It is only a half an hour from Kafr Qassem to the bustling heart of Tel Aviv, but the Arab town feels a world away from Israel’s largest and most sophisticated city. The shops, restaurants and garages that line its badly maintained roads display signs in Hebrew as well as Arabic. But most Jews are staying away in these troubled times of stabbings across the country – symptoms of a conflict seemingly without end.

Last week, Kafr Qassem marked an infamous event in its otherwise unremarkable history – the killing of 49 residents by Israeli police on the eve of the 1956 Suez war – when Israel colluded with Britain and France to attack Egypt. They were gunned down because they were unaware of a curfew that had been imposed on Arab communities on the then frontier with Jordan; their names are now inscribed on a column in the town centre.

Hundreds gathered to listen to anniversary speeches by Israeli Arab leaders, including prominent Islamists, who called for both formal recognition of the massacre and the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. All made a clear link between then and now, past and present fused into a single narrative of oppression and discrimination on both sides of the pre-1967 “green line” border. “Glory and eternity to our innocent martyrs,” proclaimed the banners and T-shirts worn by excited children placing floral wreaths around the column.

“The policies of the Israeli government continue, though they have changed their face,” said Abdullah Sarsour, who lost five close relatives in 1956. “Yes, I am an Israeli citizen and our situation is better than in Nablus [in the West Bank], but they use different ways to crush our freedom.”

Relations between Israel’s Arab minority – 20% of the country’s population – and their kinfolk in the occupied territories have evolved in the decades since they were reunited after the Six Day war. The so-called Arabs of 1948, who stayed in their homeland after the Nakba, routinely express solidarity with their fellow Palestinians. Now they are doing so again over the tensions and violence around Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, which were triggered, in the opinion of many, by Binyamin Netanyahu’s hardline policies.

“Netanyahu has closed off all paths to a two-state solution,” declared Ahmed Tibi, Israel’s most high-profile Arab MP and onetime adviser to Yasser Arafat. “The value of a Palestinian life was always less. Israelis only started to talk about a deterioration in the security situation when Jews were killed. But 21 Palestinians were killed between January and September. We are an inseparable part of the Palestinian people, but our struggle is a nonviolent one.”

In happier times, Kafr Qassem’s bargain Saturday market drew thousands of Jewish customers. Last week it was down to a few hundred. It has been a similar story in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab town, where the mayor castigated another leading Arab MP, Ayman Odeh, during a live TV interview, for talking about the al-Aqsa mosque, and demanded that he leave. “Get out of here. Enough with the interviews. You ruined the city for us. There wasn’t a single Jew here today.”

In Jaffa, a down-at-heel but increasingly gentrified suburb of Tel Aviv where Arabs have long been a minority, Jewish customers have been returning to the haunts they abandoned after an al-Aqsa protest in early October – just as they did when tensions subsided after last year’s Gaza war.

Abu Hassan’s hummus restaurant overlooking the old port is fairly busy again, though Hani, the head waiter at Abulafia’s legendary bakery, is furious at troublemakers who triggered boycott calls. “Throwing stones won’t solve anything,” he said. “People light the fire and then run away.”



In the five weeks since the latest unrest began, the majority of incidents have taken place in the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem, with an overall death toll of 72 Palestinians and 11 Israelis. Israel says 43 of the Palestinians were carrying out attacks when they were killed. Amnesty International has documented four cases of what it describes as “extrajudicial killings” of Palestinians.

Inside Israel, demonstrators in Kafr Qassem threw stones at police, while 12,000 people attended a protest at Sakhnin, Galilee. In Beersheba, an Israeli Bedouin – from a tribe whose members serve in the army (unlike other Arabs) – grabbed a soldier’s gun and killed him. But after an Arab woman wielding a knife was shot by police in Afula, it transpired that she was mentally unstable, not a terrorist.



Few on either side expect serious violence to spread inside Israel. “The Jews have succeeded in the fragmentation of Palestinian society to the extent that the Palestinians themselves stress how different they are from their compatriots,” says Meron Benvenisti, one of the country’s most astute liberal commentators. “Most Israeli Arabs imitate Jews in their pursuit of the good life. Israel has imposed its policy of divide and rule, and Israeli Arabs have internalised that way of thinking.”

In Nazareth, the Arabic-language Bokra website is running a campaign promoting nonviolence. “Mistrust of the other, and Netanyahu’s policies, are dragging this country into confrontation,” warned the participants in a debate it organised.

Israeli officials blame the trouble on “incitement” by Palestinians, citing violent and antisemitic images on social media and the glorification of “martyrs”. Palestinians everywhere retort that occupation without end and a rightwing government that appeases extremist Jewish settlers breeds desperation; and that incitement works both ways. “Netanyahu has promoted a culture of fear of Arabs,” argues Mehdi Abdel-Hadi of the Passia thinktank in East Jerusalem. Avigdor Lieberman, then foreign minister, called earlier this year for disloyal Arab citizens to be beheaded.

No one has forgotten the warning by the prime minister on the eve of March’s election that Arabs were “coming out in droves to vote” – a transparently racist dog whistle. “Bibi [Netanyahu] plays on Israelis’ fears and anxieties,” says Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer who specialises in protecting Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem. “His vision is a Hobbesian one. When he speaks in the name of the Jewish people, he is excluding 20% of the citizens of this country.”

For Menachem Klein, a political scientist, the events of recent weeks mark the transformation of a national conflict over land into an ethnic/religious struggle between Jews and Arabs in a bitterly divided country, which has given up believing in the two-state solution or any form of workable peace settlement. “[Netanyahu] says he is against a binational state, but admits we will have to live by the sword for ever,” sighs Klein. “That is his vision. It’s a nightmare.”

Many Palestinians agree. “A lot of it is about hatred and fear between the two societies,” says Passia’s Abdel-Hadi. “People on both sides say: ‘I don’t trust you and I don’t respect you. I fear you and I will stay away from you. And if you come into my space I will kill you.’”



Debate over whether what is happening can be classified as another intifada – or is something different and harder to define – is irrelevant to the risks of random violence. Several Jews have been killed or injured by other Jews because they were mistaken for Arabs: thus the widely circulating social media image of a dark-skinned man wearing a T-shirt proclaiming in Hebrew: “Please calm down. I’m a Yemeni.”



Yet even if things do calm down, most people agree that the situation could easily escalate again, as the underlying conditions look unlikely to change.

“What do you think? That Jews are suckers?” rages Meir Rahamim, a fifty-something driver from Rishon Le Zion, south of Tel Aviv, where a Palestinian stabbed an elderly woman this week. “We have our crazies too. We can throw stones at Arab cars too. If this goes on like this, there’s going to be a civil war here. If we are not going to have peace with the Arabs, we are going to screw them.”