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Israeli Arabs: Emerging as a Fifth Column for Iran? Among the Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute more than one million Israeli citizens and more than 15% of Israel's population, there is a widespread support for Iran. This has begun to worry the Israeli security establishment. The GSS, Israel's General Security Service, the Israeli equivalent of the FBI, has warned about an alarming increase of subversive activity on behalf of Iran by Israel's Arab minority. This past week, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs issued a report entitled "Iran Is Building "Hamastan" in Gaza", which documents how Iran is establishing a base in nearby Gaza, based on "a growing strategic alliance between Iran and the radical Palestinian forces…'. It has not been forgotten that the PLO, the harbinger of local Arab revolution, was the first sponsor of the successful Iranian revolution. Iran was the first and only Islamic nation ever to hand over an Israeli embassy to the PLO. And Iran now emerges as the greatest champion of Palestinian Arab Islamic nationalism. Following support shown last summer by the elected officials of the Israeli Arabs members of the Israeli Knesset Parliament for the missile attacks on Israel by Iran's Hezbollah proxy, Israel's security establishment has launched its own investigation of Israel's Arab minority. Most recently, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with GSS Director Yuval Diskin and other high-ranking security officials concerning the Arab minority in Israel, where the GSS provided a report to the Prime Minister concerning the continual decline in its identification with the state, the rise of subversive elements within it and the dangers that lie therein. Some high-ranking security officials said that the turn of events within the Arab minority constituted "the real, long term strategic threat" to the very existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. The GSS reports that there has been a rise in the Israeli Arabs' identification with the Palestinian terrorist organizations, a rise in their identification with Iran, Hezbollah and other groups that reject the legitimacy of the State of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. All of this is done publicly and openly, and has been accompanied by incitement by the local Israeli Arab political leadership. That incitement has not been yet been dealt with by Israel's law enforcement community The GSS assessment indicates that the separatist and subversive trends that are reflected by the Israeli Arab leadership are liable to set the direction and sweep the masses behind them. One American organization that provides financial help to the Israeli Arab community to develop itself as a "Palestinian religious and national ethnic community" is the American based New Israel Fund. The GSS is now looking into the work of the NIF to examine whether this outside organization is an element that encourages subversive activity amongst the Israeli Arab population. THE FEAR FACTOR Sixty-eight percent of the Jewish population in Israel fears the possibility that Israeli Arabs will begin a popular rebellion, while 63 percent do not enter Arab communities in Israel, according to a new poll issued this week by Haifa University. Meanwhile, 64.4 percent of Israeli Jewish citizens fear that the Arab citizens endanger national security because of their high birth rate, while 83.1 percent fear Israeli Arab support of the Palestinians' struggle and 73 percent believe that most of the Arab citizens will be more loyal to the state of Palestine than to the state of Israel.
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