For Israel’s Palestinians, the 2014 Gaza war highlighted their powerlessness. While Israeli Jews cheered the televised footage of Gaza’s bombardment, Palestinians watched in horror as their relatives, turned into refugees in 1948, faced the offensive alone. Israel’s rules of engagement determined that anyone remaining in a district after advance warning of a bombardment was an enemy combatant, not a civilian, but Israel and Egypt had both sealed Gaza’s gates, closing their paths for escape.
Though comprising 20 percent of the population, Israel’s Arabs had long been conditioned to accept their exclusion from the country’s decision-making, but just asking questions now raised the possibility of arrest or dismissal from work. On paper, Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948 promised equality and full citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike. But in the nation-state of the Jews, as Netanyahu’s government called Israel, their right to equality was in question. Although Arabs had the vote, in 70 years Israel’s leaders had never included their parties in government, or appointed an Arab to run a ministry. For Palestinians, the Nakba was not a finite event after which life returned to normal—it was a continuum.
If the government had been out of sync with its people there might have been some relief. But since 2009, a large majority of Israeli Jews had voted the right-wing into power. In polls, 47 percent of Israeli Jews favored expelling Israel’s Arab citizens to the West Bank or Gaza, 42 percent expressed an aversion to living in the same bloc as Arabs, and a third believed Arabs should be denied a vote. Many Jews accepted the social conditioning unquestioningly. From birth, segregation is not only sanctioned but institutionalized. Education up to university level remains almost entirely segregated
The army only reinforces the divisions. “To defeat our enemies, and that is the goal of the army, we need less pluralism and more Jewish awareness,” said Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, then the army’s chief rabbi. Hosting a highly publicized Bible study in his home, Netanyahu—a secular Jew whose Jewish observance is more a public than a private affair (he rejects the Jewish dietary code and for a time was married to a non-Jew)—extolled the Book of Joshua, a story of the Jewish conquest of the land, as a template for dealing with contemporary difficulties. “From Joshua we mainly draw the understanding that our enemies must be fought,” he told his audience.
For most of the state’s history, Israelis left the task of fighting Palestinians to their security forces. Communal clashes were remarkably rare. But with the intervals between Israel’s cycle of offensives on Palestinians shortening, the military mindset that dominates during war and mobilizes civilians as well as soldiers to the effort has scant time to subside.
If economic growth had been his first concern, Shimon Gafsou, the mayor of Nazareth Illit, might have welcomed the influx of thousands of middle-class Palestinians from cramped Arab Nazareth up the hill to his shrinking city.
Instead he worked to keep them out. He barred the opening of churches, mosques, or Arab schools, and rather than provide for the education of the city’s 1,900 Arab children, he opened a yeshiva instead. “Jews, Jews, Jews,” proclaimed his campaign posters in the 2013 local election. “Upper Nazareth will be Jewish forever.”
The city’s three public libraries stocked Hebrew, English, Russian, French, and Spanish books, but not Arabic ones. “No more shutting our eyes, no more relying on the law that lets every citizen live where he wants,” he told me. “This is the time to defend our home.” When Arab residents protested the discrimination, Gafsou, a secular politician, cited God’s injunction to Moses in Numbers 33:55:
But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.
“Mayors rightly don’t want mixed cities,” said Ariel Atias, Israel’s housing minister from 2009 to 2013, by way of support. “It’s unsuitable [for Jews and Arabs] to live together.”
But when the reverse happened and Jews moved into prime real estate inhabited by Arabs, the minister offered fulsome backing. With government funding, rabbis descended from settlements in the West Bank highlands and opened new Torah schools and sponsored garinim, or seed communities, in Arab neighborhoods on the coastal plain. They came as conquerors. Rabbis recited martial verses from the Bible and presented them as a manual for contemporary conduct, with rousing sermons about “the Jewish fighting spirit” evident in David’s slaying of Goliath. In the wake of their failure to prevent the closure of Israel’s settler enterprise in Gaza, they were anxious, too, to establish footholds in Israel proper and regain popular support. Applying the same narrative they used to win public support for the settlements, they called for “redeeming the land.” If 500 settlers, with help from Israel’s army, could occupy the heart of Hebron, a city of 300,000 Palestinians, they could do the same, they reasoned, amongst concentrations of Arabs in the old Palestinian cities of Jaffa, Acre, Lod, and Ramla, which from the eighth to the eleventh century had been Palestine’s capital.
Between Netanyahu’s second election victory in 2009 and his fourth in 2015, 38 churches and mosques were attacked, burned, or defaced in a campaign its perpetrators termed price-tag. Not a single vandal was charged. Hard-line rabbis warned with impunity of the threat Arab male libidos posed to Jewish women, and their followers spread their messages on social media, and inner-city lampposts coated with luminous stickers. “Arab, don’t even dare to think about Jewish girls,” read one.
Lehava, an Israeli NGO that took its name from the Hebrew acronym for “preventing assimilation in the holy land,” published a “Page of Disgrace,” shaming “unfaithful women who, out of choice and ideology, chose to leave the Jewish people and openly live with goyim.” Their calling cards read: “If you are in contact with a goy, or you know a girl who is, get in touch.” They rallied their 35,000 Facebook followers to disrupt inter-faith wedding parties, and at night, donned black T-shirts with a yellow Star of David, and went looking for Arab couples to accost in West Jerusalem’s backstreets. One summer evening in the midst of the 2014 Gaza war, a teenage girl caught me watching as she kicked a car with an Arab couple in it, and spat in my face. “Dai, enough,” cried a passerby in a loose white cotton dress, and collapsed in tears at the scene. “Hug me, please.”
Debates in parliament and national television reports about Lehava’s operations to “rescue,” rather than abduct, Jewish women who married Arab men lent their narrative an air of respectability. The Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality held a debate on the dangers of inter-marriage to mark “Jewish Identity Day” in the Knesset.