Nobody is making films these days about stunningly random, lethal violence. We’ve grown ritually used to it. We have a few days to nurse our horror, then we return to the struggle to close out the month financially or implore the government not to bomb Iran, until the next incomprehensibly horrible thing has happened.

Violence in Israel, at least, is an equal-opportunity employer.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of Jewish youth attacked an Arab youngster in Jerusalem, nearly killing him. The perpetrators repeated time after time, and continue in their court statements to insist that they want him dead because he is Arab; they attacked him for this reason and with this intention. In my non-legalistic mind, that’s a hate crime if I ever saw one.

This March, four Arab youngsters – the shooter was 15 at the time, according to news coverage – killed a Jewish man in Ramla, a 51-year-old father of five who had gone out at night to walk his dog. The boys approached him, they said, and he just kept trying to walk away. This week the Yedioth Ahronoth daily revealed that in interrogations, the kids denied any specific motive at all. “Stam,” said the one who pulled the trigger: slang for “no reason.”

A few weeks ago, a Palestinian family driving through the West Bank settlements of Gush Etzion was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail, injuring all six people in the car. The primary suspects are 13 years old.

In 2009, a group of young men from the Arab town of Jaljulya got into a verbal scuffle with older man, Arik Karp, 59, who was walking with his family on the promenade just north of Tel Aviv. They beat him to death.

None of these incidents were retribution for the other, or for anything else for that matter – there was no chain of revenge. That means each assailant was murderously violent, perhaps enraged, in his own right.

It’s tempting to boil this down to nationalist, ethnic and racist tensions. Today I read about a group of young athletes jogging on Friday was attacked by a tractor driver (Hebrew) who tried to run them down after they asked him to drive more carefully. The main victim was a teenage Israeli girl, just 15 years old – and black. This prompted a friend of mine to suspect racism. The details have not emerged, but I bet it’s far more banal. There is no language for resolving the large or the tiniest of conflicts; a person in the wrong cannot say “sorry, you’re right.” He can only respond with violent rage.

Here are some other highlights: this week, Yedioth reported that a business man from Beit Shean in his 30s stabbed his wife to death before their daughters’ eyes – “He butchered her,” said the woman’s mother.

Hit-and-runs continue. A few years ago just down the block from my apartment, a 27-year old woman was mowed down by drunk drivers. It happened again two years later, killing the avid athlete son of a Supreme Court justice. And again nearly a year ago – this time killing a 25-year-old woman. These “accidents” are almost always men who get drunk and barrel down city streets at a speed that would tear up a highway. Again, I take the license of not being a lawyer when I say that a man of sound mind who drinks and drives has demonstrated intention to kill.

Is any of this unique to Israel? Probably not.

Following Arik Karp’s murder in 2009, I took a poll asking people why in the world they think this is happening. Just 7 percent blamed it on sick individuals. In other words, 93 percent know on some level that this is a social problem.

The top response, chosen by 57 percent of the 500 Jewish respondents and far out-polling any other answer, was the failure to educate youth about values; the second answer chosen by just over one-quarter of the respondents was socio-economic hardship.

Only 3 percent thought such violence is related to tension flowing from the conflict.

If we know it’s a social problem, who’s taking responsibility? An Arab friend has exhorted Arabs to stop blaming the murder of women on the occupation, which apparently happens. The mother of one kid in the Jerusalem lynch said her boy was sweet like “sugar.” Erez Efrati, who dragged a woman out of her car, beat her on the bank of a river and tried to rape her, was caught by witnesses in the act; his response was to deny any involvement.

This is an exhausted rant. I’m sure it’s not terribly profound. But to sum up, I am deeply troubled by two main things:

First, there is one thing most murderers, reckless drivers, and other violent criminals have in common. It’s not race, it’s not ethnicity – sorry, all you xenophobes and haters. The overwhelming preponderance of people who kill are men. Perhaps this is so obvious that it’s become transparent and that’s why nobody is addressing the gender factor as a root cause; or because it’s not unique to Israel maybe we think it’s acceptable. It is not acceptable, and I don’t care if it’s not unique. Israel must take a deep look at what makes our boys killers and work much harder to spare them that fate.

The second thing bothers me more. I refuse to live in fear of violence, but I am terrified of the human the ability to deny. Denying is lying. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said:

Violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying… nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his method must inexorably choose lying as his principle.

I would go further. All forms of violence are connected. Whoever is violent in his home, is violent in the street. Whoever is violent in his words, is violent by his hand. Whoever is violent to his enemies will eventually be violent with his friends. We will convince ourselves that the situation demands violence; in fact, the violence that defines us demands that we create the situations.

It’s no fun to say all this. But denying it keeps the whole system going.

In those notorious demonstrations, Netanyahu famously stood on the balcony overlooking Zion Square in Jerusalem, participating in, and possibly goading the angry crowds screaming for blood after terror attacks. In those sorts of demonstrations, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was portrayed in SS uniforms, or with a kafiya on his head, behind crosshairs. That wave of rage ended in the assassination of a Prime Minister.

How will this wave of rage end? Today, the government sides with the protesters, so the mob isn’t likely to turn on the leaders.

Incidents such as firebombing attacks on apartments of African migrants in those neighborhoods don’t leave much to the imagination. It’s only by chance or luck that no migrants have been killed up to now. And for African migrants facing war and crushing poverty at home, and horrible financial, sexual and physical exploitation by smugglers even before arriving in Israel, it’s strange to talk about luck at all.

Crime and fear

Local residents are frenzied following recent incidents of rape and sexual assault by migrants. There is no minimizing these crimes. It is natural that the people who already feel marginalized in society fear and resent those who flood their neighborhoods with unfamiliar foreign faces, desperation and idleness – and some criminals. The Israeli government effectively has no overall policy for economic or political non-Jewish migration although the phenomenon is over a decade old; perhaps if there was a clear policy, the concentration of migrants in the poorest neighborhoods would not be as grave, and the migrants themselves would not feel, or actually be, as helpless.

But the data on crime doesn’t bear any relation to the exaggerated panic. The last two reports by the Knesset’s Research and Information Department (from 2010 and 2011, in Hebrew) show that the crime rate among African migrants against Israelis is a fraction of the general crime rate – in Tel Aviv in 2010 for example, police files were opened against just over one percent of African migrants, but over six percent of the general population; in 2011 files were opened against roughly two percent of the total African migrant population in Israel – actually a slight decrease compared to the total in 2010.

However, a large portion of each report is devoted to the crimes of Israeli society against the migrants, including stabbing, firebombing, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and widespread violations of labor rights.

But poring through the data, I got angry at myself. Why do I need to parade the numbers as a defense against mob violence? We have a mechanism for dealing with crime and it’s called the law. Not vigilante action. I didn’t remember any demonstration at the sweet little moshav of Batzra, where the salt-of-the-earth Erez Efrati lived at the time he tore a woman out of her car, dragged her down a bank of the Yarkon River, beat the shit out of her and tried to rape her until he was chased away by passers-by. Efrati will never face a mob – and as much as I hate his crimes, he shouldn’t.

Excuses for violence.

A few weeks ago, on a sunny spring morning around 10am, I was returning home from a jog and on my block, I found an elderly woman on the ground, dazed, bleeding, crying and missing the necklace that had been ripped from her neck by two guys, she said, who jumped her from behind in plain view of several bustling cafes. I did feel nervous for several days afterwards. But now I’m more nervous about the shopkeeper who was one of our little group of people helping the woman, when he said he was sure the thugs were African migrants. This was not because he witnessed the event himself, but because, he said with grave certainty, they are the source of the waves of crime. I scoffed and told him that Israelis have said that about the Russian immigrants, and the Arabs before that, and so on.

In fact, the most consistent identifying feature of most violent criminals in general is their gender – guess which one.  But you don’t see me organizing rallies or inciting mobs against men.

Yes, the streets are dangerous world over. No, that is never, ever a reason for mobs or politicians to threaten migrants with expulsion, or call them a cancer.

The real cancer: violent anger

I’m terrified that the rioters yesterday didn’t want to see justice done; that they were more about expressing general rage, racism, xenophobia and violent forms of nationalism, than about the actual crime rate. I’m terrified because the rally was instigated by our elected leaders.

Last week, when I stood at the gates of Tel Aviv University, I was shaken by the mob rage against those commemorating the Nakba. Screaming, red-faced, sweating, hysterical counter-demonstrators stood in a ring around a tiny cluster of students in the middle, drowning them out with their poison. I am becoming familiar with that look of violence, palpable and unmistakable, burning out of their eyes even if no one is physically harmed – yet.

There was no physical crime or neighborhood encroachment behind the anger of those demonstrating at the university. Most of the ones I saw didn’t even look like students – apparently they came just to express their hate.

TAU demonstration against Nakba commemoration, 14 May, 2012 (Photo: Dahlia Scheindlin)

It looks like certain people in Israeli will continue looking for opportunities to foster violence, and if they can’t find them, they’ll invent them. Those people include our leaders.

Read also:
How mainstream Israeli politicians sparked the Tel Aviv race riot
How I survived a Tel Aviv mob attack
Africans attacked in Tel Aviv protest; MKs: ‘infiltrators’ are cancer
Using rape to justify racism