Who pays Barakei? by Sarah Honig February 17, 2005 I got as agitated last week as my father used to get when he watched the news on TV. Whenever he took things excessively to heart - which was almost always - my mom would lecture him that it's unhealthy to view the world through dark lenses. "Besides," she'd go on, "let politicians worry; they get paid for it." Without exception, my father would then reply: "And who do you think pays their salary? I do!" What so upset me was the Knesset Finance Committee vote approving compensation for Gush Katif's soon-to-be uprooted Jews. I had anticipated the result; I expected that the one-vote majority for a decision that frays the Zionist fiber would hinge on anti-Zionist Knesset member Muhammad Barakei's predilection. What distressed me was the epilogue. Barakei lashed out at Likud Knesset member Michael Gorlovsky and screamed in his face: "Go back to Russia. You don't belong here!" He then proceeded to yell at Yehiel Hazan: "Shut up! You're a settler - a dirty criminal terrorist." What blew my mind was that public opinion wasn't outraged. This, in a nutshell, is the essence of Israel's malaise. Israelis consider themselves neutral objective observers - "from the UN," to quote local idiom. They've distanced themselves from their own cause, aren't emotionally involved with Jewish and Zionist interests, don't love, don't hate, don't deeply care. They dispassionately consider the most pragmatic options to maintain a reasonable quality of life, one entailing the fewest sacrifices and commitments, yet enabling them to posture complacently as enlightened citizens of the world. They don't want to be bothered about the history of the conflict, which still, vexingly (though they'd rather not admit it), threatens to annihilate them. Unsettling truths can burst their bubble. They don't want to hear that Arab hate predated the "refugee problem." They'd rather forget that Israel's Coastal Plain was inundated with Arab migrants from the far-flung corners of the Arab world (attracted to Jewish-initiated opportunities) and that Arabs who streamed here as late as 1946 (while Jews were barred) qualified for the status of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Israelis don't want to hear about Nazi collaborator Haj Amin el-Husseini, Hitler's pampered pet in WWII Berlin, who recruited Muslims to Axis forces, exhorting them to "slaughter Jews wherever you find them" because "spilled Jewish blood pleases Allah." Israelis don't want to know that this genocidal zeal still inspires Arabs, passing propaganda expediencies notwithstanding. They'd rather not reflect on the fact that Arab bitterness and refugees arose from Arab failure to exterminate us. Israelis trust that concessions can buy calm, painful concessions secure peace, and really painful concessions yield better and bigger peace. At this point concessions cease to be painful. They become desirable - the coin with which one makes deals. That's when Zionism dies. Dismissing our case and our justice eases things. It helps to accept the enemy's fraudulent narrative, not even call him an enemy but a potential peace partner, seek to understand the motives of those who want to ethnically cleanse this land of our presence, and discover where we're wrong and they're right. That's why nobody protested Barakei's bullyragging and why ever-virulent Arab animus to the Zionist endeavor can loudly, impudently and fearlessly resonate within the hallowed halls of the Jewish state's parliament, the symbol of renascent Jewish sovereignty. This sovereignty had been won in the existential fight for "a Hebrew state and free aliya" - our twin pre-independence battle cries. Barakei, who consistently harangues against Israel's flag and national anthem, openly defining Jewish emblems as offensive, provocatively delegitimizes the core motifs of Jewish national liberation: the ingathering of the exiles and return to the land. He paints himself as the outraged native and fulminates against "foreign interlopers" who, for no rhyme or reason, arbitrarily decided to dispossess him. He fails to mention ancient Jewish communities like the one in Hebron, uprooted via a sadistic massacre, or the bloody onslaughts against similarly old Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Jaffa, Acre and Beisan (the latter two were made judenrein before 1948). He omits reference to current Palestinian policy of rendering whatever areas they control judenrein, just as Jordan - artificially created by perfidious Albion on three-quarters of original Palestine - forbids Jewish residency by law. Significantly, the latest Arab mantra isn't "two states for two nations," but "two states coexisting side-by-side." By that definition the second state needn't be non-Arab. Self-deluding Jews miss the mutating nuance. And so Barakei, who annually laments Israel's creation and calls its Independence Day nakba (catastrophe), can continue to insult us with impunity. Our courts will back his right to mouth off and may even someday repeal the Law of Return, just as they have already undermined the JNF. Barakei must be laughing his head off at our collective gullibility, and all the while, I (and you) pay his salary.