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As rival gangs of Jews and Arabs clash on streets, fears mount of irreparable damage to Israeli society

The street fights marked a new escalation in the violence

Miriam Berger
Thursday 13 May 2021 17:14 BST
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<p>‘We are in such a state of anarchy’</p>

‘We are in such a state of anarchy’

As bands of Jewish and Arab citizens fought each other and police in towns across Israel for a third night early Thursday, Israelis worried that the battle inside the country may be harder to stop than the air war still being waged with Gaza.

Scenes of anarchy reigned across mixed cities in Israel Wednesday night, marking a new escalation in the worst communal violence to unfold in two decades. Fears of civil warlike fighting have erupted on the heels of the worst exchange of missiles and rockets between Israel and Hamas militants since the 2014 war.

Since Monday, at least 87 Palestinians, including 18 children, have been killed in the Gaza Strip, the Associated Press reported. Another seven residents of Israel, including a teenager and young boy, have also been killed, the Israeli Army said Thursday morning.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has condemned the street violence, calling it “intolerable”.

“It doesn’t matter to me that your blood is boiling,” he said in a video statement. “You can’t take the law in your hands.”

But Mr Netanyahu’s critics say that by aligning with extremist and far-right nationalist parties he himself stoked the now roaring flames of division.

“Netanyahu is burning all of us, Arab and Jews, only to stay as prime minister,” said Maisam Jaljuli, a political activist from Tira, an Arab city in central Israel. “This government is working for a long, long time to separate the two communities from each other,” she added.

In Lod, Israeli media reported that buses and cars of nationalist Jews, largely settler youths from the West Bank and organised by WhatsApp, descended on the city. They marched through Arab areas in defiance of a State of Emergency earlier declared.

“We are in such a state of anarchy,” said Nati Ron, who came to Lod Wednesday night to defend its Jewish residents “from a pogrom,” when he said the police would not. He declined to say where in Israel he was from.

As the night progressed, Arab residents set up their own street defenses, also defying an 8pm curfew, they said, to protect themselves as the police would not.

Cars entering their streets would shout, “Arab, Arab” to confirm they belonged, and they were inspected to see if they were undercover Israeli police. Bands of Arab children and teenagers donned black disposable face masks to shield themselves from police surveillance, they said.

For decades Lod was a working-class city of both Jews and Arabs. In recent years, there’s been an organised influx of religious nationalist Jews moving in next to Arab areas. Some Arab residents refer to them as settlers, as distinguished from the city’s longtime Jewish residents.

On Wednesday, Public Security Minister Amir Ohana defended those “law-abiding citizens” who carry weapons to assist the police, a statement Arab Israelis said they took as the politician encouraging the violence against them.

The night’s most shocking incident was captured by video in Bat Yam, in central Israel, where a mob of Jewish nationalists pulled a man, who they believed to be Arab, from a car, and beat him on the street in what Israeli media described as “an attempted lynching in prime time”. He was admitted to a Tel Aviv hospital with serious injuries, according to the Associated Press.

In the coastal city of Acre, Arab rioters critically injured a Jewish man with rocks and iron bars. The crowd attacked the ambulance on its way to the hospital, according to the AP.

In Haifa, a city often seen as Israel’s model for coexistence, social media messages warned Arab residents not to go outside or to answer their doors, following reports that Jewish nationalists were keeping tabs on which homes were Arab-owned.

Reports of looting, arson, and vigilante mobs elsewhere in cities such as Tiberias, Tamra, and Ramla were shared through Whats App groups and social media posts.

Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said over 400 people were arrested Wednesday “for attacking police officers and involved in major incidents” in the cities of Acre, Kfar Kassem, Tamra, Lod, Ramla, and around Rahat in the Negev dessert.

He said there were several shooting incidents in Lod, in which two Jewish civilians and one policeman were shot, the latter moderately injured. Thursday morning, an Israeli man was also stabbed in the city, Rosenfeld said.

Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz called up more reserves of the border police, who typically patrol in the military-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Border police had already been deployed in Lod, after an Arab man was killed in communal violence that erupted there earlier in the week.

Many reports of violence, or threats of it, could not be verified in the unfolding spiral of fear.

“We are seeing the fracturing of our social compact,” Israeli commentator Nadav Eyal wrote on the front page of Yediot Ahronoth.

“The cowardice of the Arab public leaders who whipped up a frenzy and then fled. The cowardice of the cabinet ministers who saw the development of La Familia’s racist gangs occur right in front of them, but after the turn of events in Lod yesterday, were afraid to say anything,” he said referring to a notorious group of right-wing Israeli soccer hooligans.

Ms Jaljuli said she was deeply afraid watching the violence tear apart the fragile idea of a “shared society” in the country.

“It seems like everything we worked for is collapsing right now,” she said. “People have no tolerance for each other. Everyone wants revenge from the other side.”

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