In the latest New Republic the Israeli historian Benny Morris raises my favorite issue, dual loyalty, this time with respect to Israeli Arabs. In rejecting author Tom Segev‘s likening of the Arab minority in Israel to blacks in the U.S. during the civil rights movement, Morris says the following:
Israel’s Arabs were part of a people that had launched a war to destroy Israel in 1948 and continued guerrilla and terrorist warfare against Israel during the following decades… Is Africa besieging the United States and engaged in a war against it, with a putative African American fifth column within?
I take Morris’s point. I imagine that a lot of the Arab citizens of Israel sympathize with/are fervent supporters of the Palestinians. Just as a lot of American Jews sympathize with/fervently support Israel. Hey, they’re our people! That 1948 war was backed on the Jewish side by many Americans, some of whom sent illegal arms to Palestine. A fifth column indeed. This is the problem when you establish a religious state. You divide people according to religion and put a lien on American Jewish citizenship in this country.
he
