Our Israeli correspondent MC sends this update with the latest on the situation in Sderot.
Sderot: Day 5
by MC
It is Shabbat and quiet. There are still a few projectiles flying around, but the tempo has decreased dramatically. News station that operate on Shabbat are reporting street incidents between Arab rioters and Israeli vigilante groups.
Arabs in Israel are split between Christian (Maronite) and Muslim, with the Muslims in the majority, but some of those Muslims are Druse, who tend to be more pro-Israel. The street fighting is worrying, but on the whole Israeli Arabs are better off in Israel than in any of the surrounding states and they know it. The have full and complete Israeli citizenship, enhanced by a form of positive discrimination in higher education (there are many in the universities who believe in equality of outcome).
Islam tends to endow its victims with a paucity of ‘spirit’. The curiosity is that Jews and Christians who have been despised minorities in Arab lands continue to display this paucity of spirit. The generations of Jews who fled North Africa in the early fifties brought with them the Dhimmi attitude, which is only now dissipating in the third generation.
One of the major unheralded achievements of Israel has been the absorption of millions of desperate immigrants, first those fleeing from Czarist Russia, followed by refugees from Nazi Germany, then from the Muslim world after the war of Independence (1948), and finally from the USSR. Recently we have seen those who are fleeing the growing wokist anti-Semitism in Europe and the USA.
That latest batch includes me and my family, of course. Those who survived the Germans were the ones who got out early. There is a constant undertow of anti-Semitism from the Left in the UK, and as the so-called ‘Conservative’ party moves slowly to the political left, increasing Muslim anti-Semitism goes unchecked.
But all these immigrants to Israel had/have things in common: their Jewish identity, and a desire to become part of Israel. There are no ‘economic’ migrants to Israel. Nobody comes to exploit and asset-strip; they come here for safety. Perhaps the biggest problems have been with Russians pretending to be Jews and the Yemenites who, through no fault of their own, were exploited by the socialist government of Ben Gurion.
Much of the Arab/Israeli problem is the result of the British preference for Arab/Muslim over Jew, and thus huge Muslim immigration in the late ’20s, ’30s and ’40s (Biden beware). In 1922 Britain wanted a colony, but instead they got a Mandate (thanks to the USA) to build a Jewish homeland. Britain allowed unrestricted Muslim entry, but strictly controlled Jewish resettlement. Of the ‘refugees’ who fled during the War of Independence, a huge majority had only recently been brought in by the British for war work. They have lived ever since courtesy of UNRWA and the taxpayers of the USA and Europe.
Because the USA has been the dominant economic and cultural power in the Western world since the Second World War, ideas such as “white privilege” and “whiteness studies” are also exported to Europe. The notion of “white privilege” is already questionable in North America, where Europeans do not constitute the native population. The concept becomes entirely meaningless in Europe, where Europeans are the natives.