The snippet below was published by Dror Eydar at Israel Hayom:
"The New Alliance" supports national service, including in the military, and recognizes Israel as the home of the Jewish people • "We are completely Israeli, and then comes religion," says party founder Bashara Shlayan of Nazareth.
The events in the Middle East have unleashed deep sociological and ideological processes, of which we are only seeing the beginning. It is not only political Islam in the eye of the media storm. Throughout the various Arab countries in the region, the bruised and battered Christian community is raising its voice. Israel appears to be the only country in the region whose Christian community does not have a negative emigration ratio as its members flee West in pursuit of a more promising life.
Recent newspaper headlines involve Christian Israelis who are setting themselves apart from their Muslim counterparts, disproving the traditional perception of Israel's Arab population as homogenous. They want to join the Israel Defense Forces.
Against the backdrop of hysteria expressed by Arab MKs who object to national service of any kind, but particularly in the army, the comments emanating from Israel's Christian Arab community sound like a cultural and social declaration of independence.To the extent that this story is true it is an exceedingly welcome development.
The problems between Israel and its Arab neighbors are not because Jews are mean to Arabs or caused the "ethnic cleansing" of the Arabs from their homes, but because the great Arab majority in the Middle East has dominated and persecuted and oppressed the tiny Jewish minority since the time of Muhammed and they still cannot accept Jewish freedom from dhimmitude.
Arab Muslim hostility toward the Jewish minority is grounded in the Koran, but the Day of the Dhimmi is Done.
To the extent that some Arabs were forced from their homes in the '48 War it was because you cannot try to slaughter a people who just came through the Holocaust and expect to do so with impunity. The very notion is, in itself, a hangover from the centuries of dhimmitude in which Arabs became accustomed to laws which justified violence against Jews - such as stoning as a sport - as proper. The Arabs of the British Mandate launched a civil war against the Jewish people in November of 1947, directly after the voting on UN 181 which recognized a Jewish State on a small portion of the land originally promised to us, and they fought that war against Jewish women and Holocaust survivors.
Yet, they lost.
If the local Arabs residing on Jewish land wished to integrate themselves into Israeli society they could easily do so and, in fact, would be rewarded with greater civil liberties and economic prosperity than Arabs anyplace else within the Arab world.
Unfortunately for their children, Arab Muslims have not chosen that route.
Perhaps Arab Christians can do better and I am exceedingly pleased to see signs that this is precisely the case.
Arab Christians are our sisters and brothers in the Land of Israel. Arab Muslims could be, as well, but that is entirely up to them.