The status quo exactly a century ago, when the first nationalist clash between Arabs and Jews erupted in this ancient port city, remains the status quo today. A once quiet and generally peaceful neighborhood where Jews and Arabs lived and worked side-by-side, Jaffa was instantaneously transformed into a cesspool of violence when marauding Muslims rioted in the streets 100 years ago, leaving 47 Jews dead, including writer Yosef Haim Brenner. Jewish blood flowed through Jaffa, like lava through Pompeii, indiscriminate, but intentional in every way.
Fueled by the Balfour Declaration and British support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” – the violence is now fired by empty declarations from a biased international community demanding a homeland for Palestinian Arabs, whose welfare they care not at all for, outside the context of extracting from Israel what little has been bequeathed to it, and for which Israelis have already sacrificed so much.
As the modern state system evolved, the struggle between Arabs and Jews remained uniquely unsettled. Similar conflicts between peoples and the agreements that followed – arrived at in due course by the clashing parties themselves, or imposed upon them by their imposing colonial overlords – typically resolved (or at least tempered) the emergent tensions resulting from a rapidly changing and newly modernizing world at the turn of the last century. But in Jaffa – as is true now in mixed cities like Lod and communities all across Israel – resolving the rancor of Arabs towards Jews remains elusive. Here, no conflict nor contract has definitively quelled the quivers of volcanic quakes.
Today, all that stands between the Jaffa riots of 1921 and those today, is the stalwart strength of the Israeli security forces. Without them, the very real promise of those in the streets who now (and again) shout itbah al-yehud, or “slaughter the Jews” would be fulfilled.
But if history is any measure of man, and his tenacious tendency to repeat himself, the promise of “The Jaffa Riot of 2021” or beyond – which would certainly result in the death of its current Jewish residents as it had its past ones – remains a tangible, if not imminent, threat.
Despite historical precedent, despite rockets raining from Gaza on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, despite the violent protests of Israeli-Arabs, threatening cities and towns where “these types of things don’t happen,” despite the ceaseless stream of subversive, hate-filled speech spewed across every social media platform and despite the clearly stated promise by Israel’s enemies that “Jerusalem is in danger,” last year marked another in which there was no change of any kind in the status quo of the Temple Mount. No additional days nor times were added to the four sparse hours permitted in the early morning and afternoon for non-Muslim visitors, no additional security measures were put in place to ensure terrorists masquerading as Muslim worshipers were not exploiting this holy space for nefarious activities and few, if any, restrictions were enforced on Friday prayer gatherings or those during Ramadan.
Not even the Supreme Court ruling regarding the return of Jewish homes in Jerusalem to their rightful owners – cautiously arrived at only after many long years of deliberation by the justice system – can be identified as the cause for which we can attribute the ongoing Muslim blood libel against the Jews.
In the absence of an explanation driven by recent events, the question remains: what is the cause of the rising violence spreading across the Jewish state?
“The perpetrators feed on social pressure,” writes former MK Anat Berko in a 2010 study conducted on the moral infrastructure of terrorists. “This thinking stems from hatred of the other, and from the normalization of violence, which is built into [their worldview].” We see this manifest time and again in acts of terrorism perpetrated across the world – in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Jakarta; in Manchester, Melbourne and Manhattan.
The fate of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Mosque – plainly stated – is not the causal factor behind violence in Israel, which is mirrored by an ever-growing number of violent attacks by Muslim terrorists across the world, and for which they are now far too many to count.
Rather, the culture of violence among Arabs generally – and Israeli-Arabs specifically – is deeply embedded in the historic nature of the very many lies peddled to them in the name of Islamic extremism. Seeded in the writings of Hassan al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who radically altered the role of Islam in Muslim cultural life, religion has been designated as a means for violence, and has been successfully deployed as such.
This violence has stealthily seeped into Israeli-Arab society, shrouded in a cloak of religiosity and carefully cultivated by the most radical elements and members within it. The response to this accumulated hatred, as it is sold to the Israeli-Arab population by its corrupt religious and political leadership, can only be realized by fighting the so-called (Jewish) “infidel.”
These cultural norms are further nurtured and fortified by the Arab educational system, which consistently reinforces these messages, planting the seed of hatred within young minds as early as kindergarten, persisting throughout high school, and even overtly at the university level. And all under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority to which the governance of the Palestinian people has been bestowed, and to which the international community – the Biden administration included, as its recent remarks suggest – has given far too much flexibility to achieve its radical and destructive ends.
These underlying structural factors are then exploited as a response to recent events, like the canceled Palestinian elections, the expulsion of illegal Arab squatters from homes to which they had been legally found to have no claim, and access to the Temple Mount which, as previously noted, has been subject to no tangible change in status at all.
Compounded by the slowing down of daily life during Ramadan, a month traditionally marred by Muslim violence against Jews, what we are seeing is a confluence of events creating a perfect storm from which the thunder of religious radicalism can strike like lightning – anytime or anywhere.
A year after the coronavirus raced across the world, immune to our borders, running rampant through countries and cities, while infecting Israeli residents from all backgrounds and faiths, the disease of Jew hatred – which has laid siege to the Arab community – crossed from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and into the other mixed cities across Israel. It saves as a stark reminder that the Jewish-Arab conflict is always, and again, about to start but rarely, if ever, close to its end.
The writer, a lieutenant -colonel (res.), is the secretary-general of the Bithonistim.