Implications of the Akko Riots

(Israelnationalnews.com) The sources of the Akko riot lie in the issue of Jewish vs. Arab nationalism, and not just social and economic relations between Jews and Arabs in Akko.

Pardon this very long blog.  The issues I want to deal can't be summarized in a page.

Just as the leftist establishment in Israel was gearing up for another hate campaign against Yesha, settlers, and people of faith in general, along come the Akko (Acre) riots and ruin the show.  Most people’s attention here is now firmly focused on where the real danger to the existence of a sovereign Jewish state comes from.  The Israeli establishment cannot discuss this problem or its solution frankly, because it does not possess the moral resources to do so.  We can, and should.

What happened in Akko was a riot, not a pogrom.  A pogrom is when armed and vicious people expend their rage on unarmed and largely defenseless Jews.  Amona was a pogrom.  However by all accounts the Jews of Akko gave as good as they got.  An article in Haaretz from last week says that in the aftermath of the riots some Arabs in Akko are fleeing their homes, which means that they anticipate that anti-Semitic violence is not likely to be cost-free.

That doesn’t mean we should be happy about a riot.  A riot is purposeless, lawless violence, a symptom of political and social disease.  (Not all extralegal violence is necessarily bad, but everything depends on the circumstances and the extent to which violence tends to stimulate the adoption of the correct public policy solution).  Riot doesn’t resolve problems, it only makes them worse.  That’s true no matter which side destroys more property and gets in more blows.  If there was any sort of silver lining to this riot, it lies in the pugnacity of Akko’s Jews, who didn’t take Arab violence lying down.  If Akko were inhabited by Kadima rabbits there would indeed have been a pogrom.  The attitude of Akko’s Jews, if it becomes widespread, can form the basis of a political solution to the problem of Arabs with Israeli citizenship, but that solution can only come about through legislation and deliberate policy, not street violence.

One example of a bad policy response is the Israeli police’ decision to arrest Tewfik Jamal, the Arab who drove through a Jewish neighborhood in Akko on Yom Kippur night with his radio blaring.  The charges are a) driving to endanger and b) deliberately infringing on religious sensibilities, a crime in Israel.

Jamal’s behavior on Yom Kippur night was insensitive and set off the riot, but his arrest is an unwarranted violation of his rights.  An Arab in Akko has the right to drive his car and play his radio on Yom Kippur night (if it were up to me I would make blasting your car stereo system in public at any time a capital offense, for Jews and Arabs alike, but that’s another matter).  Perhaps Jewish neighborhoods should have been closed to traffic on that night, but they weren’t.  I don’t believe for a moment that either of the charges are true, certainly not because the police say so.  The cops, who utterly failed to do their job Yom Kippur night, made the arrest to take revenge against Jamal and curry favor with the mob.  This arrest is just another example of Israel’s police playing to the press and exhibiting that contempt for the rights of the individual which is their hallmark, and from which our own community suffers so extensively.

At all times, the Jewish state’s policy toward every individual, Jewish or not, should be based on Jewish principles of fairness and justice, in the context of a legal system that expresses those values—including, of course, Jewish national values such as the right of Jews to exercise sovereignty in Eretz Yisrael

The real issue the Akko riot brings up, of course, is whether Jews and Arabs can and should live together in Akko; if yes, how coexistence can be fostered, and if not, what should be done about it.

The cause of the riot was the continual retreat of Jewish nationalism before Arab nationalism in Eretz Yisrael, as reflected in everything that has happened since Oslo.   Arabs sense that the State of Israel is melting away and that Jews can be victimized with impunity.  The utter incompetence of the police is only the local manifestation of a larger phenomenon, whose roots are in the fiasco of the 2nd Lebanon War and the feckless politics of the Israeli left toward Palestinian nationalism.  Like Fatah, Hamas and Hizbullah, ordinary Palestinians in Israel smell blood in the water.  Let’s note, in this context, the events in Tzipori a couple of years ago.  There was a pogrom in Tzipori, Jewish families that had come to reclaim a Jewish presence in the place were driven out, and the police, who had been sent to protect them, were the first to scurry away with their tails between their legs, leaving Jewish civilians to flee as best they could.

Arabs in Eretz Yisrael do not accept the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.  This is true of all Palestinian groups in Judaea, Samaria and Gaza.  Within Israel this position is expressed by a wide spectrum of Palestinian elite opinion, from the documents of the Higher Arab Council to the position and politics of the “northern” fundamentalist Islamic movement.  The Land of Israel is not Belgium, where two ethnic groups are moving to separation through public debate and the ballot box.  In these parts, Palestinian opposition to Jewish self-determination is expressed with violence, any degree of violence the Jews are found to be willing to tolerate.

There are three possible approaches to the problem of Arab-Jewish relations in Eretz Yisrael.  One is that of the Israeli Left.  This approach holds that the State of Israel’s violence against Arabs in Judaea and Samaria and discrimination against Arabs within Israel lies at the heart of the problem.  The problem can be resolved by ending “the occupation” and also ending Israel’s formal status as the state of the Jewish people.  This approach is unviable.  Even if the Jews were to formally surrender their claim to a sovereign Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael—which would render the entire Zionist episode pointless—malignant Arab nationalism, as expressed by such enlightened, democratic movements as Hamas or Fatah, would never settle for it.  Palestinians want Jews out, dead, or at best subordinate to an Arab kleptocracy.

A second approach is to try to move the clock back to where it was 40 years ago:  Arab nationalism in Judaea, Samaria and Gaza was at a nadir, stunned and numbed by the victory of the Six-Day War, and Arab citizens of Israel appeared to believe that a sovereign Jewish state was forever, so that they had better make the best of it.  This solution presumes that if you blunt Palestinian nationalist ambitions you can go on to establish coexistence between Arabs and Jews within a Jewish State of Israel.  This position seems to be supported by such right-wing stalwarts as Moshe Arens of the Likud.  However, the contradiction it involves is palpable.  Leftists will not be slow to point it out and I would tend to agree with them:  How are you going to reconcile Arabs to living within a Jewish state by doing the things needed to wipe out their nationalist feeling by force? 

I think that Arab nationalism of a malignant sort, irreconciliable with allowing the Jews of Eretz Yisrael self-determination, is now rife within and beyond the Green Line and cannot be put “back in the bottle.”  Conflict, if not everywhere outright fighting, is inevitable.  I therefore am extremely skeptical about the long-term possibilities of coexistence and think that the only solution is to encourage as much as possible the emigration of Arabs from all parts of the Land of Israel.  For those who support the second strategy mentioned above, I suggest that this third strategy, practiced for a couple of decades, is an indispensible prerequisite to the second strategy ever becoming viable.