The disengagement process is accelerated by the Arabs' belief that they can do as they please, combined with a hapless central government that fails to exercise its sovereignty.

Even if there proves to be something in it, the latest espionage case does not mean that Israeli Arabs are fated to be spies. Just like most of Israel's Jewish citizens, most of its Arab ones are preoccupied primarily with the difficulties of daily life, and have no intention of committing or abetting terror attacks.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of Arabs in Israel is also opposed with all its soul to the existence of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. And throughout the years, it has taken steps - not always strictly legal, but generally nonviolent - to rectify what it views as a historic wrong.

After the 1967 Six-Day War, which enabled the renewal of contact between Arabs in Israel and those in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, this opposition began to be expressed by demonstrations of support for Palestinian terror and other strident positions, as well as by actions such as the October 2000 uprising. Palestinian flags are today a common, perfectly normal sight on Israeli Arab streets. These flags are also flown at Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. They are waved both by Arab students and by their Jewish supporters.

The "future vision" documents drafted and disseminated by the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee (which is the only government recognized by, or with actual control over, the Israeli Arab populace ) and by other representative organizations provided the ideological basis for disengagement from the Jewish state of Israel. The documents provided that basis both through their harsh language and their content, which included clear proposals for establishing an alternative Arab political entity within the boundaries of the State of Israel.

Some time ago, Education Minister happened to drop in on a 12th-grade civics class in an Arab school, and was unable to converse in Hebrew with most of the students. The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee's educational wing has seized control of the Arab schools' curriculum, yet the Education Ministry is the one that funds them (including in East Jerusalem, where Israel foots the bill for teaching the Palestinian Authority curriculum, including those parts of it that incite against Israel and Jews ).

The entire leadership of the Arab community is particularly zealous about teaching in Arabic, one official told me, because that is the ultimate tool for developing an Arab national consciousness - just as the Hebrew language was a crucial tool in the Zionist movement's efforts to revive Jewish national sentiments. The real "independent education" - a term normally applied to the ultra-Orthodox school systems - is that of the Arabs, this official said.

This feeling among Arab citizens that everything is permissible also has major economic implications: the existence of a huge black-market economy and the nonpayment of municipal taxes (both widespread phenomena that every state comptroller has noted ). We are not bound by the laws of the State of Israel, the rationale goes, because we do not recognize it.

Moreover, Israeli Arabs readily sense the message sent by the fact that no one enforces the state's laws, including court orders, that are meant to apply to them: The central government feels powerless against us. Thus are authority and territory de facto ceded.

The disengagement process is accelerated by the Arabs' belief that they can do as they please, combined with a hapless central government that fails to exercise its sovereignty. And the more successes these individuals rack up, the greater their appetite grows.

These are the truly dangerous signs of disengagement - not the occasional acts of terror or espionage. Indeed, one can even assume that Israeli Arab leaders oppose such acts, because they cast a spotlight on the genuine, multifaceted subversion taking place below the surface, which the media usually ignore, and sometimes even justify. And who knows? Outraged public opinion might even generate enough pressure to halt state funding for the establishment of this separatist, alternative political entity that is springing up, virtually unimpeded, before our very eyes, while the government that makes it possible - the government of Israel - buries its head in the sand.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/a-fast-track-to-arab-disengagement-1.290084