A yawning rift has opened in Israel between the country’s Jewish and Palestinian citizens in response to the Israeli police crackdown at Al-Aqsa Shrine and East Jerusalem, which peaked on Monday May 10, and then Hamas rocket fire that same evening. Since then, demonstrations and riots unprecedented for decades have multiplied in Palestinian and mixed towns in northern Israel, in the Galilee, in the Arab “triangle” and on the coast.
It is a movement of anger, which mobilizes together the Palestinian citizens of Israel (some 20% of the Israeli population) and the Palestinians residing in occupied Jerusalem, echoing the bombed civilians in Gaza. And this mobilization may have more consequences than the ongoing confrontation between Israel and Hamas, which threatens to turn into the fourth war in Gaza since 2008.
Tuesday evening, the funeral of a man, Moussa Hassouna, 32, shot dead in the mixed town of Lod (center), gave rise to scenes of riot. The young man had been shot dead the day before in a previous episode of violence, during which Palestinians threw stones in a Jewish neighborhood, defended by its residents, some waving the Israeli flag. Three neighbors were arrested, holders of valid permits to carry a weapon.
Live on television, the mayor of Lod called on the government to impose a curfew and to deploy the army. “An intifada broke out in Lod”, Yair Revivo shouted. He was heard late in the evening. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a local state of emergency before heading to the city to denounce it ” the anarchy “. He called on residents not to take the place of the police, saying “ without the rule of law, there is nothing more ».
“Uncontrolled violence”
His silence, until then, had struck. Hours earlier, the Prime Minister had warned his fellow citizens, in a television intervention, that the clashes with Hamas would still go on, but then made no mention of the events in Lod and elsewhere in Israel. Mr. Netanyahu meant that these movements remained an Israeli social affair. In the evening, a Hamas rocket fired a sad hyphen between the two events, by killing a Palestinian resident and his 16-year-old daughter in the city, near the David-Ben-Gurion International Airport.
You have 46.82% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
