Proud of good ties, mixed Israeli cities suffer explosive split
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An Israeli firefighter inspecting a synagogue after it was set on fire by Arab Israelis in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod in Israel yesterday. Angry Arab youths rioted this week after police violence in Jerusalem spilt over into conflict with the Gaza Strip. Gangs of Jewish extremist vigilantes, some called in from out of town, started a counter-attack.
PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
LOD (Israel) • The Arabs and Jews of Lod, one of the most closely mixed cities in Israel, have been through many upheavals. But they had never before seen the kind of inter-community violence that unfolded there over the past three days.
Angry Arab youths rioted this week after police violence in Jerusalem spilt over into conflict with the Gaza Strip. They began burning synagogues and cars, throwing stones and letting off sporadic rounds of gunfire.
Gangs of Jewish extremist vigilantes, some called in from out of town, started a counter-attack, setting their own fires.
Other groups sought out Arab targets in other cities.
Not even during the intifadas - the mass Palestinian uprisings of the past - did Israelis experience this kind of mob violence.
And, though unrest started in Lod, it spread quickly to the mixed Israeli cities of Acre and Haifa, long proud of their inter-communal relations, and to the Arab towns of the Galilee.
Bedouin torched and ambushed Jewish cars with stones in the southern Negev desert.
Jews beat a driver who was presumed to be Arab almost to death in a Tel Aviv suburb on Wednesday.
"We ran out of the house without clothes on. It was burning," said Ms Shirin al-Hinawi, a 33-year-old Arab resident of Lod whose house was charred by a Molotov cocktail on Wednesday night.
Her family called for police help, but no one came, she added.
"We are not living in Gaza," she said, distraught. "I'm an Israeli citizen, and we didn't do anything."
The detritus of burnt-out cars, shattered glass and charred buildings on both sides bore witness to a national nightmare.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for calm and an end to "lynchings" and went to Lod on Thursday, saying he might send troops in.
Some Israelis began worrying about the possibility of a civil war breaking out. The authorities have declared a special state of emergency in Lod city, which has a population of about 80,000 people.
But many people feared the violence would only intensify.
The neighbourhood Ms al-Hinawi's house was burned in, Ramat Eshkol, is one of the most mixed areas in the country.
Ms Tahael Harris, a 27-year-old Jewish woman who lives in an old building with a mix of Arab and Jewish residents opposite a Jewish religious school that was burned, said she, her husband and two children had been holed up at home behind locked doors for nights while Arab mobs were setting cars alight in the streets.
As the violence ramped up, the family heard gunfire.
"Before, it was quiet, not perfect, but we were good neighbours," she said of the Arab and Jewish residents of the apartment block.
The new fear and distrust in Lod has old roots in duelling nationalism. The neighbourhood of Ramat Eshkol lies at the centre of Palestinian trauma surrounding what Arabs call the Nakba, the "catastrophe" of 1948, referring to the hostilities surrounding the establishment of Israel and the creation of the Palestinian refugee crisis.
Most of the original Palestinian residents of Lod, known as Lydda in Arabic, were expelled and moved east, never to return.
Bedouins from the Negev arrived in the following decades, as did families of Palestinians from the West Bank who had collaborated with Israel, seeking safe refuge.
The rage of the Arab youth now is steeped in a smarting sense of inequality born of decades of discrimination and a lingering fear of displacement.
Weeks ago, several homes that lacked building permits were demolished by the authorities.
The anger has been stoked in recent years by a process of internal Jewish settlement in Israel.
Instead of settling in the already well-populated Jewish communities of the West Bank, organised groups of young, ideological Orthodox families are now moving into economically weak and mixed cities like Lod, perceiving a religious calling to strengthen the Jewish presence there.
Mr Dror Rubin, 45 a conflict resolution mediator working at Ramat Eshkol's Jewish-Arab community centre, said he has been trying for years to build relations between the Palestinian Arab residents and the Jewish newcomers.
"Until a few weeks ago, I really felt that our vision was happening, that we were building a microcosm of a different future," he said.
Now, he added, "something has changed. I felt for the first time that it may not be safe to walk the streets here".
NYTIMES
