The people of Otzma Yehudit, headed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, are seeking, and apparently finding time and time again, a way to harm Arab society in Israel – a society whose loyalty to the state is superfluous, and whose loyalty to the state may be the time to talk about its loyalty to it after 75 years.
In a letter sent to the prime minister, Ministers Ben-Gvir and Yitzhak Wasserlauf requested that the government hold a discussion on its decision last December to adopt Resolution No. 550 of October 2021, the period of the Bennett government, in support of Arab society.
It seems that it is not appropriate for them for the state to budget Arab society, a budget that reaches a population that constitutes about 20 percent of the country.
The information presented by Otzma Yehudit in a letter they sent to the prime minister is full of inaccuracies, populism and incitement against Arab society.
If the two ministers with direct ties to Arab society – the first the minister of national security, the second the minister of the Negev and Galilee – are willing to sign a letter along these lines, I wonder what they think about the Arabs. Well, it's not hard to guess, things are open and clear all the time, but it's surprising that now in ministerial positions they speak as if they are in an ongoing election campaign.
"This is an inheritance that the government received from the previous government, in which, as part of the coalition agreement, huge budgets were allocated to Ra'am," the two ministers erroneously state that the budgets allocated in both the Netanyahu and Bennett governments were regular budgets, which the Arabs are supposed to receive as equal citizens to the Jews, and not exceptional budgets.
Another lie in the letter is the assertion that in the framework of Resolution 550 adopted by the previous government and adopted by the current government, a threshold was set in government ministries for allocating 30 percent of the budget to Arab society. The ministers also express their protest because of "the threshold that is significantly higher than their relative share of the population."
Assuming this is true, the 30 percent of the budget is supposed to deal with current issues and close decades-long gaps. And if this is not true - why write them down and distribute them to the media?! It seems that the ministers are still on an election campaign.
A false and astonishing statistic raised by the two signatories of the letter is that the Jewish sector in the Galilee and the Negev is discriminated against compared to the Arab sector, and that the Jewish population in the Galilee constitutes 14% – a figure that every child, Jewish and Arab, knows is not true.
I would like to believe what the ministers wrote, but since the establishment of the State of Israel, how many Jewish and Arab settlements have been established in the Galilee? From whom was land expropriated in the 70s and 80s for the establishment of dozens of settlements in the Misgav, Mateh Asher, Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee regional councils?
To both ministers, and perhaps also to all members of the coalition, I submit an attractive proposal: Instead of ignoring the rights of Arab society, which constitutes one-fifth of the country's population, perhaps you will waive the taxes that come from two million citizens – about NIS 7 billion a year – while at the same time the Arabs will give up their entitlement to budgets and services from the state?
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