Eldad calls for "anti-Islamization" legislation in Israel

MK Arye Eldad, currently with the soon-to-be-defunct National Union-National Religious Party says he is planning to introduce a package of emergency "anti-Islamization legislation" in the next Knesset to "confront the enemy within and without."

Eldad, chairman and founder of the Hatikva party, says the legislation would make military or civil service obligatory for both Arab and Jewish citizens, while requiring all citizens to declare their loyalty to Israel "as a Jewish democratic state" as a condition for voting in national elections.

The secular party, according to its Web site, aims "to return redemptive Zionism to the center stage of the Jewish state" and believes that "the Land of Israel is the exclusive inheritance of the Jewish people."

Watch Eldad on Israel National News

"I am trying to preserve the state of Israel as a Jewish state," Eldad told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday. "I'm trying to struggle against both a post-Zionist trend and the trend of 'Islamization' of some citizens of Israel, who are saying we no longer need a Jewish state and that this should be a binational state of Jews and Muslims." Anti-Israel Knesset Members are none too pleased. MK Ibrahim Sarsour, head of the United Arab List-Ta'al, said that he and other Arab activists will do everything possible to ensure that Eldad's "discriminatory" legislation package, if introduced, does not pass. The legislation, Sarsour claims, would lead to the exclusion of the Arab minority from the Israeli system, something the community "will not accept." But even if it does pass, he said, "we will go on struggling within the limitations of Israeli law by peaceful means, [so] that Israel will be a state of all its citizens, not a Jewish state or a state of the Jewish community" in which Arabs are "simply a passing minority." Most Arab leaders oppose making military or civilian service mandatory for Israeli Arabs, saying they want to create their own non-state mechanisms to serve their communities. Eldad plans to detail of the legislative package during a public conference he is hosting at the Begin Center in Jerusalem on Sunday, entitled "Facing Jihad."