The huge Arab turnout in the Israeli election this week should ring loud alarm bells for both Israel and the West.
What suddenly became visible in Israel was what’s been emerging in Europe and now also in America: the weaponization of democracy by Islamic power.
In Israel’s election, the various Arab parties clocked up a record number of 19 Knesset seats. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has accused these parties of fraud, bribery, intimidation and ballot manipulation.
Now the chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Noam Sohlberg, has ordered an inquiry by Israel’s security agency, the Shin Bet, into “serious suspicions of improper influence” through funding by foreign actors working against Israel’s interests. The main finger of suspicion is pointing at Qatar having funneled money to boost Arab turnout.
Alarm should go even deeper than this. The Arab parties have used the country’s utterly dysfunctional electoral system to put Israel’s existential Zionist project in peril.
The astonishing Arab tally of 19 mandates has put a huge obstacle in the way of both the Likud and the opposition “change” blocs in forming a Zionist government.
While this deprived the Likud bloc of possible Knesset seats, it presents a worse predicament for the anti-Netanyahu faction. If these centrist and left-wing parties who have sworn never to join forces with Netanyahu refuse to abandon this position, their only route into government is to form a coalition with the Arabs.
But these parties consist of anti-Zionist Arab nationalists, anti-Zionist communists and Muslim Brotherhood-connected Islamists.
It may yet turn out that the sheer size of this Arab achievement, not to mention a possibly corrupted election process, will force the creation of what many think would be the best way forward for Israel.
This would be a unity government, in which Netanyahu’s centrist foes swallow their “never Bibi” pledges to form a patriotic Zionist cabinet around him.
But it remains the fact that the Arab tail is now wagging the Israeli dog. It’s no surprise that Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party, has gloated: “Everyone’s speaking with us.”
Those piping up to say the Arabs’ 19 seats prove that Israel is not an “apartheid state” are missing the deeper point. The Arabs’ result is not a triumph of civil rights. It’s a strategy of using those civil rights as a weapon for Israel’s destruction.
Jubilant supporters of the Arab Joint List, whose candidates celebrated the terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sang Biladi, biladi (“My homeland, my country”) during election-night celebrations. The song extols the redemption of Palestine and its liberation through blood and fire.
In a post-election interview, Abbas once again refused to call Hamas a terror organization. In the past, he’s said he had publicly accepted that Israel was a Jewish state solely to avoid his party being disqualified from running for the Knesset. He’s also called the Jews invaders and murderers, declared that “their occupation will depart” and stated: “We are waging a civil jihad.”
Abbas is an Islamist who was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, from which he only distanced himself to gain a foothold in the Knesset. The Brotherhood uses democratic entryism, pretense and manipulation alternatively with terrorist violence, as its strategy to destroy Israel and conquer the West.
Yet many Israelis regard Abbas as a pragmatist intent upon using a presence in government to secure improvements for Israeli Arabs in their daily lives. This is precisely the same delusional ignorance about Islamic fanaticism that the Israelis displayed so catastrophically over Hamas in Gaza and that led to Oct. 7.
It should be unthinkable for Israel to allow these Arab parties to function at all. Indeed, in September, the Central Elections Committee disqualified them from running in this election. It found they all fell afoul of the Basic Law that prohibits political parties if they support “armed struggle” or terrorism against Israel, or deny it as a Jewish state.
But the Supreme Court overruled this, claiming preposterously that there was no evidence of any of that and that the parties were needed to represent Israel’s Arabs.
As ever, the court demonstrated how it’s in thrall to the leftist ideologies that are currently writing the West’s suicide note.
Leftists and liberals in the West traduce their own cultural identity as colonialist and oppressive, refuse to acknowledge the threat posed by an Islamic world that is steadily taking over their own societies, and denounce anyone who opposes this as racist and Islamophobic.
In Israel, the left has realized that it can only gain power with the help of the Arabs. In America and Europe, there’s been a similar realization in progressive political circles that, with a rising sectarian Muslim population focused overwhelmingly upon an Islamic agenda, the route to power is through the extinction of Israel and the hounding of Jews.
Accordingly, the Islamic jihad is rising as a political force in Britain, Europe and America.
From mega-mosques to mass Muslim prayer in public spaces and the “red-green alliance” between leftists and Islamists marching together “for Gaza” on the streets, the Islamic world is demonstrating that it is taking control of the West.
As Israel has now suddenly seen, the Islamists have been making huge progress through their strategic deployment of the democratic system.
In Britain, there’s now a sectarian Islamic bloc, a steadily rising Muslim presence in local government and, to the stupefaction of the general public, five “Gaza First” members of parliament.
When he was running for his current post as New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani embraced Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who had championed the most brutal forms of Islamic sharia law, endorsed terrorism and called for a takeover of America, saying “politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”
In Michigan, the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, is a follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has supported him with campaign cash and endorsement from its front groups and other fellow-travelers.
The claim that such concerns are “racist” misses the point by a mile. The West’s bargain of citizenship means that minorities are welcome to establish their own forms of worship and culture provided they all sign up to the West’s core values, such as one law for all, freedom of religion and equality for women.
Tragically, the West has torn up this bargain and refuses to privilege its historic core values over those of its Islamic minority.
In Israel, most are unaware that this bargain should be applied to its own Arabs as a minority population. Israeli Arabs should acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state and that its identity, laws and institutions are based on Jewish precepts.
Many Israeli Arabs do exactly that. Arabs fighting in the Israel Defense Forces are far greater Israeli patriots than the ultra-Orthodox Jews declaring that they would rather die than enlist.
But Israel’s ruling elites have been asleep to the growing radicalization of other Israeli Arabs who are identifying with the Palestinian agenda of exterminating Israel and killing Jews.
In part, this is because those elites are dominated by Ashkenazi Jews. These have a similar mindset to the West, which has now destroyed its moral compass by privileging misbehaving minorities over the victimized majority.
Just as the West needs to understand the foundational influence of Judaism upon its historic identity, so Israel needs to understand how its elites have been influenced by the West’s current decadence.
Both need to lay down red lines. The West must promote and defend its historic cultural identity. And in Israel, the Arabs and their political parties must sign up to the Jewish state. Otherwise, they will need to be treated as enemies of the state.
Whether motivated by hatred of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir or corrupt funding by Qatar, the huge mobilization of Israeli Arabs at this election was the democratic version of the “Al-Aqsa Flood” of Oct. 7.
In both Israel and the West, public bamboozlement is so great that deliriously energized Islamists believe they’re now within sight of victory over both.
To prevent that, governments in Israel, Britain and America need to wake up to the jihadi threat they are facing.
