Iraqi Visitor- Arabs Have Good Life Under Israel

August 8, 2005

Al-Alusi based his assessment on firsthand knowledge, after making a controversial visit to Israel last September to attend an international counterterrorism conference. “I was interested to know how they [Israelis] deal with problems and with terror. Why should we have war between Iraq and Israel? How can I forget that there is a modern state in the area which has had success in the democratic process and the economy?” he explained.

At the time, Al-Alusi was head of Iraq’s De-Baathification Commission, but his trip to Israel gained him numerous enemies in a nation still officially at war with the Jewish state and cost him his high-ranking position. He has since survived an assassination attempt and been reduced to a political outsider. His two sons were less fortunate, having been gunned down by terrorists in February.

“Before I went, I knew I would have huge trouble in Baghdad. I was very sure I would lose my political position. And I was very sure that I was a target for the terrorists, but these taboos [against relations with Israel] should be broken—must be broken,” Alusi insisted.

Al-Alusi is not alone in his observation of the favorable treatment of Arabs under Israel. Even Palestinian Arabs, despite all their anti-Israel rhetoric, often admit to preferring Jewish rule to their own Palestinian Authority (PA), noted famed columnist Daniel Pipes in May.

Musa Abu-Marzouk of Hamas once pointed out that in Israel, the “opposition criticized [Prime Minister Ehud] Barak and they were not arrested, but in our case, the PA arrests people as the first order of business.”

Pipes went on to quote a Palestinian Christian with no great love for Israel, who was nevertheless forced to admit that “Israeli laws protect us” as a minority. Were a Palestinian Arab state to come into existence, “we [would] undergo the same [persecution at the hands of Muslims] as our Lebanese brothers or the Copts in Egypt,” that same Christian lamented.

Iyad As-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, confessed, “During the Israeli occupation, I was 100 times freer [than under the PA].”

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