The Arab lawmaker who dedicated his election victory to Gaza just did Israel a huge favor.

Israel’s election ended in gridlock, the Arab parties hold the keys to the next government, and the country is deeply frustrated. This may be the greatest gift God has given us in years.

Let me explain.

On election night, as Israel’s Arab parties celebrated the best result in their history, a record 19 seats, Joint List MK Osama Saadi took the microphone at his party’s headquarters and told the world exactly who deserved credit for the victory: “We dedicate this victory to our people in Gaza, the West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.” He wasn’t finished. When this “fascist government, this government of genocide, this government of ethnic cleansing” falls, he promised, “we will send our greetings to our people in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the occupied territory, and all free people around the world.”

Saadi was elected to the Knesset of the State of Israel by citizens of the State of Israel. Yet on the biggest night of his political career, he didn’t have a single word of thanks for Israel. His loyalty, he made clear, belongs to “our people” in Gaza and Ramallah, the same people who handed out candy as Hamas butchered, raped and kidnapped Jewish families on October 7. Saadi isn’t confused about who he is. He told us exactly which nation he belongs to, and it isn’t Israel.

If you think Saadi speaks only for the radicals of the Joint List, take a look at Ra’am, the supposedly “moderate” Arab party that sat in the Bennett-Lapid government and was paraded around the world as living proof that coexistence works. A few weeks before the election, Ra’am MK Yasser Hujirat announced that Hamas is not a terrorist organization at all, but a charity. Three years after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, this is what passes for moderation in the Arab sector.

Saadi’s speech forces us to face a reality that most Israelis, and many of our friends abroad, would much rather ignore. We are not fighting Hamas, or the Palestinian Authority, or a handful of “extremists.” The Arab nation is at war with the Jewish nation, and it has been for more than a century.

This war began long before there was an IDF, a PLO or a Hamas. In 1929, Arab mobs in Hebron massacred 67 of their Jewish neighbors, many of them young yeshiva students, with knives and axes. From 1936 to 1939, Arab gangs waged a three-year campaign of terror against the Jews of the Land of Israel. There was no “occupation” back then, no checkpoints, no settlements and no Netanyahu. There were Jews living in their land, and Arabs who wanted them dead or gone.

But we Jews don’t like to think of ourselves as being at war with an entire people, so we invented an elaborate vocabulary to avoid facing the truth. There are “Israeli Arabs” and “Palestinians,” “Gazans” and “East Jerusalem residents,” and each category comes with its own policies and its own comforting assumptions. An Israeli Arab carries an Israeli ID card, so we assume he is one of us. A Gazan does not, so we treat him as the enemy, but only if he happens to be holding a weapon.

These distinctions are ours, not theirs. An ID card is a legal document, not an identity. When Osama Saadi spoke of “our people,” he made no distinction whatsoever between the Arab of Nazareth, the Arab of Jenin and the Arab of Khan Younis. In his eyes, and in the eyes of the voters who sent him to the Knesset, they are one nation fighting one war against one enemy: us.

If this sounds exaggerated, remember May 2021. As Hamas fired more than four thousand rockets at our cities, Arab citizens of Lod, Acre and other mixed cities turned on their Jewish neighbors. Mobs burned synagogues, torched Jewish homes and cars and beat Jews in the streets. In Lod, Yigal Yehoshua was driving home from work when rioters hurled a brick through his windshield; he died of his wounds a few days later. The mayor of Lod compared the night to Kristallnacht. These rioters weren’t terrorists who snuck across the border from Gaza. They were our neighbors, citizens of the State of Israel, and the moment Hamas went to war, they opened a second front from inside our cities.

Those who still believe in coexistence will tell you that Saadi doesn’t speak for ordinary Arab citizens. I wish that were true. But Arab turnout in this election hit record levels, and Arab voters handed the Joint List and Ra’am the largest bloc of seats in their history. Nobody forced them, and nobody fooled them. Every one of those voters knew exactly who he was voting for: parties that deny the Jewish people’s right to this land and describe Hamas as freedom fighters and charity workers.

What makes this so damning is that Arab voters had a real alternative. Amcha Yisrael, the new party led by Ofer Winter, placed Yosef Haddad, a Christian Arab from Nazareth and one of Israel’s most courageous defenders, at number two on its list. Haddad served in the Golani Brigade, was badly wounded in the Second Lebanon War, and has spent the years since defending the IDF in every television studio and on every stage that will have him. If Israeli Arabs truly wanted to be part of the Israeli story, here was their chance. Instead, Amcha Yisrael received a meager 95,703 votes, nearly all of them from right-wing Jews. Arab voters had a proud, pro-Israel Arab on the ballot, and they said “no, thank you.”

Take the question at the heart of Israeli politics for the past thirty years: should Israel hand over parts of our biblical homeland, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, to the Palestinians? There is a world of difference between a left-wing Jew who supports giving away the land and an Arab who supports the very same thing. The left-wing Jew believes, naively and foolishly, that surrendering Shechem and Hebron will finally bring peace and make Israel safer. He’s wrong, but at least he has noble aspirations. He wants Israel to survive and thrive; he simply has terrible ideas about how to get there. But the Arab voter wants the very same territories handed over for the opposite reason. He isn’t dreaming of peace with the Jewish state; he is dreaming of replacing the Jewish state. For him, every hill we surrender in Judea and Samaria brings us closer to the day when the Jews are finally expelled from every inch of of the land of Israel. The left-wing Jew wants to give away land to save Israel. The Arab wants us to give away land so he can destroy it.

Israelis have a name for this kind of willful blindness: the conceptzia, Hebrew for “the concept.” The word entered our national vocabulary after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Israel’s intelligence chiefs clung to the belief that Egypt and Syria would never dare attack, right up until the morning they did. Fifty years later, the conceptzia came back in a new form. Hamas, we told ourselves, was deterred, and a steady supply of Qatari cash and Israeli work permits would keep Gaza quiet. On Simchat Torah of 2023, that illusion burned to the ground along with the homes of Be’eri and Kfar Aza.

Or so we thought. In truth, the conceptzia never died. It just changed its address.

Moshe Feiglin, newly elected to the Knesset at the head of the Zehut party, understands this better than most. When Joint List chairman Yousef Jabareen stood at the Knesset podium and demanded that Israel abolish its definition as a Jewish state, he wasn’t debating civil rights or freedom of expression with us. He was demanding the dissolution of the Jewish state from inside its own parliament, using the institutions of Jewish sovereignty to tear that sovereignty down. Jabareen has never hidden his goals. What should shock us is not what he says, but that we keep refusing to believe what our own ears are hearing. In Feiglin’s words, “This is exactly the failure of October 7th: the failure of a worldview unable to recognize the enemy, to understand his goals, and to stop treating an existential struggle with the tools of naïve Western liberal legalism.”

Today’s conceptzia tells us that our only enemy is the terrorist himself, the man who actually pulls the trigger or stabs the innocent Jew with his knife. Him, we hunt down and kill. But the parents who raised him to hate Jews, the neighbors who hid him from the IDF, the imam who blessed his “martyrdom” and the village that handed out candy in the streets after he murdered a Jewish family? Those people, we tell ourselves, are not terrorists. They are innocent civilians, decent people who just want a better life for their children.

I wish it were so. But it’s a lie, and the Arabs themselves keep telling us so, at the ballot box, in their own polls and in plain sight for anyone willing to look.

Start with the ballot box. In 2006, the last time Palestinians in Gaza, Judea and Samaria were allowed to choose their own leaders, they gave Hamas a landslide victory, 74 of 132 seats, knowing full well that its charter called for the murder of Jews. Twenty years later, given a free vote in a democracy that grants them more rights than any Arab country on earth, Israel’s own Arab citizens gave a record result to the party of Osama Saadi.

The polls tell the same story. In February 2023, a Hamas terrorist shot brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv at point-blank range as they drove through the Arab village of Huwara. When pollsters asked Palestinians a few weeks later how they felt about the murders, 71 percent said they supported the attack. This is not a fringe of extremists hiding in the shadows. This is the mainstream of Palestinian society.

And then there is what we saw with our own eyes. Gadi Yarkoni, the longtime mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council on the Gaza border, was no right-winger. He lost both his legs to a Hamas mortar in 2014 and still believed in building bridges with the Gazans across the fence. October 7 shattered that belief: “The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave. We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim.” Gazans with Israeli work permits, the “good ones” we welcomed into our communities, gave Hamas detailed maps of the kibbutzim, down to which families owned dogs and how many children slept in each home.

Over the years, this lie has cost thousands of Jewish lives. After each Arab terror attack, the IDF hunts down the terrorist, perhaps demolishes his family’s house, and moves on, while the evil society that produced him goes right back to raising the next one. The Palestinian Authority pays terrorists and their families a monthly salary through Pay for Slay, whatever new name it gives the program this year. Palestinian schools teach children to revere the “martyrs” who murdered Jews, naming streets and soccer tournaments in their honor. And every time Jewish blood is spilled, the mosques broadcast their celebrations over loudspeakers for the whole village to hear.

We are fighting a national war as if it were a police action, chasing one terrorist at a time while the society that breeds them goes untouched, and Jewish families keep paying the price.

We cannot defeat an enemy we refuse to see. Israel is strong enough to win this war, as our soldiers have proven in Gaza, in Lebanon and in the skies over Iran. But we will never win it until we have the courage to call it by its name.

Galilee of the nations

Nowhere is this danger greater than in the Galilee. The prophet Isaiah called it Galil HaGoyim, “Galilee of the nations” (Isaiah 8:23), and today the name fits all too well. Arabs now make up roughly 53 percent of the Galilee’s population. This is the very region the UN assigned to the Arab state in its 1947 partition plan, precisely because it was so heavily Arab.

Israel’s founders saw the danger clearly. In 1963, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s government launched a plan to plant small hilltop communities called mitzpim, “lookouts,” across the Galilee, as part of a national effort they proudly called “the Judaization of the Galilee.” Nazareth Illit, today called Nof HaGalil, was founded in 1957 for the same purpose, and Karmiel followed in 1964.

Over the decades, that phrase became a dirty word. Arab activists and their allies smeared “Judaizing the Galilee” as racism, and Israeli officials, desperate to appear enlightened, quietly abandoned it. Today the Israel Land Authority charges over a million shekels for a building plot in the Jewish community of Moreshet and nearly as much in Kfar Vradim, while land in nearby Sakhnin and Deir al-Asad sells for a small fraction of that price. Meanwhile, Jewish families are leaving Nof HaGalil, Haifa and Acre, and Arab families are moving in to take their place. The State of Israel is subsidizing the very demographic shift that threatens its hold on the north.

Ukraine learned the hard way what happens when a hostile population dominates a border region. In the Donbas, a pro-Russian majority became Moscow’s foothold for invasion and war. Now picture the Galilee during a full-scale war with Hezbollah. If Lod and Acre went up in flames during a war with Hamas, what will happen when Hezbollah’s rockets are falling on Haifa and the Arab towns of the north rise up to welcome them?

Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party has made Yehud HaGalil, “the Judaization of the Galilee,” its next great national goal. Good. This isn’t racism. It is how a nation holds onto its land.

The ones who stand with us

None of this is about race or blood. Some of Israel’s finest patriots are not Jewish. Druze officers command IDF combat units and have fallen in battle defending the Jewish state. Bedouin trackers guard our borders, and a growing number of Christian Arabs proudly enlist in the IDF, often against fierce pressure from their own communities. These men and women have bound their fate to ours, and they deserve far more than our gratitude. They deserve our love.

The Bible categorizes these righteous gentiles as ger toshav, the “resident stranger.” As the Sages define him, a ger toshav is a non-Jew who accepts God’s moral law, the seven commandments given to Noah and his descendants, and who lives in the Land of Israel under Jewish sovereignty. Above all, he is loyal to the people of Israel. He accepts that this land belongs to the Jewish people, he wants the Jewish state to succeed, and when our enemies rise up against us, he stands with us rather than with them. The Bible commands us to support him and make sure he can live among us (Leviticus 25:35).

Yosef Haddad is a ger toshav. So is George Deek, the Christian Arab from Jaffa who served as an Israeli diplomat and now defends Israel before Christian audiences around the world. So are the Druze families of Daliyat al-Carmel and Beit Jann who have buried their sons in IDF uniform. These are our brothers. We want them here, we are grateful for them, and we will fight for them.

The dividing line in this land has nothing to do with blood. It is loyalty. And on October 27, Arab voters made it painfully clear how few of them stand on our side of that line.

Which brings us back to the deadlock, and to the gift.

For decades, Israeli politicians have tiptoed around the hardest truth in our national life, terrified of being called racists. On election night, Osama Saadi did their work for them. In his own words, on live television, he told us who he is, who his voters are and which nation they belong to. We could not have asked for a clearer message.

The principle we need is not new; the Bible gave it to us thousands of years ago. The right to live in this land belongs to those who accept the Jewish people’s sovereignty over it. Those who seek Israel’s destruction should not have the right to live here among us. Avigdor Liberman ran on the slogan “No loyalty, no citizenship” back in 2009, and the political establishment called him a racist. This election proved him right.

How we will remove this fifth column from our land, I do not know. Nobody does, because for 78 years we have been too frightened even to ask the question. But I do know this: no nation in history has ever solved a problem it was afraid to confront. The work begins the day we stop lying to ourselves.

Isaiah described the people of Israel with brutal honesty: “Who is blind but My servant, or deaf like the messenger I send?” (Isaiah 42:19). For far too long, that has been us. We watched Arab mobs burn synagogues in Lod and Acre, we heard Arab lawmakers praise terrorists from the Knesset podium, and every time, we buried our heads in the sand and told ourselves it was only a handful of extremists.

The question now is whether Israelis, on the right and on the left, will finally wake up. Will the left keep selling us “Jewish-Arab partnership” with parties that dedicate their victories to Gaza? Will the right keep treating this as a security problem to be managed rather than a war to be won? Will all of us keep our heads buried in the sand until the next catastrophe forces our eyes open?

In this election, God gave the people of Israel a precious gift: the gift of clarity. May we have the courage to use it.