A tenuous coexistence

October 10, 2008 - 10:57 AM by David · 5 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion

The Yom Kippur shutdown usually works. Whether you’re a secular Jews or a non-Jewish resident of Israel, you know that on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, you don’t drive or play music in public out of respect to those who are observing the holiday.

But one man in the northern coastal mixed Jewish-Arab city of Acre didn’t abide by the unwritten societal rule – and as a result, all hell broke loose.

According to The Jerusalem Post’s report,
Tawfik Jamal – a resident of Acre’s Old City – made his way to the predominantly Jewish Ben-Gurion neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, blasting loud music from his vehicle., Jamal denied he had intended to provoke local residents, saying he had driven with his 18-year-old son and the son’s 20-year-old friend carefully and quietly from the Old City to the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, three kilometers away, to pick up his daughter from her fiancée’s home.

But police dismissed Jamal’s claims.
“This was a provocation. An Arab driver arrived in a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur with blaring music, and refused to leave when asked to by local residents. We believe he was intoxicated. This was a deliberate act,” Galilee Police spokesman Ch.-Supt. Eran Shaked said.

The verbal confrontation between Jamal and the local residents quickly deteriorated into violence, as rocks and bottles were thrown at Jamal’s vehicle.
According to Jamal, he and his two passengers fled the car. The three were taken to hospital where they were treated for light wounds and discharged.

And then, to show you how rumors can spread faster than reason, false reports that Arabs were seriously harmed or killed by Jews reached the Old City, and then things began escalating.

Responding to the rumors, hundreds of Arabs set out from the Old City toward the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, walking down a main road, smashing store windows and cars along the way. Reports said the mob shouted “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar,” and “If you come out of your homes, you will die.”

At the same time, a few hundred Jews had congregated in the streets of the Ben-Gurion neighborhood. Fearing a deadly clash, police acted quickly, mobilizing “a very large force” to prevent the two groups from confronting one another, police said.

So, was it a deliberate provocation from an Acre Arab? An overreaction from the Acre Jews? And was the escalation simply the culmination of animosity that’s been built up between the two sides over years of living near each other?

Let’s not forget that in the scores of other areas in the country – in Haifa and the Galilee and in Jerusalem – there weren’t any similar reports. Let’s hope this was an aberration, and not a sign of a deterioration in relations between Israel’s Jews and Arabs.

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