Faten Alzinaty was heading to the community center that she manages in the Israeli city of Lod on Sunday morning when she noticed a familiar face. “Itzik!” she called out. A police officer wearing full body armor and carrying a semi-automatic rifle approached her, and the two embraced. “We missed you,” the officer told Alzinaty, who is Arab and has lived in Lod all her life. “What’s all this?” She scanned his getup. “It’s nothing; it’s for the camera crews,” he said. He smirked uncomfortably. “Take it off,” she told him, her smile slightly fading. “It’s way too hot.”
By day, the streets of Lod are quiet. It’s a nervous quiet—the kind that descends after an earthquake, say, or a tornado. When I arrived, on Sunday, torched, upturned cars were strewn all along a single road. Around the corner, charred dumpsters blocked the paths leading to the square where a mosque, a church, and a synagogue converge in what is known as the triangle of religions. I walked to the sound of glass crunching underfoot. Over here, a graffiti saying “Death to the Arabs” had been sprayed over but not hidden; over there, the second story of a Jewish prep school had been burned.
Every night this past week, duelling mobs of young men—Jewish and Arab—have descended on the city’s streets, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, carrying knives and firearms. Three hundred people have been arrested, and the city has been brought to the brink of “civil war,” as its mayor has put it. Rockets are whirring daily into Israel from the Hamas-led Gaza Strip. Israeli warplanes are levelling buildings in Gaza. It’s a conflict that repeats itself to devastating effect every few years. Amid this deadly escalation, an alarming new reality has set in, threatening to tear Israel apart from within. The mixed cities of Israel, where Jews and Arabs have lived side by side for decades, are experiencing the worst bouts of internecine violence since the country’s founding, in 1948. These cities were built on the foundation—some say the illusion—of coexistence. These days, neighbors are turning against neighbors. Perhaps nowhere are the tensions more palpable than in Lod, an impoverished city fifteen miles south of Tel Aviv.
The history of Lod, or al-Lydd in Arabic, is both ancient and raw. The city dates back eight thousand years to Neolithic times. It is mentioned in the Bible as the place from which Jews fled after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. In 1948, Jewish battalions, fighting a war for independence, entered the city, expelled the Palestinian population, and killed two hundred and fifty men, women, and children inside a mosque—a massacre that is seared into the collective memory of Lod’s Arab population. Today, the city is 72.5-per-cent Jewish and 27.5-per-cent Arab. By law, Arab citizens of Israel are entitled to equal rights; in practice, though, many are barred from buying land or property. (Although the Arab population is now seven times the size that it was in 1948, the state has not built a single new Arab settlement since then, while it has added seven hundred Jewish communities, according to the Israel Democracy Institute.)
Last week, protests broke out in Jerusalem over the imminent expulsion of six Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the subsequent police raid of the holy al-Aqsa compound. These protests spilled into other cities across Israel, including Lod, where local Palestinians gathered outside the city’s Grand Mosque, chanting to free al-Aqsa. A protester took down an Israeli flag and replaced it with the flag of Palestine. Police then stormed the area with stun grenades and tear gas aimed at protesters, some of whom threw back rocks and Molotov cocktails. As protesters marched through the streets of Lod, gunfire sounded and a local Arab man was shot and killed, and another wounded, apparently by Jewish rioters. The following night, a Jewish electrician driving home from work was pulled out of his car by a rioting mob and beaten; he later died from his wounds.
On Sunday, a week after the murder of the Arab man, thirty-two-year-old Mousa Hassuna, a small crowd gathered down the street from where he was killed for a joint peace demonstration of Jews and Arabs. Four Jewish suspects had been arrested in Hassuna’s death but were promptly released from custody after citing self-defense. Lawmakers from the right denounced their arrest as “awful” and “morally despicable.” At the peace demonstration, people held signs saying: “It’s simple: End the violence.” A Jewish resident of Lod, in his sixties, walked up to the microphone. “We are all on a rubber boat in the middle of the sea. One pinprick is enough and we will all drown,” he said.
Just then, the windows of a passing car rolled down and the people inside screamed, “Go back to Gaza!”
Among the people at the rally was Abed Shahada, a thirty-four-year-old teacher at the local Arab high school. Shahada said that, while he had physically restrained some of his students from rioting, he understood their motive. “True, there was violence and that’s unacceptable,” he said. “True, there was vandalism and that’s unacceptable. But there was anger. Pent-up anger. And the city couldn’t contain it.” Still, he spoke with guarded hope that something positive might come out of the tension. “At the end of the day, a person doesn’t only care about being a doctor—as successful and normative as he may be, he would still have an inner self that says he is part of a national minority,” he said. “And the city needs to recognize that, even if it’s uncomfortable. It’s being able to say ‘I’m Abed and I’m a Palestinian.’ If we teach these young people to express themselves with words, they won’t throw a rock.”
Standing next to him was Mira Marsiano, the Jewish owner of a bridal salon who has lived in Lod all her life. Marsiano described a lifetime of friendships with her Arab neighbors. “When I say I have Arab friends, these are not just people you go have hummus with,” she said. “These are soul mates. It’s hard to describe the rupture.” Last week, when violence erupted, Marsiano drove to her son’s house in a nearby neighborhood to extricate him, his wife, and their baby while fire raged outside their building. “I was scared senseless,” she said.
As the crowd at the peace rally dispersed, some of the Jewish attendees decided to pay their respects to Mousa Hassuna’s family, one of the oldest and most well-regarded families in Lod. During the short drive over, Aviv Wasserman, a former deputy mayor, told the other passengers that Mousa’s father had been saddened that only a few of his Jewish friends had gone to visit. “Why didn’t you go there to say hello?” Wasserman asked a man with a graying ponytail who was sitting beside him.
“Well, because you don’t know who you’re going to run into,” the man, Nissim Dahan, said.
“Who?” Wasserman asked, his voice rising. “Who will you run into? A friendship of forever is erased because you don’t know who you’ll run into? Is he a criminal?”
“Of course not!” Dahan said. “But you think everyone has balls like we do?”
“But I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about you, Nissim!”
The group arrived in a spacious courtyard. Children stopped their play and looked on shyly, and a dozen men sat around on plastic chairs. Mousa’s father, Malek, hugged the visitors and served them black coffee and dates. Mousa’s wife had been traumatized by his murder, Malek said, so their three children were currently staying with him and his wife. Malek couldn’t bring himself to tell them about their father’s death. “I told them he had taken a long journey,” he said.
Malek blamed the mayor of Lod, Yair Revivo, for inciting ethnic tensions and for allowing settler groups from outside the city to come in and patrol the streets, even as city residents had been placed under nighttime curfew. “My son isn’t allowed to carry a weapon, but the settlers? ‘Of course! It’s self-defense!’ ” Malek said. This was a sentiment that kept coming up in my conversations with the city’s Arab residents: that Revivo, who is affiliated with Likud and is seen as close to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, bears responsibility for instigating the riots. (A spokesman for Revivo said that the mayor has “called on every platform for the tamping down of tensions” and “immediately directed the security forces and the police to expel from Lod all extremist elements, Jews and Arabs, and anyone who is not a resident of the city and has come to stoke the fire.”) Earlier this month, Revivo hosted in Lod the leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, a man who has said that Arabs are “citizens of Israel—for now, at least.” Revivo called him an “excellent parliamentarian.”
As Malek spoke, he was joined by three women, including Mousa’s sister-in-law, Azia Sultan. Sultan, a forty-one-year-old lawyer, was frustrated with the Israeli television crews for focussing only on the violence that the Arabs committed against the Jews. “They come, they film, and then no one airs the footage,” she said. “I keep waiting! It’s political—to only portray Jews as victims. What about us? Our homes were also burned! Our cars were also torched! I called the police and no one came, not after an hour and not after two. Because I don’t matter. They are the victims.”
“They also don’t come when I call,” Dahan interjected.
“So that’s not right, Nissim! That’s not the answer!” Mousa’s mother, Obadia Hassuna, said.
Before the visitors left, Malek showed them pictures on his phone of desecrated Muslim graves in the cemetery where his son is now buried. The group promised to come again.
From there, I walked through the streets of the hardscrabble neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol with Dror Rubin, a community organizer. We passed by the religious prep school that had been damaged, where dozens of young men were now disembarking from buses and entering through the school gate. A large sign said “Registration.” These were volunteers, many of them settlers from the West Bank, who had come to Lod to “instill law and order,” as one of them had put it in an interview with Israel’s Kan 11. They had organized on WhatsApp groups and through the word of prominent rabbis, in some cases temporarily taking over the apartments of Jews who had evacuated amid the violence. Video recordings showed many of them carrying firearms and roving the streets during the curfew.
Across the street, a young couple was unloading two toddlers and bags from a car. “A leftist from Tel Aviv coming to help you! Don’t say we’re all bad!” Rubin called out as he carried a stroller up the stairs of their apartment building. The woman laughed. “You’re not bad at all,” she said.
From there, Rubin and I tracked back to the mosque where the riots had first erupted. Rubin spoke of the painstaking work of getting Jews and Arabs to slowly open up to each other, form tenant associations together, and share activities in the local community center. “I don’t know how to carry on here,” he said. In the past seven years, he has given organized tours to twenty thousand people, telling them “the story of a place that represents a microcosm of Israeli society and that aims to show that things can be done differently,” Rubin said. “That story has now burst in our faces.”
