Tuesday, May 13, 2003

On the same front, Israel just arrested the leaders of the Islamic movement in the North of Israel, who have been funneling money to Hamas and Hezbollah for years and have only escaped prosecution for fear of violence by Israel's Arab citizens. These are all real scary people and its well past time the government dealt with them. Its a classic case of letting a small problem fester until it becomes a big problem. Hopefully, this action isn't too little too late.
Whether there will in fact be violence on the part of Israeli Arabs I don't know. By and large discontent is growing in the Arab sector, and although the numbers of people who are actually fundamentalists is low, this could be seized upon by the radical secular leadership, which identifies primarily with the Palestinians, as a pretext for fomenting violence against Israel, something they've been attempting, with varying degrees of success, for years. I don't know personally what the outcome will be, but considering the upsurge in fundamentalist feeling in Israel and in the Arab world in general, dealing with the movement now - especially if its supporting anti-Israel terrorism - is by far the smarter option in my view.

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