Gavriel Fiske, publishing in the Times of Israel, writes the following:
I have had Mohammad Zoabi's video displayed on the right side of Israel Thrives for a number of days now, but here it is below, as well:Police arrested three men Tuesday for threatening their relative, an Arab Israeli teen who, in a strikingly pro-Israel video posted online, wraps himself in an Israeli flag and expresses solidarity with three kidnapped Israeli youths
In the video, uploaded to YouTube earlier this week, 17-year-old Mohammad Zoabi of Nazareth called for the release of the three teens, affirmed his own identity as an Israeli, and urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop negotiating with Palestinian terrorists.
Another relative, the controversial MK Hanin Zoabi (Balad), distanced herself from his comments Tuesday and said that, contrary to his assertion, the kidnappers were “not terrorists.”
I want to focus on two aspects of this story, the fact that MK Hanin Zoabi does not consider the kidnappers to be terrorists and the fact that Mohammad Zoabi has been threatened with death by at least three family members for daring to stand up for Jews.
Israeli parliamentarian Zoabi does not consider the kidnappers to be terrorists because she believes, even as a Knesset member, that Israel is a terrorist country and that the Jews have no rights to autonomy and self-defense on Jewish land. In fact, she does not believe in any such concept as "Jewish land." There is plenty of Arab lands and Muslim lands that span a very big part of the globe even well beyond the Middle East, but the very notion of Jewish land on the land where Jews come from is entirely anathema to Hanin Zoabi who, without question, should be removed from any position of authority in the Israeli government.
By claiming that the kidnappers of Yifrah, Shaar, and Frenkel are not terrorists she is essentially claiming that Arabs have every right to kidnap Jewish youths. And, astonishingly, she says so as a member in (sort-of) good standing within the Israeli parliament. Although I very much hope that she is shortly removed from that position, it should speak volumes to the liberal nature of Israeli democracy that they would even allow malicious anti-Zionists to be government representatives.
Can you imagine if the United States government contained openly treasonous members of congress?
The American people would never put up with it, but the American people tend to be somewhat less liberal than are the Israelis. Israel does not even have the death penalty and is among the only countries in human history to facilitate the immigration of Africans into their country, not for purposes of exploitation, but in order to welcome them into the community as free members.
Nonetheless, the hard-left will continue to bash Israel - and by implication, bash Jews - while the center-left will simply not give a damn, but will always oppose and condemn Jewish efforts at self-defense, both literal and discursive.
In any case, we should all be proud of Mohammad Zoabi. He is a kid. He is only seventeen years old, but his outrage was palpable and his articulation both concise and intense. I tend to be hard on the Arab majority in the Middle East because of their history of persecution of the Jewish minority, but we need such Arab friends and it is refreshing to see it coming from a fresh faced kid from an anti-Zionist Arab political family.
He may also require ongoing state security because he has put himself into a very difficult situation with the Arab-Israel community, including members of his own family who have threatened his life.
To my mind, this says a little something about Arab culture within Jewish land. That family members would threaten a seventeen year old boy with death for the crime of opposing the kidnapping of Jewish teenagers is dysfunctional - to put it in the kindest terms possible.
When the kids were swiped Israeli-Arabs handed out sweets to children and to one another in celebration of this great victory. Under no circumstances would the Jewish communities around the world ever celebrate the kidnapping of anyone.
In the liberal west we like to think that all cultures are more or less the same and that we all pretty much want the same things in life. We want security and prosperity and happiness and freedom for ourselves and our children and our friends and our community and our country and, hopefully, for the rest of the world.
These are western values, but we must cease going on the assumption that everyone shares these values.
Clearly they do not.