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Avoiding future catastrophes The killing of 13 Israeli Arab demonstrators by security forces in the violent October riots and the subsequent mass boycott by Arabs of the February Prime Ministerial election were two recent watersheds in this process. Also significant have been the increasingly strident anti-Israel positions that have been taken by Arab Members of Knesset. Perhaps most worrying has been the increasingly active participation of Arab citizens in terrorist attacks, and vocal support for the violent Palestinian uprising and Hizbullah attacks from Lebanon. Today Arabs represent some 18% of the Israeli population. The Knesset has 12 Arab MKs, including 9 belonging to explicitly anti-Zionist parties. For the first time there is an Arab Minister, Saleh Tarif in the government. Both the percentage of Arabs in the population and their representation in the political arena is steadily increasing, and is likely to keep growing by virtue of a rate of natural increase that is more than double that of the Jewish population. The fear of many Israeli Jews is that they will be a minority in two or three decades. Large swaths of Israel's north and south already have Arab majorities. The Arab population represents a bloc of voters and legislators that can decisively influence Israeli governments and their policies. Arab support enabled the Oslo Agreements to pass. Arab support kept the Rabin and Barak governments in power. And the loss of Arab support for Barak contributed greatly to Sharon's landslide victory. Arab Israelis have much to complain about. The quality of their infrastructure and public services, on average, is markedly lower than those of Jewish Israelis. On the other hand, Arab citizens are not required to assume the national service burden expected of other Israelis, a fact which further contributes to a sense of second-class citizenship. The place of the Arab minority in Israeli society goes to the core question of the state's identity. The Declaration of Independence of Israel, the nominal cause for the Arab's "catastrophe," calls for the creation of a nation that is both Jewish and democratic. It enshrines the idea of a homeland specifically for the Jews of the world but also the principle of equal rights for all citizens. Do Arabs citizens, in principle, have the democratic right to change the essential character and purpose of the "Jewish State" as its founders envisioned it? The legal answer, of course, is that they do. And if current trends prevail, they will continue to try. This is at the heart of the debate over the symbols of the state, such as the flag (with its Star of David) and a national anthem (which speaks of "the Jewish soul"), which hardly can be expected to resonate within the Arab consciousness. But the widespread adoption of the credo that Israel's creation was a catastrophe signals a dangerous new stage in this process of estrangement. For Israeli Arabs to call the creation of the country catastrophic is to implicitly endorse its destruction, by bullets or ballots. For the Arab citizens of Israel, the state's survival of the Independence War was the result of their tragic diplomatic mistake and their military failure. They, along with the neighboring Arab states had a chance to accept a much larger Arab state alongside a truncated Jewish one when they opposed the United Nations Partition resolution of 1947. They bet on their superior force prevailing in war. They lost their bet, and they have paid a heavy price for that loss. Regardless of whether hundreds of thousands fled out of fear or were evicted during the war, the bitter fact is that they lost their homes and their way of life. It is understandable that they look back on their loss with regret and mourning. But both Israeli Jews and Arabs, so burdened by their respective tragic pasts, urgently need to look forward constructively Arabs must decide, once and for all, whether their intended solution is the end of Israel as a Jewish state. If their collective intention is to correct the "catastrophe" by eliminating the "Zionist entity," they can hardly expect support from the vast majority of Israeli Jews. For those Arab citizens who show a genuine willingness to accept the framework of a Jewish democratic state, Jews must redouble their efforts to eliminate discriminatory measures and address the real disparities in conditions of the Arab minority, including programs that foster coexistence, ensure equal educational opportunities, provide greater access to capital, and more fully integrate minorities into the workforce. At the same time, those who support the goal of Arab-Jewish coexistence west of the Jordan and non-violent solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict urgently must seek creative approaches to ensure that Israel will remain both Jewish and democratic. Creative solutions proposed include exchanging heavily populated Arab areas of Israel for Israeli annexation of Jewish settlement areas in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, as well as legislating the endorsement of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as a condition for citizenship. For the first time, with a Palestinian state in formation, citizens of Israel who abhor the Jewish state and seek to destroy it have the option of fulfilling their sense of national identity in a land of their own on a portion of historic Palestine. The real Palestinian Catastrophe was the rejection of the original partition by the Arab states and the subsequent Arab declaration of war after Israel declared its independence. Today there is a chance - perhaps the last chance - for a new partition, with boundaries that take into account demographic facts, democratic principles, security needs, and the inalienable rights of both Arabs and Jews to self-determination in their own nations, allowing birth of a viable Palestine and ensuring survival of Israel as a Jewish state. The alternative path, in which self-defined "Palestinians with Israeli citizenship" use Israel's democracy to subvert its identity and essential function as the Jewish homeland -- seeking all-encompassing dominance in Jordan, the Palestinian State, and in Israel -- will only invite a tragic, bloody and utterly unnecessary repetition of their catastrophic past.
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