When Israel faces its next military conflict, the IDF plans to call up reserves units that will be deployed in civilian areas to ensure that Arab Israelis do not interfere with military movements.

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The IDF is still disturbed by the events that erupted during Operation Guardian of the Walls against Hamas infrastructure in the Gaza Strip this past May, which included not only rioting and violence in mixed cities, but also attempts by Arab Israelis to carry out attacks on main roads and near sensitive installations.

Highway 31 near the Nevatim Air Force Base southeast of Beersheba was blocked off a few times during the May operation, and entrances and exits at the base, which is the IAF's largest, were restricted.

In the past, there have also been attempts to target armored vehicles on Highway 6 and a few other roads in northern Israel.

The military is concerned that in the next war, incidents like these will become more prevalent and could develop into organized attempts to block the movement of forces, block roads, and even infiltrate bases for the purpose of attacking soldiers or sabotaging sensitive equipment.

"We are focuses on offense, but could pay a heavy price in defense that will interfere with the plans for the offense," one senior IDF officer said.

In any war scenario, the IDF will need to move large contingents of personnel and equipment to the north and the south. Since the country has relative few highways suitable for this type of traffic, the movements are out in the open and exposed to attack. Thus, the threat is a double one – the enemy, who will try to focus its fire on convoys to prevent forces from amassing at the fronts (this is considered a particular threat in the scenario of a war against Hezbollah); and Arab Israelis, who could attempt to launch attacks on Israeli forces and weapons.

In light of these threats, the IDF is working on preparations for the next war, beyond the actual operational plans for the front lines.

The new plan will include three parts. The first has to deal with Border Police forces that will operate under the auspices of the IDF. The Border Police activities will take place in the main across Judea and Samaria, under the command of the IDF. In a state of emergency, the Israel Police will take command of these operations. During Operation Guardian of the Walls, there were a few days in which these Border Police companies were assigned to the police, but now the IDF's plan calls to transfer command as soon as the next military conflict erupts. This will require the IDF to call up reservists to operate in Judea and Samaria.

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The Border Police companies to be reassigned to the Israel Police will be deployed mostly in mixed cities, as patrol forces. The police will send them to various districts, based on situational assessments, and Border Police reservists could see emergency call-ups. A decision has already been made not to assign IDF personnel to back up the police in order to avoid a situation in which uniformed IDF troops would wind up using force against civilians to keep the peace.

The second part of the plan addresses the need to secure IDF missions. The military thinks that the police will be occupied by events in cities and will need to divert police personnel from all its units, including the Traffic Police, meaning that there will be fewer police available to secure roads and the areas around IDF bases.

This is where reservist battalions from the Homefront Command come in – who will receive emergency call-ups as soon as a war breaks out. The soldiers will be deployed across different regions and assigned to combat support as well as the civilian home front. Their main job will be to secure roads and military convoys to ensure that freedom of movement is not cut off.

"We understand that if in the past, a tank transport driver could have loaded a tank and driven feely from northern Israel to the south or the opposite, now he'll need security," the officer said.

Two weeks ago, outgoing head of the IDF's Technology and Logistics Division Maj. Gen. Itzik Turgeman said in an interview to Maariv that in the next war, the IDF would avoid moving forces through the Wadi Ara area to avoid clashes with Arab residents there. Turgeman's comments sparked considerable astonishment – not only because Israel cannot accept a situation in which the IDF is unable to maneuver freely in any part of the country, but also because it is possible to secure its forces. Alternatively, curfews can be utilized in villages and against civilians in cases where there are grounds to suspect that they will try to interfere with the movement of forces or armed vehicles.

The new plan is designed to address this issue. The third part of it, which has not yet been finalized, seeks to reach solutions that will increase the number of police available to handle events in Israel during a war, without backup from IDF soldiers.

One of the main lessons learned in Operation Guardian of the Walls was that Israel will need to implement these plans quickly, as soon as any military conflict begins. In any war scenario, the IDF will need to move large contingents of soldiers and equipment to the front, which will require massive movements throughout the entire country. This depends on freedom of movement and reduced threat on roads and at military bases.

"This is a new challenge we didn't have to deal with in the past, one that requires us to prepare now so we won't be surprised in the future," the IDF official said.

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Six months after Hamas handed Israel an ultimatum to evict the Jewish residents from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shimon HaTzadik/Sheikh Jarrah, the Nahala compound in the middle of the neighborhood and the adjacent streets are completely quiet. The autumn sunlight creates a chiaroscuro on the stone walls, which have been mostly cleaned of the Hamas graffiti that once covered them. 

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Only a few months ago, locals wrote on one wall: "We are Mohammad Deif's soldiers." The soldiers might have stayed, but the slogan is gone. On the other hand, the wall of the building opposite is still adorned with a map of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, entirely in the colors of the Palestinian flag. 

The quiet here is fraught. The eight Jewish families living in the "Nahala" know that at any moment everything could change, and that fires are still burning under the surface. Now, for the first time, they break their silence and speak to the Israel Hayom weekend supplement. They relive the difficult moments of this past May and June, describe their daily lives, and talk about hope for the future. 

For years, these families have been at the eye of the storm, a constant flashpoint of conflict, dispute, unsolved contradictions. They live not far from the Hadassah Mount Scopus university campus and hospital, right next to the "beating heart," as the grave of the High Priest Shimon HaTzadik (Simeon the Just) is known. They draw spiritual succor from the figure of one of the greatest Temple high priests ever known and from the remains of the Great Assembly. But in an odd juxtaposition of desire and reality, they live on a street named after Uthman Ibn Afaan, a noble from Mecca, who put together the final codification of the Quran and caused it to be written down. 

The 1948 precedent 

The 17 Jewish families in Shimon HaTzadik live in three residential compounds – Nahala, Havatika, and Menuha – and send their children to nearby daycares, nursery schools, and primary schools. Most of them are once again walking among their Arab neighbors without protection or weapons. In the upper part of the neighborhood there is a kollel. Prior to the founding of the state, the Shimon HaTzadik Synagogue operated in the same building. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef celebrated his bar mitzvah there. His grandson, Yonatan Yosef, who serves on the Jerusalem City Council, is one of the prominent defenders of the Jewish community in the neighborhood. 

The families' homes are located in the center of the famous Meriva plot, which members of the old Yishuv purchased from Arabs 150 years ago. After the purchase, Jews founded the Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood and other similar communities in the area, only to be run out in the riots of 1929 and 1935-6 and 1948. Only a few hundred meters from the Jewish homes stands a memorial to the memory of 78 doctors and nurses who were murdered in the Hadassah convoy in April 1948 by the Arabs of Sheikh Jarrah and their helpers. 

After the 1948 War of Independence, Jordan moved Arab families into the Jewish homes. But in the past few decades, the Nahalat Shimon organization has been waging a long and slow legal process that has seen Jews return to the neighborhood. The Arab families are either being forced or reach understandings to move out. Some are refusing. 

Earlier this month, a group of Arab residents of the Nahala compound rejected a compromise offered by the Supreme Court, under which they would recognize the Jewish ownership of the homes in which they are living in exchange for being allowed to stay there with the status of protected tenants. Some of the Arab families wanted to accept the deal, but heavy pressure from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority prevented them from doing so. 

Seven minutes from the Western Wall

This is the reality that Elazar and Moriah Cohen encountered when they moved into the Nahala part of Shimon HaTzadik as a young couple two years ago. It happened after they turned down an offer to settle in the "dangerous and unstable" Kfar HaTemanim in the heart of the city's Silwan neighborhood. 

"We chose Shimon HaTzadik so we could contribute to the settlement of Jerusalem," Elazar says. "As far as we were concerned, we came to live in a quiet area, with room to move, a good atmosphere, seven minutes away from the Western Wall, very close to the center of town, because we knew that the spot was the center of a dispute." 

"There used to be a demonstration in the neighborhood every Friday, but we never for a moment thought that things would deteriorate to the point they did. I'd exchange greetings with my Arab neighbors. I went to console one of them when his mother died. But this past Jerusalem Day, things changed all of a sudden. We're only now getting back to normal, very slowly."

Elazar grew up in a family deeply rooted in the Old City of Jerusalem and testifies that he is very bound to the city and its landscapes: "I didn't come here to prove anything to anyone or wave a flag and say, 'Look. This is mine.' I don't need that. Jerusalem is part of me and lies deep in my heart. I don't have a problem with the Arabs who live here, as long as they don't fight us." 

Q: Can you imagine dialogue and discourse with your Arab neighbors? 

"Before I talk with Arabs, I want to talk with my brothers, but yes, of course. Our Arab neighbors are welcome to talk instead of waging war. They just need to understand that the moment they throw a rock at me, they aren't partners in conversation." 

'Two simple words' 

Cohen says he was raised in a home of discourse, clarification, and dialogue. His father was active in talks with the Palestinians. At the wedding of his brother, who lived in Beit Choshen on the Mount of Olives, Jewish and Arab guests danced together. 

"Jerusalem is a great flame," he says. "The choice we have is between a fire of love or one of hatred. I, and my friends here, don't hate. I didn't come here looking for action. My choice is the flame of love, love for Jerusalem, the creator, for people. I know that if I choose that, hatred will pull back. It's not me." 

Elazar and Moriah remember the hard times clearly. "Those were days when you couldn't stick your head outside. If you did, you'd get hit with a rock or a Molotov cocktail. Fireworks fell a meter [yard] from my kids in the compound, right where we used to hang the laundry. On Fridays, when the Arabs would wave a Palestinian flag and sing nationalist songs here, we would play Shabbat songs from the roof, using an amplifier – 'Shalom Aleichem' and 'Lekha Dodi,' to drown out the harsh sounds from the other side, but mainly to calm our kids." 

Recently, Moriah took part in a meeting of local women with a psychologist the Israel Association of Community Centers placed at their disposal. 

"All the women gathered to get things off their chest, to vent. We brought up our deepest feelings, difficult things. Fears. About kids who had started wetting the bed again. Kids who wanted to sleep with their parents. Women who hear a 'boom' or a door slam and jump. People here are still afraid to walk past an Arab man or woman. We are still working through what we experienced – long weeks of being shut inside our homes, of trouble going in or out. A kind of PTSD," she says. 

Moriah notes that "the worst feeling was of being abandoned. People felt that the government was neglecting them, ignoring them, a feeling of helplessness, mostly about the police, which should have been somewhere we could turn. We did not and are not breaking any law. The opposite – we're working within the framework of the law. What strengthened us and still does is faith in the Lord and also the huge embrace we've received from the general public." 

Moriah talks about an endless flow of offers of help, both then and now. "Cakes, drinks, casseroles, donations, solidarity visits, volunteers who came to bolster us, and offers to host us from central Israel, the south, the western Negev, and the North – the total opposite of how the government treated us during the rioting." 

People on the left side of the political map claim that the return of the Jews to the place from where they were ousted in the War of Independence opens the door for Palestinians to do the same in places where they lived until 1948 – in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Lod. 

Elazar: "There is no symmetry between the attacker and the attacked, between the murderer and the murder victim, but even before that we need to say, 'Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people. It's a shame that there are still people who still have difficulty saying two simple words, two words that release us form the trauma of exile and the Holocaust – 'It's ours.' Rashi wrote that explicitly in his interpretation of the first verse of the Torah." 

From the moshava Kinneret to the neighborhood 

Ayelet and Adiel Hazan, who arrived in Shimon HaTzadik out of a "sense of purpose, to live near the grave of Shimon HaTzadik and near the Temple Mount," agree that there is asymmetry. "The Land of Israel and certainly Jerusalem belong to the Jewish people. That's the foundation. I could understand the distress of my Arab neighbors, as people, but given what we experienced here from them in the past few months – violence, hatred, and attacks, attempted murders, Molotov cocktails struck a baby and people were wounded – if they leave, I'll be happy. I'll hang out balloons. As far as I'm concerned, and the court has addressed this, they are occupiers. They did not meet the criteria the law demands for protected tenants." 

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Adiel grew up in Maaleh Hever in the southern Hebron Hills, and Ayelet comes from Revava in Samaria. She is a music teacher and he teaches at a Breslov kollel and makes a living from a falafel stand. Adiel explains the choice to live here by saying, "For us, it's like finding Mount Meron in the middle of Jerusalem. A place to isolate, to pray. A kind of Garden of Eden. Through Shimon HaTzadik, I get closer to the Creator." 

The families here are diverse, but they are all religious: Breslovers, Haredim, modern Orthodox, members of Ateret Hakohanim and Har Hamor. Some wave Israeli flags and rejoice on Independence Day, others don't. One young couple, Shmuel and Eliana Peretz, just married. 

Peretz was raised on the secular moshav Kinneret and found religion as a teenager. He formed ties to the place, where he volunteered during the riots to bolster his friends at Ateret Hakohanim. He studied there, too. As a volunteer with Magen David Adom, he was present at a car-ramming attack in the neighborhood that wounded six police officers. He now works as a social coordinator at the Eitan pre-military preparatory program in Mishor Adumim. 

Eliana made aliyah with her parents about 10 years ago. Her father served as a community rabbi in Chicago. She is an occupational therapist who studied at Tel Aviv University, and until recently lived in student lodgings in Jaffa, where she encountered the complexities of the Jewish-Arab conflict for the first time. Eliana says she attended lectures that reflected a variety of views and also mentored Jewish and Arab children at a community center in Jaffa as part of her scholarship program. 

Both Shmuel and Eliana stress their respect for Arabs as human beings. Shmuel also understands why it is difficult for them to be evicted from the homes where they have lived for decades. However, he does not think that the process should be stopped. 

"The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. The processes against them are being managed respectfully, according to the law, considerately. Treated this way, they resort to violence, bullying, invasions. Eliana and I are coming to settle the heart of Jerusalem. It's our country. Simple as that," he says. 

Eliana says that she is coming to Shimon HaTzadik to live and make herself present. "If wants to accept that and live in the neighborhood with me – I'll respect him and we'll be neighbors, but if he wants to fight me, I'll fight back. I was raise to respect people as human beings, but some of the Arabs in Shimon HaTzadik have stopped behaving like human beings." 

Mom in the kids' room

For Dvir and Moriah Cohen, relations with their Arab neighbors, or the lack thereof, meet deeper issues as a result of the events of this past May. 

"My hardest moment here was on Jerusalem Day," Moriah says. "When I wanted to go home with the kids from the celebrations, and all of a sudden there was a siren. From afar, I saw thousands of Arabs facing our homes, whistling and dancing with joy, and I was cut off from reaching my home, the place that's supposed to be my safety and my defense. It was a terrible feeling." 

Dvir and Moriah are parents to five young children, for whom the events of May were difficult. 

"Eleven Molotov cocktails were thrown at our compound, along with endless rocks. They broke car and house windows. They set fire to cars. They threw a big metal chair at the window of the kids' room," they say. 

They couple projected confidence in the children's presence. "We told them that the noises from the Arab attacks were noises from police actions that were defending us, but at one stage, our oldest child, Yinon-David, who's five, asked, 'Dad, if the police are protecting us, why aren't they here?' That's an emotionally healthy kid. When a guest asked him one time if he was afraid to live here, he said completely naturally and innocently, 'Why, are you afraid to live in your house?'" 

Despite everything, Dvir and Moriah say that when things are calm, which is much more common than the days of rioting, "It's nice to raise children here. We returned to the Land of Israel and Jerusalem after 2,000 years. The police learned lessons, too, and now they are doing their job here much better than they used to. Only [last] week they broke up a gathering in 15 minutes. Six months ago it took them days. Now we're safer." 

The couple has been in the neighborhood for six years, and came here after spending a few months living in Jewish homes in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Moriah, a teacher at a Talmud torah school, grew up in Petah Tikva. Dvir, a student at Ateret Hakohanim, grew up in Eli. His grandfather, Eli Sasser, was one of the founders of Karnei Shomron. Before Gush Katif was evacuated in the 2005 disengagement, his parents moved to Morag to bolster the residents of the bloc. 

The government isn't enthusiastic 

When the resettlement of Sheikh Jarrah began, the attorney general was Michael Ben Yair, a native son of Nahalat Shimon, whose families lived next to the grave of Shimon HaTzadik before the state was founded. In January 1948, during the War of Independence, the leadership demanded that the Ben Yairs and the other families leave their homes. Later, Ben Yair recommended that the government remove the Jews from Shimon HaTzadik. He thought that if Arabs couldn't return to what had been their homes prior to 1948, Jews shouldn't be able to, either. 

Dvir says that "You can't equate someone who comes at you to throw you out of your home, murder you, to someone who lost a war whose purpose was to annihilate you; between the attacked, the murdered, and the side that carries out the pogroms and rioting and is forced to leave their homes. Between the people who made the decision and those who rejected it, convinced that the state of Israel was temporary and they'd go back home to finally oust the Jews from the land. There is no mutuality, and even before that – the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people." 

Q: And if the government orders you to leave? 

Dvir: "I'll sit and weep, like I wept with my family when they evacuated Morag. We lowered our heads and wept. The people of Israel are with me here. We won't be anywhere that the people of Israel don't want us to be. But I don't believe we'll find ourselves in that situation. The people's support of us crosses camp lines. We are sitting in the middle of Jerusalem." 

Dvir's moment of crisis came when Arab rioters burned the Israeli flags that the Jews were flying outside their homes. "I went nuts when an innocent cop told me, 'Take down the flags, it's a provocation.' I asked him how he wasn't ashamed of himself. It pained me so much that the Arabs had managed to bring down the Magen David we'd hung at the head of the Nahala compound." 

The media large portrays the Jewish settlers in Shimon HaTzadik as violent, provocative, and inconsiderate. I've been following the community here since 1998, since then-MK Rabbi Benny Elon went into the abandoned, ruined synagogue with a group of activists and rebuilt it. The vast majority of allegations about violence by Jews are baseless. Usually, the Palestinians are the violent side, but they have managed to demonize the Jews of the neighborhood in the foreign press. 

The Jews here don't have too many supporters in the Israeli media, either, despite having been attacked countless times and mostly ignored it. The Jewish ownership of the strip of settlement that connects west Jerusalem to Mount Scopus, and Jews' religious and historical ties to the grave of Shimon HaTzadik are downplayed. 

Muna al-Kurd and her twin brother, Mohammed, who live across from the Nahala compound, are adept at using the internet and social media in the battle that has been awarded the catchy name "Save Sheikh Jarrah." The Jewish side is virtually non-present in the fight. The government, especially the current one, is – to say the least – unenthused about the Jewish presence in Shimon HaTzadik, not to mention the US and its State Department. US President Joe Biden said so explicitly when he met with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in August. 

Throughout the years, the Jewish settlers have won a series of victories in court, which has repeatedly recognized the Jewish ownership of the local properties. The judges suggested that the Palestinian residents adopt the same approach and in return be allowed to stay in their homes under various conditions. The Jews agreed in principle, but the Palestinians refused, even in the Supreme Court the week before last. Now everyone is waiting quietly to see what the judges, who do not hesitate to decide disputes, have to say. This appears to be the calm before the storm.  

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Egypt closed its main border crossing point with the Gaza Strip on Monday amid tensions with the Hamas rulers, officials said.

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It was the first time the Rafah crossing was shuttered on workday since early this year. Egyptian authorities had kept it open during Israel's Operation Guardian of the Walls in May.

According to the Egyptian officials, the closure was connected to Cairo's efforts to broker a long-term ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It was not immediately clear how long the closure would last, the officials said.

One of the officials said the move was meant to pressure Hamas because of the "differences" between Cairo and Hamas over lack of progress in both the Egyptian-led, indirect talks with Israel, and also efforts to reconcile Palestinian factions.

The closure came hours after Egypt's state-run news agency reported that the crossing point had been opened on Sunday after its weekly closing down for the Muslim weekend, Friday and Saturday.

Iyad al-Bozum, a spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said Hamas had been notified of the closure. He said they were in contact with Egyptian authorities to reopen Rafah.

"The closure of the crossing exacerbates the humanitarian crisis inside the Gaza Strip," he told The Associated Press. "We hope the crossing will return to work as soon as possible."

Violence erupted on Saturday during a protest organized by Hamas to draw attention to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza. Dozens of Palestinians approached the border fence with Israel, with one of them shooting and critically wounding an Israeli Border Policeman. At least 24 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire, two critically.

Egypt has been a key mediator between Israel and Hamas over the years. Egypt's intelligence chief Abbas Kamel paid a rare visit to Israel last week to discuss the ceasefire deal with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He invited Bennett to visit Egypt.

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Former director of the Israel Space Agency and Israel Prize laureate Avi Har-Even died Sunday of injuries sustained during recent rioting in Acre.

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Har-Even, 84 at the time of his death, was hospitalized at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa for smoke inhalation after Arabs lit a fire at a hotel where he had been staying during the riots. Har-Even also sustained burns, and was in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator the entire time he was in the hospital.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz said he had been grieved to hear that Har-Even had died, calling him "Someone who has contributed to the security of Israel is ways that will never be known. Avi, who was injured in the riots in Acre and died of those injuries, was a hero. When we confer this year's Israel Prize, we will remember him and his contribution."

Har-Even began his defense career in the IDF as an officer in the Armored and Artillery Corps. He was one of the founders of the IDF's missile and advanced weaponry programs. He also set up security for the nuclear facility in Dimona.

At the end of his military service, Har-Even served as director of a number of high-tech companies, and later moved to the Israel Aerospace Industries, where he served in a number of administrative and R&D positions. He also headed the team that developed Israel's Shavit satellite lift launch vehicle.

From 1995 to 2004, Har-Even served as director of the Israel Space Agency, where he expanded the ISA's international ties and helped bring about dozens of cooperative ventures between the ISA and other space agencies from around the world.

Current ISA director Professor Isaac Ben-Israel said that Har-Even "laid the foundations to build Israel's current space capabilities, and his contribution is worth its weight in gold."

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The Tel Aviv District Court extended the detention of Bat Yam residents Lahav Nagauker, 20, and Netanel Binyamin, 25, following their arrest on suspicion of brutally beating Saeed Mousa, an Arab Israeli, in the Tel Aviv suburb, last week. The police, who presented the court with a prosecutor's statement, has accused the two of attempted murder.

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According to the police, the suspects, along with a mob of rioters, incited against Arabs and looted and threw chairs and bottles at Arab-owned stores. When they noticed an Arab man driving nearby, they pulled him out of the car and beat him brutally, punching him and hitting him in the face with a scooter and bicycle. Binyamin continued to beat the man as he lay unconscious on the ground as Nagauker spat on the victim and smashed his car window.

Binyamin's lawyer said his client had cooperated with the investigation and given a statement in which he basically admitted to his role in the attack. He said no connection had been found between participants in the attack, which he said was spontaneous. Binyamin also claimed he had acted in self-defense, saying he thought the driver was about to attack him.

Nagauker, for his part, denied he had acted violently or taken part in the incident, insisting his role in the assault had been limited to spitting on the complainant's face once he was on the ground.

Prosecutors sought to extend their detention by five days in light of the severity of the charges and the need for the attorney general to sign off on the filing of an indictment.

In a statement explaining her decision to extend their detention, Judge Christina Hilou-Assad said: "Given the nature of the offenses and the evidentiary infrastructure gathered thus far, I am convinced there exists so-called evidentiary infrastructure for the filing of an indictment against the suspects and that there are grounds for an arrest."

She said, "The danger lies in the suspects' very involvement, the extent of their involvement in the events of that evening, including violent events involving property that ended in the brutal beating of a man. The High Court of Justice has already determined that the danger lies also in the period we now find ourselves in, and is not examined in a vacuum."

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President of Tel Aviv University, Ariel Porat, has angered students with recorded remarks in which he asserted that Arabs in Israel were suffering more than Jews during the current wave of violence that has engulfed the country.

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In a video he shared, Porat said, "Minds cannot tolerate a situation in which Jews in the State of Israel are scared to leave their homes … out of fear for their well-being and property, but the attack on Arab citizens is an attack on those who are a minority among us, and is, therefore, seven times as severe."

Porat said, "More than any other people, we Jews need to understand the significance of attacking a person solely for their ethnicity or nationality."

He said he was particularly shocked to see that the crowd of Israelis that had gathered to watch the brutal beating of an Arab driver in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam last week did nothing to stop the attack.

"What a terrible sight," he said.

Following criticism of Porat's remarks, the university edited out the words "seven times as bad." It claimed Porat had not meant to say that attacks on Arabs were worse than attacks on Jews.

In a statement, the Tel Aviv University said: "The university president issued an important public call for an immediate end to the violence and racism spreading among us, among both Arabs and Jews, which could lead to a civil war. As for the expression 'seven times as bad,' the aim was to sharpen the message that as the Jewish people, we must be particularly sensitive to attacks on a minority. Unfortunately, this expression was misconstrued and taken out of context, and as a result, half an hour later, was removed from the video to prevent misunderstandings."

In a similar incident last week, lecturers at Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design angered students when they expressed support for the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Israel in the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.

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Clashes between Jews and Arabs living in mixed cities continued to rattle Israel on Saturday, with protests across Palestinian cities giving way to concerns in Israel that the unrest would soon spill over to the West Bank.

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The leader of the Arab party Balad, MK Jamal Zahalka, said, "If the assault on Al-Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrah continues – the country will burn 10 times worse than what is happening now. This is only a promo for what will be if they dare to evacuate Sheikh Jarrah. Our young people and youth will take to the streets and will not stop until the occupation ends. We are not afraid."

Police Commissioner Yaakov Shabtai visited the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod, Saturday night.

Speaking to the press, he said, "We are deployed on an unprecedented scale in a forceful way in all of those hotspots with exceptional events. We will settle the score with the lawbreakers. Together with the Shin Bet security agency, we are doing the work, and up until now, we have seen successes," he said.

As for the inability of the police to take control of events as they unfold, Shabtai said, "Indeed there have been a large number of incidents. We weren't prepared to respond in small field units; today we are. We see the results in the field – things are calming down.

Shabtai called for political representatives to call for calm.

Alluding to Otzma Yehudit party head Itamar Ben-Gvir, he said: "There are officials on the political spectrum, every one of which contributed their part to what took place. I turn to all leaders as such to calm tensions and restore order."

Rioting in east Jerusalem continued apace, Saturday, as Palestinians marked Nakba Day, commemorating the displacement of Palestinian refugees during Israel's War of Independence.

Three attempted terrorist attacks and dozens of attempted arson attacks and riots were reported over the weekend.

Six battalions have been deployed to Judea and Samaria to back up forces stationed there in response to the events in recent days.

A terrorist attempted to run over Israeli soldiers at Ziph Junction in the South Hebron Hills, Saturday afternoon. The terrorist was shot and neutralized. No Israelis sustained injuries in the incident.

On Friday night, a terrorist armed with a knife approached Israeli soldiers in Nablus. The soldiers shot and neutralized the terrorist. No Israeli casualties were reported in the incident. Earlier Friday, an attempted attack was also thwarted in the Binyamin community of Ofra.

Firefighters worked to extinguish dozens of fires police believe were sparked by Palestinian rioters throwing Molotov cocktails and burning tires. A majority of the fires were located at access roads near military bases and adjacent to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Shiko Bar Dov, commander of the Israel Fire and Rescue Services' Judea and Samaria Division, noted "a sharp increase in fires as a result of terrorist activity."

In Jerusalem, rioting was reported on the Temple Mount, near the Damascus Gate in the Old City, as well as several neighborhoods in the east of the city.

Dozens rioted at the Neve Yaakov – Beit Hanina Junction, Friday afternoon, attacking Israeli cars. Police officers, who also came under attack, used riot control measures, including water cannons, to disperse the crowds.

On the Temple Mount, rioters threw rocks at police officers stationed at one of the entrances to the site, Friday afternoon. Police, who managed to push the crowd back into the Temple Mount, arrested two suspects involved in the rioting after Friday prayers.

Also on Friday afternoon, Arabs rioted at the Old City's Damascus Gate. Dozens threw rocks at the police. Four were arrested.

Rioters started a bushfire when they threw Molotov cocktails at Jerusalem's Hebron Road. Five Arabs were arrested on suspicion of firing a cap gun at worshippers at a synagogue on Bar-Lev Boulevard. In the At-Tor neighborhood, situated on the Mount of Olives, rioters set a police cruiser on fire.

Dozens of rioters were arrested in the neighborhoods of Issawiya, Beit Safafa, and Ras al-Amud over the weekend.

Some 15,000 police officers, including special units, have been working around the clock to restore security at friction points across the country.

Since the riots broke out, over 900 suspects – of them 150 Jews and 600 Arab, have been arrested.

Around 265 officers have been moderately injured in the rioting, and the Israel Police's emergency hotline (100 from any Israeli phone) has received around 154,000 calls about some 40,000 incidents.

Working on a tip, Border Police officers in Lod discovered a loaded Carlo submachine gun, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks in a search of an apartment in the city over the weekend. Forty-three suspects were arrested on suspicion of rioting.

While the intensity of the rioting has decreased over the past days, attempts to harm apartments and people with pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and live gunfire were ongoing.

In a particularly disturbing incident, Saturday, police discovered 15 Molotov cocktails and a gallon of fuel, believed to have been hidden for future use in rioting in one of the city's mosques after receiving a tip.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with security forces and municipality officials in a visit to the city, Friday.

Speaking to the press, he said, "What is happening in Israeli cities is very grave. Groups of rioters from the Arab public are going out and attacking Jews for being Jewish. It's not all of the Arab public, and it's not a majority of the Arab public, but it is a significant minority. From our standpoint, this is terrorism. That's how we will treat it."

In Jaffa, meanwhile, police arrested 19 individuals on suspicion of rioting after they were found to be carrying weapons.

A 19-year-old soldier in civilian clothing is in moderate condition after his car was blocked by rioters, who threw him to the floor and proceeded to beat him up over the weekend.

In another incident, two men on motorcycles beat a man who was returning to his Jaffa home after finishing his shift at a restaurant in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Neve Tzedek. The two suspects fled the scene.

Elsewhere in Jaffa, the car of Labor MK Efrat Rayten was torched overnight. It remains unclear whether the vandals who set the car on fire knew it belonged to an MK.

Also in Jaffa, two Arab Israeli children were hurt when their family home, in the Ajami neighborhood, was firebombed. A 10-year-old girl sustained a minor head wound but her brother, 12, sustained burns to his face and upper body and is hospitalized in serious condition at Sheba Medical Center's Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.

While the girl has been released from the hospital, the boy is in a medically induced coma and is on a respirator.

While police initially believed Jews were responsible for the attack, the investigation has taken a new direction as they investigate whether this was a case of Arab rioters mistook the Arab home for one belonging to Jews.

In surveillance video of the attack, two men in hoodies can be seen approaching the site, firebombing the home, and then fleeing. Police confirmed they are investigating the circumstances of the attack, as several adjacent Jewish homes were also firebombed by Arab Israelis that night.

Meanwhile, in the north of the country, large numbers of Border Police, riot police, and patrol units were deployed to friction points in mixed Jewish-Arab cities.

In Acre's Old City, as well as central access roads in the Haifa and Western Galilee region, hundreds of Border Police and riot police officers were deployed to prevent clashes, rioting, looting, and vandalism.

Arab rioters torched the Acre Theater, a longtime symbol of Arab-Jewish coexistence in the city.

Hundreds of police officers secured a Haifa court, where the deputy leader of the outlawed northern branch of the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Kamal Khatib was set to be remanded. Dozens were arrested when clashes broke out between police and Khatib's supporters following his arrest.

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The head of the Islamic Movement political party Ra'am, Mansour Abbas, said on Thursday that he was freezing talks to form a government because of the violence between Arabs and Jews, making it increasingly likely that new elections will need to be held.

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"We have stopped all political contacts," he said in an interview on Army Radio.

Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid and Yamina head Naftali Bennett have been in talks with the Joint Arab List, Abbas's Ra'am and left-wing parties to form a government, but the recent conflict has thrown those talks into a tailspin.

Since the riots broke out, Bennett's party has been under heavy pressure by his base and right-wing voters not to form a left-wing government with the Arab parties. It seems increasingly untenable that other parties, like Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope, will be able to join such a government with a war going on and Arab riots breaking out across the country.

On Thursday evening, Bennett read the political currents and reversed course, with Israeli media reports saying that he has ruled out forming a government with Lapid, as well as with left-wing and Arab parties.

The Israel Police instituted a blanket curfew on Lod on Wednesday night after Arab rioters destroyed cars, businesses and synagogues the day before. Arabs continued mob violence into the evening in other cities with large mixed Arab and Jewish populations, including Acre, Jaffa, Bat Yam, Haifa and Tiberias. Arab violence continued on Thursday night across the country.

On Friday, Israeli security forces arrested an imam with the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, in the town of Kafr Kanna.

Meretz MK Issawi Frej came out publicly in Israeli media in recent days condemning the rioting and violence, and seeking to calm the waters.

"At this time, it is forbidden to be silent! The anarchy in the streets of Ramle, Lod and other places threatens our existence as a society. We now have one task as public leaders – to work for calm, to [build] understanding between Arabs and Jews as neighbors and not enemies. Please, return to your houses and stop the violence," he tweeted on Tuesday.

Rodayna Badir, an expert on Arab society in Israel, told JNS that "the Arab parties Hadash and Balad are the biggest enemies of Abbas's Ra'am party."

The internal Arab bickering is on Israeli-Arab social media, she said, adding that there "is extremely high competition over who is perceived to be the leader of Arab society and the resources this position has control of. The Joint List parties are jealous of Abbas because the media is only interviewing Abbas and talking about him all the time, while no one cares about them."

"This has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict, but is all about money and power," claimed Badir. "Why are no Arab politicians in Jerusalem protesting? It is because they do not care and are focused on gaining power and prestige."

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Abbas seeks to support the formation of a government, and in return, receive a massive budget for the Arab sector, which the Islamic Movement would control and use to strengthen its power.

Though she said talks are suspended, Lapid has signaled that discussions to form a government would continue despite the current violence with Hamas in Gaza.

Further, she said that the Joint List of Arab parties that include the Communist Hadash, the nationalist Balad and Ahmad Tibi's small Ta'al Party should not be viewed as a single block, but as separate entities that have different interests.

The Arab parties joined forces for the election, but whether to join a government with Lapid or Bennett will be up to the individual parties.

Bishara Shlayan, an Israeli Christian Arab from Nazareth, said "the Arab political parties do not have anything to do with the daily lives of Israeli Arabs. I believe we must be integrated into society."

Shlayan, who is the head of a party that ran in the past elections under the name, Alliance for National Union, stressed that "Arab Israelis must be part of every government."

His party, which failed to get enough support to make it into the Knesset, says that instead of focusing on conflict, the emphasis should be on practical issues where Arabs and Jews can find common ground.

To that end, he said, "there needs to be cooperation between Arabs and Jews on day-to-day issues and for differences to be settled in the Knesset, not in the streets."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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As violent clashes between Arabs and Jews continue across the country, residents of mixed cities are concerned about the impact of the riots on coexistence and trust between residents.

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The old city of Acre, which is usually bustling with tourists and visitors, looks like a ghost town.

"No one wants to take a risk and everyone stayed home. That's the situation," said Nidal, who owns a small grocery shop in the old city. She closed it Thursday afternoon.

"It will take years for us to return to coexistence and mutual trust," Acre resident Samer Tanus told Israel Hayom. "This isn't like the October 2000 riots or the 2008 Yom Kippur incident. Back then, there was no Facebook or Instagram, or TikTok. This time everything is documented and shared [online] in seconds. The problem is that you Jews from day one began to call for boycotts of Arab businesses."

Residents of Lod were relieved to see hundreds of Border Police officers arrive in their city to restore order after the government declared a civilian state of emergency in the mixed Jewish-Arab city. Some were so glad to see the officers that they went out to greet them and lifted them on their shoulders in joy.

Residents of Ramle, another epicenter of clashes, expressed disappointment that a similar emergency lockdown had not yet been imposed in their city. Both Jews and Arabs called for an end to violence and asked the police to ban both sides from protesting. 

"We live alongside each other and we cannot allow anyone to ruin that. True, the Arabs started his, but this must be stopped," one of them said. 

Yael, who lives in Bat Yam where riots erupted Thursday night, told Israel Hayom, "When I saw all these young men gather and chant 'Death to Arabs,' it was scary. The police were hardly seen, and instead of getting the rioters out of there within minutes, they just let them do whatever they wanted."

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The time has come for Israel to stop giving a pass to Arab Jew hatred.

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In his book From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel, the late historian Robert Wistrich documented how before, during and after the Nazi period scholars from the political left disregarded and denied the ideological power antisemitism held over the Germans and their collaborators. The cause of their blindness was Marxism.

Marxism has long been the theoretical prism through which the left sees the world. Marxism is hateful and contemptuous of Judaism because Judaism is fundamentally opposed to the obedient universality Communism demands. Karl Marx and his followers sought to eradicate Judaism through a world Communist revolution that Jews could only join if they first abandoned their national, cultural and religious identities.

One of the ways Marxism derides Judaism is by presenting it as an archaic dogma fundamentally irrelevant and counterproductive to the modern world. Since Marxists belittle Judaism, in the Nazi period they were incapable of recognizing that antisemitism was Nazism's central organizing principle.

Leftist scholars of Nazism insisted that Nazis didn't hated Jews because they were Jewish. They hated Jews because many Jews were Communists and Nazis were anti-Communist. By this reasoning, it was the Jews' fault that the Nazis hated them and in due course, annihilated them. For scholars of the left, the Holocaust itself was a mere byproduct of Jewish membership in Communist parties.

Much of the same doctrinaire thinking has long informed – or misinformed – leftist understanding of the Arab war against the Jewish state. Immediately after the UN General Assembly adopted the partition plan to divide the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine into two separate states – one Arab and one Jewish on Nov. 29, 1947—the Arab war against the Jewish state began. Until Israel declared independence six months later, the war was waged by local Arab militias. The local Arabs were joined by five invading armies the day Israel declared independence. The declared goal of all the Arabs was to eradicate the newborn State of Israel and throw the Jews into the sea to "finish Hitler's work." The rhetoric and actions of the Arabs left no room for doubt. Their aim was genocidal and it was driven by Jew hatred.

In 1949 – just four years after the gas chambers were shut down – the Soviets used the Marxist model to legitimize the Arab war against the Jews to a world still embarrassed by the Holocaust. That year, the KGB invented a new term, "anti-Zionism." The Arabs weren't anti-Semites. They only hated Jews who wanted to live as free Jews in their sovereign homeland. Notably, as the KGB laundered Jew hatred to suit post-war sensibilities, the Soviet regime was outlawing the practice of Judaism and purging Jews from public life in the Soviet Union.

Outside the Soviet bloc, anti-Zionism was a hard sell early on. It was given a big push forward though in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel's victory in that defensive war placed it in control of the Golan Heights, Sinai, the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria and enabled it to unify Jerusalem. Despite the fact that Israel had a right to incorporate these areas into its sovereign territory both under the laws of war and the borders of the Jewish state as set out in the League of Nations Mandate, the Soviets and leftists in Western Europe used Israel's control over these territories to build a new, counterfactual narrative to justify the Arab war against the Jewish state.

If the Jews were responsible for the Nazis' genocidal antisemitism because some Jews were Communists, then Israel was responsible for the Arab aggression because it "stole" Arab land and refused to give up land for "peace."

Setting aside the obvious logical fallacy – putting the cart before the horse – this narrative made no sense practically speaking. If the problem was Israel's size rather than its existence, then why did the Soviets and the Arabs ram through UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975, which said Zionism is a form of racism, and so proclaimed Israel's very existence illegitimate and immoral? Why do the Palestinians demand the so-called "right of return" of Arab who left Israel in 1948 and their descendants to Israel rather than a future Palestinian state? And why did both Yasser Arafat and his successor Mahmoud Abbas refuse Israeli peace offers that gave in to nearly all of their territorial demands?

All of these things occurred because the post-1967 leftist narrative of Israeli avariciousness for "Arab" land, like the 1949 Soviet narrative of anti-Zionism is entirely wrong. Yet despite its obvious absurdity, the left's land-for-peace/two-state solution narrative dominated the international and domestic Israeli discourse on the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israel conflict for the past half century.

This week it disintegrated.

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The dominant – indeed leading – role Israeli Arabs are playing in the current round of the Palestinian war against Israel puts paid the notion that the Palestinian war on the Jews has something to do with specific territories Israel controls. Israeli Arabs are not burning synagogues, schools, yeshivot, Jewish-owned stores, cars and homes because of the so-called "occupation." They are not lynching Jews that fall in their paths because of the so-called "settlements." They are assaulting the citizens and institutions and symbols of the Jewish state because they seek to destroy the Jewish state.

Timing is everything in war and in life. And the Israeli Arabs and Palestinians clearly believe that the time is ripe for them to discard the nonsense about "the occupation."

The Biden administration is on their side. Not only did President Joe Biden restore US funding to the PA despite its funding of terrorism. Over the past month of escalating Palestinian violence against Jews in Jerusalem and other cities around Israel, the Biden administration has embraced the Fatah narrative that Israel is "provoking" the Palestinians to attack Jews because Israel deployed police to the Temple Mount to restore the peace after the Palestinians attacked Jews. The Biden administration has also adopted Fatah's antisemitic claim that Jews have no right to assert their property rights in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem because they are Jews.

For their part, Congressional leaders of the Democrat Party's dominant hard left faction – Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Betty McCollum and their comrades – are pushing Hamas's PR line. Like Hamas, they project the Palestinians' crimes onto their victims. Israel, they slander, murders Palestinian children in cold blood. Obviously, a state that kills children on purpose is a criminal state that must be given no place in the community of nations.

The anti-Semitic disposition of both the administration and prominent Democrats serves as a tailwind for the Palestinians today. This state of affairs makes things more difficult for Israel to defeat its enemies. But at the end of the day, the Americans are not the ones who will decide Israel's fate. That is the responsibility of the people of Israel.

The Palestinian war, now joined by Israel's Arabs and supported by the ruling party in America, presents Zionism with its supreme test: Will Israel protect its Jewish national identity or will it crumble under pressure?

Israel must do two things to persevere. First, it must quell the Israeli Arab violence and confiscate all illegal weapons now in the hands of the Arabs. Over the past two decades, reports of thefts from IDF bases of everything from small arms to automatic rifles to shoulder launched missiles have surfaced with some regularity. Nearly all of the theft was the work of Arab Israelis and few and far between have been the instances where stolen weapons were located and returned to the army.

Israel's security forces must use all necessary force to locate and seize those weapons. The Arab pogromists marauding through mixed Jewish-Arab towns lynching Jews and torching their synagogues and their property prove incontrovertibly that so long as huge caches of illegal weapons remain in the hands of Israeli Arabs, Israel's future is imperiled.

More fundamentally, after 75 years of making excuses and denying the plain fact that antisemitism is the root and the branch of the Arab conflict with Israel, Israelis of all walks of life and across the political spectrum need to accept this truth. As a society, we must demand that Israel's Arab citizens and their leaders recognize the legitimacy and justice of the existence of the State of Israel. And we must not accept no for an answer any more.

When discussions began several weeks ago about the possibility of forming a governing coalition based on the direct or indirect support of Arab Knesset members from the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated United Arab List, Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes wrote an article considering the issue. Pipes explained that just as there are Judeophobic and philosemitic versions of Christianity, so the Quran includes two approaches to Judaism and Jews. The first and most familiar approach is the jihadist approach. The jihadist approach rejects the Jews, the Torah and Jewish rights to Israel. The second approach embraces all three. Pipes said that the only way to include the United Arab List in a government, or to base a government on its support, is by first demanding that the party's members publicly declare that they uphold the Quranic approach that celebrates Jews and the Torah and recognizes that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews.

For the past 75 years, Israelis across the political spectrum have passively accepted Arab Jew hatred. The left believed Jews earned the Arabs' hatred by defeating them in successive wars. To appease their hate, the left has pushed policies that restrain public expressions of Jewish pride and holds Arabs to lower standards than they hold Jews – forgiving their anti-Semitism while condemning rare expressions of Jewish anti-Arab racism with all the passion and urgency they can muster.

The Israeli right also has taken Arab Jew hatred for granted. Its members have argued that the way to defuse or mitigate the hatred is to integrate Arab citizens into all walks of public life, never asking that they first accept the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

The time has come to end this state of affairs. The Israeli Arab pogroms of 2021 together with the Western left's adoption of narratives legitimizing Arab Jew hatred give Israel no option of continuing to pretend away or excuse this reality. Just as antisemitism was the central animating ideology of Nazism so it is the central ideology of the Arab war against the Jewish state. To put an end to these pogroms now, and to prevent them from recurring, Israel must end its tolerance for Arab Jew hatred and must stop making apologies for Zionism and Jewish peoplehood. Israel must assert its national rights to all areas of this country without apology. It must do so consistently. Israel's future, and the possibility that coexistence between Jews and Arabs will ever be restored, depend on our willingness to forthrightly demand that Arab Israelis abandon their hatred of this country.

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