An Open Wound on Israel’s Body Politic

The current fighting between Hamas and Israel is to a large extent a rerun: It is the fifth major confrontation between Israel and Hamas since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. We have seen this script before: Thousands of rockets — Hamas rockets, albeit with longer range, improved accuracy, and larger payloads — aimed at Israel’s cities; international condemnations of Israel’s response to the deliberate targeting of its civilian population as “disproportionate”; and UN calls for a cease-fire before sufficient damage has been inflicted on the Hamas military infrastructure that it will not feel free to resume where it left off in a matter of months or a few years at the most.

What is new — or at least not seen since the widespread Israeli Arab rioting of 2000 at the height of the Second Intifada, which left many of the major east-west highways through the Galilee impassable — has been the rioting in mixed Jewish-Arab cities: Jerusalem, Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Akko, Haifa, and Nazareth. Molotov cocktails have been thrown into private homes, synagogues and Talmud Torahs have been torched, and Jewish drivers have been pulled from their cars and beaten.

Yigal Yerushalmi, a 56-year-old husband and father from Lod, who serviced both Jewish and non-Jewish clients as a plumber, was killed by a brick smashed on his head. (In response, Jewish vigilantes in several cities attacked Arabs and beat one Arab man seriously in Bat Yam, actions that were sharply condemned across the Israeli political spectrum, including in very strenuous terms by Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich.)

THE INTERNAL RIOTING caught Israel Jews largely by surprise because Jewish-Arab relations seemed to be heading very much in the opposite direction. At the time the rioting broke out, Mansour Abbas, the leader of the four-member Ra’am Party, had already been engaged in weeks of negotiations with every Zionist party, whether on the left or right, over the participation for the first time of an Arab party in the governing coalition. On April 1, he addressed the Israeli public on prime time TV in Hebrew, calling for “a vision of peace, mutual security, partnership, and tolerance between people.”