For a few days now, they've been passing each other with their eyes to the ground, not looking at their neighbors, their friends, or their playfellows. Gazes are averted stubbornly, quickly, bitterly. It is happening in the stairwells of buildings where Jews and Arabs live together, in business centers, and in public playgrounds.
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These non-glances include a little of everything: fury and anger and hatred and anxiety and fear, as well as astonishment and embarrassment, but mostly express the biggest question of all: How did it happen that out of the clear blue sky, people they thought were friends, neighbors, and human beings turned into mobs of rioters that burned and vandalized property and beat and hated people?
The forensics department of our minds has already spotted the accelerant: the blood libel "Al-Aqsa is in danger." But this libel wasn't the only fuel on the fire. It isn't only because of the false story and the religious incitement that this fire is starting to eat away at our lives and threatening to sink the fragile coexistence between the descendants of Abraham in this country. There is a huge elephant in the room that has barely been mentioned since the riots of 2021. Three weeks before the violence erupted, on the eve of Independence Day this year, a group of 40 people – Arabs and Jews – met at the Jaffa Theatre to commemorate the "Nakba" and talk about right of return for Palestinians. At the event, they screened pictures and displayed evidence of places where Arabs had lived prior to the War of Independence. The organizers picked a name for the event, which might be the best name for the elephant in the room now: "We thought it was temporary."
It's not exactly clear whether the refugees thought that their flight from their homes during the war was temporary and they would return one day, or whether they believed that the Jewish state was a temporary entity whose days were numbered. Maybe both. What is clear is that for over 30 years, the discussion of Palestinian "right of return," even among Arab Israelis – and not only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip – has become a central issue, a dream that can be made to come true.
'The natural Palestinian landscape'
Over the years, masses have taken part in marches for the right of return and heritage tours of sites that were once Arab communities. Many of them showed off the keys to their former family homes. Year after year, the Arab sector marks the "disaster of the establishment of Israel," and swear allegiance to the right of return, which is nothing more than the end and destruction of the Jewish state.
In-depth research conducted among Arab Israelis in recent years has shown that along with accepting that Jews have historic and national rights to this country (57% of respondents think so), and acknowledging the right of Israel to retain a Jewish majority (43%) – 67% of Arab Israelis think that Israel has not right to be the national state of the Jewish people; 66% refuse to accept the existence of the Law of Return; 77% refuse to forgo the right of return for Palestinians; 47% justify Palestinian intifada (uprising); and 51% justify intifada by Arab Israelis.
The Nakba, or "we thought it was temporary," mindset, has existed for a few years as a match to tinder, along with the Al-Aqsa libel. This mindset has been fed constantly by Arab Knesset members, writers, poets, and public and religious figures, as well as by representatives of the Israeli far Left. Three weeks ago it was set alight and set the country on fire.
The Jaffa Theatre once hosted an event in support of Darin Tatur, a poet and photographer from the settlement Raya, who was convicted of inciting to terrorism and supporting a terrorist organization. Last August, when thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank entered Israel illegally via holes in the security barrier, Tatour documented them flooding onto Israel's beaches. She wrote: "The sight of our cities on the Palestinian beach, like Jaffa, Acre, and Haifa, full of their original residents, is the natural landscape that should exist in this homeland … the sights and smells of the Palestinian presence .. this entire country, from the [Jordan] River to the sea is called 'Palestine.'"
Tatur is a template of the Arab Israeli landscape: Arab MKs have warned repeatedly over the years that Palestinian right of return is non-negotiable. Ahmad Tibi and Osama Saadi from the Joint Arab List, as well as others, have said it. Arab students at universities mark the disaster of the founding of Israel on an annual basis. Others tour sites such as Canada Park, Menashe Forest, or Tzippori, formerly Arab communities. These parades including Israeli flags and maps of Israel being burned. May see themselves as the Arabs on the inside, to whom one day Palestinians outside of Israel will be linked. They define themselves not as "Arab Israelis" but as "Arabs in Israel" – who belong to the place, but not the state.
A uncivil agenda
Many members of Arab society still want to eat their cake and have it, too – justify the rejection of the international partition plan and the offensive against the Jewish state, while also complaining that during the War of Independence, the Arab population suffered a similar fate to the one they had wanted to bring upon the Jewish population.
Back in 2006, the famous "vision document" authored by Arab Israeli leaders demanded that Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 be given the right of return. That was when the term "memory of the Nakba" began to worm its way into Israeli discourse, questioning the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and seeking to eradicate Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Given this, the Arab discourse has frequently made comparisons between the state of Israel and the Crusader kingdom, hoping that Israel will come to a similar end.
The periodic demands by Arab Israelis to cancel the Law of Return, turn Israel into a state of all its citizens, and even recognize a separate Palestinian constitution for the Arabs of Israel could, if met, lead to the end of Israel, both as a state and a Jewish state. The attacks on Jews in mixed cities were the almost natural result of the "return" mindset, to which a number of Arab-Israeli organizations still cling.
Neither the Jews nor Israel has a monopoly on consciousness or the shaping of memory and heritage, but when these turn into a physical and existential threat in the form of riots, the government has an obligation to contain them, and only then establish coexistence on the ruins that remain. The dream of return and the dream of coexistence cannot co-exist.
The Arab rioters in Jaffa, Acre, and Lod did not have a civil agenda (like Mansour Abbas'). They weren't focused on oppression, neglect, or inequality. Instead, they were shouting, "Through spirit and blood we will redeem Palestine." Over the years, incitement has led them to believe that the Jews' presence here is passing, in the spirit of the memory of the Nakba and "we thought it was temporary." They haven't realized that the Jews returned to their land to stay. Not as guests or passers-by, but as owners.
"The right of to annihilate," or as it is whitewashed "the right of return," must not be an option, and that's without even discussing the nature of Palestinian refugee-dom, the only one in the world that passes down from father to son from generation to generation and whose only purpose is to oust the Jews from Israel.
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