FIVE months after an arson attack in a Palestinian village killed three members of the Dawabsheh family, including the parents and an 18-month-old baby, two suspects were indicted by an Israeli court on January 3rd. A 21-year-old Jewish extremist was accused of setting the house alight and a minor was accused of having assisted him. Israel’s Shin Bet security service was certain from the start that the murderers came from a group of fanatical young settlers living on austere “hilltop” outposts in the West Bank. That it took such a long investigation, as well as 40 days of questioning during which the suspects were subjected to “special measures”—the euphemism used by Israel’s legal system for physical coercion or torture—is a sign of how difficult it is for Israelis to come to grips with anti-Arab racism within their society. “Special measures” are routinely used against Palestinian terror suspects; their employment against Israeli-Jewish detainees is unprecedented.
The suspects belong to a small group of young settlers committed to replacing the democratic Israeli state with a “Jewish kingdom”. Their actions have been condemned across the Israeli political spectrum. Even so, some members of the right-wing coalition that is in government have insisted that they shouldn’t be regarded as “terrorists” and objected that they had received similar treatment to Palestinian terror suspects. Ironically, the only organisations joining them in protest against the use of “special measures” are Israeli human-rights organisations, which just last month were the subjects of a right-wing smear campaign branding them as alien “plants”.
Although the government has ordered its security chiefs to take off the gloves against Jewish terrorists, its leaders have hardly been trying to ease tension between communities. On New Year’s Day an Israeli-Arab citizen opened fire at a crowded bar in Tel Aviv, killing two people and wounding eight. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to the murder scene to make a speech accusing Israel’s Arab community of being “a state within a state for some citizens in enclaves where there is no law enforcement”.
Mr Netanyahu, who on election day in March 2015 said that “the Arab voters are moving in massive numbers to the ballot boxes”, has since made half-hearted attempts to mend fences. This week, however, he further angered Arab Israelis when he decided that a 15 billion shekel ($3.8 billion) plan to compensate local Arab authorities for historical funding shortfalls would be conditional on their agreeing to increased policing. The government’s heavy-handed approach comes at a sensitive time. Attacks on Jewish Israelis by non-Israeli Palestinians occur almost daily: some call it the “stabbing intifada”. So far, only a tiny handful of attacks have been perpetrated by Israel’s Arab citizens. How long will that last?
The worsening relationship between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs is part of a wider cultural conflict. The education ministry has banned from the national high-school curriculum a prize-winning novel, “Borderlife”, by Israeli-Jewish writer Dorit Rabinyan, on the grounds that it promotes intermarriage and “assimilation”. The novel depicts a doomed affair between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man. Similar books have long been used in Israeli classrooms, but it seems there’s no room for Arab-Jewish love today.