Israel – Students Say Orthodox Jews Threw Rocks At Them After Rabbi’s Anti-Arab edict

Israel – Psychology student Osama Ghanaim was woken early one night last month by a mob of 60 ultra-Orthodox Jews chanting ”Kill the Arabs” outside his flat.

‘Then they stoned my house,” Ghanaim said this week. ”Rocks broke through my front windows.”

After the crowd dispersed, Ganaim, who is one of 1400 Arab Israeli students enrolled at Safed Academic College, in northern Israel, found a poster on his front door warning him to move out.

”The poster said they would set fire to the house, so I called the police,” Ghanaim said. ”The police took four hours to come to my house, and they did nothing. I have not heard a thing from them since.”

One of Judaism’s four holy cities, Safed has been the centre of roiling ethnic tensions in recent weeks after the city’s state-sponsored chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, issued a ruling forbidding Jews to rent flats or sell property to non-Jews because it ”causes evil and makes the public commit the sin of intermarriage”.

Only 70 Arab students live in private accommodation in Safed, a city of 32,000 Jews, one third of whom are ultra-Orthodox. Another 120 Arab students live in dormitories provided by the college, while the remaining 1200 commute from nearby Arab villages.

”Here at the college, we Arabs get on very well with the Jewish students,” Ghanaim said. ”Many of us have Jewish girlfriends, and I think this really is the problem. The Jewish people who live in Safed don’t like to see Jewish women with Arab men.”

Ghanaim moved out of his flat, and was able to find alternative accommodation without further harassment.

But a fellow student, Mustafa Ali, has not been so lucky.

Last Friday, two months after Ali’s flat was damaged during a riot against Arab students living in Safed, he woke to discover that his car had been vandalised.

”All the windows were smashed, some of the tyres had been cut, and the words ‘Arabs out’ were spray-painted on the front of the car,” he said. ”What is next? Are we made to wear a green crescent on our coats so everyone knows we are Arab Muslims? Why are these people not being stopped?”

Ali and Ghanaim took the Herald on a short tour of their campus, identifying sites where anti-Arab graffiti had been painted over by college administrators. ”Mostly things like ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘Arabs go home’,” said Ghanaim.

Pointing to several benches in the park next to the college, Ghanaim said they had been smeared with the words ‘Seating for Jews Only’.

Despite Rabbi Eliyahu’s edict sending shockwaves through Israel’s secular political establishment – with many commentators likening it to Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 – it received the immediate backing of 75 rabbis across Israel.

At last count more than 300 rabbis – most of them in positions funded by the state – have added their names to the edict.

”A short perusal of any history book, and of course Wikipedia, will immediately lead to the parallel laws and regulations enacted by the Nazis against the Jews,” the columnist Ruth Sinai wrote this week in the mass selling newspaper Maariv.

Israeli Jews offended by the actions of the state rabbis have been further angered by their apparent immunity from the law.

”The silence of the law-enforcement agencies towards displays of racism is not a sign of liberalism or tolerance; it is a sign of weakness,” said the Israeli commentator Boaz Okon.

Yet, after two months in which a host of discriminatory laws were passed by the Israeli parliament, including a loyalty oath demanded of all new immigrants to Israel, a ban on Arab tour guides in the city of Jerusalem, and a ban on all organisations that question the Jewish character of the state of Israel, others argue that it is a natural extension of the current status quo. ”Fascism has raised its head in Israeli society,” said the Arab Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi.