Israeli Arabs: Fathers and Sons (and Daughters)

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bIsraeli-born and not a personal witness to the shattering trauma bof defeat and fear of the Jews—led to a vicarious deep sense of bshame and anger directed against the older generation of Arabs. bThe Arab who survived the 1948 debacle that permanently af- bfected his thinking and drove him to collaborate with the Jews bwas now looked upon by his Israeli-born son as a traitor and bboot-licking lackey. Born free, taking his citizenship and general brights for granted, educated, and open to radical ideas, he blooked with contempt on his own father for kowtowing to the bIsraelis.

bThus, in February 1978, Israeli radio interviewer Edna bPeer offered a live exchange between an Israeli Arab university bstudent and his father. The son, a budding actor who told of bhaving broken with his Jewish girl friend because she called bArafat a “murderer,” was bitter toward his father. The latter is ba quiet Arab, the kind of whom Israelis are fond. His local bvillage’s Histadrut (Israeli trade union) chairman, he is typi- bcally trotted out by all the Israelis who refuse to see the Arab breality. He is presented as “proof” of Arab loyalty. The son, bknowing this and knowing, too, that his father’s father was bkilled in Acre during the 1948 war, bitterly asked the father: b“Do you know what I would have done if the Jews had bmurdered you the way your father was killed?” The son, not the bfather, is the representative of today’s Israeli Arab. Every Arab bschool which Rabin and Begin and all the rest boast Israel has bestablished will produce hundreds and thousands of such haters bof Jews. The hamulla patriarch is an anachronism; the Israeli bgovernment saw him as a dam to stop the waters of Arab na- btionalism, but the dam has already burst. The Israelis might bhave gained twenty years had they attempted to preserve the bArab feudal structure. But since they chose to bring education band progress to the Arabs, they guaranteed the creation of an bimmediate generation of those dedicated to the active destruc- btion of the Jewish state.

bOf course, education is only part of the total revolution that bhas taken place in the Israeli Arab community. The Israeli gov- bernment, which at first really believed that a well-fed Arab is a bquiet, happy Arab, and which was also determined to show the bworld how liberal it was, consciously set about to raise the Arab bstandard of living. Two five-year plans, designed to develop the b