'It brought color back into the cheeks'
The Arab community's 'March of the Dead' was an invigorating affirmation of life
Last week was a terrible week in Israel.
Much of the credit for that accrues to the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has no qualms about openly demonstrating his contempt for the country’s Arab citizens. Early in the week, Smotrich announced his intention to hold back 200 million shekels (about $50 million) over the next five years from a program that helps prepare Palestinians from East Jerusalem for study in academic institutions in the city. Academic study in Israel, he explained, radicalizes young Palestinians, because it is at the Hebrew University and other local institutions that they are exposed to “Islamic radical cells” that “identify with the enemy.”
At the same time, Smotrich announced plans to withhold another 300 million shekels just this year from the country’s 67 Arab municipalities, funding that had been agreed upon by the previous government, and that was intended to close some of the social and economic gaps long dividing them from Jewish towns. Smotrich cited his concern that some of the money going to particular Arab local governments ends up in the hands of organized crime groups that have penetrated city hall, taking over contracts for such services as waste collection and public construction projects. His solution to that problem is to deny funding, some of which go to day-to-day operations, to all of Israel’s Arab towns, whether or not they have proved to be victims of extortion.
Additionally, there is the growing violence of extremist settlers against their Palestinian neighbors, and the growing awareness that the government has no intention of acting against it; the knowledge that the High Court of Justice will be ruling on several elements of the government “reform” package, and that the prime minister refused to say that he will abide by the court’s rulings in the case that they go against him; and, just for good measure, the plan of the environmental affairs minister, Idit Silman (the former Yamina Knesset member who brought down the “government of change” in 2022 over the issue of whether visitors or staff could bring hametz into hospitals during Passover), to introduce sex-segregated swimming hours at some public beaches, although the attorney general has told her that such an action needs to be anchored in legislation, which doesn’t currently exist.
Yet, last week also brought with it a bright spot, albeit one brought on by terrible circumstances: last Sunday’s march and rally in Tel Aviv calling attention to the ongoing wave of violence in Arab towns, and the government’s flaccid response to it.
If you have been paying attention to anything in Israel beyond the “judicial coup,” you are likely aware of the precipitous rise in the murder rate in Arab towns. Violent crime in Arab society has been on the rise for at least a decade, although 2022 saw an encouraging drop, but the mid-year numbers for 2023 give the impression that all hell has broken loose.
In 2018, 74 people were murdered in the Arab community, and that number rose over the next three years to 94, 109 and 126, respectively. Although last year saw a small improvement, with “only” 116 murders, this year the murder rate came roaring back: On July 12, the total passed the total for all of 2022, and the time of the Tel Aviv rally, on August 6, another 15 had been added to the tally, bringing the total for 2023 to 141.
According to the NGO Abraham Initiatives, which is dedicated to advancing the cause of “shared society,” about 75 percent of the killings can be attributed to organized crime, “while 15 percent is attributable to tribal blood feuds, femicides involving family members and the remainder to general criminal activity.”
While the Hebrew media are good at keeping a running tally of the killings, as if keeping track of a slugger’s home runs as he draws closer to breaking Barry Bonds’ lifetime record, I don’t get the sense that there is much public interest or understanding of the factors contributing to the crisis. It’s terrible, but fortunately it’s their problem, not ours, seems to be how much of Jewish society reacts.
There was, therefore, good reason for low expectations for last week’s event. The logic for holding it in Tel Aviv was the desire of the Arab organizers to recruit their Jewish fellow citizens to their cause. But those fellow citizens have been preoccupied all year with another protest movement, and there was no telling how many of them would be willing to give up a free evening for another cause, no matter how worthy.
But the March of Death, as the August 6 was grimly dubbed, was a great success. When I spoke to her the following day, Ghada Zoabi, owner of the Arabic-language web portal bokra.com and the initiator of the Tel Aviv event, said she herself hadn’t expected such a big turnout, which the police estimated at 20,000. Nor had she anticipated that half of those in attendance would be Jews, as her calculations showed.
The event began with a roughly one-kilometer march from Habima Square to the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is where the speeches and music were heard. Leading the march was a procession of 141 coffins, one for each Arab murder victim this year – although, as I write this, another in the six subsequent days, another six victims have joined the tally. The coffins were carried along the route by young people dressed in eerie, white, satin hooded capes, which Linda Dayan described in Haaretz as resembling “both the red Handmaids’ outfits seen at pro-democracy protests and [Muslim] burial shrouds.”
Once the procession arrived at the darkened plaza in front of the museum, the model coffins were laid down in a provisional “cemetery” that was fenced off from the rest of the plaza, which quickly filled as the living marchers entered as well.
The rally that followed was full of surprises. The two most powerful speakers, to my thinking, were Badia Khnefess and Samir Mahameed. Khnefess is the mother of Johara Khnefess, who was murdered by a car bomb in June 2022 in her hometown, Shfaram, where her father has been a longtime deputy mayor. Was Johara targeted because of her father? Two years later, the murder remains unsolved. Her mother says she doesn’t even know what the motive was, although she fears that Johara, who was 28, was singled out because of her feminist activity, including her outspoken condemnation of violence against women in Arab society.
Badia Khnefess, a longtime women’s rights activist, directed her remarks at the prime minister, imploring him angrily: “Netanyahu, look me in the eye, sir, and tell me that your government, and all of its institutions – its ministers, Shin Bet, IDF, police -- is unable to solve the murders of our children? Our siblings, our friends, and our family? You are able to get to the uranium-processing plants in Iran, and [at targets] in the rest of the world … but when it’s our blood, you can’t? Even though our blood is the same color?”
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The short-lived “government of change,” led first by Naftali Bennett and then by Yair Lapid – and with the participation of the United Arab List, headed by Mansour Abbas -- invested significant attention and funding to improving personal security in Arab towns. Whereas the current government, which placed responsibility for the same realm in the hands of Itamar Ben-Gvir, who believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved with sufficient violence, clearly has no interest in improving life for the 20 percent of Israels who are Arabs. But can such a dramatic change at the political level reflect itself immediately in the street? Can the connection be so direct and so immediate? It’s a question I can’t stop pondering, and for help with an answer, I turned to Prof. Badi Hasisi, from the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University Faculty of Law.
Hasisi began by reminding me both that violent crime has been on the rise in Arab society for at least a decade, and also that most of it is connected to organized crime groups, which run protection rackets in many towns, loan-sharking operations, and, as noted by Minister Smotrich, have infiltrated a number of city governments. They have access to automatic weapons and explosive materiel, much of it stolen from the army, and they have little trouble recruiting “soldiers” from among the disproportionate number of young Arab men who have left school and have minimal job prospects.
Behind the proliferation of organized crime are “deep-seated factors” – sociological and economic – but, he explained, “the central thing is the absence of government. And when people feel that no one is protecting them, they become vigilante.” If there was a small decline in murders in 2022, believes Hasisi, it can indeed be connected to Bennett-Lapid government, and in particular to the appointment of Yoav Segalovitz as deputy minister of public security. Before Segalovitz became a Knesset member for Lapid’s Yesh Atid, he held several senior positions in the Israel Police, including heading the Lahav 433 unit, which deals with national crime and corruption.
According to Hasisi, “You could see that Segalovitz created a feeling of trust, and a sense that the government was really going to act. The criminals like to act when no one is disturbing them. And if the police can take down a big criminal in Umm al-Fahm that no one had the nerve to take on before, it creates a feeling that the government is in charge.”
Today, says Hasisi, “it’s obvious that the political atmosphere is anti-Arab. Many initiatives lost their momentum. The atmosphere [of governance] is weakened. The first to feel it are the criminals. For them, it’s party time!”
(A clip posted on Facebook by the rally's organizer Ghada Zoabi)
Ostensibly, the Tel Aviv rally had the goal of pressing the government to take the crime problem more seriously. But, as Samir Mahameed, the mayor of Umm al-Fahm, who gave one of the most rousing speeches that evening, told the crowd, “I don’t have expectations of this government, and I believe that you also don’t have any expectations.”
Nonetheless, Mahameed, continued, “I do have expectations when it comes to the audience that is here [tonight]. The time has come for the joining of forces. The Jewish campaign against the judicial reform is impressive and important. But no less important is for that struggle to integrate into it the campaign against crime in the Arab sector. … I invite all the civil organizations that participated [tonight] to join us in our protests in the Arab communities.”
That was an appeal worth taking note of. Mahameed, a former school principal who holds a doctorate in education, is finishing his first term as the politically independent mayor of the country’s third-largest Arab city, and one of its most complex. He has avoided grandstanding and demagoguery, and focused on issues related to day-to-day life in Umm al-Fahm, which demands cooperation with the national government.
Mahameed is by nature inclusive, and practical-minded. He delivered his speech alternating smoothly between Arabic and Hebrew, directing his words to his entire audience. If he has the stomach for national politics, he may find that the Arab and Jewish publics are both ready for a leader to serve as a bridge between them.
Without mutual cooperation, Israeli democracy is a lost cause. Suspicious of the hopeful feeling that I carried within me as I headed home from the Tel Aviv Museum, I decided the next day to call Mohammed Darawshe for a sort of reality check. Darawshe, the director of shared strategy at the Givat Haviva Center for a Shared Society, is a seasoned veteran of what used to be called “coexistence” programs, but now is referred to as promotion “shared” existence.
When we spoke, Darawshe said he too had come away from the rally “feeling positive, and optimistic about Jewish-Arab cooperation, something that had gone out of fashion.” It “brought color back to the cheeks.”
Like Mayor Mahameed, Darawshe said he didn’t see the rally doing much to reduce violence, even though that was its ostensible goal. The current government, he said, “is impermeable” to public pressure. But the demonstration, he hoped, was a reminder that “shared political activity is something that is still possible, and something legitimate, something to dream of.”
Darawshe himself had a brief flirtation with electoral politics two years, as the head of a Jewish-Arab party that withdrew from the race when polling showed that it would not gain enough votes to pass the Knesset threshold. Today, he sees a single party based on common ideology as less promising than political cooperation based on “pragmatism” among the mainstreams of both Arab and Jewish society. In other words, he said, “we need to widen the field, and move further to the right in both Jewish society and in Arab society. I don’t mean the traditional ‘right’ – because I don’t believe that either the Jewish right or the Arab right believe in shared society – but more in the direction of the center.”
The biggest surprise of the rally was the appearance of Meir Sheetrit, a longtime Likud MK and former minister of justice and of finance, among other positions he held. Sheetrit left Likud together with Ariel Sharon, when the latter formed Kadima in 2005, after pushing through the Gaza withdrawal, and left national politics in 2015. So, he deserves credit for just showing up at the rally. He also deserves credit for his inclusive message, calling on Arabs to more fully integrate into Israeli society, including participating in the current protest movement, from which they have mainly kept their distance. But when Sheetrit also urged his audience to “Join the army,” adding that “everyone should be involved in carrying the burden,” he received a round of boos, and quickly wrapped up his speech.
Several of those who followed Sheetrit on the stage, including Samir Mahameed, went to pains to dissociate themselves from his remarks. I found myself wondering if Sheetrit had anticipated the reaction, and if he would have delivered the same message if he had known how unpopular it would be. (I got in touch with Sheetrit to ask him that directly, but he didn’t respond.)
Someday, when Israeli Jews and Arabs live in complete equality, and Israelis and Palestinians are living in peace, the question of universal military service will need to be confronted. We’re not quite there, however, and the most that can reasonably discussed today is national service of some kind for all – including Haredi Jews and Arabs. “Discussed,” as opposed to “dictated.”
If Sheetrit’s desire was to get the conversation started, it was brave of him to do it with a bang, and be willing to take the inevitable criticism for it. I suspect, however, that he didn’t make enough of an effort to study his audience beforehand. Had he done so, he would have understood that if the Israeli establishment wants to draft Arabs for military service, there are few things it has to do first: It has to stop telling them that this isn’t their land too, that their history doesn’t merit study in Israeli schools, and that if they identify with the Palestinian people, that means they are “supporters of terror.” And, yes, it shouldn’t cut government funding that was intended to improve Arabs’ ability to contribute more fully to Israeli society.
Bravo, David! We are so grateful for your presence and your wisdom. Sidra and Bernie
Your insights are much appreciated, David. Keep shining your bright light!