WILLIAM MEHLMAN: BEYOND THE PALE
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/?p=1191
While a picture may still be worth a thousand words, its repute as bondsman for the “whole truth and nothing but the truth” has become a footnote to a bygone age. A current case in point is Fiddler With No Roof, a video film produced under the auspices of Israel-based “Rabbis For Human Rights.” Starring Theodore Bikel, a practiced Israel critic reprising in narrative guise his cinematic role as “Tevye the milkman,” it strives to create a parallel between Czarist Russia’s expulsion of Tevye and his fellow townsfolk from their beloved “Anatevka” and Israel’s proposed relocation of 30,000 of its Bedouin citizens in the Negev from a disease-ridden collection of tents and corrugated metal huts sitting on the edge of a toxic waste dump to a group of modern apartment blocks equipped with running water, electricity, sewage and sanitation disposal facilities, a nearby school, health and social services. Fiddler With No Roof doesn’t waste much footage on these inconvenient facts, or with the quarter acre of land and monetary compensation each of the relocated families will be receiving, or the fact that the transferees, far from being expelled to any Arab Pale of Settlement, much less out of the Negev, are to be consolidated with an existing Bedouin community five kilometers down the road from their uninhabitable dwellings. Fiddler With No Roof’s crowning omission, however, is its failure to inform us that 15,000 of the 30,000 being considered for relocation have petitioned the Israeli government to remove them from their pestilential surroundings.
Being readied for a final reading in the Knesset, the relocation bill is the product of a carefully crafted, $2.5 billion, five-year plan enabling Israel to get a handle on a runaway Arab ethnic segment, powered by illegal polygamous marriage, that doubles in size every 15 years. At its fringes, it is a population rampant with poverty, chronic unemployment, crime, violence, illiteracy, illness, the world’s highest birthrate and an infant mortality rate seven times that of Tel Aviv. It has been allowed to run wild over the Negev for decades, erecting scores of instant slums, while claiming ownership, past, present and forever over every dunam of desert its camels may have trod. As explained by former minister Benny Begin (Likud), who with National Planning Director Uri Prawer formulated the Bedouin consolidation strategy, “We [Israel] cannot lay thousands of kilometers of water pipes to reach every group of shacks in the middle of the desert. If we want to improve the situation of the Bedouin we need to create responsibly- sized communities big enough to have a school with residents near enough so its youngest children can attend.”
Proving yet again that where Israel is concerned not even the noblest of intentions will go unpunished, the presentation of the Begin-Prawer plan to the Knesset detonated a violent late November “Day of Rage” in Umm al-Hiran by an upper crust Bedouin minority radicalized by an irresponsible claque of Arab and far-left Jewish MKs and bolstered by sympathy demonstrations in Haifa, Jerusalem, Hebron, London, Rome, Amsterdam, Berlin and some 20 other cities around the world.
Declaring the plan to be a manifesto of “racism,” “ethnic cleansing” and “Islamophobia” by a fascistic Zionist regime bent on “Judaizing” the Negev and robbing its “indigenous” population of “land that has been in its possession for 14 centuries,” a mob numbering upwards of 1,500 had to be held off with stun grenades and water cannons as it assailed police and IDF personnel with rocks, Molotov cocktails, ignited trash bins and anything else it could lay hands on. Injuries to 15 police officers, including one brutally stabbed, were characterized by Southern District Police Commander Yoram Halevy as “an attempt to start a war.” As 48 of the most egregious protestors were being marched off to jail, Prime Minister Netanyahu vowed that Israel would not allow a “violent and vocal minority endeavoring to deny a better future to a large and broad population” to win the day. “We have and will have no tolerance,” he warned, “for those who break the law.” However commendable, Mr. Netanyahu’s professed intolerance for those who violated the law at Umm al-Hiran will be of little consequence if he fails to recognize the umbilical cord linking them to those who systematically and knowingly violate the truth.
Clearly, the most unconscionable aspect of the Bedouin issue has been a brazen attempt to conflate it with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taking their cue from an armored brigade of Palestinian malefactors of meretricious political mischief posing as Knesset members, the Israeli Left, supported by its coterie of useful idiots in America and Britain and the stentorian editorial pages of Ha’aretz have managed to drag the Begin-Prawer plan into a political tug of war. However, “unlike the refugee question in the peace talks with the Palestinians ,” The Times of Israel avers, “the question of Bedouin resettlement is not about demographics or Israel’s ‘Jewishness.’ They are citizens of Israel and their demographics are part of the fabric of the Israeli state, come what may.” Underscoring that distinction, the paper points to a “key divide in Jordanian society [that] separates the Bedouin from the Palestinians.”
The European Union Parliament in Brussels, prominently involved as it has been in conflating the Bedouin resettlement issue with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, could easily have been apprised of the truth if it were willing to listen. The Jewish state’s ambassador to that august body offered to present its members with a detailed rebuttal of the alleged connection as well as the charge of “ethnic cleansing” of its Bedouin citizens. They were willing to grant him all of five minutes to state his case within the parameters of a larger discussion of Israel’s multitudinous sins. He respectfully declined.
At the climactic point in Fiddler With No Roof, with helicopters ominously hovering overhead and demolition bulldozers rumbling to the dismemberment of a Bedouin village paradise on orders of a heartless Israeli bureaucracy, Bikel solemnly intones “What hurts even more is the fact that the very people who are telling the Bedouins to get out are the descendants of the people of Anatevka.” Far more hurtful and infinitely more disturbing than this contrived scenario, is the notion that its producers, ostensible supporters of Israel, actually believe what they are saying.
William Mehlman represents AFSI in Israel.
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