Most people might not be aware that Muslims comprise 18.1% of the population of Israel, the only Jewish nation in the world. You may appreciate it better by comparing it with the percentage of Muslims in India (14.23% according to the 2011 Census). Because the conduct of Muslims in Israel has been analysed and documented in several studies, they can serve as a pointer for the conduct of Muslims elsewhere in the world where such studies are not conducted for reasons of political expedience.
Why There Are So Very Few Muslims in the Israeli Military?
Israel, though a small nation of just 93.6 lakhs, has a highly sophisticated army of about 1.7 lakh active soldiers with 4.65 lakh reservists, led by a small corps of career officers. Ever since the country was created, it has, by law, made fixed term military service after the age of 18 compulsory so as to provide soldiers for the defence of the motherland. Discharged after 32 to 36 months of service, they remain reservists until 40 years of age.
This conscription law applies to citizens who are Israeli Jews (males and females), Druze (males only), and Circassians (males only). Females of Druze and Circassians are exempted on account of their small population. Muslims, though nearly one-fifth of the population, are not conscripted, though they may join voluntarily.
Out of this significant Muslim population, according to a BBC report, Muslim volunteers comprise just about 1% of the army. The BBC documentary team was allowed access to Gadsar, an all-Arab unit of 500 within the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). A Muslim soldier Mahmud Kashua told the BBC that a few guys in his hometown in northern Israel saw him wearing the uniform and told him that he was a traitor. This feeling is not limited to lower ranks alone. According to Israel Forever Foundation, Maj. Ala Wahib, currently the highest ranking and one of the only two Muslim officers in the IDF, says that his people to this day refer to him as a traitor.
Muslim volunteers are not forthcoming for the IDF even as the government besides giving attractive salary makes them eligible for a grant of land and post-discharge free university courses as incentive, a facility not available to Jewish recruits. Not only that, such is the reluctance to join military that Hanin Zoabi, an Israeli Arab MP, accuses that the government is after people to serve in the army who are poor and have no work. According to The Telegraph of UK, about 1,500 Bedouin are currently serving in the IDF. Bedouins happen to be a nomadic Muslim Arab people living mainly in the Negev desert of southern Israel. They have traditionally been pastoralists not bothering much about nationality.
The reason of exempting Muslims from compulsory military service and their not coming forward to volunteer for the defence of the country is obvious though not uttered officially. Israel’s enemies are exclusively Muslim nations; many of them would like to exterminate the Jewish nation on religious grounds alone, if not political. Since Islamic extremism has been found to ‘infect’ Muslims all over the world, irrespective of their race or nationality, the nation of Israel, facing an existential crisis, cannot take risks with its national security with people whose loyalty to the nation could be suspect.
Ernst Renan, eminent French political scientist and Orientalist had observed that a nation is a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. If a significant percentage of the population of a nation consciously declines to volunteer for national defence, it can only mean that their nationalistic credentials are suspect and they have deliberately refused to integrate with the nation they belong to.
No Contribution to Their Society and Mankind
Israel is a global technological powerhouse. It has 30 technology companies valued over $1 billion (unicorn start-ups), more than all of Europe combined. According to the Bloomberg Innovation Index, Israel ranks fifth in the world in terms of research and development, technology education, patents and other marks of technological prowess. The USA ranks sixth! The list of Israeli innovations is very long but here suffices it to mention that the development of Microsoft Windows, Intel computer chips, instant messaging, mobile phone and many high-tech medical devices (such as capsule endoscopy) all have their research roots in Israel. The USB drive that you use every day was developed by the Israeli company M-Systems, which was purchased by Sandisk. The Israeli company Elbit developed the helmet-mounted display system for USA’s most advanced F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Let us face it. What is the contribution of these 18.1% Muslims to Israeli science, technology, arts, literature, or the society as a whole in its multifarious dimensions? How they have enriched the society they are living in? The answer is a resounding ‘nothing’. Look around yourself and you will realize that it is a universal truth. They remain perpetual burdens on the societies they live in.
Jews have contributed absolutely out of proportion to their numbers to human knowledge and progress. Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population. However, 22% of the Nobel Laureates (214 out of 965) of the world are of Jewish descent.
In comparison, Muslims have produced only 16 Nobel Laureates in 122 years with more than half of them coming in the 21st century for obvious reasons of prevailing political compulsions. Nine of them are Peace Prize winners (including dubious characters like Yasser Arafat and Malala Yousafzai), three for literature and only four for sciences. Not one of them is from Israel. Muslims constitute about 24% of the world population. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist at the Quaid-e-Azam University discloses in his paper ‘Science and the Islamic world: the quest for rapprochement’ that 46 Islamic countries put together contribute only 1.17% of the world’s scientific literature. On the other hand, Israel, with just 0.11% of the world population, contributes 1% of the world scientific papers.
Islamic societies have, for all practical purposes, become deadwood as far scientific innovation is concerned. As Pervez Hoodbhoy says, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.
Refusal to Integrate in Mainstream Anywhere
Ghettoization is just a fancy word. Fact is these people continue to live in ‘islands’ of their own, wallowing in their culture, language, customs, and practices, wherever they happen to be, without contributing in any way to the society they happen to be. The situation is exactly the same everywhere in the world irrespective of whether they are natives to the land or are migrants.
They purposefully refuse to realize that integration and assimilation do not demand surrendering one’s identity. They will not become any less of the devout Muslims they think themselves to be if they do not insist on things alien to the societies they inhabit. It is only a matter of placing the national identity above their communal identity and abandoning vestiges of a trans-national mind-set. Yet, they make it a point to make it clear from their words and deeds that they continue to derive their inspiration and identity in social, cultural, historical and emotional terms from the deserts of Arabia instead of the nation they belong to, by birth or migration/refuge. ‘Eternal outsiders’ that they are, their primary identity still remains that of a subset of the global ummah and not of their nation. Pan-Islamism, by undermining Muslims’ allegiance to nation-states and their constitutions is actually the anti-thesis of nationalism.
Plagued by an inferiority complex arising out of their ‘intellectual backwardness’ or lack of achievement in life in the societies they live in, they seek to compensate for it by an overt show of their religiosity and by becoming too rigid about what they consider western societies’ transgressions in social conduct. That is how, there have been instances of schoolboys in Norway and Germany refusing to shake hands with their female teachers and Muslim women refusing to shake hands with government officials with whom they seek official favours. An Algerian woman was denied French citizenship precisely for this reason as the government argued that an applicant must demonstrate being integrated into society as well as respect for French values.
They Contribute To Criminality, Of Course
Muslim migrants have been responsible for a series of riots, street violence, gangsterism and many despicable crimes across the world. For example, in Britain, a three-year long independent inquiry (2022) into child sexual exploitation, headed by Tom Crowther, Queen’s Counsel established that over a thousand children in Telford were methodically sexually exploited by Muslim gangs. Daily Mail reports that a Pakistani Muslim grooming gang in Rochdale, UK kept a 15 year old girl in a cage like a dog, while using her as a sex slave. Victoria Agoglia, the victim, was raped before being killed by a lethal heroin injection by a 50-year old Pakistani man. The same gang also kept the aborted foetus of another teenage girl as a souvenir, storing it in a freezer.
Europe is, in fact, overwhelmed by a wave of rapes committed by Muslim migrants, particularly in Scandinavian countries. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown that in Sweden, 47.7% of the rape convicts are foreign-born (mostly from Middle East/North Africa). In response to the Cologne sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve 2015-16 in which some 1,200 women were sexually assaulted, German supporters of Alternative für Deutschland rioted and called for mass deportations.
Accusation of Islamophobia Is a Hoax
It is not that Islamophobia or xenophobia has surged across the world in the wake of Israel-Hamas war as Al Jazeera claimed in a recent article. On the contrary, the conflict is being used to emotionally blackmail the world into maligning Israel as it tries to secure justice for the Jews. In this evil game of perception management, Hamas is being projected as the ‘wronged’ side through its carefully crafted stories of the sufferings of the children, while the accounts of horrendous atrocities committed by them on Israeli women and children are now not even found easily on social media or even on Google.
They Divide the Society They Live In
Muslims across the world have been found to have an inveterate habit of remaining ‘eternal outsiders’ who, in their ‘self-othering’, place their communal identity above any other consideration.
Within Israel, as a Pew Research Center survey, conducted through face-to-face interviews in different languages found, 79% of Muslims maintain that there is a lot of discrimination in Israeli society against them. Nearly 58% of Muslims want that Sharia must be enshrined as the official law for Muslims in Israel, with 68% of them holding that religion is very important in their lives. On the other hand, 74% of the Jews maintain that there is no discrimination. Muslims practice such social isolation that they do not even make friends with Jews. Half of the Jews believe that, in such a situation, Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.
Elsewhere in the West, for example, according to a poll by Institut Français d’Opinion Publique in 2020, 46% of Muslims maintained that their religious beliefs were more important than the values and laws of the French republic. Among Muslims under 25 years of age, a large majority (74%) considered their religion more important than French laws and values. The irony is that they still flock to the West to ‘pollute’ it, as if it is their divine right to leave their own countries and settle in the West while carrying their native country in flesh and blood with them.
The consequence of such behaviour and harbouring of such perceptions about the nations they happen to be in is an ‘irrevocable division of the society’ they live in. Look around yourself and you would find that the pattern is eerily the same everywhere.
An excellent article by Dr Asthana. It brings out the absolute truth of various facets of islamic attitudes, in proper perspective. Other than a Dr Hoodbhoy in Pakistan, there is not a single Muslim of eminence who has ever spoken out against these wrong or deplorable attitudes. Hence the trend continues, forcing us to believe that they too are party to the entire enterprise which will only vitiate the environment further. Hope some sense prevails.