After the Egyptian foreign minister’s visit to Israel last month, the Israeli-Arab party Ḥadash—supposedly the most moderate of the three parties in the Arab parliamentary bloc known as the Joint List—officially condemned Cairo for trying to improve relations with Jerusalem. Evelyn Gordon comments:
In a press statement, Ḥadash . . . accused the burgeoning Egyptian-Israeli alliance of being “an alliance that undermines a just peace and real stability in the region.”
Think about that for a minute: a party sitting in Israel’s parliament has just declared that peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors—something one would think every Israeli would welcome, and its Arab citizens above all—actually undermines regional stability. Does Ḥadash think Israeli-Egyptian hostility, which led to no fewer than five wars in the 30 years before the countries signed their peace treaty, would somehow be better for regional stability? Or is it simply so hostile to the country it ostensibly represents that it views anything beneficial to Israel, like peace, as evil by definition? . . .
[W]hile Arab Knesset members have very little power to harm Israel’s foreign relations, they have enormous power to harm relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. When Israeli Jews hear statements like [this] from parliamentarians who have repeatedly received the vast majority of the Arab vote, they naturally assume ordinary Arab voters must share their MKs’ views—that they, too, . . . seek Israel’s diplomatic and economic isolation. . . . [T]his assumption isn’t necessarily correct, but it’s perfectly rational.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/israeli-arab-mks-war-on-israel/