By Awad Abdel Fattah

Ben Gurion Airport. Palestinian citizens of Israel regularly face interrogations upon their arrival in Israel. (joshuapiano/CC BY 2.0)

I was fortunate this week. I had a quick and easy crossing from Jordan back into Israel. No delays, no questions, no invasive body searches and no lengthy rummaging through my luggage. The border guard sitting next to the computer took my passport, opened it and looked at the screen, presumably to check for any special alert. Unlike previous occasions, she didn’t leave her seat and disappear into another room to take instructions on what to do next. She simply handed back the passport, and I walked outside to my car.

For years, on almost every occasion, I have been routinely delayed and harassed for no apparent reason upon my return to Israel, whether following a speaking engagement or a personal trip, which I do with increasing infrequency given my treatment by these officials.

A month ago I went through the humiliating routine on my return from Amman. I find it impossible to let the procedure pass without responding. Possibly, it was this previous, heated exchange that suspended, if only briefly, my expected round of humiliation this week.

On that earlier occasion, as so often before, I ended up in an argument with two “security” men from the Shin Bet. (Similar confrontations occur when I arrive at or leave from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport.) After an hour of unnecessary delays, the two asked me to put my bag on a raised bench. One of them opened it and roughly began searching the contents: some clothes and two books.

I protested angrily: “Why don’t you do that more gently?”

He answered with a feigned calm: “You must accept everything that happens here in a nice way.”

I responded: “How can I deal with racist treatment and humiliation in a nice way?”

The other man, annoyed by the comment, interrupted loudly: “Tell me, why do you hate us?”

Next, the confrontation developed into a back-and-forth of accusations, with a subtext of politics.

I answered: “Who hates whom, me or you?”

He said: “I read your writings and you hate us.”

I replied: “I hate your racism, and the humiliating way you treat me and my people.”

Angrily, he declared: “Go to the Arab countries and you will see what will happen to you there.”

This statement, regularly uttered by Israeli Jews, irritated me. He wanted to erase the differences between our situation as Palestinians in Israel and that of other “Arabs” in Arab countries as a way to justify his country’s racist polices, and to silence us. The implication of his comparison was that we are not the indigenuous people of Palestine, and that Israel is doing us a favor by “allowing” us to express our opinions and vote.

That requires ignoring Israel’s long history of political oppression. I myself was first summoned for interrogation when I was 14 years old, after I wore a T-shirt with black lettering lamenting the death of the then most popular Arab leader, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The persecution continued, both against myself and my family, because we, like many others, voiced our opposition to the Israeli regime and identified with the struggle of our Palestinian people against the policy of Israelization (destroying our national identity) and Judaization (confiscating on a mass scale the lands of Palestinians who are citizens of the state).

The 1980s witnessed the harshest campaign against the secular democratic political movement I was by then a senior member of  Abnaa al-Balad, or Sons of the Village – and against me and my family. Once, in 1983, I was marched by three Shin Bet officers out of the newspaper office where I worked and beaten brutally in a police van. Later in the police headquarters, I was issued with an administrative order signed by the public security minister, banning me from entering the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Back to our exchange. I said: “It is you who should go to wherever you came from. You are a European colonizer, you came here as an invader.”

His face grew red with indignation. “My grandfather was born here and he didn’t come from Europe.”

“Well, if your grandfather was here before the invasion, so he must be a Palestinian like me, and like thousands of Palestinian Jews who were here all the time and lived peacefully with other Palestinians. But if he and his children participated in colonizing my country and killing my people, and continue to carry arms, then as far as I am concerned they are enemies – enemies of me, of justice and of human values.”

The other security man intervened: “Wouldn’t you treat me the same way if our roles were reversed?”

I said: “No, I wouldn’t.”

He asked why.

“Because I am a human being.”

Irritated, he asked: “Am I not a human being?”

“No, you are not.”

He became angry: “Are you against me personally?”

I said: “No, I am not against you as a person, or as a Jew. For me, all peoples of the world are equal. But I am against you because you are racist, and you represent a colonial and racist regime which has deformed you and most of your society.”

He looked down at the bag, seemingly unsure what to do next.

I continued: “Do you know what my party is struggling for?”

“No,” he replied, dismissively.

But I insisted on explaining: “We are struggling not only to liberate the Palestinian people from the occupation and from Israel’s racist apartheid regime, but also to liberate you from the illness of racism, so you can stop inflicting harm on me and on millions of people who are the natives of this country. And then we can live together equally and peacefully.”

He shifted uncomfortably to the left and right, while the other man returned to searching my bag, thrusting his hand deep inside.

He found a booklet, and asked what it was about.

I said: “I wrote this recently to explain how I and others think the Arab Palestinians and the Israeli Jews should live together under one democratic regime in a single state. It is a humanistic and democratic alternative to your occupation, colonization and apartheid. By the way, you can take it as a present.”

He said: “No thanks. I read everything you write, and your opinions are extremist and hostile to us.”

I said: “You are not willing to listen to our viewpoint. You are racist.”

He answered: “I am not racist. I am leftist.”

I asked skeptically: “Can you tell me what you mean by left? You are Zionist left. The left, as I know it, is against racism and is identified with universal values of equality between all human beings and with social justice. The Zionist left doesn’t uphold those values.”

We both fell silent for a moment. But I started up again as he returned to searching my bag. “Look, you talk to me always in Hebrew. You don’t know Arabic. Arabic is not taught in Israeli schools, although 20 percent of the state’s citizens are Arabs. Not only that, but although you are living in the heart of the Arab world you don’t want to be a part of the region. You insist on remaining a part of the West.”

He said: “I know Arabic. I matriculated in Arabic.”

I said: “This is further evidence that you are racist and a colonizer.”

“How so?”

I answered: “We know that whoever wants to be employed by the Shin Bet must know Arabic well. What motivated you to learn Arabic was the need to oppress me, to know how to keep controlling me. It is not because you and your colleagues desire to know about Arab civilization, or to communicate with it or with the Arab people and to advance real coexistence.”

Finally, he stopped the search. It looked as though he had run out of things to say. I know very well the conflicted feelings of the Zionist left. Unlike the right and the far-right, who are clear in their views about the rights of the Palestinians, the Zionist left are trapped by their desire for democracy and their adherence to a Jewish state and the resulting apartheid regime.

As he allowed me to leave, he gave me a look whose meaning I could not fathom.

Awad Abdel Fattah is the secretary-general of the National Democratic Assembly party in Israel, also known as Balad, which has three elected Knesset members.

Teddy stadium, where Beitar Jerusalem plays (photo: flickr / Matthew Wilkinson)

My colleague Noam Sheizaf wrote recently about the racism of the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem. Tensions were running high in the club after it signed two Muslim players from Chechnya, and the hardcore right-wing fans – part of an organization called La Familia – were probably behind the act of arson that took place at the club’s headquarters in Jerusalem. After the arson, the pressure on the club to take care of the racism in its ranks peaked – and apparently bore fruit. Noam uses this example of outside pressure successful in the micro area of the soccer fields, and hints at the macro:

… The case of Beitar Jerusalem – for years, written off as a lost cause – teaches us that on human right issues, outside intervention is effective (perhaps it’s the only effective thing); and that public opinion and local institutions are more attentive and receptive to pressure than it seems, as long as its presented in a clear and effective way.

I agree with this assessment wholeheartedly.

But, what interests me even more in this analogy is the question it raises, at least for me: what is the arson attack, on the macro level?

When the arsonists lit the headquarters on fire, many in Israel were laughing at an inside joke. “Burning the club” is a line from a comedy sketch performed by Israel’s leading comedy-trio, Hagashash Hahiver. The following clip is a short commercial for a cable company, which has a recording of those lines from the skit from the 70s, when “burning the club” was first mentioned. Coincidentally, the two characters are a reporter – and a Beitar Jerusalem fan!

“Fan, what exactly are your demands as fans?”
“OK, we want to say who the refs will be! If not, we’ll burn the club!”
“Tell me, can you number your demands?”
“Why number if I can count them for you? OK, we want 15 wins a year, minimum. 15, yeah? If not, we’ll burn the club. We also want to say, once and for all, who the players will be, who the coaches will be, who the result will be, and who the weather will be.”
“And if this is not given?”
“We’ll burn the club.”

In time, “burning the club” became widely used in Israel as a term that meant something along the lines of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” When someone wanted to go all the way with something, even if it meant harming himself and others important to him, he’s “burning the club.” Sometimes for spite, along the lines of “if I’m going down, I’m taking everybody with me.”

So, here they were, Beitar fans, in real life, bringing the term “burning the club” into reality. Yet, I digress. My initial questions was, what is the equivalent of “burning the club” when it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict? If, as Noam hinted, outside pressure is the way to go – will it only arrive after the club here is burnt? How extreme is this event? How large? How deadly?

I shudder at the thought.

Here’s what Ben-Ari wrote today:

Mercy on immigrants = blood of IDF soldiers

Now it’s clear, the IDF inquiry determines: the terrorists waited for the soldiers to give the infiltrators water and then they shot them!

The conclusion that should have been reached long ago:

Infiltrators who want water should go drink in Sudan or Egypt, whoever approaches the border, will get a bullet in the head, this is the only way we’ll save the lives of our children and guard our borders!

MK Michael Ben-Ari’s Facebook page

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, Thursday, two weeks ago: a bus driver on the 286 line that goes to the settlement of Ariel refused to allow a group of Palestinian workers on board who wanted to get back home to the West Bank. After a short argument the driver called the police, asking for the Palestinians to be escorted away from the door of the bus. A policewoman who arrived shortly after talked to the would-be passengers, and then told the driver the Palestinians all had valid permits to be in Israel, all went through security checks at the entrance to the station, and that he therefore must allow them on the bus.

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station platform (Wikimedia/public domain)

“The driver told her she was wrong and took her name and badge number so that all guilt would be on her head, and also said that he would drop them off half way, but the policewoman insisted,” says Neria Mark, a passenger who witnessed the scene. “Eventually he let them on, and even took some more Palestinian passengers outside the station so the bus became quite packed. The great heat and the Ramadan fast made many of them fall asleep, and so we drove on.”

However, when the bus reached the industrial zone outside the settlement of Barkan the driver called the guard at the gate, and had him order all the Palestinians to get off the bus. Two people who were accidently missed were ordered off by another guard at a later point along the route. “They all went down without a fight, some protesting verbally against the treatment and reminding both the driver and the guard that they’re fasting. All this time one of the passengers was encouraging the driver to do this ‘cleansing’, and once the deed was done the driver told him: ‘That’s the only way they’re going to learn. Anyone who boarded the bus today won’t dare to do it again.’”

According to Mark, from that point on the driver didn’t make the stops where Palestinians were waiting along the road. In a letter she later sent the Ministry of Transportation, Mark wrote that “the driver’s behavior was racist and in violation of the policewoman’s orders. He humiliated people just in order to teach them a lesson.”

The law requires drivers to take Palestinians, but makes it impossible at the same time (Activestills)

In the bus company where the driver works, however, nobody seems to see anything wrong with this story. “The driver acted exactly as expected of him,” says Ben-Hur Akhvat, CEO of Afikim. “The official policy is simple: anyone who can pay the fare can go on the bus. This means we have no choice but to also take Palestinians on board in Israel and drive them to Judea and Samaria, even though it always causes problems with the Israeli passengers, and both sides start verbal and physical slights with the other.”

According to Akhvat, any driver in the company has the mandate to decide that Palestinians look suspicious and call the police, but has to obey the police as the driver in this case did. “Inside Judea and Samaria the case is different, as Palestinians are not allowed inside the Israeli settlements without a permit by local security and an armed guard even if they do have an entrance permit to Israel, so the driver did the right thing in forcing them off. Every now and then Palestinians fall asleep on the bus and get unnoticed, and when they wake up at the last stop inside Ariel we have to call the police to show them the way out.”

Akhvat also wishes to remind us that army orders forbid Palestinians from entering or leaving Israeli borders through the same checkpoints as Israelis. “These people are supposed to go only through the Eyal checkpoint. On their way in they don’t have a choice, but on their way back they make it easier on themselves by taking our buses through the Cross-Samaria Checkpoint which is only meant for Israelis. Unfortunately we are not authorized to enforce the law they are violating.” Akhvat also mentions that the company regularly receives complaints from Jewish passengers who don’t wish to see Palestinians on the bus. “We are in ongoing negotiations with authorities regarding a possible alternative solution to the problem,” he says.

> To read more on the Eyal checkpoint and The Wall click here

Mark is unsurprised by this. “After I got to Ariel, all stunned, I was picked up by Palestinian friends from Nablus and told them the story. They all just nodded, and treated it as the most natural thing in the world. They think it’s normal, but I think there’s nothing normal about this reality.”

Police: Palestinians allowed on buses. Settlement: True, but not inside settlements

The IDF Spokesperson response is that the issue does not fall under military jurisdiction. An army source adds that there is no regulation forbidding Palestinians from riding on Israeli buses. The Tel Aviv Police says that the policewoman acted appropriately and that there is no regulation that forbids drivers from taking Palestinians on board. The Ministry of Transportation corroborated this.

“IDF regulations forbid Palestinians from entering industrial zones and settlements unless they have a specific working permit for that place,” says the spokesperson for the Samaria Regional Council. “This is why guards are placed at the entrances, to keep people out, including passengers on public transportation. A permit to enter Tel Aviv does not allow a person to enter Barkan. The Barkan industrial zone has some 3,000 Palestinians working there, entering it daily with the required security permit.”

It’s interesting to see how everybody’s right in this story. The official state bodies – ministry, police and army – all stick to the dry question of whether or not Palestinians are allowed on the bus in Tel Aviv. The answer here is indeed yes. But the people who have to live daily with the reality of occupation – Palestinians and the settlers (including the bus company, which has its headquarters in Ariel) – expose the deeper layers of Apartheid: the separate checkpoints for different people, the racial profiling security system, the permit regime, and the route of the bus which is planned only for Israelis.

—-

This story was originally published in Hebrew in Zman Tel Aviv and NRG, and is based on Neria Mark’s report in MySay.

The new racist poster, written in both Hebrew and Arabic by the extremist Kahana-style NGO “Lehava,” has been circulating in Facebook in recent hours and is gaining hundreds of “likes” and “shares.” The poster, which is aimed at young Palestinian men, comes in the aftermath of the attempted lynch in central Jerusalem, and warns that visiting popular areas in the city, like big malls and the pedestrian area off of Zion Square could lead to more similar attacks.

The poster fits into a growing trend of narrating anti-Arab racism as a means to “protect our daughters” – a form of discourse promoted by politicians and ministers also in relation to African asylum seekers.

The poster reads the following:

Dear Arab guy:

We don’t want you to get hurt!

Our daughters are valuable to us,

and just as you would not want a Jew to date your sister

we unwilling are also unwilling for an Arab to date a girl from among our people.

Just as you would do anything to stop a Jew from dating your sister – so do we!

If you are thinking of visiting Jerusalem malls or the pedestrian street [Midrechov] with the intention of dating Jewish girls – this isn’t the place for you.

You may walk around in your own village freely and find girlfriends there, not here!

Last week an Arab who thought he might find Jewish girls got hurt.

We don’t wish for you to get hurt,

So respect our daughters’ honor

As we mind it dearly!

Lehava organization    o.leava@gmail.com

“Dear Arab guy – We do not wish for you to get hurt, so keep away” (Lehava)

Many comments on the picture thread on Facebook show great enthusiasm for the text, and some people have already volunteered to help hang it up around Jerusalem.

However, other comments were much more critical, and some have compared its content to Nazi agendas. At least two mock posters have already been made in response, one translating the text into German and aiming it at Jewish men:

The mock poster in German (Amir Schiby)

The other, by Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky, calling on Jewish men to mind their own business and not meddle in women’s decisions on whom to date.

The mock poster in Hebrew (Zoya Cherkassky)

Update: The Jerusalem based NGO Ir Amim has filed a complaint to police against Lehava, accusing it in incitement to racism and violence. In addition, according to the complaint the poster suggests that anyone not abiding to its terms is likely to be physically assaulted, and is thus to be considered an illegal threat.

Read also:
The holy war against Arab-Jewish relations and the Jerusalem lynch
What is the link between Eli Yishai and Jerusalem ‘lynch’?
Attacks on Palestinians highlight history of lax enforcement on Jewish extremists

Palestinians in Israel is a short but compelling read that teases out the tensions inherent in a “Jewish and democratic” state by revealing the multitude of ways Israel has historically treated and continues to treat its Palestinian minority as second-class citizens.

In the first chapter–which is titled “Jewish and Democratic?”, revealing one of the central themes of the book–White writes:

The 2009 budget for religious services and religious institutions for the Jewish population was approximately $390 million. Religious minorities, which constituted slightly more than 20 percent of the population, received approximately $14.2 million, or less than 4 percent of total funding.

White also points out, “…for each Jewish student, schools have a budget of around US$ 1,100 a year. For each Palestinian child, however, the figure was just US$ 191: almost six times smaller.”

The book also includes bits of history that escape the attention of the media, which often neglects to ground current events in their broader context, such as the fact that Palestinian citizens of the state lived under a military regime until 1966 and that this same military regime continued to expel Palestinians long after the 1948 war had ended. “At least 2,000 Palestinians were ‘transferred’ to Gaza in 1950,” White writes, “while according to a Foreign Ministry report, during 1949-53 Israel expelled almost 17,000 Bedouin Palestinians from the Negev.” Most journalists depict the demolitions of Bedouin homes as a relatively new phenomenon, but White points out that more than 500 Bedouin homes were destroyed between June 1988 and May 1990; over 2000 were demolished from 1993 to 1996; and more than 600 between 2001 and 2008. The chapter titled “Land Regime” is an extensive discussion of how Palestinians’ dispossession continued long after the nakba and, indeed, continues today. 

Ben White’s Palestinians in Israel (courtesy of the author)

Palestinians in Israel is a must read for anyone who is unfamiliar with the systematic and institutionalized discrimination that Palestinians face inside of Israel. For those already familiar with the subject, White’s book helps reframe the issue of Palestinian rights by using their lack thereof as a premise to question whether or not Israel is, indeed, a democracy—a question that is gaining traction both inside of Israel and abroad.

The arguments White makes here are so deeply researched that they are almost unassailable. Which is why, I suppose, detractors had to resort to name-calling. White faced accusations of anti-Semitism after this book came out. Having read it, I didn’t see any grounds for the charge. What I did see, however, was a lot of uncomfortable truths that Israeli Jews and those who support the Zionist project—as Interior Minister Eli Yishai likes to call it—must face.

But, as is often the case in life and art, in its strength lies its weakness. All the research, for me, turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword. Palestinians in Israel is so grounded in reports from various NGOs and experts and journalists and facts and numbers that it sometimes loses sight of the issue at hand—namely, the Palestinians in Israel.

White has spent a significant amount of time in Israel/Palestine and has strong ties to the Palestinian community. So I found myself wondering why there was so little original reporting in this book. There are only a handful of interviews included and most are culled from other resources. That’s not to say that the personal stories of Palestinian citizens of Israel should have replaced the research White included. Rather, they would have helped to illustrate White’s points, making them more vivid and memorable, breathing life into what is, now, a decidedly academic text. An excellent example of a book that blends a tremendous amount of research with extensive, original reporting is Arthur Neslen’s In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian.

It’s a question of balance and Palestinians in Israel is at its best when White offers his own analysis rather than quoting others, when he  uses his skills as a sensitive interviewer who knows the issues and cares about the people who struggle with them. The short interview with Janan Abdu, wife of Palestinian political prisoner Ameer Makhoul, for example, seared my eyes. She speaks to White so earnestly about the difficulties she and her daughters face without their husband and father.

My qualm is small, however, and it’s partly a matter of personal taste. But, to argue against myself, the statistics about discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel are already out there and yet the world still sits on its hands. Maybe it’s moments like the one that the reader gets to share with Abdu—delivered by White’s steady, able hand—that have the potential to affect real change.

In the past week, the Bikur Holim hospital in Jerusalem has turned away at least three Eritrean asylum seekers, according to a report in Maariv (Hebrew).

After experiencing severe stomach pains, Nestah Ibrahim, a 21-year-old Eritrean woman who arrived in Israeli legally, was transported to Jerusalem’s Bikur Holim by ambulance. There, hospital workers asked her if she had money to pay for the visit. When she told them she did not, they told her to go somewhere else.

Speaking to Maariv, Ibrahim says,

I tried to explain to them that I’m new here, that I don’t have status and rights but they weren’t convinced and they told me: “Go to a different hospital.” I asked them to at least give me pills to make the pain go away but they did not agree to give them to me.

Earlier this month, Ynet reported that a Tel Aviv hospital, Sourasky Medical Center, will limit admissions of and ban visits by African asylum seekers “out of concern for the spread of infectious diseases to other patients.”

While a number of African patients have been found to have tuberculosis, the plans put forth by Sourasky’s Director General, Gabi Barbash, will separate African and Israeli women in the maternity ward even if the former have been found to be free of infectious diseases. African and Israeli babies will also be separated.

Israeli doctors responded by condemning what they called “patient care apartheid.”

The Ministry of Health also slammed the move, calling it “racist.”

Following the outcry, Sourasky Medical Center eased the restrictions.

The phenomenon of refusing or limiting African patients is not new.  In early 2011, for example, an Eilat doctor refused to care for a pregnant African woman, telling her that he does not tend to Sudanese. In late 2010, an Eritrean man who had been attacked on the street by an Israeli man in Ashkelon was turned away from a local hospital even though he was bleeding.

Related Articles

>> South Tel Aviv residents protest against African asylum seekers

>> Authorities round up South Sudanese ahead of mass deportation

>> Israeli coalition members speak about refugees

The same goes for the people. An elderly neighbor watches my landlords’ children a few afternoons a week. My apartment, a mother-in-law suite, is owned by a wealthy, white-collar couple. Both the husband and wife work.

It was one of these afternoons when I ducked into the alley, barefoot. By the time I’d gotten back, sage in hand, the rusted gate had been closed. The elderly neighbor saw me reaching between the bars for the key, which is always in the lock, and scolded me for not having shut the gate for the 30 seconds I’d been in the alley. “You know,” she added, “there are a lot of Arabs wandering around here.”

It’s true. There are a lot of Palestinians in our neighborhood. Arab children attend the school for the deaf just a street away from my apartment. Palestinian women teach there. There are some Arab day laborers—either citizens of the state, East Jerusalemites, or West Bankers with or without permits—working on various construction projects. And I’ve noticed some Palestinian families that seem to live in the area.

“Excuse me?” I asked the neighbor, giving her a chance to redeem herself by not repeating her comment.

Instead, she insisted that I’d better lock up, even if I was headed into the alley just for a minute, because of “all the Arabs wandering around the neighborhood.”

As though a Jew couldn’t be a thief? As though all Palestinians are?

I pointed at the woman. “You can’t talk like that. That’s racist.”

She didn’t answer me. I went on to my apartment downstairs, feeling guilty that I’d spoken so sharply to an elder. But just because she’s older doesn’t mean she isn’t responsible for her behavior.

A few days later, she was in the yard, hanging laundry, as I went out. I started to say hello but she ignored me, put the half-full basket down, and went inside, slamming the door behind her.

And then my landlord came to me. She’s one of those Peace Now types. For Independence Day, she and her husband hung a blue and white banner from their porch. The word Shalom stood between the blue bars where the Star of David goes.

“I heard you had some sort of argument with our neighbor…?”

I was shocked that the woman had complained to my landlord. After all, wasn’t she ashamed of what she said?

“I wouldn’t call it an argument,” I said, and I recounted what had happened. My landlord smiled, chuckled and told me to leave it. There’s no changing the old woman now.

I was disturbed by our conversation, by my landlord’s tendency to forgive such comments and to laugh them off. The big moral and human rights issues like the nakba and the refugees and the occupation and the settlements and the institutionalized discrimination and the racism towards all non-Jews are built on and feed off of and are reinforced by all these the little comments, millions of little remarks made in an off-hand way. Remarks that no one confronts, that people smile and laugh away.

But I didn’t say all this to my landlord. I didn’t want to fight with her and I didn’t want to find myself booted from the place when my lease is up. So I nodded, forced a smile, and went on my way.

As I walked away, I realized that I’d just given my landlord a pass and, in a way, this let our neighbor off the hook, too. And I realized I’d given up on my role in Israeli society, however small.  Change, I realized, will only come from the outside.

Alola Dabesai, an Eritrean refugee, outside his apartment that was torched Monday in Jerusalem. (photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills)

Authorities were alerted to the fire shortly after 3:00 AM. Firefighters rescued 10 Eritreans trapped inside; four were taken to Shaare Tzedek Hospital where they were treated for light injuries and released. According to Assaf Avras, the spokesman of Jerusalem Fire Services, whoever set fire to the apartment intended to kill those inside.

The fire comes less than two weeks after an anti-African protest in south Tel Aviv turned into race riots. Both refugees and the Hotline for Migrant Workers report that a number of asylum seekers have been attacked and threatened by Israelis since then.

In late April and early May, a number of Molotov cocktails were thrown at the apartments of Africans in south Tel Aviv.

Violence towards the African community began at least a year and a half ago. In January 2011, the Israel-born daughters of Nigerian migrants were jumped by a group of Jewish Israeli youth. The boys shouted racial slurs at the teenage girls. One of the attackers was armed with a knife and one of the girls needed medical treatment for her injuries.

That same night in 2011, a flaming tire was thrown into an Ashdod apartment shared by Sudanese refugees.

Knesset Members have attended anti-African protests in south Tel Aviv since they began in 2010.

Related:
Africans attacked in Tel Aviv protest; MKs: ‘infiltrators are cancer’
Refugee homes, kindergarten, torched in arson attack
Community shaken after night of arson attacks on African community

As I have done countless times over the past four years that I have been covering and researching migrant workers and African asylum seekers in Israel, I spent most of yesterday hanging out in south Tel Aviv, conducting man-on-the-street interviews. After last week’s race riots, the mood in the area is dark, tense, pessimistic. While our conversations took place in public, a number of Africans told me that they are scared “even right now.” These were grown men who were frightened for their physical safety on busy streets in broad daylight.

So I was moved to see a couple of bright spots in the area. The Garden Library–the initiative of local NGOs, including Mesila–was up and running yesterday. Asylum seekers and migrant workers were perusing the books while Israeli volunteers played with African and Filipino children.

In the grass to the side of the Garden Library, a small group of Jewish Israelis and the children of African asylum seekers marked Shavuot by reading the Book of Ruth together in Hebrew.

Jewish Israelis and the children of African asylum seekers celebrate Shavuot in Levinsky Park by reading the Book of Ruth. When the older girl on the right hit a bump in her reading, a volunteer helped her sound out the word. (photo: Mya Guarnieri)

This sign reminds that while racism and xenophobia are huge problems in Israel society, there are some Jewish Israelis who oppose hatred of foreigners (photo: Mya Guarnieri)

The scene was especially moving to me because, as Yuval Ben-Ami points out in his excellent post about the holiday, Ruth was a foreigner. During Sukkot and Pesach we remember that we, too, were strangers in strange lands. And the Torah commands us to care for the strangers among us.

While yesterday’s Shavuot celebration does not mitigate or whitewash the country’s deep-seated racism–and, unfortunately, xenophobia seems to be the prevailing sentiment in Israel–we cannot forget that there are Jewish Israelis who are caring for foreigners, in ways large and small.