This is a most positive development. Although Jews and Christians face the same fate under Islamic law — subjugation as dhimmis and denial of basic rights — the unhappy history of Christian anti-Semitism and the near-universal denial of the reality of the Islamic jihad, among innumerable other factors, have prevented the formation of any large-scale cooperative efforts. Freedom lovers may hope that this will be the beginning of much more toward that end.
“Israeli Army Sees Rise in Christian Arab Recruits,” by Karl Vick for Time, March 7:
Jewish Israelis are compelled to make themselves available to Israel’s military, but the obligation has never been applied to the 20 percent of Israeli citizens who identify as Palestinian, and are sometimes called Israeli Arabs. As descendants of the people that Jewish armies fought and defeated to create the state of Israel in 1948–but, who, unlike the 700,000 who fled or were forced out of their homes, were permitted to stay—young Palestinians living Israel were never expected to carry arms to defend it.
Yet a few do. Last year 100 Arab Israelis joined the Israel Defense Forces, double the number of each of the preceding three years. All were Christians, “a minority within a minority,” notes Gabriel Naddaf, the Greek Orthodox priest who is promoting enlistment, and with it a controversial separate identity for the 160,000 Orthodox and Catholics among the 1.7 million Israeli citizens who regard themselves as Palestinian.
Many Israelis, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, welcome the move, proudly displaying Arab Christian recruits as an indicator of the country’s commitment to a certain sort of pluralism, even as it presses negotiators for the Palestinians who live beyond Israel’s immediate borders to recognize Israel as “a Jewish state.”
Note the sneering tone. Israel wants the “Palestinians” to recognize Israel as a Jewish state so as to end their oft-stated imperative to destroy it utterly. They want the “Palestinians” to recognize that Israel has a right to exist, and to exist as a state with a Jewish majority. Christians and other non-Jews in Israel enjoy equality of rights and are represented in the Knesset. Compare their situation to the plight of non-Muslims in Islamic states, which Time would never dare criticize: in Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere, non-Muslims live a precarious existence, harassed and brutalized with little or no recourse to protection from the authorities. In Israel, non-Jews live freely.
Palestinian leaders regard IDF recruitment–as well as a Knesset vote last month designating a seat for Christians on an employment commission—as a cynical, divide-and-rule tactic intended to splinter the solidarity of a national liberation movement conceived, in the 1960s, around a newly emerged Palestinian identity. “It’s an expression of the way the Israeli system thinks and works,” says Hanan Ashrawi, a senior PLO official: “Dividing people, defining them by religion, trying to discriminate.”
Actually this Israeli decision was a reaction against divide-and-rule tactics employed by Islamic supremacists in the days of the caliphates and Islamic empires, up to and including the Ottoman Empire: the dhimmi communities were divided from each other and their mutual antagonisms encouraged and perpetuated at the highest levels, so as to avoid the creation of a coalition of victimized peoples against their Muslim overlords. Arab nationalism later co-opted Middle Eastern Christian communities as fellow Arabs and made it a linchpin of Arab loyalty to support the Islamic agenda, when the natural alliance would have been for dhimmi communities to unite against the Sharia imperative. Israel has no made a welcome step toward that alliance.
Father Naddaf says that’s fine by him. In Israel, he says, military service is a key to success in life and Christians want to do better. “Enough of the lies regarding Christian identity and the nationality of the Christians in Israel,” Naddaf tells TIME. “We want to integrate into Israeli society. We want to contribute to the society we live in. And we want to represent ourselves. No one else will.”
The priest said Christians have learned from the examples of other non-Jews who advanced in Israeli society by serving in the military: the Druze and Bedouin, Arabic-speaking residents of Israel who have never identified as Palestinian. In 2012, along with two other Orthodox priests, Naddaf established the “Israeli-Christian Recruitment Forum” to encourage army enlistment. The forum has its own flag—a sword in the shape of a cross behind the Israel’s own Star of David standard—but the two other priests are gone. “Unfortunately they withdrew because of the threats,” says Naddaf, who has received so many threats to his own life that Israel’s internal security service rates him at level four on a scale of one to six, he says.
Which bring us to another driver of the nascent movement: The dire situation facing Christian populations from Iraq to Egypt to Syria. “We are caught between the hammer and anvil,” says Ezak Hallak, a Nazareth lawyer for the Forum, quoting a Hebrew expression. “In our hearts, we support Israel, the Jews. I think the Christians in the Middle East are getting slaughtered because we are not speaking what is in our hearts. Stand up for yourself. There is no other way to face the craziness of the radical Arabs. No other way in the world.”
How controversial is an Arab joining the IDF? After enlisting, Naddaf’s son, Jabron, was attacked on the street by a man shouting “traitor”—a word even his friends would have used just two years ago, Jabron Naddaf says, “but it’s not the case any more.” And indeed, the idea of serving in the IDF brought no strong reactions from a half dozen people—all Muslims—interviewed on the street in downtown Nazareth, the town where, according to lore, Christ came of age….