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‘Arab, Islamic nationalist revolt’ in Israel has begun — former IDF general

Retired army general says Israel must acknowledge risk of heavily armed Arab population launching full-scale effort to destroy the Jewish state.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Retired IDF brigadier-general and former housing minister Effi Eitam warned Tuesday that Israel is currently facing a violent uprising among Arab citizens of Israel, with their ultimate goal being to dismantle the Jewish state.

“We need to tell ourselves the truth: We are in the midst of an Arab revolt, an Islamic-nationalist revolt against the idea of Israel as the state of the Jewish people,” Eitam told Army Radio on the heels of two deadly terror attacks that left six Israelis dead within less than one week.

“They hold [Israeli] citizenship and have equal rights in everything, but they are separatists.”

Speaking about the hundreds of thousands of weapons stolen from IDF bases and police stations over the last decade, which are in the hands of tens of thousands of Arabs, Eitam said that Israel is now struggling to manage a hostile fifth column with enough firepower to pose a serious danger to national security.

“These 200,000 ‘good’ Arabs don’t need guns. The [Arab] sector is building a military force against the state, Israeli Arabs are becoming a separatist population,” he said.

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“We may face a situation in which citizens of the country rebel against its authority and its sovereignty, including armed underground movements…We’re going to see an arms race between Israelis and Arab citizens – an absolute failure of the police to maintain order.”

This was not the first time Eitam has warned about the dangers of a heavily armed Arab population in Israel.

In an August 2021 interview with Israel Hayom, Eitam said that Israel was “obviously” losing sovereignty in the southern Negev desert and in the northern Galilee region and that there was “no good reason” for Arabs in those areas to have so many firearms at their disposal.

Eitam was a top military official who played a critical role during the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza. However, he told Israel Hayom that if could go back in time, he would find a way to prevent the evacuation.

“We were told that Hamas would engage in construction and rehabilitation [in Gaza]…and that if even one missile flew into Israel, we would easily go in [militarily] and lay down the law,” he noted.

He characterized the disengagement as “a crime against the [Jewish] residents [who lost their homes in the evacuation], but mostly a crime against the truth.”