Yahoo Finance ‘This is more than a reaction to rockets’: communal violence spreads in Israel
The mob that rampaged along the seafront promenade in Bat Yam, a southern suburb of Tel Aviv, started by attacking businesses owned by Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The young far-right Jews, some dressed in black and chanting “death to Arabs”, had gathered after a callout on social media that explicitly threatened violence.
After smashing the window of an Israeli-Arab owned ice-cream parlour frequented by both communities, they turned their attention to a passing motorist they had identified as an Israeli Arab, dragging him from his car and beating him savagely before leaving him to lie in the road for 15 minutes until police arrived.
The attack was caught live on camera by Israel’s Channel 11. The reporter Daniel Elazar warned: “We’re watching a lynching in real time. There are no police here,” before the camera pulled away at the anchor’s request.
The assault in Bat Yam was not an isolated incident. Since the rapid escalation in fighting between Hamas and Israel, in which rockets have been fired at Israeli cities including the metropolitan area with Tel Aviv at its centre, communal tensions between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel have exploded into riots and violent attacks, with some people warning of the risk of civil war.
By Thursday, communal violence had been reported from Beersheba in the southern Negev desert to Rahat, Ramla, Lod, Nasiriyah, Tiberias, Jerusalem and Haifa. There have been riots, stabbings, arson, attempted home invasions and shootings, some of it captured in terrifying detail on social media.
The alarm has been enough to prompt fearful editorials, including in the conservative Jerusalem Post which warned that “the delicate and vastly imperfect coexistence that has existed between Jewish and Arab Israelis for the last 73 years now risks fraying beyond recognition”.
In Acre, a 37-year-old Jewish teacher was attacked in his car by Israeli-Arab demonstrators near Egged Square and sustained serious injuries, a day after protesters torched Uri Buri, a well-known Jewish-owned seafood restaurant.
Sameer Salem, a 58-year-old Arab-Israeli driving teacher in Acre, blamed both sides for the increasing confrontations. Describing the initial protests, he said: “We wanted to send a message to the international community to protest what happened in al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, not be involved in the damage to property that happened.
“The protesters vandalised and burned shops, and that’s not right for the Jews in Acre. [Then] extremist Jews gathered last night and attacked the Arab residents of Acre. We don’t know where things will end. But the situation is very dangerous.”
On Thursday morning Israel’s defence minister, Benny Gantz, ordered a “massive reinforcement” of border police forces in cities across Israel to “cool off” the situation. “We’re in an emergency,” Gantz said in a statement.
What some observers are describing as the worst outbreak of communal violence in two decades has been fuelled by a combination of tensions immediate and more long-lasting. Israel’s Arabs make up about 20% of the population and are the descendants of Palestinians who stayed in the country after the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation, when an estimated 700,000 fled.
While they have citizenship, including the right to vote, they face widespread discrimination, and because they largely identify with the Palestinian cause many Israelis view them with suspicion.
In recent days, Arab citizens of Israel have held mass protests across the country over Israel’s policing of a flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem and plans to evict dozens of Palestinian families in the city after a legal campaign by Jewish settlers.
There has been a resurgence in recent weeks of the activities of overtly anti-Arab groups such as Lehava, racist football hooligans known as La Familia, and far-right settler groups, who have reportedly been involved in the violence.
One recent message sent by La Familia, described by the Haaretz journalist Bar Peleg, called on supporters to head to Jaffa, where it said there was a minimal police presence, naming the streets where it might be possible to enter Arab homes and stab occupants.
But it has been in the mixed city of Lod where some of the most alarming scenes have been witnessed and where violence has continued, including the stabbing of Jewish man on his way to synagogue and the attack on a pregnant Arab woman, who suffered serious head injuries.
Related: Israel’s army drafts Gaza ground operation plan as mob violence escalates
The situation has been enflamed by the rhetoric of local elected officials, including the deputy mayor, Yosi Harush, who was caught on video at a council meeting saying hundreds of people were coming from the West Bank settlements to protect Jewish houses and “help with the security”, warning Arab residents not to leave their homes.
Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli political analyst, echoes the views of many in saying that the communal violence is unprecedented in her experience. “It’s really bad,” she told the Guardian, returning home from Bat Yam. “It feels like ethnic conflict. People going out in the streets to find and do violence to people from the other community. This is more than a reaction to Hamas’s rockets. There’s something deeper going on under the surface.”
She added: “I don’t believe in both-siderism. It may look like this is mutual, but this is coming from very different places.”
On the Israeli side, Scheindlin argues, a key factor has been the increasing normalisation of the far right over a long period of years, in which leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman have used the politics of racism to appeal to voters, creating an opening for more extreme figures. This, say Scheindlin and others, has allowed far-right violent groups to flourish.
On the Arab-Israeli side, Scheindlin blames the under-policing of violent crime and the over-policing of perceived threats to Jews for exacerbating tensions. “It’s a disaster. The question is what can be done?. At the moment the first and last resort is force and ever more heavy policing.”
Inevitably it has been left to figures who have previously benefited politically from inflammatory rhetoric, including Netanyahu, to try to calm the situation.
“What has been happening in the last few days in the cities of Israel is unacceptable,” Netanyahu said. “Nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews and nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs.”
