Jews and Arabs protest together against Israeli government inaction on crime
More than 250 Israeli Arabs have been killed in the last year as part of an ongoing crimewave - the government and police have been accused of doing little in response
Nearly 40,000 Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel jointly protested in Tel Aviv against government and police inaction to counter violent crime within the country’s Arab community, with an Israeli Arab MK describing how the rally “should be a turning point” for Jewish-Arab relations in the country.
The protest, which was organised by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, has come after strikes in Israeli Arab cities and towns against the mass-violence experienced by the Israeli-Arab community in the recent period. 252 Arab Israelis have been killed in the last year in crime-related violence, with a surge an extortion-related shootings.
Jamal Zahalka, the head of the Committee and a former MK for the Balad party, addressed the crowd, accusing the government of “fuelling crime organizations and criminals who murder, extort and threaten.” He accused Israeli police of having a “silent agreement” with “criminal organizations” in which law enforcement practised a “policy of deadly restraint” with regards to Arab-on-Arab crime. He particularly criticised the Israeli government’s far right Minister of Policing, Itamar Ben Gvir, referring to him as “Minister of Crime”.
Family members who have lost loved ones to the wave of violence were also among those to speak. In September, Firas Abu Fana, 29, was shot and killed in the Israeli Arab city of Kafr Qara in Northern Israel. His mother Khatam told the crowd that she wakes up each day mourning for her child, who “did nothing wrong and was murdered in cold blood.”
Although serving Jewish and Arab MKs were present at the demonstration, none of them spoke from the main stage, to avoid making the protest party political.
Ayman Odeh MK, Chairman of Hadash-Ta’al, told Times of Israel that “this should be a turning point, another important building block for the common struggles of Jewish and Arab society.”
Meanwhile, Gilad Kariv MK, part of Israel’s The Democrats party, told the Israeli paper that ““We have a joint demand from Netanyahu to fire Ben Gvir, and because we know that he’s not going to do it, our demand is to replace this racist government.
“If a mother in Umm al-Fahm or Sakhnin feels [too] insecure to allow her child to go to the playground in the afternoon, it means we cannot be safe and feel secure here in Tel Aviv.”
The next general election in Israel is required to take place by this coming Autumn. Last month Israel’s key Israeli-Arab parties announced that they were reforming a coalition ahead of the election, leading to the possibility that they could win as many as 15 seats out of the 120 making up Israel’s Knesset.
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