A MUST READ
Dear Friends
If we still need to convince anyone of the urgent need to apply Jewish sovereignty between the sea and the Jordan river, we strongly suggest you read Nadav Shragai's article that appeared in Yisrael Hayom this Friday. Translated into English as a public service by the Sovereignty Movement.
A MUST READ!
Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar
The Sovereignty Movement
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Maybe you Thought that the Old People Died and the Young Ones Forgot
The Riots of May 2021 exposed how some Israeli Arabs are increasingly involved with the "Nakba" and the "Right of Return", which affected the fomenting of the riots · From new research by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Nadav Shragai, the main point of which are presented here, shows that many no longer believe it is a dream, but a real aspiration · "In the end, the Arabs in Israel are Palestinians; if you don't recognize this – you are hurting yourselves".
Nadav Shragai, Yisrael Hayom, 9/2/22
Translated into English as a public service by the Sovereignty Movement
Aya Zinati, a native of Lod, is a public figure familiar to some Israeli Arabs. Despite this, six weeks after the riots against the Jews of Lod, she surprised many people who did not have a deep knowledge of her opinions.
Zinati, who is now a resident of Haifa and works at Shatil, a foundation of the New Israel Fund, and is an activist in the organizations Gisha and Zochrot, explains that "despite the great pain and real fear in Lod, she has a new hope that "we succeeded to talk about the right of return…". "We, in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Jerusalem – are the same people. She emphasized, "We are not talking about co-existence. It's not a matter of 'a shared life' in the mixed cities… the problem is Zionism itself".
Zinati expressed satisfaction that she and her friends are succeeding to present "the Palestinian struggle as one struggle", emphasizing that "there is one occupation": "I am not talking about the occupation of '67. My terms are different from Israeli terms and this must be internalized… when I talk about occupation, I am talking about the occupation of Jaffa, Lod, Acre and the village of Ma'alul (a village that existed before '48, near Nazareth). "I explain to my children", said Zinati, "again and again, that they are not from Haifa, but from the village of Ma'alul, that was destroyed by the Zionists and that in the future they will return there."
Zinati is not alone in this approach. During the riots and afterward, the "Nakba" and "return" remained part of the discourse in internal Arab networks in hundreds of tweets and posts.
Ella, an Arab Israeli from Lod, tweeted this on Twitter at the end of May, for example: "The best thing is that the Israelis are writing about us, the Palestinians of '48, that we are traitors. That we have betrayed them. Those asses don't know that it's a long time since our loyalty has not been to them.
It's just that they realized only now. What happened to them to make them ignore it."
Journalist Hanan Amior, editor of the media monitoring site, Perspectiva, came to Lod during the riots and met with three Arab youths about the age of 16 – "impressive young men"; according to him, one of them had joined in the riots a few days prior. After a long discussion with them, Amior got the impression that "the story they tell themselves is different from the story that we, the Jews, tell ourselves, and it is one story – the Nakba.
"They were born in Lod", says Amior, "but they described to me and my friend, with tears in their eyes, the exact angle of the shadow that was cast by the fruit tree in their grandfather's yard in some village in the Galilee before '48, upon the ruins of which, a Jewish town was built. They described to us how they go there sometimes on Shabbat to see exactly where the house stood, which is now near a different house – belonging to Jews… I understood that the occupation of '67 is not what interests them. They are only interested in returning to the houses they had before '48"
In the days following the riots, one of the songs by Tamar Nafar, an older Arab Israeli rapper, also a native of Lod, who defines himself as a "Palestinian with Israeli citizenship", won renewed popularity. The song, "I'm Going Home", describes the connection and bond that some Israeli Arabs feel for the homes that were abandoned in '48: "I'm retuning to the house / where I can wash the dust of time from my hands / … The sound of the key entering the lock/ The key turns round and round … / And the time goes round and round/… an entire people is exiled from its land and is trying to return / In which language should I say it?..."
Sheikh Yusuf Elbaz, formerly the imam of the Great Mosque in Lod, a member of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, was even more blunt when he said, a few months before the riots in Lod: "Israel is not our country. Our national duty is to preserve our identity, our land and our holy places. The way to do this is by civil rebellion, gradually and in phases…".
The riots perpetrated by Israeli Arabs in the Jewish neighborhoods of mixed cities during May unsettled Israeli society. Delicate seams that allowed co-existence between Jews and Arabs were unraveled all at once.
The Department of Forensic Science almost immediately identified two key, direct reasons for the riots: the scandalous blood-libel of "the al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger" and the dispute between Jews and Arabs over the neighborhood of "Sheikh Jarrah" – Shimon Hatzadik.
There were some who mentioned other factors, which, at least from the rioters' point of view, were background factors: the activity of Torah nuclei in the mixed cities "the Judaization of Arab areas", economic gaps and gaps in infrastructure between Jews and Arabs" or the involvement of criminal elements in the riots.
Despite this, almost no one spoke about the elephant in the room: the growing involvement of Israeli Arabs with "the return" and "Nakba" – not as a matter of tradition, awareness or something that is just theoretical but as the foundational basis for Palestinian thought and consciousness and as a practical, feasible aspiration.
These deep currents apparently had their influence on the events in May as well, sometimes only in the background and sometimes as the central, practical cause.
For many years, discourse on "the return" was conducted mainly in the Palestinian diaspora throughout the world, in refugee camps that Arab and Palestinian countries perpetuated, by UNWRA and of course, in the territories of Judea and Samaria and Gaza, which are under the control of the PA and Hamas.
This discourse has increased greatly among Arab Israelis in the two past decades, especially since the Monitoring Committee on Arab Israelis published "The Future Vision for the Arab Palestinians in Israel" in 2006.
In these documents, Arab Israelis were defined both as natives of the land and as citizens of the state as well as "part of the Palestinian people of the Arab nation and from the Arab and Islamic cultural space…".
But over the years, many Israeli Arabs became radicalized in their identity and dropped the component of Israeli identity. In a public opinion survey carried out by Prof. Sami Samuha a few years ago, it was found that while 80% of Israeli Arabs did indeed incorporate "Israeli-ness" into their identity, at the same time, 60% define themselves as Palestinians.
Journalist Meirav Arlozorov, who revealed these facts, noted that "We can all choose between the half-full cup and the half-empty cup"
In May 2021 and in events that occurred in the following months, Israel was exposed to the half-empty cup: The Nakba as obligatory inheritance, Palestinian identity and the "right of return" as a commitment to the future, also appeared in the background of the events, sometimes as a hidden basis of consciousness and sometimes as overt and explicit, and not only in Lod.
Tayser Hatib, a resident of the old city of Acre, explained after the events that "At the end of the day, the Arabs in Israel are Palestinians and we have a Palestinian identity… Wake up – if you don't see this, you're hurting yourselves again. It will happen again and again".
The events in this northern coastal city did not happen out of the blue. Years ago, as in the days of the riots, Arab residents in Acre tried to change street signs and replace them with names of neighborhoods that were abandoned in '48.
In recent years, in addition to ceremonies in the PA, there is also an annual ceremony in memory of three murderers of Jews in 1929, whom the British sentenced to death by hanging for their part in the massacres perpetrated upon Jews in Hevron and Safed.
The synergy and symbiosis between the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria and Israeli Arabs were also reflected in reactions to the incarceration of the Arab rioters in the May events. Dozens of residents of Acre, along with Arab members of Knesset from RAAM and the Joint List, demonstrated, expressing solidarity with the prisoners suspected of violence against Jews.
They even demanded that the PA and Hamas include the imprisoned Arab Israelis in a future deal for the release of prisoners. A person from the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Acre, Sheikh Muhammad Madi, believed, in those days, that the collapse of the Zionist entity was imminent.
On the eve of Independence Day 2021, a few weeks before the riots broke out, Arabs and Jews came to the Sariya Theater in Jaffa to talk about the "right of return" and the Nakba. They chose a title that suited its character: "We thought it was temporary".
In Haifa, two weeks before Jews were also attacked in the riots, tours were held as part of a project called The Haifa-Beirut Bus, which was intended to teach about the history of the Nakba in the city. Here too, a prior foundational basis of awareness was built: The Haifa Declaration, which was written by a group of Israeli academicians and Arab leaders two decades before, called on Israel to, among other things, recognize her responsibility for the Nakba and begin to act to implement the Palestinians' "right of return".
The declaration corresponded well with many of the "Return" tours that had been held over the years in Haifa, and dozens of other points of settlement, as well as with calls in violent demonstrations in the city last year: "With spirit and blood we will liberate Haifa".
In May of 2021, Israeli Arabs attacked dozens more places of Jewish settlement and Jewish targets in the north and in the Negev, they attempted to lynch Jews, waved Palestinian flags and burned Israeli flags.
Jews and Jewish neighborhoods were attacked in Lod, in Acre, Jaffa and Ramle, among other places. Jewish apartments were looted and burned, two Jewish citizens were murdered and 196 Jewish citizens and another 300 police were injured.
Much public property was destroyed and set on fire and ten synagogues were set ablaze. As the violence escalated, the GSS published an unusual announcement determining that it was terrorism.
As the riots continued, and it became increasingly difficult for Jews to travel some of the roads in the country, even finding themselves more than once besieged in their homes and their neighborhoods, things deeper than the riots were revealed, other than "al-Aqsa or Sheikh Jarrah.
Kamal Khatib, Deputy head of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, spoke at the height of the riots, declaring (according to the indictment served against him) "words of praise, sympathy and encouragement for the acts of terror perpetrated against Jews". Khatib defined the rebellious generation of Arabs as "the generation of courage and heroism". He noted that "on the 15th of May, the 73rd anniversary of our people's Nakba will be commemorated".
"And even if you thought that those of the older generation have died and the younger ones have forgotten", Khatib explained, "the older generation has died, but only after teaching their sons that this is Palestine, and left them a key, deed and entry in the land registry".
Muhammad Barka, head of the Monitoring Committee on Arab Israelis, explained that Israeli Arabs are "part of the Palestinian people" and the protest is both civil and national". Barka explained that "Jerusalem has dear sisters: Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lod and Ramle…
Last May, in the last intifada, the focus of the resistance against the oppressive Zionist forces was in these cities in particular, in those cities that they tried to do away with and remove from the map of Palestine", said Barka. "These cities rebelled, as if to say: this is Palestine. It was called Palestine in the past and it is called Palestine again."
Many of the demonstrators who rioted at the time in the area of Nablus Gate in Jerusalem came from the Galilee and emphasized that they came "from northern Palestine" and not from the north of Israel. Some of those who took part in the riots of those days spoke similarly.
Muntasir Shalabi, who murdered Yehuda Guetta, in a shooting attack on the 2nd of May at Tapuah Junction, said in his investigation that "according to religious law, I am permitted to harm and kill anyone who took my land; I mean that you took houses in Ashdod and in Haifa".
In the Shuafat refugee camp, near Fiyyad Abu Shahidam's house, the murderer of Eliahu Kay explained to young Arabs: "This is our land. They expelled us in '48.. You thought that the older generation would die off and the younger ones would not remember… We will accept Jews here only as tourists and afterward they will return to their countries…".
A similar call was heard in one of the Bedouin demonstrations in the Negev, when one of the demonstrators told Prime Minister Bennett to go back to San Francisco and declared: "This is not your place".
A few months after the riots, there was a performance in the Chicago Community Center, in the neighborhood of Eshkol, in Lod, where Arabs rioted against Jews in their neighborhoods, in which they sang, among other things, the unofficial Palestinian hymn "Mutani" (My Homeland), which speaks of the homeland that must be liberated: "My homeland, my homeland/the youth will not tire until your independence or his death…/ we will beware of death and will not be slaves to our enemies…/ my homeland my homeland/the sword and the pen, not the words and the quarrel – they are our symbols…"
NGO Monitor, which investigates non-governmental organizations, mapped, even a decade ago, 21 organizations – five of them Arab-Israeli – that support the "right of return".
The organization Mossawa, for example, spoke of "a return to the original villages"; Mada al-Karmel determined that "reconciliation requires the recognition of the right to return and acting to implement it"; while The Return Council, ironically a Jewish body, determined that "In our times, we are obligated with the responsibility to act to promote the return of refugees and the internally displaced Palestinians", "acting within Jewish society to increase awareness of the significance of return, its necessity, justice and feasibility".
The council recommended "to imagine the return and plan for it and the space that would result from it", noting that it could rely on 93 percent of state lands.
The violent events of May, which were also nourished by the discourse of "the return" and the Nakba, occurred against the background of many and varied previous expressions of this same sort: return processions, where "keys of return" were carried, streets in Arab towns named after places that were abandoned in '48, restoration of cemeteries, mosques and churches that were left standing in Arab towns that were destroyed in '48, etc.
Seventy-five years after the establishment of the state, it seems that among a significant portion of Israeli Arabs, "the return" is no longer just a theoretical, traditional dream, but a practical, feasible aspiration. The events of May showed us that it is not "only" a future challenge for the continued existence of the Jewish state or the state in general, but an aspiration with a proven, immediate potential for violence and terror, and we can no longer ignore the dangers it represents.
