Mixed city of Arabs and Jews remains on edge
LOD, Israel — Israeli security forces guard the streets of Lod, weeks after rioters torched patrol cars, synagogues and homes. Attackers who killed an Arab and a Jewish resident are still at large. And a mayor whom some blame for setting the stage for some of the worst domestic unrest in Israeli history remains in office.
Israel and Hamas reached a truce two weeks ago to end 11 days of fighting in the Gaza Strip. But the roots of the upheavals that wracked Israel’s mixed JewishArab cities during the war have not been addressed, leaving those communities on edge.
Lod, about 10 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, next to the main international airport, is home to 77,000 people. About a third are Arabs — many of them descendants of Palestinians who formed the majority of the city before a mass expulsion amid the 1948 war around Israel’s creation.
An urban landscape of lowrise housing projects from the 1950s and ’60s, the workingclass city also is a bastion of hardline Jewish politics. In the March 23 election, staunchly nationalist parties, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, won more than 60% of the vote in Lod.
Any tensions were largely below the surface — until last month.
Clashes between Jerusalem police and Palestinian protesters in and near the AlAqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites, and the planned eviction of Palestinians from homes in an East Jerusalem neighborhood drove some Arab residents of Lod into the streets in protest.
On the night that war began between Israel and Hamas, the shooting of an Arab man by a Jewish resident of Lod touched off over a week of violence, and the city was placed under a state of emergency.
Similar disturbances, fueled by longstanding Arab grievances over discrimination and lack of opportunities, quickly spread to other mixed areas across the country.
In Lod, two residents were killed: Musa Hassuna, 32, by a suspected Jewish gunman, and Yigal Yehoshua, 56, by a suspected group of Arab attackers. No charges have been filed in either case, and police say investigations are ongoing.
Some Arab residents point to the election of Mayor Yair Revivo eight years ago as a turning point. Revivo has close ties with a religious nationalist movement known as the “Torah Nucleus.”