in the early 1960s. Indeed, even then there were those who saw and understood -- and those who did, terrified by what they saw, put it out of mind. In Midstream magaz'me (December 1962) Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer, said: "One of the more alarming aspects of the Israeli problem is that the new generation of Israeli Arabs generally show even less willingness, not to speak of eagerness, to accept the fact of Israel's existence than do their fathers and grandfathers. The so-called Arab 'intelligentsia' in Israel, which seems to embrace every literate person from university graduates to those who finished a few secondary classes, are in the majority of cases swayed by the heady talk ... about 'settling scores with Israel.' Many of them, it would appear, cannot reconcile themselves to their status as a 65 minority in a Jewish state and keep hoping for some sort of savior." Was anyone listening? In the past ten to fifteen years, a professional, academically trained stratum has arisen among Israel's Arabs. The rise of the new Arab was a result of the bewildered and bewildering "policy" of an Israel that hopes to win Arab love through educational, social, and economic advancement. What is the real result of the millions of dollars poured into higher Arab education and the hundreds of millions spent on secondary (high school) training? Consider: In December 1979 the Progressive National Movement (PNM) won the election for control of the Arab Student Committee at Hebrew University. In its platform the PNM called for: - acceptance of the Palestinian Covenant (which calls for the elimination of Israel), - the creation of a "democratic, secular Palestine" in place of Israel, - acceptance of terrorist activities as part of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. And, indeed, in 1979, students and visitors at the university were startled to find mimeographed copies of the Palestinian National Charter being distributed. Among other things in the charter were Articles 19 and 20, which read: "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the State of Israel are entirely illegal. ... Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history. ...” The strenuous efforts of the leaders of the State of Israel have produced a generation of Arab leaders and intellectuals who are a source of everlasting irony: they are the products of the Jewish state that they wish to dismantle in favor of an Arab one. And should one have any doubt, the immensely frank interview with Mahmud Muhareb should dispel all of them. Muhareb, an Israeli Arab citizen of Lydda and at the time chairman of the Arab Student Committee at Hebrew University, presented his views to Maariv, Israel's largest newspaper (January 20, 1978): "We, the Arab students in the university, constitute an indivisible part of the Palestinian Arab nation, and we struggle in its service and in order to achieve its goals. "As for me and my personal lot, I am first and foremost a Palestinian, resident of Lydda. My Israeli citizenship was forced upon me. I do not recognize it and do not see myself as belonging to the State of Israel. The law requires me to carry an Israeli identity card and passport. As a Palestinian I would prefer Palestinian ones. 66 "With the final solution common to the Arabs of Palestine and Judea, Lydda will be in the sovereign boundaries of the democratic state. What will that state be called? Palestine, naturally. ... "We do not recognize the right which you call 'historic' of the Jewish people in this land - this is our fundamental principle. In this land only the Palestinian Arab people have the historic right. “ Muhareb is a member of the PNM, one of the two major forces among Arab students in Israel. It is instructive that the other force, the "moderate" one, is Rakah, the Israeli Communist Party, which led the bloody Land Day riots against the government in 1976. But there is no essential difference between the ultimate hope of any Arab student in Israel: Arab sovereignty in every part of "Palestine" that is freed from the "conqueror.” There is nothing new or startling about this. The signs of Arab intellectual hatred of Israel and deep desire for its dismantlement were obvious to all who wished to see. The day the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War saw the surreptitious circulation of a flier that read: "With blood and spirit we shall liberate the Galilee." On the terrible night of the massacre of more than twenty Jewish high school students by Arab terrorists in the Galilee town of Ma'alot, in 1974, the nation mourned. But not all. The Arab students at Hebrew University held a noisy, joyous party in their Mount Scopus dormitories, built by funds from naive Western Jews who wanted to help the "Jewish state.” The next morning a Jewish student who had lost her brother during the "war of attrition" in 1970 complained bitterly to the dean of students. An investigation was begun and evidence gathered, but no disciplinary action was taken. The administration explained to the Jewish students that its primary role was to lessen tensions and preserve the delicate relationship between Arab and Jewish students. This declaration brought forth predictable results. Within two weeks the Arab students were involved in yet another incident. Israel commemorates, annually, the terrible Holocaust that ripped away the lives of six million Jews. Known as the Day of the Holocaust and the Bravery, it was commemorated at Hebrew University by the lighting of memorial candles at the entrance of the dormitories. That night a band of Arab students smashed the glasses that held the candles. Even as an investigation was launched, the next week -- Memorial Day for the fallen soldiers of Israel -- saw similar desecrations of candles in their memory. Angry protests led to a decision by a 67 university committee to suspend the students, but the university administration in a "gesture of goodwill" accepted the appeal against the "harshness" of the verdict and allowed the students to return to the benches of Israeli intellect. Not for nothing did the Arab students see in this retreat further proof of Jewish weakness. (It is pertinent to note that on Holocaust Day, 1980, more memorial candles were desecrated. One Arab student, Suliman Hasham, caught as he extinguished one of the lights, said: "There is enough light in the dormitories. We do not need candles.") The pitiful weakness of the Hebrew University administration under President Avraham Harman inexorably led to greater brazenness on the part of the Arab students. During the latter part of 1974, terrorist activity reached a peak, and worried university officials met with the student organization to set up regular guard duty in the exposed dormitories. It was decided that all students who lived in the dormitories -- including Arabs -- would have to take a turn at guard duty. The Arab student organization immediately issued a statement that read: "No Arab student will participate in any activity aimed at a brother fedayon ["freedom fighter," the Arab term for the PLO terrorists], even if this refusal involves self-sacrifice -- if this must be the price of the Palestinian revolution.” At a press conference called by the Arab students on December 1, 1975, three Arabs, Adel Mana'a, Riad Amin, and Nabil Nahas, along with two of the apparently obligatory Jewish self-haters, appeared to explain their opposition. The Arabs called the requirement "unjust because it involves a matter of conscience." The conscience, of course, was their feeling that the terrorists were fighting their battle and that it was a just one. Meanwhile, two Arab students, fearing that they would be expelled from the dormitories, did agree to guard duty. On the night of November 28, an attempt was made to set fire to their room. On December 23 some 200 Arabs and their radical leftist Jewish friends from a group calling itself Campus gathered at the university to protest. The banner they carried read: "We are not ashamed to be Palestinians." The transformation from "Israelis" was becoming bolder. A mass petition signed by Jewish students demanded that the Arab students fulfill their obligations. At first the university stood firm and agreed with the demand. Suddenly, however, it announced that it had recognized "the crisis of conscience" posed for the Arab student and agreed that those who could not morally agree to do guard duty would be excused. 68 The victory led to similar demands for exemptions at Haifa University, where at least one-third of the students are Arabs. In a struggle that saw threats on the life of the Jewish student in charge of the guard-duty roster as well as two Arab students from the villages of Isfiya and Deir Hanna charged with kidnapping and threatening the life of a Bedouin student who was prepared to guard, the Haifa University administration agreed to allow the Arabs to escape guard duty for a token monthly fee of IL 30 (at the time less than five dollars). The truth of the matter is that the Jewish demand to have pro-PLO students do guard duty was in itself grotesque. What emerged from this theater of the absurd was a Jewish university allowing pro-PLO Arabs to study and enjoy scholastic benefits. Jews demanded that the haters of Israel guard the Jews from their own Arab brethren. The combination of Israeli ghetto timidity and Arab brazenness (one fed on the other) rapidly brought the campus, for the first time, to violence. In the winter of 1975, the city of Nazareth, hotbed of Arab nationalism, elected a Communist mayor, Tewfik Zayad. Zayad, a bitter hater of Zionism and the Jewish state, became the focal point of a new upsurge of Arab nationalism. In particular he led the struggle against land expropriation (with full compensation) in the Galilee. That northern region of Israel, with an Arab population of more than 50 percent, posed a serious security threat to the Jewish state, and strenuous efforts were made to encourage Jewish settlement there. As mentioned earlier, the Arabs seized on the land issue to call for a general strike on Land Day, March 31, 1976, and in the resultant violence in which the Arab population of both the Galilee and the Little Triangle attacked police and soldiers with rocks and firebombs, six Arabs were killed. At Hebrew University, Arab students gathered on May 19, 1976, to commemorate the dead Arabs and to shout: "Down with the Occupation" and "The Galilee is Arab." An opposing Jewish group waved the national flag and sang Hebrew songs. Suddenly, from the Arab side, heavy stones began to fly. Witnesses later testified that the Arabs had parked a Cortina automobile, license number 755-982, nearby and removed sacks of stones which were thrown at the Jews. Four Jewish students were injured. One, Elhanan Blumenthal, was injured seriously and required a head operation. The leader of the Jewish student body, Ariela Raudal, bitterly accused the university administration and President Harman of bowing to the Arabs. Raudal warned that the presence of 500 Arab students in the dormitories would lead to bloodshed and that the riot "was only the beginning.” 69 And the Israeli government response to the clear threat from Arab educational advances? In January 1976 the Ministry of Education released the findings of a fourteen-member team of Jewish and Arab "experts" on education, headed by leftist Mattatyahu Peled (who later became one of the spokesmen for Peace Now). The team called for reform of Arab education by basing it on the traditional and modern foundations of Arab culture, "stressing the particularity of the national character of Arab literature and history." There is, clearly, nothing more calculated to instil in the young Arab a greater sense of difference and feeling of injustice done to him than this program. And, of course, it would be done at Jewish expense. Nevertheless, the Israeli government refused to bite the bullet. In reply to Arab Knesset member Zeidan Atshe's demand for an upgrading of the Arab schools. Education Ministry Director-General Eliezer Shmueli announced on September 27, 1978, that he had taken schooling in the Arab sector under his personal care. The ministry, despite budget problems, announced that it would spend an extra IL 20 million on Arab education. Earlier, in June 1976, the first twenty-four Arab women graduates received their diplomas and licenses as Arab elementary school teachers from the David Yellin Hebrew Teachers College in Jerusalem. The program was sponsored and paid for by the Education Ministry, which was anything but lax in its diligent efforts to produce the educated and intellectual Arabs who would lead the struggle to do away with the David Yellin Hebrew Teachers College, the Israeli Education Ministry -- and Israel. Thus, Prime Minister Begin's adviser on Arab affairs, the Ministry of Education, and the Jewish Agency announced, in March 1978, that a new state-financed fund had been set up to award one hundred scholarships to outstanding Arab university students. Studies were being made, it was announced, to widen the scope of the fund to cover outstanding Israeli Arab high school students as well, if enough Jewish money could be found. The most powerful weapon the PLO has in Israel is the education provided by Jews, with Jewish money, for the Israeli Arabs. The Jewish state trains teachers who, increasingly, either teach or turn a deaf ear to strident Arab nationalism. And how could it be different? In 1937 the British Palestine Royal Commission Report claimed that Arab teachers were turning government schools into "seminaries of Arab nationalism." 70 A former Arab education official in Palestine wrote: "An Arab teacher could not, even with a severe stretch of the imagination, have been expected to foster loyalty to a government that, in his opinion, was daily undermining the national existence of his people" (A. L. Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine). The very same words could be -- and are -- said by Arab teachers serving under the Jewish government of Israel. And they, actively and passively, train the new, educated, hostile, hating generation of the PLO. In December 1979 Maariv carried an expose of the growing open hostility toward the state manifested in Arab government schools. It quoted an official of the Education Ministry: "Political subjects are raised in class and teachers utter slogans that deny the very existence of the state. These are commonplace occurrences." The superintendents whose job it is to check and prevent such incidents are themselves, in many cases, in sympathy with the statements. Writes Maariv. "At a meeting of superintendents three years ago, one said: I am a Palestinian Arab and as such I will educate the children.'“ Among the incidents reported by Maariv. On a trip to Jericho by a school in Araba, the teacher shouted at two Bedouins serving in the Israeli army: "You should be ashamed of yourselves wearing those uniforms and serving in the army as the Jews rob you of your land.” In Rama, on Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day), a teacher told his class, "Those Arabs who celebrate the Jewish Independence Day are traitors to their homeland.” On Independence Day, 1977, as the Israeli flag was being raised, one teacher in Sakhnin said: "This flag raising is in honor of the day of servitude and not of independence." The same day, in the village of Sha'ab, three teachers refused to rise for the flag raising and asked others to do likewise. In general, the flag has become the symbolic target of Israeli Arab teachers and students alike. In Tayba, one teacher refuses to teach about the Israeli flag since "the two blue stripes are symbols of the occupation and the desire to expand to the Nile and Euphrates.” On June 18, 1978, students in Turan ripped the flag to pieces. The principal admitted there had been similar incidents in the past and apologized for not reporting them. According to Maariv. 71 "There have been cases of flag burning, the drawing of the PLO flag on blackboards, and hate-filled compositions. In none of these cases was there an adequate response by administration or faculty.” In November 1978 Prime Minister Rabin visited Nazareth to speak to high school students. The Arab students asked him questions that in both content and tone shocked the country. Said Maariv in an editorial: "If anyone thought that the pro-PLO sentiment was limited to the other side of 'the Green Line' [the territories], yesterday's meeting between Premier Rabin and Nazareth high school students should have brought him up short.” In February 1978 four high school students from the village of Tayba were accused of attempting to set fire to two buses and of painting antiZionist slogans. When they were taken to the village to reenact the deeds, hundreds of students stoned the police and prevented them from finishing their mission. When the mayor, Abdul Hamid Abu Ataya, appeared in court with scores of students, he threatened a general strike unless the students were released. It is, thus, little wonder that in a survey of Arab high school students in June 1974, fully 84 percent stated that they favored the establishment of a Palestinian state. (Of the rest, almost all refused to venture an opinion.) The high school students are the target of and greatly influenced by the Arab university students, and because most other careers are limited, the university graduates gravitate toward teaching, where they convey their bitter anti-Israel feelings. High school students are invited to the campus. In one interesting development, after the openly anti-Israel rally at Hebrew University's Wise Auditorium, the Arabs asked for the hall again for February 10, 1980, to meet with high school students. In light of the previous meeting, the school declined to grant the facility, but a "spontaneous" Arab demonstration persuaded them to change their minds. In March 1978 Arab students at Hebrew University invited high school youngsters from Tayba to spend the weekend at the "Hadassah" dormitories of the school. A wild party broke out, with the students smashing sinks and toilets. Bitter Jewish students complained that it was not the first time. It was clear that the actions were more than exuberance but a political expression of hate and contempt for the state. The rise of the new generation of educated Israeli Arabs who did not know the bitter taste of defeat and who openly moved toward 72 confrontation with Zionism and the Jewishness of the state was itself given enormous impetus by the Six-Day War. Again, ironically, it was Jewish military victory that the Jews turned into yet another political defeat. For the first time in nineteen years the Arabs of Israel were able to meet and talk with other Arabs who were not Israelis, who called themselves "Palestinians," and who openly spoke of the day when the hated Jews would leave. The Israeli Arab suddenly realized that he was neither meat nor milk, fish nor fowl. He was not an Israeli, but now he was struck by the awesome realization that he had not been a "Palestinian" all those years either! He was looked upon by the West Bank "Palestinians" as a traitor who cooperated with, and accepted, Israeli citizenship from the Jews who had stolen the land from his people. In one fell swoop, all the factors that went into creating the new radical Israeli Arab came together. Things would never be the same again. Not only were there new contacts with the West Bank "Palestinians," but this was also the beginning of joint cooperation. Thus, Israeli Arabs participated in a "Palestine Week" held in 1978 at the Universities of Bethlehem and Bir Zeit. They helped organize it, and they printed and distributed a leaflet calling for support of the PLO. In defiance of the law several Israeli Arab students have begun studying in schools in the liberated territories. Indeed, Hanna Nasir, the PLO-backing former president of Bir Zeit College (near Ramallah) who was deported by Israel in 1974 for incitement, told a Kuwaiti newspaper in January 1979: "Despite all Israeli efforts to prevent young Arabs from within the Green Line [Israel] from both studying and teaching at the college, we have three lecturers there today from the region occupied in 1948 [Israel] plus several students. "One of the beautiful things is the renewal of ties between all members of the Palestinian people living in the land of Palestine, and this makes it easier to fight against the conquerors.” This is quite true. The opening of the borders between the State of Israel and the liberated areas was seen by the incredibly obtuse Israelis as allowing the better-fed Israeli Arabs to demonstrate the benefits of Israeli occupation. Of course, a child could have known that exactly the opposite would occur. The Israeli Arabs were suddenly given the opportunity to meet, regularly, with their own people who were struggling for what the Israeli Arab understood to be a common goal: freedom. The mayor of Hebron, Fahd Kawasma, said (January 22, 1979): "The Israeli Arabs have remained foreigners and their lot remains ours. There 73 is no possibility of blurring the fact that they and we are part of the same people, and the fact that they live in Israel does not make them less Palestinian.” In his newspaper interview, Bir Zeit President Nasir added: "The destiny of the Arab College at Beir Zeit is to be the nucleus around which is built the Palestinian state." Indeed, the Arab students being trained in the Jewish universities of Israel see themselves in the same light. They are the seed of the future "Palestine" leaders in that area of "Palestine conquered in 1948." They give leadership and examples to high school students and are the PLO leaders of tomorrow. The irony is that the most extraordinary rise in Arab brazenness has taken place under the supposedly tough Begin government. Maariv reporter Yosef Tzuriel commented on this as long ago as April 27, 1978: "The rise of the Likud to power created a certain amount of tension in the first months among Arabs of Israel and the territories who expected a firmer policy against them. But after a short while it became clear that the new government was as liberal as its predecessor, if not more so.” The last two years have seen an inevitable rise in Arab student hostility toward the state. After winning the elections for leadership of the Arab students at Hebrew University, the PNM opened an office in the student dormitories on Stern Street, hanging out an eye-catching sign: "Progressive National Movement." How a group such as the PNM was allowed to run for office or its members remain as students rather than be prosecuted for sedition would seem difficult to explain. Bear in mind, however, that this is a university that allowed an Arab student. Fares Saur, a member of a terrorist group that planted a bomb in the school cafeteria, to continue his studies after finishing his jail sentence. The school explained that the criteria for acceptance to the university were purely academic. In its publication Tachadi for December 1978 the PNM wrote of its opposition to "any settlement with a recognition of the Zionist entity in any part of Palestine." The student author called for a war "beginning with leaflets and demonstrations and concluding with armed military struggle." Above all, the PNM made this point crystal-clear: "The struggle is not limited to the 'occupied territories.' We must widen it to all parts of the Arab motherland.” The PNM, running for control of the Arab student body, had distributed literature outlining its program and goals in which they demanded that "the right of national self-determination for the 74 Palestinian people also includes the masses in [Israel's] Galilee and the Triangle." And so in January 1979 several Arab students distributed a pamphlet calling for support of the PLO and the disappearance of the "Zionist entity." Moreover, some Arabs fired off a cable to the Damascus meeting of the Palestine National Council to voice their support of the PLCs struggle against the ever-present "Zionist entity.” A furor arose in Israel; more "shock"; more demands for expulsion of all PLO-supporting students from the school. The university did nothing, but tough General Avigdor Ben-Gal issued "stay-at-home" orders to six of the students. The orders kept them limited to their villages and were to be in effect for three months - enough time to make them heroes and thus allow them to return and continue their incitement. The six came from six different Israeli villages: Tamra, Araba, Kfar Yasif, Musmus, Sandala, and Umm al-Fahm. It is instructive to look at two of the students so that we may get a clear picture of the insanity of the Israeli policy, as reported by Yosef Valter in Maariv (February 16, 1979). Masoud A'jabria, twenty-four, is completing his M.A. at Hebrew University in international relations while going to law school. Beside Masoud, there is his brother, Sa'id, learning chemistry at the Mizrachi-religious-sponsored Bar-Nan University; a sister, studying at a teacher's seminar in Hadar Am, and five younger brothers and sisters are attending high school. Naturally, someday they will go on to a university. Yosef Valter visited the family and reported: "From a brief conversation you find that all of them think and speak like Masoud, the older brother." That is a starkly frightening sentence when one remembers that the editor of the Hebrew University student paper, Arye Bender, recalls a conversation he once had with Masoud A'jabria. Said the Arab: "In order to achieve a Palestinian revolution we must shed rivers of blood.” Jamal Mahajana, twenty-one, comes from Umm al-Fahm. His is a small Arab family, with only six children, four of high school age, and one a teacher. Mahajana is a product of the integration Israeli myopics preach. He studied in the mostly Jewish Afula high school and says, "I was not discriminated against." And so, having received the same education his Zionist neighbors received, and having been accepted into Hebrew University while 50,000 poor Sephardic Jews remain outside, Mahajana says of his telegram to the PLO in Damascus: "We emphasized that we are Palestinian Arabs living in the State of Israel and, like others, we claim that the PLO is the sole representative of the Palestinian people. ... The Zionist regime is an oppressive regime. ...” 75 The total lack of any coherent and consistent policy on the part of Israel toward the Arabs was seen two weeks later, when the national Arab Student Union announced that it, too, saw the PLO as the exclusive leader of the Palestinian people. No one was arrested, no one placed under house arrest. Little wonder that in the year that followed Arab boldness increased. Arab students held an unauthorized demonstration at Hebrew University in November 1979 to protest the planned expulsion of Shechem's PLO mayor Bassam Shaka. When the school suspended the leaders of the demonstration, the Arab students announced a massive -- illegal -- protest. The rector, Yisroel Meshulem, a rather spineless academician, fearing a Jewish-Arab confrontation, pleaded with the Arabs to cancel the demonstration and promised to rescind tfie suspensions. The Arab protest was held, nevertheless, and as the students shouted, "We are all Arafat," and "The state is all ours," a fight broke out involving chains, rocks, and knives. Three Jewish students were injured. A Jewish student group was formed called Students Who Are Disgusted. At Haifa University, on May 4, 1980, 150 Arab students marched through school buildings, disrupting classes and shouting against "Israeli fascism." Three days later a swastika and the words "Death to the Jews" were painted on doors at Haifa's Technion. At Haifa University, the Arab students published a paper called Bian, in which, among other things, they said: "We are an indivisible part of the Palestine Arab people and the PLO is our sole legal representative ... Zionism is a racist, colonialist movement. ...” The young Arabs of Israel. The fathers are dying. The sons remain, and they will have sons and daughters - many. The young, educated, modern Arab. The Golem of Israel, created by Jews who believed that by caring for his body and expanding his mind, they would lead the Arab to accept being a permanent minority in a Jewish state. If examples of Israeli blindness were not so prevalent, no one would believe them. But consider: In January 1979 Knesset Education Committee chairman Ora Namir paid a well-publicized visit to the schools of Umm al-Fahm, one of the centers of Israeli Arab hate. Passing a wall on which had been painted "Long live Fatah," she told the Arabs that "we are committed to doing everything we can to make Arab schools equal to Jewish schools," despite a government decision to freeze and cut spending levels for Jews. 76 And then Mrs. Namir, a Knesset member and a leader in Israel, said: "The fact that you do not have enough latrines in the schools is, for me, even more tragic than not enough classrooms. You will have the budget. But you will have to promise me that the latrines will be first.” Not by latrines does an Arab live, and he will never trade his national passions for them. The latrines we give him he will take. But the education he receives from Israel he will use to bring closer that day when Jews will be a minority and he can generously offer them the latrines.