Reply #1: Avigdor Lieberman's Chutzpah

[bemildred]

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Yet if you are a former bouncer born in former Soviet Moldova, like Avigdor Lieberman, you can come to live in the Holy Land as of right and become the leader of a party that proposes to institute a "loyalty oath" not just to the Arab citizens of the state of Israel but to all Jewish members of religious Orthodox sects that do not declare themselves Zionist. And this grotesque party, named Israel Beiteinu or "Israel Is Our Home," is now the power broker, and its leader is the kingmaker in the Israeli electoral process.

In his early days as an immigrant in Israel, Lieberman was briefly a member of Kach, the hysterical group led by Rabbi Meir Kahane that was morbidly obsessed with the sex lives of Arabs and that yelled for their mass expulsion or—to employ the common euphemism—"transfer." He has now somewhat refined his position, calling for an exchange of territories and people that would more nearly approximate partition or even a two-state solution. But as with every such proposal, this still leaves a large number of Arabs under Israeli sovereignty, either on the West Bank or in Israel "proper." I doubt that Lieberman is really serious about any "land for peace" negotiations—he quarreled even with Ariel Sharon about disengagement from Gaza, so if it were up to him, there would presumably still be Israeli settlers in the strip. He has changed the whole tone of the argument by deciding to question the presence of Israeli Arabs who, unlike their cousins under occupation, enjoy the right of citizenship and voting as well as the privilege of living under the Israeli flag.

The best book about this highly interesting and neglected community was written by the Israeli novelist David Grossman in 1993 and is called Sleeping on a Wire. It contains micro-flashes of illumination (such as the probability that more Israeli Arabs than American Jews speak Hebrew) and also some memorable reflections on language and its relationship to literature and culture. We all remember that Maimonides wrote in fluent Arabic, but it's perhaps less well-known that:

The everyday conversation of Palestinian Israelis sparkles with expressions from the Bible and the Talmud, from Bialik and Rabbi Yehuda Halevy and Agnon. Poet Naim Araideh effuses: "Do you know what it means for me to write in Hebrew? Do you know what it's like to write in the language in which the world was created?"

http://www.slate.com/id/2211915