Since 7 October and the bloody attack by Hamas on Israeli soil, little has been said about the situation of Israeli Arabs, also known as “Arab citizens of Israel”. According to the latest demographic data, they represent 21% of the Israeli population, descendants of the 160,000 Palestinians who remained (or were not expelled) in the territory granted to Israel in 1948. As for the right to nationality, it was not until the late 1960s that they gained access to it.
Today, although they enjoy the same rights as the Jewish population, including the right to vote, they are still victims of discrimination. Already fairly badly regarded, recent events have made Israeli Jews even more wary of them. The situation is particularly complex because most of them still share very strong links with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Friends or family members who chose to leave or were forced to do so during the exoduses of 1948 and 1967.
Whatever barbaric atrocities they commit against Israel, the Palestinian jihadists of Hamas remain heroes in the eyes of the Arab-Islamic Street. These fanatical and savage terrorists are seen as an army for the liberation of Palestine by the majority of people in the Arab world. They are seen as soldiers who “fight in the way of Allah: they kill, and they are killed”, because “Allah has bought the believers, their persons and their goods in exchange for Paradise” (Koran, verse 111 of sura At-Tawbah).
Victims of an irrational reading of reality, the overwhelming majority of Arab populations imagine that they are surrounded by Jews and their atheist accomplices who are constantly plotting against the Ummah, the nation of Islam. This plunges them into a veritable paranoia!
After all the hatred and barbarity that has been unleashed on Israel, and the bloody response of the Israel Defense Forces that has claimed several thousand civilian victims in Gaza, can we imagine any way out of the current conflict other than the destruction of Hamas? In other words, the total crushing of its military structures and the dismantling of the politico-religious diktat it has installed in Gaza.
As we wrote in these columns the day after the attacks on 7 October (Screen Watch, n° 38, October 2023), putting Hamas out of action is not only imperative for Israel’s security, but also for the honour of the just cause of the Palestinian people, so sullied by Hamas’s bloody crimes.
Since the Hamas terrorist attack on 7 October, the conflict has been raging once again in the Middle East, while its inevitable import is causing considerable damage in Europe and Belgium in particular, not least because of a worrying resurgence of anti-Semitic acts. Physical and verbal attacks, tags, publications and other visuals comparing Israel with Nazi Germany… The list of manifestations of hatred towards the Jewish community is long, so much so that Jewish schools and places of worship are under tighter control throughout Belgium, particularly in Brussels and Antwerp.
Young people are particularly affected by this conflagration. It was therefore essential to provide schools as soon as possible with a distanced look at the tragic events currently unfolding in Israel and the Gaza Strip.
The French Ministry of Education therefore undertook to provide a teaching aid on this subject as soon as possible. The fact sheet was finally published after four long weeks. And its content is disappointing, to say the least. A look back at a difficult birth.
On 11 October, a large demonstration was held in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels. The slogan? “War in Gaza: For a ceasefire and a just peace, against colonial violence and apartheid”.
Reading this text, things are clear: the culprit for everything is Israel. Israel, which colonises, illegally occupies and has shamefully despoiled a territory that does not belong to it, exerting such violence on its inhabitants that the key to peace is now in its hands alone.
Astonishment and horror at the extreme barbarity of the medieval and bloody raids perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, the 50th anniversary of the “Yom Kippur War”, with the macabre aim of reviving the traumatic memory of that 1973 war, which almost shook the very existence of the State of Israel, then barely 25 years old.
