10-Aug-06: One Page, Two Voices

It was along the lines of Alice in Wonderland.

In Wednesday's Haaretz, we have a Jewish Israeli admonishing the Israeli government for pursuing its war against terrorists without engaging in diplomacy with them.

On the same page and alongside, we have an Arab Israeli exhorting his compatriots to join Israel in opposing Hezbollah and Hamas.

The former, Gideon Samet, concedes that this war "has made clear the extent of the danger emanating from the contemptible enemy in the backyard." He relates that his recent two week trip to East Asia illuminated for him "the extent of the Islamic fundamentalist threat to the east of us." He writes of the "Islamic axis" and of the "tom-tom drums of world jihad' that reverberate in the region. He warns us that this "radical Islamic chain feeds the local threat".

So far so reasonable.

But then Samet does a 180 degree turn on us to conclude that after trying the military approach and failing: "this is the time to move to a completely different front, serious negotiations with Hamas and the Palestinian administration. This is also the time to talk to Syria or at least to take its pulse."

You have to wonder what Samet took with his coffee before he wrote the piece.

The Israeli Arab journalist, Riad Ali, on the other hand, maintains that the events of this past month made it clear that: "[Hezbollah's] war is against Jews wherever they may be. You have to be deaf in order not to hear the voice of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as it emerges from Nasrallah's throat, and naive in order to believe that the purpose of the arsenal Nasrallah has accumulated is the release of prisoners and the liberation of the Shaba Farms.

Ali urges Israeli Arabs to resist the urge to join the Arab masses throughout the region who extend support to Hezbollah and Hamas "if not with guns, then with funds, and if not with funds, then through words, and if not through words, then in heart, as the Muslim preachers tell the masses."

He urges them to do so "for their own sake, and not for the sake of the Jews. For the sake of the values they want to instill in their children. For the sake of retaining their intellectual dignity."

It is uplifting to hear another Arab voice speaking truth.

By the way, he doesn't place a halo over Israel. And we don't expect any Israeli citizen to do so, particularly not Arab Israelis who have often suffered from governmental indifference to their needs and problems. However, he is firm on

"...the right of the Jewish people to their own independent state. To the best of my understanding, this war, as with the intifada, has to be judged from this perspective."

Ali Riad pleads with his fellow Arab Israelis to "ask themselves if the Islamic ideology that is leading the war today against Israel and the West in the guise of a war against the occupation and heathens is representative of their ambitions."

We wonder whether Samet saw Ali's article.