As thousands of rockets rained down on Israel over the last nine days, another disturbing development got less attention in the mainstream media. For days on end, Arab rioters carried out what have been described as “pogroms” in Lod, Acre, Jaffa, Haifa and other so-called mixed communities. The anti-Jewish violence was followed by several attacks on Arabs by far-right Israelis.
The mayor of Lod, a town in central Israel, compared the riots in his city to “Kristallnacht” and warned of a civil war. “All the work we have done here for years [on co-existence] has gone down the drain,” Mayor Yair Revivo said. Defense Minister Benny Gantz called the mob violence “no less dangerous than Hamas’ missiles.” A Jewish resident of Lod died after Arab rioters pelted his car with rocks, and an Israeli Arab man was shot dead, reportedly after throwing stones and firebombs at a Jewish-owned house. Many others have been wounded.
Nevertheless, when covered by international media outlets, the Arab-initiated violence was often devoid of context.
The New York Times on Monday reported that “mob violence erupted in the city of Lod, where rival Arab and Jewish groups attacked people, cars, shops, offices and hotels early last week.” The Washington Post described the violence as “clashes between Arab Israelis and right-wing Jewish Israelis”; CNN as “street battles” between “Palestinian and Jewish youth”; and Huffington Post as “violence within Israel between its Jewish and Arab citizens, with clashes and vigilante attacks on people and property.”
These reports did not mention which group started the violence. Indeed, Arab attacks on Jews and their property had already started last month, following a disturbing online challenge. On April 15, a Palestinian man attacked two ultra-orthodox Israeli boys on the Jerusalem light rail. The footage of the unprovoked attack went viral on the video-sharing app TikTok. In the days that followed, more and more clips of attacks on Israeli civilians started appearing on the platform.
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Furthermore, there is no equivalence between Arab assaults on Jews and the retribution attacks that followed. According to data released by the Israel Fire and Rescue Services, the violence from Israel’s Arab sector greatly exceeded that of Jewish radicals.
Between May 11 and May 16, Arab rioters set fire to ten synagogues, 112 Jewish houses and 849 Jewish-owned cars. Additionally, 673 Jewish homes were in a variety of ways damaged and the apartments of 386 Jewish families were looted. Authorities recorded a whopping 5,018 instances of stone-throwing at Jews.
#BREAKING: Anti-Jewish riots break out in #Lod, #Israel. At least 1 synagogue burned, Jewish residents evacuate. PM @netanyahu declares special state of emergency. pic.twitter.com/hfzsFbW2zY
— Leonardo Feldman (@LeoFeldmanNEWS) May 11, 2021
By comparison, Jewish vigilantes did not burn down a single mosque. No looting of Arab homes has been reported. Jewish rioters did damage to 13 Arab properties and burned 13 cars owned by Arab Israelis. Moreover, Israel’s emergency services registered 41 cases where Jews threw stones at Arabs.
Most important, Israeli leaders immediately denounced reprehensible acts committed by Jews, while Palestinian politicians encouraged the riots.
For example, when 30 Jewish extremists assaulted an Arab driver in Bat Yam, Israeli politicians across the political spectrum condemned the act unequivocally. “I do not care if your blood is boiling; you cannot take the law into your own hands,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated. Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, said he was “shocked and ashamed to the bottom of his soul” and called for restraint. “We must not escalate into anarchy,” he tweeted.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid was quoted as saying that “the rioters in Bat Yam […] are a bunch of pathetic racists who don’t represent Israel’s Jews.” How different were the responses from the Palestinian leadership. On Sunday, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, issued a statement praising the ongoing violence and destruction perpetrated by Arabs Israelis.
“You are the men of men, so go forth to defend our people in revolt in our eternal capital Jerusalem and in the persistent Gaza and [West] Bank, Lod, Haifa, Yafa, and Nazareth and all of Palestine,” the missive read. “This is your role, and this is your time. […] Make their roads, settlements, and occupation camps a target for you and unbearable hell [for them].”
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The political leader of Hamas, the US-designated terrorist organization gaining support amongst Arab Israelis (see for example here and here), made even more brazen remarks over the weekend. In a speech aired by Al-Jazeera, Ismail Haniyeh praised Palestinians for “waging an Intifada (uprising) from Rosh HaNikra [located in northern Israel] to Umm Al-Rashrash [Eilat].”
“The theory of co-existence between the two peoples within the 1948 borders – a theory they have been cultivating for 70 years – is being trampled underfoot today by our sons and our people in Lod, in Ramla, in Umm Al-Fahm, in Nazareth, in Baqa Al-Gharbiyye, in the Galilee, in the Negev, in Rahat, in Beersheba, and in Safed,” Haniyeh said.
“Safed is ours! Safed belongs to us and to nobody else!”
This incitement to violence by Fatah and Hamas garnered little, if any, attention in the international press. Instead, reporters opted to draw a false equivalence between Arabs and, put bluntly, the unacceptable response by extreme groups that reside on the fringes of Israeli society.
