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The rise of community violence between Arabs and Jews in a number of mixed cities in Israel was an ugly surprise to many Israelis.
Arab riot police burned at least one synagogue and apparently another was burning Lod. Extremist crowds and Jewish settlers marched through Haifa and Tiberias singing “death to the Arabs.”
As Israeli forces traded airstrikes and artillery shells launched by the Islamist group Hamas in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he asked “strength, strength”To put an end to the riot police and close this threatening second front.
What illuminated this trail of dust from the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Arab Jerusalem?
The flames of religious unrest were rekindled when Israeli far-right extremists chose the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to increase provocations in areas of Jerusalem East they try to distance themselves from Palestinian families. They also intensified pressure on the Noble Shrine or Haram ash-Sharif, which houses the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, as well as the western wall sacred to Jews. Israeli riot police have carried out three violent raids on the mosque and its grounds, and have led Arab citizens of Israel to spill into the streets.
There has been nothing like this level of unrest among Arab Israelis since October 2000. This was followed by Ariel Sharon, the late prime minister and champion of the settlers, marching under armed guard from Al-Aqsa to Mt. Temple, triggering the second “al-Aqsa”. intifada. This time Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish power party and ally of Netanyahu, tweeted: “It’s time to liberate the Temple Mount and Jerusalem and show them who owns the house once and for all. “.
The conflict with Hamas, which erupted into war in 2009, 2012 and 2014, speaks to a family-friendly, if deadly, Israeli-Palestinian playbook. But a revolt by Israel’s 1.9 million Arab citizens opens wounds that add a dangerous dimension to the existential problems that Netanyahu and his allies have been complacent about.
Netanyahu himself struck many of the sparks that ignited this fire, with scorched earth tactics to help him cling more and more desperately to power. Prosecuted for corruption since last May, he has openly embraced the religious and radical irredentist right, promising to annex the Palestinian land established by the Jews.
Less recently, he used social media in the 2015 election to sound the alarm The “Arabs” were “voting en masse”. The hiss of the dogs ’whistle was that Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin, although a fifth of the population, were a fifth columnist threat to the Jewish state.
Netanyahu followed him in July 2018 by getting one the so-called law of nation-states through the Knesset, declaring that Jews have only an exclusive right to self-determination in Israel. Ayman Odeh, leader of a coalition made up mainly of Arab left-wing parties, said at the time that Israel had “passed a law of Jewish supremacy and he told us that we will always be second-class citizens ”.
This law and Netanyahu’s opportunistic embrace of openly racist anti-Arab groups such as Ben-Gvir’s convinced many Arab citizens to fight for equal rights with Israeli Jews. Palestinians under occupation and the lack of a path to a viable independent state are coming similar conclusions.
While Arab Israelis enjoy rights that only neighbors harassed by Arab despots can dream of, they are nonetheless second-class citizens. Israel oppresses its third-class Palestinian brethren in the occupied territories, gradually dispossessing them by expanding the Jewish settlement.
He Association for Civil Rights in Israel says: “There are notable socioeconomic differences between Jewish and Arab population groups, especially in terms of land, town planning, housing, infrastructure, economic development, and education.”
The Arab Israelis were also shaken by the buried suggestion to former US President Donald Trump “treatment of the century“That some 350,000 of them could be transferred to the Palestinian Authority as part of a land exchange, depriving them of Israeli citizenship.
In 73 years of state, no Israeli government has included an Arab party. The Arab governments do “Normalized” relationships with Israel in what appeared to be one new wave of regional distension now you may feel that it is time for Israeli leaders to begin normalizing at home.
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