While much of the world’s focus earlier this month was on the war between Hamas and Israel, something else was happening within Israel itself that may pose a potentially greater long-term problem.
On May 12, almost as soon as the conflict between Hamas and Israel began, rival Israeli Arab and Jewish mobs began attacking businesses, cars and people in cities across Israel. Border police were deployed in cities across Israel to help tackle the unrest.
In Israel’s cities, casualties were not a result of rocket fire, but of stone throwing, fire, and gunshots.
It reminded many people of the type of communal violence seen in India between Hindus and Muslims, and in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants.
Israeli Arabs, like Jews, are citizens who have lived within the original 1948-49 borders since the founding of the state. Their population, at 1,890,000, represents 20.95 per cent of the country’s people.
They live mostly in Arab-majority towns and cities, mainly in parts of the Galilee and the so-called Tringle in north-central Israel. Many have ties to Palestinians who fled or were displaced by the fighting in 1947-48.
Jewish mobs took to the streets of Haifa and Tiberias. An Arab man was stabbed in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, A crowd of Jewish Israelis attacked a driver in Bat Yam, a coastal city just south of Tel Aviv, smashing Arab property as they headed toward neighboring Jaffa.
The northern port city of Acre, a mixed Arab-Jewish town, saw Arabs torching a popular restaurant, hotel and arts centre. The municipality had invested in education, employment, and cultural events that all residents could participate in together.
Hooligans in Lod, another Arab-Jewish municipality, clashed with police and set cars, stores and five synagogues ablaze. A 32-year-old Palestinian-Israeli was shot and killed, and a Jewish man died after being attacked by a group of Arab Israelis. The government imposed a state of emergency and the mayor called it “civil war.”
Violence flared in other cities and towns with sizeable Arab populations, including Ramle, where a synagogue was destroyed, as well as Haifa, Tamra and Jisr al-Zarqa. In Umm el-Fahm, following the May 21 ceasefire, a convoy of cars drove through the streets, honking their horns and waving Palestinian flags.
Israel’s government responds that Arab citizens have equal social and political rights as individuals, although they are exempt from compulsory military service. They vote and mostly support their own political parties. Some have become judges and diplomats.
The current outburst of Arab violence comes after a positive decade in the state’s relations with the Arab minority. Government Resolution 922, a $4.6 billion act passed in 2015, has been a step forward towards the social and economic advancement of Israel’s Arabs.
But Israeli Arabs say they face legal, institutional and social discrimination. Eight of Israel’s ten poorest cities are Arab-majority. Only 44 per cent feel part of the State of Israel, according to a 2020 study by the Israel Democracy Institute.
Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, Director of the Arab Society in Israel program at the Israel Democracy Institute, observes that Arab residents of mixed cities live almost completely separate lives from the Jewish majority.
Neighborhoods, and even city blocks, are clearly delineated between Jewish and Arab residents. The vast majority of children attend separate schools, and Arab political parties have never joined a government coalition.
Approximately 30 per cent of Arab citizens between the ages of 18-24 are neither employed nor studying. Among Jews, only 13 per cent are not working or studying.
Less than 20 per cent of Arabs in mixed cities have academic degrees, greatly limiting their ability to improve their lot and gain meaningful employment.
Gershon Hacohen, a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, places more blame on the Arab minority.
He sees the violence “as a nationalist (and Islamist) rising stemming not from the lack of rights or opportunities but from the rejection of a minority status that is regarded as unlawful domination by an alien invader who must be supplanted.”
This is not something the so-called “two-state solution” – the creation of an independent Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, areas conquered by Israel after the 1967 war, can rectify.
No comments:
Post a Comment