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bnumber of Hellenized Israelis declare that if there is a conflict bbetween Jewishness and democracy, they choose democracy and bthe end of the Jewish state. bOf course, the evaders of reality still constitute the majority. bThey flee the reality of the Arab teacher in Araba. bAraba, the Galilee Arab village. Na’ama Saud is a young bArab Sabra. He teaches school, teaches the young Arab gener- bation of Israel. A reporter for Maariv, Yisrael Harel, asks him b(May 28, 1976) whether he accepts the fact of Israel as a Jewish bstate with himself as a minority with equal rights but no na- btional ones. Saud replies: “Today I am in the minority. The bstate is democratic. Who says that in the year 2000 we Arabs bwill still be the minority? We are today about half a million bArabs in Israel. Today, I accept the fact that this is a Jewish bstate with an Arab minority. But when we are the majority I will bnot accept the fact of a Jewish state with an Arab majority.” bWho is listening? Who wishes to see the dual threat to Israel b—demographic and democratic? Certainly not Israeli leaders. bIn 1976 all the blindness, deafness, and contradictions that char- bacterize the problem were in evidence in the person of Prime bMinister Yitzhak Rabin. bOn April 14, 1973, Rabin was Israeli ambassador to the bUnited States. In a press conference in Tel Aviv, he made the bfollowing significant statement: “The process of Jewish re- bjuvenation is based on the rise of a state whose great majority is bJewish and which will be founded on Jewish values. Therefore, I bdoubt if she could hold too large an element of non-Jews.” bThree years later, Rabin was prime minister of Israel and bin an angry mood. The Land Day Rebellion (March 30, 1976) bhad left a shocked country in its wake. Rabin, in a Knesset bspeech, furiously attacked the Rakah Communist Party, in- bstigator of the Land Day riots, for attempting “to tear up the bfabric of cooperation between Jews and Arabs built up over the bpast twenty-eight years.” A prime minister whose view is based bon Israel as a Jewish state that cannot accommodate “too large” ba number of Arabs blames the Communist Party for destroying b“a wonderful relationship”? What can we say? What can Rabin bpossibly take the Arabs for? bThen, on May 6, 1976, Rabin spoke to the annual meeting bof Tel Aviv senior high school students. There he proclaimed: b
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