By Joshua Rosenstein, Special to JTNews
This is the second in a series about life between Israeli Jews and Arabs living outside of the territories and the current intifada.
My father, Rabbi Marc Rosenstein, has built a career out of trying to understand Jewish Arab relations in the Galilee.
He ran a business called “A Place in the Galilee,” which offered educational seminars and co-existence programs along with bed and breakfast-type hosting for over 10 years. His business relied heavily on American youth groups coming to Israel on summer programs. He was forced to close the business in 2003 due to lack of clientele. Now he has pared down and runs a small nonprofit offering co-existence and Galilee history educational programs to a variety of groups.
“The issues and complexities that plague Jewish Arab relations in the Galilee are many and varied,” Rosenstein says. “The questions that one needs to ask to understand the situation span a range of subjects. Economics is of course fundamental, but so are cultural and religious difference, political identifications, and questions of lifestyles and values.”
Rural Galilee is around 80 percent Arab. There have been migrations at various times in history, but the Galilean Arabs have been living in the area since anyone can remember. In 1948, when the British declared a dual-state solution, the Arabs rebelled against it. They went to war, lost, and were made citizens of Israel.
Until 1966, however, the Galilee was under military rule, similar to the way the West Bank is now. Arab residents were not able to travel freely or go about their lives. The entire area was like a reservation — frozen in time, with no utilities, water or sewer.
In the ‘60s the government lifted the military rule and began encouraging Jews to live in the area. Carmiel was founded then and heralded as the Tel Aviv of the North. Most of the Misgav (lower Galilee) settlements were begun during the late 1970s. The government offered incentives, referred to as Yehud HaGalil, or, the Judification of the Galilee, to Jews willing to move there.
One important historical date of note is Land Day. A statue in Sachnin pays tribute to those killed on March 30, 1976, when general confusion and anger over a piece of land known as Area 9, originally a British firing range that the Israeli army continued to use as a firing range and forbade Arab herders from grazing on. Arab communists used this issue as a confrontation point and organized demonstrations.
General Raphael Eitan, military chief in charge of the Northern region at the time, sent armored personnel carriers and troops into the streets. Six Arabs — three from Sachnin — were killed in the fighting. The Arabs claimed these people were shot in the back while the army claimed self-defense in the face of mobs. This day has since become a symbol of Arab oppression.
For years, there have been protests on Land Day. When I used to take groups of Jewish teens from A Place in the Galilee on tours of Sachnin, the Arab hosts would always point out the statue commemorating those that died.
“There has always been great confusion over land, especially questions of ownership, jurisdiction and zoning,” explains Rosenstein. “In the Galilee, like anywhere else, you can own a piece of land but still not be able to use it as you wish. The Jews have indeed appropriated Arab lands for public purposes, but sometimes the Jews simply enforced zoning laws which had legitimate reasons for existence, like damage to the environment,” he said. This complicates claims of “stolen” land immensely.
It is this background that that holds the deeper implications of the current intifada and the current situation in the Galilee. In October of 2000, Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount, a holy site in Jerusalem for both Jews and Muslims, in an ambiguous move some interpret as a direct attempt at inflammation. The current intifada broke out in the territories soon afterwards. Coinciding with the uprising, riots broke out all over Israel and hit the Galilee especially hard.
There were riots in Sachnin, forests torched, tires burned at the entrances to villages, and public institutions smashed. These events had a tremendous effect on the region. After all, this was not Gaza or Jenin, this was the Galilee, where Jews and Arabs co-existed; where you could get falafel in Sachnin and where cross-cultural programs and schools flourished.
When the riots broke out, Yasmin Dekel was just leaving a 10-day retreat in India. The first Israeli she met after 10 days of silence told her the news. “It was so strange to hear it like that. When I lived in Yuvalim, we used to go to Sachnin all the time. It was so hard to hear that they were using that kind of violence,” she said.
Israeli police responded with live fire, killing 13 Arabs. Hysteria and fear erupted across the board. Suddenly Jews were afraid of their Arab neighbors, afraid to drive through the villages. The Arab populace seethed with resentment and anger over the killings and the governments’ lack of reaction. The Jews began to boycott Arab businesses and there were several instances of vandalism.
“The atmosphere is different now, there is fear in the air,” said Shelomit Pollack, a 21-year-old Jewish woman from Moshav Shorashim. “When I was younger, before 2000, I used to go to Sachnin to use the ATM machine or get a late-night snack. One time, just before the riots I went with a friend to buy cigarettes and we both had a feeling that something bad was building there. There were a lot of people out in the streets and people looked at us in a way that made us feel uncomfortable. That was the first time I felt afraid to be in an Arab village.”
Yusuf Ibrahim, a 31-year-old Arab man from Kaukab, works in his families’ convenience store at the gas station at the entrance to the village.
“From a business perspective, every time there is a pigua (terrorist attack), less people come to shop here, to eat, to fill their tank,” he said. “When it’s quiet, people come; terrorism is terrible for business, people are scared.”
To many Jews in the area, the riots felt like a sudden and inexplicable betrayal by their Arab neighbors. Galilee residents prided themselves on getting along despite all the violence and hatred in places like the Gaza Strip. But what I never understood as a teen, and what many Jews had not grasped, was how different reality seems when you are on the other side of the cultural fence.
Adi Belin, a ninth-grader at the Misgav regional school, lives on Moshav Shorashim. She says she has no problem with Arabs, except with the ones from Sha’ab.
“Sometimes they make trouble, steal bicycles. When they come to the moshav to have picnics, they leave trash,” she says.
As to what caused the riots of ‘00, she thinks it was because Israeli forces are in places they shouldn’t be, like the Gaza Strip and the territories.
“The people in Sachnin probably identify with the Palestinians. I don’t blame them, but that doesn’t make it okay to get violent, or burn flags,” she says. “I don’t stereotype them, they shouldn’t stereotype us.”
Belin is not aware of any racism or oppression of Arabs in the area.
Oren Levinthal, a 20-year-old driver in the Israeli Army, admits there is some racism in the area, but feels Jews and Arabs are equal.
“They do their thing, we do ours,” he says. In his social group there are definitely negative stereotypes of Arabs. “Especially in driving, if you see someone driving messy or breaking a lot of rules, you say, ‘probably an Arab.’”
The cause of the riots seems obscure to him. “Maybe they felt like they had been holding things in for a long time, once there was an excuse they went wild and it all came out,” he says. But in some way he understands their reasons.
“Honestly, we don’t let them develop, we kicked them off their lands, and they were here before us, but there really isn’t anything you can do about it.”
“The events of ‘00 were not spontaneous; they burned for a long time before they finally blew up,” explains Yusuf Chagi, a middle-aged Arab man who owns a travel agency at the entrance to the village of Kaukab. “The driving force behind them was the oppression and that has not changed. “
Chagi has been involved in peace tents and co-existence forums in the past. He is still in touch with some of the people he met then but says it feels like it has lost momentum.
“As with all relationships there are ups and downs,” said Chagi. “Things are improving. And it was more about panic and hysteria then about truth. As with all things, it takes time to understand and to heal.”