Acre is Burning! This was the headline of one Israeli newspaper on Day Five of the communal clashes that erupted between Arab and Jewish residents in the historic coastal town. It began on Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, the most sacred of Hebrew holidays, when angry Jewish youths attacked and beat up an Arab driver who was trying to get to a friend’s home in the same neighborhood.
As a result, violence flared up in the city, one of few towns where Arab and Jews still live in close proximity. Arab homes were set on fire and many families were forced to flee fearing for their lives. Arab teens retaliated by torching cars and smashing shop windows. Police lost control and tension gripped the entire country.
But the real casualty of this confrontation is the claim of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in today’s Israel. A predominantly Arab town until the 1948 war and the birth of the Jewish state, about 80 percent of its 50,000 residents today are Jews. Most Arabs live in the city’s crowded and badly serviced old district, and only 15 percent of those are descendents of families who once lived there before the war.
As the city’s Arab and Jewish leaders tried to bring calm, right-wing Israeli politicians rushed to Acre to express solidarity with Jewish residents. One radical Knesset member charged that the conflict was a preplanned Arab ambush and said, “We must not let this pass without a response.” In contrast, left-wing politician Yossi Beillin said the clashes prove that little has been done to improve Arab-Jewish relations inside Israel since the October 2000 riots when police killed 12 Arabs, many in cold blood.
Acre’s troubles revived concerns about the heightened ethnic tensions in Israel and the historical complaints of the country’s minority Arab citizens, who number 1.5 million, of discrimination, a claim which outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert corroborated last week when he met a group of Israeli Arab leaders. Ironically, Olmert’s government had done little to close the divide between Jews and Arabs in Israel and upheld policies that are perceived to be discriminatory in nature.
Writing in the Washington Post a year ago, correspondent Scott Wilson says that “Israel’s policies have deepened the gulf between Arab and Jewish citizens in recent years, through concrete walls, laws that favor Jews, and political proposals that place the Arab minority outside national life.” Citing Acre as an example of a city with mixed population, Wilson mentions the fact that a single crowded high school serves the entire Arab population of roughly 10,000. Where Arabs are concentrated in decrepit districts, Jews live in the newer, outlying neighborhoods that ring the Old City. Public services in Arab towns and districts are modest compared to those provided by the government to Jewish areas.
In another town, a 15-foot-high barrier, funded by the government, divides the leafy streets of Nir Zevi from the adjacent Arab community of Lod, writes Wilson. Tension is also high in Galilee, where a majority Arab population still exists, over land ownership and building of new communities. In recent years more Jews have been leaving West Bank settlements to live in mixed towns such as Acre inside Israel. Accordingly, the demographic fault lines have been shifting in mixed areas, mostly in favor of the Jewish population.
There are few stories of successful integration between Jewish and Arab communities in Israel today, let alone in the Occupied Territories. Divisions inside the so-called Green Line have underlined one of Israel’s most important challenges — its purity as a Jewish state. The demographic threat of Israeli Arabs, whose numbers are growing at an alarming rate of 2.5 percent annually — some say even higher — has become one of the issues that leaders across the political divide are now embracing.
So much so that it is now a new item on the peace negotiations agenda. A year ago before the Annapolis conference was due to convene, Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a Palestinian state would “be the national answer to the Palestinians” in the territories and those “who live in different refugee camps or in Israel.” And in July last year she warned against “... a process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state,” adding that that “the Arabs and Palestinians who live within Israel should accept the Jewish state with all that the word means.”
Livni is now putting the final touches on a coalition government that she will head in the wake of Olmert’s resignation. The Acre incident will certainly stimulate the ongoing debate about the future of the Jewish state once a peace treaty is concluded with the Palestinians. Since the Right of Return (to Israel) for millions of Palestinian refugees is a definite red line for Livni, the fate of Israeli Arabs will likely become a hot issue sooner rather than latter.
One of the controversial problems that will force the issue will be the future of Jerusalem and its Arab inhabitants, also considered Israeli citizens. Arabs make up some 35 percent of the city’s population, but according to Israeli sources their numbers have been increasing at a steady rate of 3 percent annually. The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies has concluded recently that the gap between the city’s Jewish and Arab population is narrowing by about 1 percentage point a year.
The forecasts don’t always agree on the timing of the explosion of the so-called demographic bomb, but some predict that Israeli Arabs will make up a third of the population of Israel by 2020 and may even become a majority by 2035. According to a report by Haaretz newspaper, at present, Jews are in a slight majority, with 50.5 percent of the population of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, which also includes Druze, Bedouins and others.
The scare permeates across a wide spectrum of Israelis. Historian Benny Morris once described Israeli Arabs as a “time bomb” and a “potential fifth column.” Such radical views have been embraced by right-wingers who are now promoting forced transfer and land exchange as a way out of this conundrum.
The “Acre is Burning” paradigm will not calm fears as Arabs and Israelis give up on the false promise of peaceful coexistence, and one can predict that the next phase of Israel’s “struggle” for survival will involve facing up to its own Arab minority and tying their future to that of the Palestinian state. It will be a development that will further burden an already precarious peace process.
