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Tamer Nafer, a Palestinian rapper from Lod, the Israeli city plunged into a paroxysm of community violence between Jews and Arabs, thought he had seen it all.
At 43, he has lived the first and second Palestinian intifades or uprisings, the steady rise of increasingly right-wing Israeli populism and a cycle of wars between the country whose passport he has and his Arab comrades in Gaza. Never before had there been so much sentiment in the minority Israeli Arab community, he said.
“This time it’s different, a kind of awakening born at the age of 70. . . years of oppression, ”he said, the morning after his hometown seemed to break down: Jews and Arabs who are Israeli citizens fought in the streets, as police and special forces were unable to impose order. “In this country, equality is a technique: it is a Jewish country, and its national anthem ignores two million Arabs and Christians.”
This week Nafer’s own hymns, such as Innocent criminals (“When Jews protest, the police use clubs / when the Arabs protest, the police take their soul”) – the music teams of young Arabs driving through mixed cities such as Lod, Jaffa and East Jerusalem erupted.
With Israeli Jews and the Israeli Arab minority fighting in the streets and the Israeli army bombing Palestinian militants in Gaza and Hamas firing rockets at Israeli cities and towns, Israel has gone from a single week of seeming secure, stable and prosperous fight with internal conflict and at war with undefeated enemies nearby.
With nearly a dozen people killed in communal fighting and hundreds detained, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Right now we have no greater threat than these riots.”
Arab-Jewish violence has challenged the Israeli narrative of peaceful coexistence and its assertion that all citizens are treated equally. Arabs, who make up one-fifth of the population, say their daily lives are limited by bureaucratic and legal discrimination rooted in Israeli law. Israel has dozens of laws that discriminate against or apply only to Arabs, according to Adalah, a group that advocates equality between Arabs and Jews.
Human Rights Watch said last month that Israel’s system of government had crossed the threshold of apartheid, discriminating against its Arab citizens while violating the human rights of five million Palestinians in the occupied territories. B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, took office in January.
Both groups received the condemnation from the Israeli government, which dismissed the HRW report as “absurd and false.” He says his policies are based on security considerations and not race.
“In the end, it doesn’t matter if it’s a right-wing or a left-wing government, it’s still a Zionist government,” said Tony Copti, a documentary filmmaker who worked on the award-winning film. Ajami, on crime and poverty in a corner of Jaffa, an Arab quarter. “This fire has been simmering all this time: it’s like a bubble that Palestinian citizens of Israel have been told to live in, but we can’t do it anymore.”
The immediate trigger for this week’s unrest was a volatile mix of issues from a crowded calendar: a court ruling due to the anniversary of the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem that would have seen how the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem were evicted from their homes; images of strong Israeli police beating Muslim protesters at the al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan prayers and an increasingly aggressive right-wing fringe in the Israeli parliament or Knesset.
The al-Aqsa Mosque is located in an area known to Muslims as Haram ash-Sharif, or noble shrine, and for Jews as the Temple Mount, which is sacred to both religions.
The long list of Arab grievances, from historical injustice to al-al-Aqsa restrictions, has strengthened ties between Palestinians on Israel’s borders and the territories it occupies, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. A few days later, Hamas, the militant group that controls the blocked Gaza Strip, launched a volley of rockets at Israel, launching a conflict that threatens to turn into a full-scale war. This was quickly fueled by community violence in Israel.
For some of the minority Arab community, mostly descendants of Palestinians who remained on the borders of the Jewish state when Israel was born in 1948, the scenes evoke attacks by Jewish militias against their parents and grandparents.
Jews have been deeply shaken by violence, which some call a “pogrom” that recalls their suffering in twentieth-century Europe. Arab protesters have burned Jewish synagogues and schools. Dozens of Jews have been attacked and hundreds of vehicles have been burned. The Arab crowd threw stones and vandalized Jewish property. A Jew was stabbed as he was walking toward the synagogue. “Civil war has broken out,” said Yair Revivo, Lod’s mayor.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said: “The sight of the pogrom in Lod and the unrest across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab crowd, injuring people, damaging property and even attacking spaces sacred Jews is unforgivable. ”
For the Arabs, the violence was so severe that Asthma happened Eid al-Fitr, the day Muslims break the fast of daytime Ramadan with a party, hidden at home. The 48-year-old mother validated her two children to grant her Eid’s wish: to close the doors, tear down Ramadan balloons from the windows, and hide at home in Ajami, an Arab quarter south of the country. Tel Aviv’s bright scenery and cozy beaches.
Outside, the streets were deserted; within the crisis social networks were amplified. In the news and on their phones, Asma and her family watched videos of a crowd shouting “Death to the Arabs,” just five minutes from their home. In another video, men masked with a Star of David in army leftover clothing showed off their stun grenades and blocked the entrance to a vaguely recognizable street. “Let the world see the ugly truth,” Asma said of the videos.
He searched his drawers and took out his Israeli passport, used only once, when he flew to Istanbul for his 45th birthday. “I should throw this away,” he said. “It’s worthless.”
For Nafer, the rapper, the fight is not over. “I don’t want to live together, I just want to exist.”
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