The Acre riots were typical of the confrontations in other mixed Jewish-Arab towns such as Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Lod. While leftist dreamers speak of peaceful coexistence, people on the ground don’t want each other. More specifically, a small percentage of people on each side is strongly anti-another.
Democracy is a fiction: mobs are led in whatever direction by a handful of passionate activists. The voting herd abrogates the responsibility it is unsuited for. It goes to most absurd wars, accepts government robbery through inflation, and submits to whatever decisions lobbying groups imposed on it with the power of state. It does not matter that 95% of Israeli Arabs would live with Jews peacefully; the five percent do all the fighting job.
The government’s task is to suppress the hotheads efficiently. This is how America dealt with communist radicals and black criminals. Nothing encourages the anti-social behavior as much as the lack of serious punishment. Jews, of all people, should know this lesson: throughout centuries, mobs attacked us when assured of the government’s non-intervention. Even a mild police opposition stopped pogroms immediately. This approach worked in Israel for decades: ruled by iron fist, Arabs were nice to Jews. The post-1990 relaxation provoked them to revolt.
Unsurprisingly, Haifa police was not prepared for the clashes. The Arab who provoked them whether intentionally or through utmost stupidity acted alone or on behalf of a very small circle of conspirators. Only a single Arab proceeded to incite the mob from mosque loudspeakers which doesn’t suggest a big organization. Normally, large-scale Arab riots are launched officially by mosque preachers or the Islamic Movement’s leaders.
The police, accordingly, had no advance warning. But none was needed. A few policemen firing in the air would disperse the crowd, especially if announcing that the alleged Arab victim is alive and regrettably well. Firing plastic bullets at the crowd would do even better. But it took the police two hours to arrive in any numbers whatsoever even though the roads were empty and enough policemen were placed on stand-by during Yom Kippur. The very absence of police provoked the Arabs to push on with their violence.
It became still worse when the arriving contingents refused to fire at the maraudering crowd. The policemen did not want to fall into the jaws of leftist courts, prosecuted for firing at the Arabs who “only” vandalized Jewish property as they could find no Jews on streets. The Arabs sensibly took the police inaction for tacit sanctioning, and proceeded.
The Jewish response was odd. The Ben Gurion neighborhood of Acre is not a particularly young community, but there still were armed Jews there; many took Yom Kippur leave from the army. Yet, no firearms were fired at the obviously dangerous Arab crowd. Instead, Jews crouched in their homes as they used to do during ghetto pogroms. To all purposes, Arabs scored a victory.
When the Arab violence subsided, Jews played revenge against isolated Arab homes and businesses in the area. While driving the Arab settlers out of Jewish homogenous neighborhood might be a decent idea, it had nothing to do with defense or meaningful revenge. The perpetrators, residents of Acre Arab neighborhoods, went unscathed.
Still, it was a shame for government officials to call on both sides to end violence, and to condemn both. In a Jewish state, Jews and Arabs are not equal by definition. Olmert may apologize to the Hamas’ Islamic Movement any number of times he wishes, but it is not wrong for Arabs to suffer inequality in the Jewish state. They can enjoy equality in Jordan and Lebanon, if any would be granted. So long as Arabs remain legal residents of this country, they must have personal and property rights – in this and only in this regard they are equal to Jews. But there is no political equality because the state is a Jewish one. Moreover, there is no equal right to violence.
In a Jewish state, Jews can be rightly upset about Arabs swarming their neighborhoods, and may oppose the Arab settlers without major damage to their limb or property. The Arabs have no such right because in our state Jews can settle wherever they wish.
There is no equality of violence between Jews who want the land and Arabs who want the land free of Jews. Any confrontation takes place on the background of major wars and countless pogroms which Arabs perpetrated against Jews. If Arabs demand rights for descendants of the 1948 refugees, they would have to recognize liabilities for descendants of the 1948 perpetrators. Every Arab in the state of Israel is traceable to those who killed and maimed Jews. In that war, really a peasant war, Jews lost 2% of the population killed and almost 10% wounded; that’s about ten times the US losses in WWII. Palestinian Arabs were killing and mutilating Jews when the state of Israel was not yet even planned, in the mid-nineteenth century. Today’s violence is rooted in Arab violence of the past hundred fifty years.
Leftists love cutting the roots off. Rootless Jews, bereft of Judaism, became Zionists. The Arab war on Jews, devoid of its roots, became mob violence, for which both sides share the blame. Eviscerating the roots is endemic to leftism because it allows for clean experiments. Leftism is about rational planning of inherently irrational things such as economies, societies, or foreign affairs. But how you can account rationally for the centuries of Jewish struggle for survival? How you can build a blank-slate Jewish-Arab society when the slate is really red with Jewish blood spilled by Arabs? Ignore for a moment the staggering immorality of abandoning the dead Jews’ cries for revenge or forgiving the blood which is not our own. Any Jewish-Arab solution which discounts the past history is doomed – but if we properly account for that history, no solution is possible.
Fools say that past should not determine the future. It does. There is no future but the one built upon the past.
Equality is another name for blindness.
