Israeli Arabs Post-Lebanon - UJC Aided the Enemy
After the latest Lebanon fighting, Helen Freedman of AFSI wrote a piece warning that much of the Federation raised funding for Israel would actually be going to Arabs.
"So you thought your money was going to the Jewish children and their parents who spent the past summer in bomb shelters. Or you believed that your donation was going to rebuild homes in the north of Israel that had been destroyed by Hezbollah rockets.
Did you think that a huge part of your donation would be given to the very Arabs who supported Hezbollah and danced on their rooftops in celebration whenever word came of Jewish soldiers or civilians killed? Probably not," Freedman wrote.
The UJC mainly met the whole thing with a shrug. The UJC is a money making machine which pays out 6 figure salaries to hundreds of executives nationwide. It's a massive bureaucracy that funnels huge chunks of money into their own programs and grants.
Some Zionist bloggers wrote up a letter condemning Freedman for actually suggesting that money for the victims should go to loyal Israeli citizens, rather than to the Arabs, who repeatedly demonstrated their support for Hezbollah's campaign and even when their own children died, still blamed Israel.
Snoopy the Goon, wrote up the following, "The majority of Arab citizens are loyal tax paying citizens of the State of Israel and the stories about them dancing on the roofs and cheering Jewish deaths are, most probably, a sad result of lumping all Arabs together. Indeed, the manifestations of happiness mentioned by Ms. Freedman were observed in the West Bank and Gaza. But in any case these manifestations are not relevant where humanitarian assistance is concerned.
We support the policy of UJC and other Jewish organizations to provide assistance to all the citizens of Northern Israel. We believe that this is the best way to win hearts and minds of Israeli Arab, Druze and other minorities and to show the world that Jews will not begrudge help to their fellow non-Jewish Israelis in the time of need."
Solomonia, Lisa on the Face and some others joined in praising the Snoopy letter and condemning AFSI's article as disgusting.
At the time I wrote up a rather bitter reply, saying, "Are we to be known as the sort of people who stop donating money to the people killing us? A thousand times nay! We should give them even more money! Personally I say we should double our donations for every time they cheer on the terrorists. Maybe triple. That will show them.
Surely after a while these loyal citizens of Israel will get so fed up with our generous donations, that they will abandon all support for terrorism and finally at last the joyful day will have come when we will have at last won their hearts, minds and livers ushering in that New Middle East."
Suffice it to say the hearts and minds of Israeli Arabs have officially not been won despite all the money pulled away from the victims of the violence, to those who sympathized with its perpetrators.
"A Haifa University study showed that 49.7 percent of Israeli Arabs justify the kidnapping of soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev by Hizbullah. The study also showed that 48.2 percent of Israeli Arabs justify the rockets launched by Hizbullah into Israel."
Half the Israeli Arab population openly supporting the enemy is a hard number to wish away. It's not a handful of misreported Palestinians dancing in the West Bank, as the Snoopy letter claimed. It's fully half the population. Assuming that most surveys underreport views that are illegal, terroristic or criminals, it's likely to be a good deal more than that.
Possibly the Israeli Arabs in question might not have been as willing to sympathize with the Hezbollah position if eager American Jews hadn't thrown money to smooth away their wartime losses, but even that is doubtful.
Arabs who took losses in the war routinely blamed Israel. An Israeli Arab Knesset Member boasted that he had suggested the kidnapping idea to Hizbullah. The Arab Deputy Mayor of Haifa was fired for openly supporting the terrorists.
The reality is you don't win anybody's hearts and minds with giveaways. It doesn't even work that well on six year olds. It certainly doesn't work on hostile populations who have real nationalistic and religious reasons for hating you. It didn't work in Vietnam. It didn't work in Iraq. It's simply not going to work. Period.
The United States rebuilt Europe twice and we're more hated there, than we are anywhere outside the Muslim world. You don't win hearts and minds of a hostile population, you simply eliminate the alternative possibilities for them besides loyalty. Then you can treat them fairly as they deserve. Anything else is a foolish and self-destructive squandering of resources. In this case one that deprived loyal Israeli citizens, Jewish and Non-Jewish of post-war aid and instead redirected them to the people who hate us in the plantitive hope that maybe now they won't hate us so much anymore.
Either way we should help our own, rather than helping a hostile population embedded among us. There are Holocaust survivors living in Israel who cannot afford proper dentures. There are children still going hungry and the economic situation in the Negev is terrible. The residents of Gush Katif who were forcibly expelled from their homes are living in refugee camps. Throughout all this it is inconceivable and indefensible that tons of aid was sent to Indonesia, which aids Hamas, and that aid money from American Jews was diverted to aid a domestic enemy.