Mansour Abbas, Arab-Israeli Lawmaker, Changing Present Day Israel's' Outlook

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

The shock of it all was when this political Israeli lawmakers invited Mansour Abbas's party into the political arena.  Mansour Abbas, 48, born 22 April 1974) is an Israeli Arab politician. He is currently the leader of the United Arab List and represents the party in the Knesset. He was appointed as the chair of Special Committee on Arab Society Affairs in the Knesset on 27 April 2021.  Abbas is married with three children.

This was the first time that Arab parties in Israel have been invited to join a ruling government.  It's also the first time a party has not represented themselves as the opposition to any Israeli government.  There are many Arab-Israeli parties in Israel's Knesset and they have generally participated in Israel's political system as a hostile force, seeming to protest Israel's very existence, which they really have been doing just that.   Abbas has taken a difference path; one that is noticed.

 Abbas was born in the town of Maghar, where he began delivering sermons at the Peace Mosque at the age of 17.

                                               

 Maghar is a Druze city of mixed population of Muslims, Christians, and Druze in Israel's Northern District with an area of 19,810 dunams. Maghar was given the status of a local council in 1956, and of a city in 2021. In 2019 it had a population of 22,957. It's 112 miles north from Jerusalem.   He lives here still.  The majority of residents are Druze (57.9%), with Arab Christians (21%) and Muslim (21.1%) minorities. Many of the Druze residents serve in the IDF and Israel Police. The Christian population is mostly Melkite Catholic.

He attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to study dentistry, where he was elected chair of the Arab Students Committee between 1997 and 1998. While at university he met Abdullah Nimar Darwish, the founder of the Islamic Movement. He also studied political science at the University of Haifa.

                                               

On 21 April 2020, Abbas delivered a historic speech on the Holocaust in the Knesset in which he spoke of the suffering of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis. Abbas stated: "As a religious Palestinian Muslim Arab, who was raised on the legacy of Sheikh Abdallah Nimr Darwish who founded the Islamic Movement, I have empathy for the pain and suffering over the years of Holocaust survivors and the families of the murdered." He added, "I stand here to show solidarity with the Jewish people here and forever."

Then, just a few weeks ago,  Abbas said ,"It's time for his countrymen  to accept Israel's Jewish identity."

The Globe, a financial newspaper, had a conference that he attended.  Abbas broke new ground for an Israeli Arab politician, noting that "TheState of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and the question is this: "Howare we going to integrate Arab society into it?"  

This really is a very heavy question with  Lebanon as an example as to how Muslim politicians  smothered the Christians, and that Jews are the minority of the Middle East. The ratio of 80/20 must be maintained for Israel. 

                                               

The Abraham Accords have broken the chokehold held on Arab peace concepts by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which denied any possibility ofreconciliation with Israel until the PA's intractable maximalist demands were met;  a state with "those unbearable "1967 borders and a capital inJerusalem."                                   

    Gazans were unhappy with his signing onto the new government. 

Palestinians in coastal enclave, with which Israel fought bitter 11-day war in May, accuse Islamist leader of being 'opportunist' who is motivated by self-interest and political ambition rather than seeking to represent the Arab community within Israel. 

His thinking developed along the way.  Abbas had  joined the rest of the Joint List in voting against the Abraham Accords. He described his vote as a protest against the lack of a peace treaty with the Palestinians, adding, "If there will be a real agreement with the Palestinians, there will be real agreements with 55 Muslim countries. But what truly matters is that we are Israelis, and our actions are not supposed to be influenced by whether there is peace with Bahrain."

                                                 

I do not understand this attitude.  He knows very well that Israel would love to have peace with 55 countries without losing the 10% left to us of an original promise of a Jewish Homeland.  It's the Palestinians who have said, NO NO NO at the Khartoum Conference in 1967 after the war.  He voted with the others, against the Abraham Accords.  Perhaps this is when he changed his attitude; seeing that this kind of attitude would get him nowhere in life.  Now, he is special.  

By January 2021, in the buildup to the 2021 elections, the United Arab List split from the Joint List. According to the by-laws of the party, limiting MKs to three terms, Abbas was ineligible to run again for office in the 2021 elections. Abbas stated, "I have to respect the institutions of Ra'am,(his party of United Arab List)  if the bylaws are not changed, even though they didn't anticipate four elections in two years when they made the rules."

                                      United Arab List ballot

                                                    

 However, he ran in the election as party leader and the United Arab List won four seats. On 2 June 2021, after holding negotiations with Israeli opposition figures Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, Abbas renewed his commitment to backing a non-Netanyahu government after signing a coalition agreement with Lapid.

                                                     

On 21 December 2021, Abbas said that Israel was born as a Jewish state and will remain so, provoking outrage from members of other Arab parties,   

The party supports the two-state solution, and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital (This is not to happen). It also supports equal rights for Arab citizens of Israel.

Its constituency consists mostly of religious or nationalist Israeli Arabs, and enjoys particular popularity among the Negev Bedouin: in the 2009 election, 80% of residents of Bedouin communities voted for the party. The Islamic Movement also operates in poor Arab towns and villages, as well as in Bedouin settlements, to mobilize voters. The southern faction of the Islamic Movement is now the dominant force in the party, whilst other factions include the Arab National Party. (So it's not surprising that Gaza did not respect his party. They want Hamas control, anyway.)                                   

To the credit of the Jewish parties in Israel's ruling coalition, they've shown admirable willingness to cooperate with Mansour Abbas in supporting significant initiatives to tangibly enhance Arab-Israeli society.  The recognition of Israel as a Jewish state was regarded as an exceptional and important statement by an Israeli Arab leader, especially one from an Islamist party. 

Abbas added: “The question is how to integrate Arab society into it … there is no doubt that we are on the threshold of a new era, and I say this cautiously and hope that the process will succeed and that the coalition-level partnership will be a trend towards more different partnerships in the industry and more.”

Update: 1/12/2022: Police and military forces have been deployed in the southern Negev as a result of rioting by local Bedouins who are protesting tree planting by the Jewish National Fund on land that belongs to the government that they claim is their territory. The Arab Ra'am party, which is the key member of the fragile 61 seat government coalition, is threatening to leave the coalition if the tree planting efforts are not halted. Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin of the New Hope party, whose ministry oversees the tree planting, is opposed to halting the work. To read more

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansour_Abbas

FLAME- Facts and Logic-About the Middle East , James Sinkinson, Pres. 

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgzGmtNhCSrckSnMVQFgQcPgjbDfn

https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/HkryIH8qO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_List

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maghar,_Israel

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/united-arab-list-ra-am-political-party

Facts About the 1.7 Million Israeli Arabs in Recent Election

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                          

Prime Minister Netanyahu was caught saying that the Arabs were coming out to vote in force and that he wanted his people to get out and vote!  That put him in deep hot water with Europe and the USA.  What many don't realize is that for once, the Arabs were voting in one block instead of many broken up ones, and were being groomed by the USA's Obama to vote for Labor's Herzog, known to be much to the left and most likely very pliable, Obama thought, to his ways of thinking, which actually turned out to be wrong.  There are many political parties that Arabs have organized.  "This time, the  political alliance of four Arab-dominated parties in Israel—Hadash, Balad, United Arab List, and Ta'al. would have gone over to 

be with Labor,  which was the fear.  
                                                                             

Arab women vote in Israel, too.  

The list is ideologically diverse and includes communists, socialists, feminists, Islamists, and Palestinian nationalists.  Where Netanyahu has been concerned with being wiped out by Iran, others have been concerned by high prices of living.  

Security won out in the end with Netanyahu remaining to finish out a term he had stopped after 

2 years when he called for new elections.  Netanyahu had to apologize to his Arab citizens for 

that remark, not meaning the way it came out.  

                                                                                

10 of 12 tribes of Israel being led away in battle 721 BCE

Let's look at the Arabs and Jews and their history in Israel.  Long ago, what came to be called Palestine, was the Jewish states of Israel and Judah.  Israel was attacked and its best citizens were carted away by the Assyrians in 722 BCE.  The Babylonians took over the Assyrians and they also attacked and took the best people in 597 and 586 BCE.  King Solomon had died in 920 BCE which is when Judah was carved out of Israel's southern section.
                                                                             

Jerusalem Destroyed in 70 CE by Romans 

In 70 CE, the Romans had attacked Jerusalem after occupation and destroyed the 2nd Temple.  In 132 CE General Bar Kokhba made his last attempt to retake his land in a 3 year war lasting till 135 when he was killed in battle.  To get even with the Jews, who hadn't had to engage in such a long battle before, they renamed the land as Palaestina, the name of Jews' enemy, the Phoenicians.  There had always been Jews who had never left Eretz Yisrael throughout the Roman Period and all the other conquerers who came along, but many had when Jerusalem fell, becoming Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews, depending on where they went to live.
                                                                           

Abraham Stern (1907-1942), Jewish fighter for Israeli Independence, leader of the Stern Group.Stern was born in Suwałki, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire) where my grandmother was born and raised. Stanley Goldfoot, my 3rd cousin,  became the Chief of Intelligence of the Stern Group-called the Stern Gang by the British who shot Abraham dead at age 35.  Not only were they trying to protect the Jewish population from Arab attacks, but were attacked by the British for doing so.  The British were given the mandate to help Jews create their Jewish Homeland.  Instead they kept out Jews and helped Arabs enter illegally.  

                                                                     

Arabs from Lydda fleeing in 1948 from war

In 1949, at the end of the Israeli War of Independence, there were only some 160,000 Arabs in the new Jewish state of Israel, created on May 14, 1948. Being also a declared state made up of other religions and many nationalities, it was important to keep a Jewish population as the major group, for that was the purpose it was created.

 In 1972   there were 3.2 million people in Israel which were made up of
2.7 million Jews (85.1%)
359,000 Muslims (11.2%)-most all Arabs
 80,000 Christians (2.4%)-most all Arabs
 39,000 Druzes (Arabs that broke away from Islam in 10th Century)
 478,000   non Jewish Arabs

The population increase was due to natural growth and to the readmission of thousands of Arabs who fled when the Arab states attacked Israel.  Many remained in refugee camps and have stayed there to this day, now in very large numbers.

Today there are 6 million Jews living in Israel and 1.7 million Arabs.  They all know that Israel's basic constitutional document is the Proclamation of Independence written in 1948.   It provides complete equality of social and political rights for all citizens regardless of creed, race or sex, and guarantees freedom of religion and conscience, as well as of language, education and culture.  It specifically invites Arabs living in Israel to help build the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all institutions.  There is no institutionalized discrimination against Arabs or other minorities.  All groups may freely exercise all citizen right, including the right to vote and to run for public office.  Netanyahu was not  stopping them from voting; just yelling to his own contingent of Likud to get out and vote.  

Anyone who lived in Israel in 1948 after May 14, 1948 and has stayed there since is an Israeli citizen, not matter if a Jew or Arab.  So is anyone born in Israel since 1948 who continues to live there.  People may come to Israel to live and may become citizens after a waiting period of 3 years in most cases.  However, because it is the established Homeland for the Jewish people who had been without a homeland for over 2,000 years from 70 CE till May 14, 1948, Jews can become a citizen immediately through the LAW OF RETURN.  I didn't realize that it could be immediate for me when my husband and I made aliyah (immigrated) in September 1980.  We waited for the 5 year period expected of new citizens in the USA before filing to have dual citizenship.  I suppose we passed up some voting rights by doing that.
                                                                         

Wherever you go in Israel, you see signs in 3 languages; Hebrew, Arabic and English.  We had gone over as teachers from the USA to be teachers of English in Israel.  I had the occasion to vote for our mayor of Safed (Tzfat) before I left.  Notice the bars on my living room window in Safed.  They are to keep out terrorists since I lived in the ground floor apartment.  We just moved in and I'm waiting for my lift to arrive from the dock in Haifa.  I had turned a twin bed into a sofa of sorts.  Another English teacher at my junior high was an Arab.  He translated the Hebrew in teacher's meetings for me since I understood nothing.  When I left, he got my position.  I believe he lived in Ramallah and traveled quite far to get to our school.

Resource: Jewish Digest 1976,  Israel:  A Pluralistic Democracy -status of Arabs in Jewish State page 22 from American Jewish Committee Background Memorandum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_List
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11490945/Netanyahu-apologises-to-Arab-voters-in-Israel-election.html