The Israeli government this week is debating making two sets of extraordinary payments to different groups. Both payments are in some part necessary, but the story they tell about Israel is not a hopeful one. Indeed, they are an encapsulation of why so many, both inside Israel and out, harbor immense frustration with Israel’s political leadership.

The first set of payments is in response to the fires that ravaged Haifa, Zichron Yaakov, and other pockets of Israel over the past week. The initial suspicion was that the primary cause of the fires was arson, and the Israeli government arrested thirty five suspects, a majority of whom were Arab citizens of Israel. Deliberately torching homes and forests for nationalist motives can certainly be considered terrorism, and the government moved quickly to treat it as such, with Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan calling to demolish perpetrators’ homes and Interior Minister Aryeh Deri floating the idea that arsonists’ Israeli citizenship should be revoked. Of more immediate consequence, a number of ministers and MKs called for the government to compensate everyone whose homes and belongings were damaged by the fires, and the Israel Tax Authority on Tuesday ruled that the fires were universally the result of arson. The reason this is important is that the state only has to compensate citizens who suffered financial losses as a result of terrorism; if you lost your home due to wildfires, such as the ones that ravaged the Carmel forest in 2010, then you are covered by private insurance and not entitled to complete restitution from the state. In this case, despite the fact that the Fire and Rescue Authority deemed only 25 of the 1,773 fires to be arson and the Israeli police initially believe that the fires in Haifa – where the most damage occurred – were not arson-related, by moving to cover all losses the government is creating a narrative of Israel under assault from a terrorist fire intifada.

My objection to this is not because I have any desire to see Israelis who lost their homes in a terrible fire be abandoned by the state. It is also not because I think criminal arsonists acting out of nationalist motives are in any way justified or are anything but terrorists. It is because there is another and far more accurate story to tell here, and it is one that does not paint a picture of Israeli society breaking apart because Jews cannot trust Arabs not to burn their country to the ground. Leaving aside the fact that it now appears that deliberate arson was a drop in the bucket compared to weather and environmental factors, the real story of these fires is the cooperation that ensued between Israel and its neighbors and between different segments of Israeli society. The dominant theme is Jews and Arabs helping each other out, rather than Jews and Arabs at each other’s throats. The Palestinian Authority sent eight fire trucks and forty four firefighters to help bring the fires under control, prompting a thank you call from Prime Minister Netanyahu to President Abbas. Even more encouragingly, firefighters from Ramallah helped put out the fires in the West Bank settlement of Halamish, rather than limiting their assistance to fires inside the Green Line. Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey all sent personnel or equipment. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs crossed community lines to host their fellow citizens in their homes, regardless of religion or politics. Yes, there was deliberate arson. Yes, many people on social media were celebrating Jews being burned. These things should not be papered over as if they are irrelevant. But by rushing to declare the entirety of the fires as a terrorist attack that requires the state to compensate every effected Israeli, the government is elevating the smallest and most unsavory part of the story and making sure that it subsumes the far larger and more important part. Rather than seizing on hope, the government is seizing on fear, and guaranteeing that the 2016 fires will be remembered as the latest example of terrorism rather than as an encouraging example of true partnership and cooperation.

The second set of payments being debated this week involves another group that has been deliberately wronged, and in this case as well the government is rushing to pay compensation to people who should never have to be compensated. Despite the fact that Moshe Kahlon’s opposition temporarily derailed it yesterday, the bill to retroactively legalize settlements built on private Palestinian land and pay compensation to the Palestinian landowners is still moving forward, and will only be stopped by a High Court ruling or Netanyahu suddenly developing some political and moral courage on this issue. There is no question that if the government manages to legalize what is blatantly and indisputably illegal that the Palestinians affected need to be fairly compensated. But nobody should celebrate not stiffing the landowners outright as an example of Israeli justice or fair play. The juxtaposition of Israeli MKs who think that it is fine to take revenge on Palestinians who have rendered land uninhabitable for Jews – such as Oren Hazan, who actually held up a lighter in the Knesset and demanded “an eye for an eye” – against the majority of MKs who think that it is fine to render land uninhabitable for Palestinians by illegally taking it and then just paying for it afterwards is particularly jarring.

If the government is so intent on paying people to vacate land in the West Bank, it should move the settlers in places like Amona – who were encouraged by the government to go there and were led to believe that they would never have to pick up and leave – and compensate them for their detrimental reliance on explicit and implicit promises made by successive Israeli governments. Much like the compensation for people who lost everything to wildfires and arson, the government thinks that compensating Palestinians who lost their land puts Israel in a positive light when in fact it does the opposite. Rather than instill faith that the Israeli government will do the right thing, it instills faith that the Israeli government will take a bad situation and somehow make it even worse.

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