‘A great fear that there will be a mighty revenge’
LOD, Israel — Fida Shehada is a member of the City Council of Lod, a town of some 84,000 people, perhaps 30 percent of them Arab citizens of Israel.
And Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is afraid, to put it mildly, of what may come now, after the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas. “Everyone is in great distress,” she said. “There is a great fear that there will be a mighty revenge.”
In Lod, which lies just south of Tel Aviv, Jews and Arabs often live in the same building, she said, but now Arabs are reluctant to go into the air-raid shelters. “They say they see hate in the eyes of the Jews,” Shehada said. “They say they see hate, but I think what they really see is distress and fear.”
Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom want to be identified as Palestinians, make up some 18 percent of the population. They have been caught for years between their loyalty to the state and their desire for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the creation of an independent Palestine, and a better life for themselves.
Now, after this unprecedented killing of Israelis inside Israel, when an enraged Israeli Jewish population is calling for revenge, normal tensions have been raised to almost unbearable levels.
Leading Arab politicians in Israel, including Mansour Abbas and Ayman Odeh, both members of the Knesset, have clearly condemned the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that carried out the attack on Israel, and called for calm.
But people are torn in their feelings, Shehada said, and so they tend to hide them. Young Arabs at first felt pride in the resistance of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, she said. “In the first moment when the people of Gaza invaded Israel, people were happy, they felt that someone was doing something about the situation.”
But that surge of pride faded quickly, she said. “This was before we saw all the images of slaughter, kidnap, and rape,” Shehada said. “This is not a legitimate form of struggle.”
In May 2021, during another Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Lod was wracked by riots and mutual hatred between Jewish and
Muslim communities. Shehada, 40, says she was attacked in her own home by Jews throwing rocks.
Even in more normal times, Lod has deep-seated problems of poverty and crime, with Arab criminal organizations operating with little interference from the Israeli police, people here say. Even the local government is largely segregated, with separate Arab and Jewish sections within departments.
The police are the responsibility of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government. Ben-Gvir, who has supported settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, has also been ramping up tensions with Israel’s Arab population.
He has talked of “storming” the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, one of the Muslim world’s holiest sites, and in late July, he led more than 1,000 ultranationalist settlers to the site, infuriating Muslims and prompting Hamas to say that it is fighting to defend Al-Aqsa.
Ben-Gvir has spoken this past week of renewed Arab-Israeli violence in cities such as Lod and ordered police to prepare for riots, which Shehada and others view as a dangerous provocation.
In Ramla, a similarly mixed town nearby, the sprawling market normally overflowing with local vegetables and fruits was nearly empty, with an unusual wariness in the air, said Mousa Mousa, 23, an Israeli Arab in a Hebrew-language T-shirt advertising his juice stall. “I’m not sleeping,” he said. “I’m afraid of the reaction of the villagers on the road to what Hamas did.”
The market is a mix of Arabs and Jews, he said, “but the feeling is different now.”
“I feel an animosity from the people here — they’re not smiling as they used to,” Mousa said. “I try to keep my head high.”
He said he had contempt for the politicians who stoked hatred inside each community.
“They thrive on division,” Mousa said bitterly. “That’s what politics are based on.”
What Hamas did has changed life here profoundly, he said. “I don’t think there’s a way back,” he added. “People will not be as they were.”
In East Jerusalem, too, near the uncharacteristically empty Old City, there is a palpable tension and a more visible presence of Israeli police.
In normal times, they tend to stop and check young Arab men every so often. But Adham, 19, says that now he is being stopped three times as he makes the short walk from his father’s shop near the Damascus Gate to their home in the Old City. Each time, he is asked to show his ID card, lift his shirt and drop his trousers. His father asked that their last name be withheld for fear of their security in the current environment.
Unlike Arabs in Ramla or Lod, who are part of Israeli society, most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens and feel less torn between loyalties. In 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem, it made the Palestinians there legal residents, but not citizens.