As terror attacks rip through the Jewish state of Israel, claiming the lives of over a dozen innocent civilians in the last three weeks, one thing is clear: Israel's political decision makers are failing its people. The government's incompetency in addressing last summer's riots in Lod and other Arab-Israeli towns, its refusal to confront the radical mosques proliferating in small villages in the West Bank and Israel's northern triangle, its disregard for the tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of illegal Israeli firearms that land in the hands of Arabs, and turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who continue to cross through the border fence daily, have together set the stage for us to arrive at this painful point.
Israel's current parliament is a gutless disgrace of leadership, but the former government shares the blame for putting Israel's imminent homeland security crisis on the backburner. Though former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid lip service to the predicament of 400,000 illegal weapons, the vast majority of which are circulating in Arab communities, he did little to counter the problem. In recent years, there's been a surge in violence on Arab streets, where residents are killing each other at alarming rates. It is not difficult to spot the connection between the thin presence of law enforcement in these areas due to an unwillingness of authorities to undertake the daunting task of confiscating illegal weapons and last May's riots during the war in Gaza, in which the vulnerable country saw an unprecedented vigilante response unleashed by its Arab citizens across the cities of Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre.
At the same time, Netanyahu looked askance as the Negev Bedouin population was being infiltrated by ISIS from the Sinai border. Yet, security forces were apparently taken by surprise, when, on March 22, an Israeli citizen from the Bedouin community of Hura who was publicly outspoken about his support of ISIS and had spent four years in prison for attempting to join the terrorist outfit, went on a murderous rampage and killed four civilians. The flagrant truth is that a good portion of the Israeli-Arab citizenry has sympathy or allegiance for the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalist Islamist factions. They are not merely preaching in mosques throughout the West Bank, but in Israel proper as well. There are roughly 1.8 million Arabs in Israel, the majority decent, law-abiding citizens, but even if a low estimate of 10% has been radicalized, that is 180,000 existential ticking bombs that Israel should be confronting. And while no celebrations have taken place in Israel praising the recent terror attacks – unlike in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories – a civil war is not unimaginable in the near future.
Then there are those tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been crossing the border from the West Bank, many to work illegally in Israel. Israel's security apparatus and intelligence agencies are well aware of these crossover entry points, yet they continue to allow the breach. Enter Diaa hamarsheh and Ra'ad Fathi Hazem: two Palestinian terrorists in their twenties from the West Bank who trespassed into Israel unlawfully and carried out deadly shooting attacks on March 29 and April 7, respectively, killing eight people, including two Ukrainian nationals.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has been held hostage by his own coalition, unable to take dramatic action because the left-wing Arab Ra'am party would dissolve the government. It should be obvious that forming an alliance with an Arab party like Ra'am restricts the government's freedom to look after the interests of state security. It appears as if Israel's authorities are just now reacting decisively, announcing this week that they will address the gaps in the security barrier and will construct 25 more miles of barrier along the Green Line. But with such coalition constraints, what can this government truly achieve? How uncompromising and thorough can it be in its determination to protect national security given the political alliances in place? With the imminent possibility that this government will collapse, one can only hope the next coalition will prioritize the safety of their citizens.
The ruling coalition has also been reluctant to act because it is scared of inflaming an uprising in the West Bank. To be sure, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which is a unit of the Defense Ministry, the administrative arm of the government in the West Bank, plays a substantial role in this and adds an important dimension to this story. COGAT has deliberately ignored illegal Arab building of West Bank roads and schools, digging of wells, and development of olive fields and vineyards. COGAT's ambiguous relationship to the issues of security in the West Bank is sadly motivated by a left-wing ideology that does not believe Judea and Samara should be a part of Israel to begin with. Consequently, its officials choose not to enforce their laws and much that is set forth in the Oslo Accords, a mutually agreed-upon treaty between the Palestinians and Israelis, which prohibits Palestinians from building in Area C. Yet Palestinians have since erected thousands of illegal structures and have grabbed large swaths of agricultural land in this region, quadrupling its Arab population in the process. They have done so under a synchronized initiative called the "Fayyad Plan," which aims to unilaterally seize as much territory as possible in Area C in order to create facts on the ground.
COGAT'S laissez-faire attitude to what amounts to an egregious and blatant infringement of the Accords is the same laxity reflected in the behavior of the ruling coalition, who have chosen to remain ambiguous in an effort to appease the Palestinian Authority rather than put focus on an inflexible policy of national security. The refusal to take a clear-cut stand and assume a principled position toward the security of Israel's population has now landed the country in a terrible mess of heartbreaking proportions. Israeli society is overrun with enemies who wish nothing less than to inflict a second Holocaust on half of the world's Jews and could not care less if their fellow Muslims die as collateral damage.
The complexity and density of Israeli politics create internal structural problems and convenient political alliances that undermine the ability to operate effectively and defend its citizenry. It is time we acknowledge that leadership in Israel is suffering from a Biden complex, afraid of international opprobrium and seeking to appease all sides. It is simply not possible to have adequate security while avoiding the essential issues. Someone always ends up trapped in the middle and paying the price. In this case, it is tragically the innocent civilians of Israel.
Karys Rhea is a writer and researcher living in Brooklyn. You can follow her on Twitter @RheaKarys.
