Israel has largely avoided the kind of inter-communal strife that shook the country during the last conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2021. But the scene on Saturday night in Netanya, 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, was a frightening glimpse of what could be coming.
💥Terrifying event at Netanya College, where a few dozen Arab students are locked in dorms & several 100s far-right Jews are trying to break in & shouting the police minister’s old song, “death to Arabs.” Cops doing nothing to evacuate writes @AlonLeeGreen pic.twitter.com/6zBWvUA5b7
— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي💙 (@NTarnopolsky) October 28, 2023
Traumatized and enraged by the brutal Hamas-led assault on Oct. 7 that left more than 1,400 people dead and 230 kidnapped, some in Israel have begun to turn on its Palestinian citizens — long portrayed by the far right here as an enemy within.
Palestinians who managed to remain in the country after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and took Israeli citizenship now make up 20 percent of the population. The majority of their brethren were displaced or forced from their homes in what Palestinians refer to as the “nakba,” or catastrophe. Many of their descendants live in refugee camps in Gaza, now under intense Israeli bombardment.
In recent weeks, some Israelis have poured through the social media posts of their Arab neighbors and classmates, seeking out anything that could be deemed as sympathetic to Hamas or to the Palestinian cause more broadly. Telegram groups are “doxxing” Palestinian Israelis viewed as having split loyalties, posting their phone numbers and addresses online.
“What happened in Netanya is a very, very dangerous signal,” said Hassan Jabareen, the founder of Adalah, an Israeli nongovernmental organization focused on the rights of Palestinian citizens. The group is following the cases of about 100 students facing disciplinary action for social media posts. “It sends a message to the Arabs that you are not safe,” he said.
On Sunday, the Netanya college campus was largely deserted. There was little sign of the previous night’s chaos aside from cracked glass on a door to one of the dorms.
“We are wounded, we are bloody … and still they rub salt in our wounds?” said Gabi Dayan, a 50-year-old Jewish resident who was part of the angry crowd. After Oct. 7, he said, emotions are still raw. “Where is the solidarity? Whoever is here that is not a loyal citizen, you have to expel them.”
He accused the students, who live above the entrance to a synagogue in the majority-Jewish city, of throwing eggs at worshipers. Some residents said they came from a balcony, and others said they were lobbed from a moving car. The students denied any involvement.
Following the accusations, “agitated calls were circulated on social media for a demonstration against the students who live in the dormitories on the grounds that they hung Palestinian flags, provoked and played loud music — information that was checked and denied,” Netanya police said.
“In Netanya, we are not going to give up until they kick out the Arabs who are at Netanya College! The police won’t stop us, nor the municipality, nor the state!” tweeted Roi Agmar, 28, who heads the local chapter of Garin Torani, an ultranationalist group.
In 2021, during the last conflict in Gaza, Palestinian citizens of Israel took to the streets to protest the Israeli air assault. In mixed cities like Lod, the demonstrations descended into communal violence. Synagogues and mosques were burned. Armed vigilantes patrolled the streets.
After Oct. 7, community leaders urged calm. Ayman Odeh, a Palestinian member of the Israel Knesset, said he categorically condemned “calls for Israeli Arabs to join the fighting against Israel.” Senior rabbis issued a joint letter denouncing the harassment of Arab municipal workers in Jerusalem.
Israel’s far-right government, by contrast, has responded with an unprecedented crackdown on free speech and demonstrations.
Israeli’s chief of police, Kobi Shabtai, has said there will be “zero tolerance” for protests in solidarity with Gaza. “Anyone who wants to identify with Gaza is welcome — I’ll put them on buses that will send them there,” he said after a rally in Haifa was forcibly dispersed by police on Oct. 18.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has handed out weapons at political events and has proposed abolishing restrictions on police using live fire on demonstrators.
At least 30 people have been indicted in connection with social media posts deemed supportive of Hamas. Actress Maisa Abd Elhadi is being prosecuted for identifying with a terror organization and incitement to terror. Among her flagged posts was a picture of a bulldozer plowing through the Gaza border fence, with the caption “Let’s go Berlin style!”
“We’ve never really seen this before,” said Sawsan Zaher, a Haifa-based lawyer who has clients that have lost their jobs over social media posts. “What’s changed in this war is the high casualty numbers among Israelis, which has led to aggressive persecution.”
In Netanya on Saturday, “we came to demonstrate and ask that they return to us our security,” said Agmar, a reservist who deployed to Kibbutz Be’eri, the scene of some of the worst brutality on Oct. 7. More than 100 people were killed there.
“After those sights, I question if we didn’t make a mistake in our whole concept” of Arabs and Israelis living side by side, he said.
Netanya is a predominantly Jewish city, but around a third of the 3,500 students that study at the college are Palestinian Israelis.
When the crowd called for the students to be banished, the city complied. Netanya’s mayor, Miriam Fierberg-Ikar, arrived to address the demonstrators: “There’s a decision to vacate the dorms and house evacuees from the south there,” she announced to cheers.
“The Arabs should get out now!” a member of the crowd yelled. When the students were escorted out of a back door to vehicles organized by Palestinian Israeli politicians, it felt more like an escape than an evacuation, a 20-year-old law student told The Washington Post. “We ran away, just with the clothes on our backs,” he said.
Miriam, 19, a Jewish psychology student at the university, said she supported the move. She has spent time with friends in recent weeks trawling though the social media pages of her Palestinian classmates, as well as other Arab professionals in the community. “We are reporting them,” she said: “nurses, doctors, professors.”
“There was someone in my class that posted something about Hamas,” she said, pulling out her phone to show the post — a picture of jubilant Palestinians riding on a captured Israeli military vehicle.
“An unforgettable picture for history,” the caption read, with two Palestinian flags.
“She got expelled,” Miriam said. The university confirmed that a student had been “removed from her studies” following “inflammatory posts.”
“Students from any side who express themselves in a way that explicitly or implicitly supports terrorism or Israel’s enemies … will be immediately suspended from their studies pending a disciplinary investigation,” the university said.
Following Oct. 7, Miriam said, she is scared to go back to the classroom. “I don’t know whether they want my death,” she said.
The Palestinian Israelis who hid in the dormitories aren’t sure if they will ever feel comfortable returning.
“Can anyone promise me that if I come back to Netanya this won’t happen again?” asked the 20-year-old law student, who said he is nervous now about speaking Arabic in public.
The campus will remain empty for the foreseeable future. Classes will be held on Zoom, the university announced Sunday.
Judith Sudilovsky contributed to this report.
