It’s bad. It’s bad on so many levels.
Personally, we are ok in our area. A given Israeli’s frontline concerns depend on where exactly they are located. For us on this side, the very rare siren in the last 15 years is not much of an issue.
That can’t be said for every corner of the country, though. The ones you probably hear about on the news. Plenty that you don’t.
Which makes this last 5+ days really out there, really other-level – so many of these seemingly unconnected Israeli corners are blowing up at the same time.
- In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a dispute over rights to home turns violent
- To the south, Gaza is showing off what it’s accomplished with its patrons in the last seven years
- To the north, rogue or not so rogue or very rogue actors are tempting fate from Lebanon
- To the east, our defense minister pleads with West Bank locals not to get any ideas
- But internally – up, down, all around – the bigoted, flame-stoked chickens have come home to roost.
What’s happening within Israel’s borders is the scariest. The fabric of our society – an insanely delicate, tense, powder keg of a society – is coming undone, as horrible violent rioting has broken out in many of our largest mixed Arab-Jewish cities. Namely, Lod, which if you’re sitting anywhere that’s not here you may have heard by now. But also Akko. Haifa. Yaffo. Towns across the north.
Maybe we will fall for the same bullshit with Gaza, enter a ceasefire, and do this again in 4-5-6 years. Maybe it will take longer, maybe it will get to ground incursion, maybe it will be worse. But the internal rioting and violence that has erupted amongst our Israeli Arab neighbors – literally, people living alongside each other within mixed Jewish-Arab towns, ‘neighbor’ is a truth, not a euphemism – clashing with violent Jewish extremists showing up to instigate, fight and, yes, kill – this is terrifying, this will take decades if not more to overcome, if we even start now to work together to overcome it. These are extreme ends of our spectrums, but we should not be surprised how we got here – it doesn’t take the most extreme of the extreme to heat up this fight with decades of words, non-action, rhetoric, turning a not-so-blind eye on extremists. Fanning flames.
It makes everything feel hopeless, it spreads, it’s contagious.
And I didn’t even touch on the ‘PR/comms’ war zone…
Whadya got: