reply by
JC
4/14/2002 (24:43) |
|
I know us Jews all seem alike Ozzie, but we're not. :)
Out with the family all day and just reviewing how much output in the forum there has been.
Well, here's my little cut and paste contribution for the evening. I find this most destressing and really hope it does not spin into something bigger.
I'm getting a very bad feeling that we may be headed into a major regional conflict with tremendous loss of life on all sides.
A letter seized by the IDF from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Ramallah office suggests a concerted effort by the PA to incite Israeli Arabs against Israel. The letter, released Sunday, is dated September 30, 2001, the first anniversary of the 'Aksa Intifada.'
'Yes, we will still write in blood the map of the one homeland and one nation....' reads the letter, issued as a statement in the name of a 'Liaison Committee' from President Arafat’s office. 'We look and follow with nationalistic eyes, dreaming about our families and great nation in villages and cities that stand strong since the year 1948. For they are partners of the goal and the fate, partners of the one national dream.'
According to Yarden Vatikay, media adviser to Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the letter reached leaders of the Israeli-Arab community, although he declined to comment on whom those leaders might be. He said the number of recipients was relatively small, perhaps between 10 and 20 people, one reason the letter has not previously come to light.
Reached for comment Sunday, Palestinian sources said there is no proof the document is authentic. 'This is just another document Israel claims it has found; like the other ones, it is unsubstantiated,' said one source.
However, PA security sources have said in the past there were connections between the Islamic Movement in Israel and Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The PA has also recruited some Israeli Arabs, they added. Palestinians have warned in the past that the conflict may spread into Israel creating a confrontation between Israeli Arabs and Jews if the political process does not resume.
Efforts by Arafat and the PA to co-opt Israeli Arabs are not new. In the mid-1990s, Arafat interceded in the quarrels of hamullas – or clans – in villages in northern Israel, in an attempt to be recognized as the 'godfather of all the clans,' according to Mordechai Keddar, an expert in Israeli Arab society at the Begin-Sadat Center of Bar-Ilan University.
Not all of these efforts have met with success. In the election last year, there were indications Arafat was sending messages to Israeli Arabs to vote for the Labor Party. Most Israeli Arabs chose instead to sit out the election.
Israeli Arabs have also been careful not to mix their problems with Palestinians living under PA control.
Following the September 9 suicide attack in Nahariya by Muhammad Hobeishi, an Israeli Arab, several Arab MKs visited Arafat, reportedly to ask him to make sure the PA does not involve Israeli Arabs in suicide attacks.
But the release of this letter casts doubt on Arafat's willingness to comply with the request. 'They're asking the Arab population not to sit quietly, but to take the initiative by saying we have the same goals and the same national dream,' said Shalom Goldstein, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert's adviser on east Jerusalem affairs. 'It shows the problems we had with Israeli Arabs were coordinated with the PA, with Arafat’s office.'
According to Goldstein, the differences between the PA and religious terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad have increasingly become blurred. Terror attacks in Judea and Samaria are coordinated through a common leadership, known as the Islamic and National Leadership of the Intifada. And several Israeli Arabs have been implicated in several attempted suicide bombings. In February, the police foiled a female suicide bomber en route to Jerusalem, who was being driven in a car driven by Israeli Arabs.
Then too, according to Keddar, an Israeli Arab newspaper, Sawd al-Haq Wa al-Hurriya, has published articles by Yusuf Qaradawi, an Egyptian fundamentalist living in exile in Qatar who sanctions suicide attacks, including attacks by women. Publication of the newspaper is permitted under Israeli free speech laws.
|
|