Hundreds of Arab residents of Lod marched through the mixed Arab-Israeli city Friday, chanting subversive slogans against the state of Israel and its institutions. They carried a huge PLO flag and marched from the old mosque in the city toward the municipality building, in protest against the destruction of illegally built Arab homes.
Rafi Vered, a resident of Lod, told Arutz Sheva's Hebrew news magazine that police blocked all approaches to the marchers and that “we received informal instructions not to let our children leave home. We heard the shouting and saw the sights from our houses. There were about 300 people there who came out of the mosque near the central bus station.”
Vered said that while the march was not accompanied by violence, it is a sign of the Jews' loss of control over the city. “The atmosphere is escalating,” he said, and noted two incidents in which explosive charges were thrown at Jewish homes, and an arson attack on a synagogue. “The air is charged and eventually it will explode,” he said.
Symbolic mosque
The mosque from which the march began has great symbolic meaning for the Arab residents of Lod, Vered explained, because about 30 Arab fighters were killed there in the War of Independence, in what they see as a massacre. The mosque was recently renovated and now serves as a nationalistic rallying point for the city's Arab residents.
According to an account of the fighting in Lod given several years ago by a former member of the Palmach militia who participated in the liberation of the city, Arab resistance continued even after it had surrendered to the IDF. Most pernicious were Jordanian snipers who had not been located, and who continued to shoot and kill Jewish fighters. In order to put an end to this, Arab men were rounded up and placed inside a mosque, and mortar shells were fired into the mosque, killing many of them. After this event, the sharpshooters ceased firing at Jewish forces.
The Arab sector in Israel has become more brazenly anti-Israeli and violent in recent years, while Jewish authorities are increasingly loath to use force to quell any Arab activity. On Yom Kippur 16 months ago, hundreds of Arabs were bussed into a Jewish neighborhood of Akko and rampaged there for hours. In other incidents, Arab hooligans have brutalized and murdered Jews in Jewish cities like Tel Aviv and Netanya. Arab Knesset members routinely vilify the state of Israel and sometimes engage in violence toward security personnel.