Published: 25 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
EETTA PRINCE-GIBSON visits the epicentre of Jewish-Arab violence and finds agreement on just one thing: there is no more common ground
AS HAMAS AND OTHER ISLAMIC GROUPS in Gaza fired thousands of missiles at Israel, and as Israeli planes intensively bombed the Gaza Strip during the most recent 11-day campaign, another front of violence and destruction opened throughout Israel, mainly in mixed cities, where Jews and Arabs have lived in close proximity in a tense, but mostly non-violent, form of co-existence for decades.
The worst of the violence was in Lod, a city of some 76,000 in central Israel, just 18 kilometres from Tel Aviv and 15 km from Israel's main international airport. For four days, gangs of mostly-young Arab men, many carrying knives and some apparently carrying live ammunition, threw stones and Molotov cocktails; gangs of Jewish men, some reportedly also armed, took to the streets to repulse them.
Two people were killed here, a 31-year-old Arab man shot by armed Jewish civilians, and a 56-year-old Jewish man, killed by an Arab mob. Synagogues and Jewish schools were torched, a Muslim cemetery and mosque were desecrated, cars and apartments and public areas were burned.
(In a separate incident, also in Lod, a 52-year-old Bedouin man and his 16-year-old daughter were killed when rockets fired from Gaza hit their car.)
In 1948, during Israel's war of independence, which Arabs refer to as Naqba, or the catastrophe, Israeli forces captured the city. Two hundred and fifty men, women and children were killed inside a mosque, and almost the entire rest of the population was forcibly expelled.
Today, the city is an impoverished backwater, approximately 80 percent Jewish and 20 percent Arab, suffering from neglect, crime, political corruption and municipal mismanagement. Most of the housing is made up of drab, crumbling apartment blocks.
Poor Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia and Eastern Europe have bought homes here, while most of the indigenous Arabs who can leave, do. Bedouins from the Negev have come in, and the state has also resettled here West Bank Palestinians who collaborated with Israeli security services, creating volatile intra- and inter-communal tensions.
