The flip side of the fact that Avraham Poraz has been no stranger to controversy from the day he became interior minister is his intestinal fortitude to tell it like it is.
Poraz did just so Tuesday while visiting Galilean Arab municipalities.
Unlike his predecessors he didn't dispense blandishments. He pulled no punches and told his hosts they'd better get their acts together. In western Galilee alone 10 municipalities and local councils have not bothered to put together even the draft rehabilitation plans, which are prerequisites for a financial bail-out from the central government. These local authorities failed to make even this minimal effort despite the fact that they are not paying their employees' wages, some of them for well over a year. Moneys earmarked for employee savings funds and pensions disappeared elsewhere. Yet these same local councils have no compunction blaming the government for their shortcomings. Against the charged background of the Jewish-Arab conflict, the subtext is that government discrimination is at fault.
We praise Poraz for putting the record straight and for doing so in front of the joint Ba'aneh, Majd el-Kurum and Deir el-Asad council. "Arab local issues are plainly neglected ... by Arab MKs," Poraz argued, "I hear them sound off endlessly about what happens in Nablus, Jenin and Gaza but not in Nazareth or Ba'aneh."
Poraz put his finger on it. Too many Israeli-Arab politicians relish radicalizing their constituents and fanning the flames of discord. Discrimination has hardly been eradicated, but cannot be addressed in the face of mounting identification with the Palestinian Authority's war against Israel.
MK Azmi Bishara is a case in point. He recently announced a hunger strike to protest the security fence. This coincided with an op-ed he contributed to Egypt's Al-Ahram in which he portrayed Israel as a racist state bent on oppressing Arabs. "If Israel were to be recognized as a Jewish state, there will be no room within the Green Line for Arabs, the original indigenous inhabitants of the land.... Those really threatened aren't Jews but Palestinians."
On Monday he told an American radio station that "Israel is worse than apartheid. There's nothing like it in the world. Some of Israel's crimes are even worse than its massacres ... its aim is to destroy Palestinians ... Israel's a spoiled child, the neighborhood bully."
Israeli-Arab politics seems to operate under the assumption that the more outrageous a politician's incitement, the greater his following. Yet MKs who expediently turn their electorate against the state in fact become obstructionist and contribute to the misery of their own people.
Too many Arab communities have in effect refused to "cooperate" with the state and hence fail to collect local taxes, allow water bills to go unpaid, neglect infrastructure and condone, if not encourage, illegal construction.
Last February Ba'aneh witnessed the largest-ever clashes with police since October 2000. The demolition of illegal structures on public land usurped by locals in 1999 had to be secured by 450 policemen. Three officers suffered broken bones and others were injured by the hail of rocks which greeted them. Yet they were doing Ba'aneh's residents a favor. The site taken over illegally was earmarked as a housing project for no fewer than 40 local families, whose rights the land-grabbers callously violated.
These are truths which Arab politicians prefer not to tell. They likewise fail to disclose what share of the state's allocations Arab local authorities receive. The government testified to the Or Commission that in 2002 the Arab sector, comprising
11.6% of Israel's population, received 25.4% of the Interior Ministry's development budget,
70.7% of the Housing Ministry budget for rehabilitating old neighborhoods,
72% of the budgets for constructing public institutions,
48% of the Infrastructure Ministry's sewerage budget, and
63% of the Education Ministry's classroom construction funds.
This hardly indicates deliberate state antagonism towards Israel's Arabs.
What Poraz in essence rightly sought to impart is that less antagonism towards the state by Arab politicians is what's needed. The more they identify with the state's enemies and practice self-serving obstructionism, the more they deepen and perpetuate their communities' malaise. "I don't expect them to become honorary members of the Zionist Movement," Poraz said, "but they'd serve Israeli Arabs' best interests if they devote much more attention to the true problems of those they represent."
