Tuesday is Memorial Day for Israel's fallen soldiers, but also for the victims of hostilities. Just 24 years ago, 50 years after its establishment, the State of Israel decided to admit to its national memorial hall the civilians killed by the enemy. The understanding - that if in time of war "the IDF is the army of the people", then in times of terror "the whole country is a front" – was "bought" with blood and many terrorist attacks in which civilians and soldiers were killed together:
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Ohad Orbach (a soldier) and Uri Shachor (a civilian) were murdered together in Wadi Kelt while hiking there. An explosion on Bus 18 in early1995 killed soldiers and civilians together, as well as in the severe (double) attack at the Beit Lid junction, in Maalot, and many other attacks. There was no point in separating remembrance from remembrance. Moreover, many civilians whose lives were cut short by terrorism were in essence soldiers on missions. Just like the children of Moshav Avivim. And the 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. And the victims of the explosion at the Israeli Embassy in Argentina. Even those who were found dead near the basket of vegetables, in the market, on a bench on a booby-trapped bus or by a knife or a car-ramming in the street – they were all murdered because they were Jews or Israelis.
This reminder is needed now because, in the State of Israel, which today is also uniting in mourning with the victims of hostilities, there are long-serving members of Knesset (the vast majority of them Arab) who refuse to define the victims of hostilities as victims of terrorism and insisting on the term "victims of conflict". This definition is derived from their view of the terrorists as "martyrs" and "freedom fighters".
It is surprising that this needs to be said, but we have a moral debt to the victims of terrorism. We must exclude from the circle of legitimacy – moral and political – any supporter, admirer, understander or glorifier of terrorism, overt or covert, including as an active or passive partner in any government, right or left. This, too, is part of the ancient commandment: "You shall not stand by [the shedding of] your fellow's blood."
This is not politics, this is an existential-moral issue, which touches the heart of the unwritten connection and contract between the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the Arab minority living in it:
Those who refrain from defining Hamas as a terrorist organization and ideologically connected to the Muslim Brotherhood whose ultimate goals are a global Islamic revolution and caliphate; those who have often gone to support terrorists and the Hamas' "marches of return", and those whose leaders have called for "sacrificing their lives for al-Aqsa" and dying as shahids for it – and all these and more are Ra'am (United Arab List) and the Islamic Movement's southern faction (its dominant component) – can not be whitewashed overnight and become legitimate for government.
The Arab citizens of Israel are not disqualified from serving in the Knesset and the government, but those who support or identify with or glorify terrorism cannot be partners. Even in the southern faction, as in the "northern" one that was outlawed, some believe that the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel is temporary. Some of them hold the view that the Jews are not a people, but a religion and a collection of Jewish communities, belonging to different places and peoples; that the Jewish religion is a false religion – Din al-Batel, compared to the true religion, Islam – Din al-Haq.
In their principled view, Islam came into being to take the place of Judaism and Christianity, which are inferior religions and can exist only as dhimmi – as tolerable religions that depend on a Muslim ruler, and that all Palestinian land is Muslim sanctuary (waqf). Therefore, Ra'am and the southern faction do not recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Their ambition to "integrate" into the government and become part of it is predominantly tactical.
There was an opportunity to examine this aspiration positively, and perhaps even to assume that they could change, if only they had unconditionally renounced terrorism, terrorists and terrorist attacks. As long as they avoid doing that, they are not marriage material for political legitimacy. And it is precisely today, on Memorial Day, that this must be said. This is the minimum we owe to the thousands of victims of terrorism and hostilities, whose memory we commemorate today.
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