Will Netanyahu now make peace with Israel's Arab citizens?
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is eager to expand normalization beyond Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, but many Israeli Arabs would prefer that normalization begin at home.
“As-salaam aleikum.” That’s how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to begin his Sept. 15 message. He continued, “to all of Israel’s friends in the Middle East: those who are with us today, and those who will join us tomorrow.”
Netanyahu delivered this speech at the ceremony to mark the signing of the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain on the South Lawn of the White House. He later tweeted that part of the speech in Arabic to all his Twitter followers around the world. Yes, in Arabic! The very language that, just two years ago, saw itself demoted by Netanyahu himself, from Israel’s second official language to a language with “special status,” to use the term as it appears in the new law.
The truth is that anyone who has followed Netanyahu’s remarks ever since he announced the normalization agreement between Israel and the UAE will find a man who speaks positively about the Arabs and talks about the need to turn the page on Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. He keeps using the Arabic word salaam, which is very much unlike him. After all, he based his whole career on incitement against Israel’s Arab population.
In fact, Netanyahu’s resume is replete with all sorts of racist comments targeting Israeli Arabs. In the second round of elections last year, Netanyahu wrote in an automated popup Facebook message to his followers, “Arabs want to annihilate us all: women, children, and men.” The incident, which soon came to be known as “the chatbot of hate,” caused Facebook to announce that it was suspending his account for 24 hours. Then there was his miserable comment last March, in response to the election results, that the left-wing bloc has only 47 seats, and that the Arabs are not part of the equation. All of this happened after another famous statement during the 2015 election: “The government of the right is at risk. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” And there were more. In fact, there have been all sorts of attacks and attempts to delegitimize Israel’s Arab citizens.
