Daily Alert Archives

Hostility Exposed on Isawiya Streets

(Jerusalem Post) Editorial - Nir Nahshon, 28, was traveling from Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus to Ma'aleh Adumim last Sunday when, in his words, he "met death face-to-face." Misdirected by his GPS device, he found himself in Isawiya, an Arab neighborhood just outside Jerusalem's French Hill, inside Jerusalem city limits. Some people began hurling cement blocks at Nahshon's car. Then he was pulled from the vehicle, beaten and kicked. Nahshon might well have met a dreadful fate had it not been for Isawiya's courageous mukhtar, Darwish Darwish, who took him into his home and shielded him. Like the Ramallah lynching of two reservists on October 12, 2000, at the start of the second intifada, the readiness to resort to violence against an Israeli whose "crime" was merely to take a wrong turn into an Arab neighborhood persists. Such hostility is fed by the steady dose of incitement and demonization of Israel that so often pollutes the official PA media, its educational system and mosques. A few days ago, Jewish mourners visiting their mother's grave at the Mount of Olives cemetery were attacked at close range by stone-throwing Arabs. Last month, five policemen were wounded at A-Tur after rocks and firebombs were thrown at them. All of these cases - and there are numerous others - occurred inside sovereign Israel. The grim concern is that any Jew in a predominantly Arab area may find himself in mortal danger. How stark a contrast to the period before Camp David 2000 when tens of thousands of Israelis did their weekly shopping in the West Bank without having to fear for their lives.
2011-07-01 00:00:00
Full Article