31 July 2013
"Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens.
The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israel army draft for the past 65 years.
Leaders from the Palestinian community, Christian and Muslim, who have spoken against this new enlistment effort have been called in for investigation by Israel’s secret police. In an Orwellian inversion, they have been accused of “incitement to violence.”
The issue first came to prominence last October when the defense ministry quietly staged a conference close to Nazareth, the effective capital of Palestinians in Israel, to promote military service among Christians......
The logic of Israel’s moves to recruit the Christians and Druze was explained in 1965 by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s Arab affairs adviser: “The communal frameworks of religious and linguistic groups should be fostered, except for the Muslim, and the individuality of each and every separate community should be consolidated.”
Recent events highlight that this policy formulated in the state’s early years – to use sectarian differences to isolate the largest Palestinian community, of Muslims, from their Christian and Druze compatriots – holds to this day.
With Palestinian communal solidarity seen as a serious threat to the state’s Jewishness, Israel would prefer to push Muslims, Christians and Druze into open conflict."
No comments:
Post a Comment