Israeli Arabs are in a strange situation in this war. In all the other Israeli-Arab wars, the number of Israeli Arab victims was very small in comparison with the total number of victims, either on the Israeli side or among the Arab countries. In all of Israel's wars, it took care to bring the battle to Arab soil, and thus considerably limited damage to the home front. Even in the worst days of the intifada, the number of Israeli Arab victims was relatively very small.
This situation has changed in this war. Hezbollah missiles have turned the whole north into a front, thus nullifying the "advantage" of Israeli Arabs. They have begun paying a heavy price in fatalities. The claim that the large number of victims is due to the lack of shelters and security rooms in Arab communities is true, but it is not the whole truth.
Anyone visiting the Arab communities these days can see that life is going on almost normally. Most people have not left for the center or the south, even in communities close to the Lebanese border. One reason for this is the belief that the missiles falling on Arab communities are falling by accident and are not aimed at them. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's apology for the children killed in Nazareth strengthens this belief.
Nevertheless, the missiles are falling in Arab communities and Arab neighborhoods of Haifa. Fifteen Israeli Arabs have already paid with their lives, and the war is still not over.
It was strange for me to see the names of Arab fatalities flickering across the television screen against the backdrop of the symbol of the State of Israel. It was even stranger to see the pictures of those killed and the stories of their lives in the newspapers. Articles along the lines of "the missile fell on the mother and her daughters while they were planning a wedding" were until now reserved for Jewish fatalities.
But the Israeli media, both print and electronic, cannot change. It must, it simply must, ask the relatives of the victims about their political opinions and about Nasrallah. After all, Israeli Arab victims in this war are newsworthy. You cannot talk about the human tragedy that struck the families and just stop there. Every Arab fatality is merchandise. For some, he or she is a symbol of coexistence and proof of the hackneyed claim heard so often over the past weeks - that "the missiles do not differentiate between Jews and Arabs." For others, the victim is a tool for reproving Israeli Arabs, along the lines of "maybe now you'll stop being a fifth column and support your country." And sometimes, he or she is a tool in the struggle against the government, proof of "dozens of years of discrimination against the Arabs by successive Israeli governments."
The Arab community's elected officials, who look for any reason to cry out against the government, excel at this. There is no doubt that there is discrimination against the Arab public in Israel, and has been for decades. There is no doubt that the lack of shelters in Arab communities has exposed residents to greater danger from missiles. But the inability of Arab leaders to see the human tragedy in the death of Arab citizens in a missile strike, their use of that tragedy to shore up their political and social positions, is infuriating.
Nothing would happen if an elected official mourned the deaths of members of his community instead of immediately getting up and drafting the citizen-victim into the struggle against the war in Lebanon, for coexistence or for Arab rights in Israel. Arab elected officials, when they speak on Arab news networks like Al Jazeera, have become political and military commentators, and sometimes raise a greater hue and a cry than many Arab speakers in Arab countries.
They do not bother to mention the price that Israeli Arabs are paying in this war, or to express their condolences to the families. Former mayor of Nazareth Tawfiq Zayyad once said that "the Arab political activist must provide the masses with answers for everything - from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the problem of garbage cans in Arab communities." In these times, no one is asking Arab MKs to deal with garbage cans in their communities, but it would not compromise their honor to relate more to the distress that their constituents are experiencing at this time.
Some will argue, and rightly, that the deaths of all Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs, as well as the many Lebanese fatalities, are due to the war - to Hezbollah's actions and Israel's aggression against Lebanon - and therefore cannot be treated as ordinary events. That is true. But using Israeli Arab deaths in the war as a tool, whether against Hezbollah or the Israeli government or the lack of coexistence, turns these victims into unwilling martyrs. I have no doubt that many will also use this article to prove their political or social views, and I am sorry for that.
The writer is a teacher and a doctoral student in history.
