The soccer matches on Kibbutz Galuyot Street are serious affairs. With water scarce, soccer in the Israeli city of Acco is played not on grass fields but on cement slabs the size of basketball courts. The games are fast, high–scoring and intense. Every night, teenage boys from the neighborhood gather to play, the oldest getting priority and the best among them dictating the teams. Those left out join the young spectators and fan out around the pitch to watch, talk, and taunt.
For the first five months of 2007, I lived just down the street. My landlord, an Arab businessman, and his family lived below my apartment. The presence of an Arab family in a mostly Jewish neighborhood is relatively rare in Israel. Acco prides itself as a city of coexistence, one of a handful in Israel where Jews and Arabs live side by side. Cities like Acco have been internationally praised as shining examples of the multiculturalist ideal. For many Israelis, these cities signify the potential for peace between Jews and Arabs, both within Israel and outside of it. Ethnic coexistence has become one of Acco’s distinguishing characteristics, along with picturesque ocean views and ancient ruins.
But, the soccer matches on my street were ethnically segregated, with Jewish and Arab kids alternating nights. No more small quirk, this fact is a symptom of a larger and more dangerous condition. In Acco, coexistence is a façade under which lies interethnic resentment and hatred—tensions that at times have sparked violence.
Discriminatory governmental policies have deepened preexisting prejudices and created new ones. Over the last sixty years, local and national governments in Israel have implemented policies regarding land use, employment, and education intending to strengthen Acco’s Jewish community at the expense of Arab communities. These policies have undermined interethnic solidarity and bred a volatile atmosphere in Acco. Indeed, Acco tests Israel’s very conception of itself as a democratic state with equal rights for all its citizens.
One step of that test occurred in early October 2008 when broken glass and boisterous crowds abruptly shattered the image of Acco’s breezy, palm–lined Mediterranean charm. Rioters lit cars on fire, packs of young men prowled the streets, and neighbors turned on each other. Acco descended into another battleground of the conflict it has been purported to transcend.
That night—the night of Yom Kippur—Jewish youths attacked an Arab whom they accused of intentionally showing disrespect for the holiday by smoking cigarettes and listening to loud music as he drove through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. Jews and Arabs have contested the details of the incident, but soon after, Arabs gathered outside the old city of Acco and marched toward the neighborhood of the attack. Police prevented them from crossing Ben Ami Street, which bisects the city. Meanwhile, hundreds of Jews had gathered on the other side of the road. The two groups hurled rocks and violent chants at each other as the police struggled to keep them apart. But police could not stop young men from throwing stones at each other in the train station. Elsewhere in the city, Arabs damaged about 50 Jewish owned shops and another 150 cars, and over the next five days, the Jews on the northern side of the city firebombed eleven Arab homes.
On Kibbutz Galuyot Street, Jews from the neighborhood thronged outside my old house, besieging my old landlord and his family. The crowd was so large that the police needed teargas and reinforcements to disperse it. My former landlord and his family snuck out under police supervision and sought refuge outside the city.
October’s violence and the policies that catalyzed it must be considered within a historical context. Only by noting the history of Accos before Israel’s 1948 War of Independance can one properly examine the political and ethnic dynamics of Israeli Acco.
Acco—Akka in Arabic and often rendered “Acre” in English—is an ancient city on the bay of Haifa on the Mediterranean in northern Israel. The area was home to various settlements for thousands of years before the Crusaders transformed it into a bustling city that served as the Holy Land’s primary link to Italian trading ports. The Ottomans made Acco a provincial capital, and under British Mandatory rule, Acco expanded outside the Ottoman “old city” and became a regional center for Arab religious, intellectual, and economic life. Recognizing Acco’s cultural and historical significance to Arabs, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, which proposed the creation of neighboring Jewish and Arab countries in the former British Mandate, placed Acco within the Arab state. To that point, no sizable Jewish population had ever settled in Acco.
That would change in May 1948 when, in the midst of the Independence War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a Jewish unit defeated Arab defenses at Acco after a two–day campaign. Before the battle, Acco’s Arabs fled the city. Some left fearing violent confrontation with the Jewish soldiers, while others heeded the calls of local leaders who sought to abandon the city temporarily until the Zionist army was defeated.
Following the war, Arab refugees from surrounding villages poured into the old city while the Mandate–era elite, either by choice or Israeli policy, remained abroad. Israel decided to settle thousands of European Holocaust refugees in Acco, placing them in abandoned Arab homes and refugee camps surrounding the city. The result was a near–complete demographic overhaul of the city’s population in a few short years. Whereas in 1947 Acco had been a small Arab city, by 1950 it was a booming, majority–Jewish city in which 95% of the Arab population were recently–arrived refugees from elsewhere in the north of Israel. The Jewish and Arab refugees faced similarly desperate conditions—for at least twenty years, the state would struggle to supply them with housing and employment.
In these early years, the economic lives of Acco’s Jews and Arabs were necessarily and intensely integrated. A lack of food and basic consumer goods produced a barter culture and black market trade without ethnic boundaries. The demands of survival helped Arabs and Jews forget their animosities. Even in the early 1960s, the Muslim Deputy Mayor would invite the anti–Israel president of Tunisia to Acco “to see how it is possible for Jews and Arabs to live and work together in peace.”
Yet tensions did not entirely disappear. The 1967 war, in which Israel defeated its neighboring Arab countries against all expectations, left Acco’s Arabs bitter and increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. When Acco Arabs bombed numerous Jewish–owned buildings in 1969, relations between the two communities permanently worsened. In 2000, while the second intifada rocked Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Arabs in Acco initiated brief but traumatic riots. The violence has recurred in the city repeatedly despite the varying political circumstances that surround each incident. Today Acco is home to 50,000 people, one–third Arab—a majority Muslim and a minority Christian—and two–thirds Jewish. The city faces widespread crime, alcoholism, drug abuse, and unemployment problems. A steady flow of Jewish immigrants—first European, then North African, Middle Eastern, and most recently Russian and Caucasian—have settled in dilapidated subsidized housing north of the old city.
Despite spurts of violence and increasing criminal activity, Acco’s economic integration has not wavered. The city boasts an array of successful Arab businesses, including its famous hummus establishments, where Jewish and Arab customers alike jockey for places in line. The Arab shuk (open–air market) in the old city teems with Jewish shoppers and tourists. Arab and Jewish residents cooperate in cultivating the tourist–friendly image of the city that emphasizes its exotic past and downplays the present reality. This image of coexistence has proven profitable, preserving a tenuous calm among Acco’s residents that belies the simmering tensions. This veneer of coexistence in Acco explains the widespread national and international surprise in reaction to the riots this past October. Shortly after the riots, Gideon Levy, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, described Acco in dismal terms, writing, “This binational city is sitting on a volcano—a volcano of nationalism and distress, fear and hatred.”
Hisham Nafa, another reporter for the paper, observed, “There is no coexistence. In Acco, there is pain and bitterness, built up over decades.” Their remarks note the obvious: a city in which coexistence thrives would not have erupted so suddenly. October’s riots did not signify the end of coexistence, but shattered its image by unveiling a deep–seated antagonism which splintered the seemingly pacific city.
The Israeli government’s slow and relentless marginalization of Acco’s Arab community over the last 60 years is central to the matter. This process of alienation has been advanced in part by Israeli Jews who wish to transform the ancient town into a modern city that meets their technological, architectural, economic, and religious needs. As the Jewish population increased, Jewish cultural and economic institutions encroached upon Arab society. While this natural–born growth played a role, governmental actors took more deliberate, heavy–handed measures to transform the city.
One method of marginalizing Acco’s Arab population was employment policy. With a significant part of the city unemployed in the 1950s, the Acco municipality received funding to build an industrial complex outside the city. Whereas thousands of Jews found employment in its new steel factory, Arabs were barred due to vaguely articulated national security concerns. As Jews started to claw out of Acco’s financial desperation with solid industrial jobs protected by labor unions, Arabs found employment in construction and small business. Those employment divisions still exist today.
Discrimination is evident in education as well. Acco’s Jewish students can attend multiple elementary and high schools, while the Arab community has one middle school and one high school, both overcrowded and in need of repair. In contrast to the pre–1948 era when students would travel into Acco from all over the north for school, Acco residents must now travel to a neighboring Arab village for a decent education. Religious institutions have suffered as well. The government has closed all but one of the mosques outside the old city, citing suspicious claims about the mosques’ structural safety.
Perhaps the worst example of Arab marginalization concerns residential policies. Both local and national governments have exercised control through subtle maneuverings over who moves where. As Israel scrambled to build housing for the Jewish refugees flooding into Acco in the 50s, Arabs were confined to the old city. The municipal and national governments have made every effort to keep them there. Housing subsidies are enough of a bargain for middleclass Jews but not for poor Arabs, thus bringing Jews exclusively into new neighborhoods. In the largely Arab old city, the government has recently facilitated a Jewish influx by condemning dilapidated houses, renovating them, and selling them at prices only Jewish residents can afford. Even this Arab enclave is targeted for a demographic shift.
 Police attempt to separate Jewish and Arab protesters in Acco in October, 2008. The riots tore the city apart and left 11 Arab homes and 50 Jewish businesses stoned or firebombed. Photo © Hagai Aharon. |
The case of the Wolfson neighborhood demonstrates another type of residential discrimination. The neighborhood northeast of the old city was built in 1965 to house young couples and immigrants still living in transit camps. High birth rates had created an Arab population too large to fit in the small confines of the old city, and new housing was in high demand. Yet the municipal government refused to let Arabs move into Wolfson. The government built the neighborhood, but with support from foreign Jewish philanthropy. On those grounds, the segregation was legally justified. Eventually, Wolfson was compelled to integrate as Arab anger became violent and caught national attention. However, the use of private funding to justify discriminatory policies has continued. The Jewish Agency, which coordinates Jewish philanthropy, has been recognized as a private transnational organization but has involved itself routinely in Israeli policymaking. Israel supplies half of the Jewish Agency’s funding, and many insiders claim that the Agency has heavily influenced Israeli policy at the legislative level. When the Jewish Agency provides money for Jewish projects in Acco, the government is legally guiltless but deeply implicated in discrimination.
The prominent role of foreign philanthropy in Acco’s discriminatory development projects raises the question of how and by whom Acco is governed. After the Israeli conquest in 1948, a municipal council was instituted with guaranteed spots for Jewish and Arab representatives. Nonetheless, thanks to its larger population, the Jewish community maintains a more substantial presence on the council. National government policies have also impacted Acco’s development given that Arabs, due in part to ideologically based abstention from Israeli politics, are underrepresented in Israel’s Knesset (parliament). National organized labor, long dominated by the Israeli left (but the decidedly Jewish Israeli left), has also been a big player in Acco, controlling the introduction of new industries and selecting their workforces. The Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, and other pseudo–private organizations have informal but extensive influence on the municipal government as well. These power centers of legislative initiative, money, and ideological leadership leave the Jewish and Arab citizens of Acco vulnerable to discriminatory political projects.
Prejudice is no conspiracy theory in Acco; it is openly discussed at all levels of government. Local Jewish leaders make their agenda perfectly clear. “There is already an almost official policy of separation...we have to be vigorous so that Acco does not fall into the hands of the Arabs,” said Aharon Lahiani, a member of the Acco municipal council, in 2001. He used the ubiquitous phrase, “the Judaization of the Galilee” to describe the project of bringing Jews to the Israeli north in order to stymie the perceived Arab demographic threat. In 2003, another vocal proponent of “Judaization,” Rabbi Yossi Stern, opened a controversial yeshiva (men’s religious seminary) in an Arab neighborhood with government subsidies. Stern has made no secret of his distaste for Arabs. Upon its opening, the yeshiva’s website gleefully announced, “The municipality of Acco, which sees us as an impetus to bring Jews to Acco, has allocated land for us to build a new campus.” Not only does the yeshiva intend to draw Jews to Acco, but it has also been at the center of a number of altercations with local Arabs—in October’s riots, Arab residents blamed yeshiva students for inciting violence against them. The municipal government’s financial and political encouragement of Yeshivat Hesder–Acco has a bitter symbolic meaning for Acco’s Arab community. Elsewhere in Israel, another yeshiva was recently opened in the equally volatile city of Jaffa—also in an Arab neighborhood. Evidently, Acco is not exceptional in its attitude towards Arab citizens.
Occupational, educational, and residential discrimination have left their mark on the city’s personality. While Acco is economically integrated in many respects, it certainly is not socially integrated. The segregated soccer matches on Kibbutz Galuyot Street are one example of the wider divisions that permeate Acco’s society. Amidst this tension, governmental efforts to control Arab life in the city have inflamed social tensions beyond the boiling point. The recent national elections further illustrate the divisions within Acco. While its Jews voted in unprecedented numbers for Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is Our Home”), a nationalist party that identifies Israeli Arabs as internal threats to Israel, Acco’s Arabs supported Balad (“Homeland”), an anti–Zionist party that rejects Israel’s nature as a Jewish state. Ironically, the local leaders of Yisrael Beiteinu and far–right Islamist parties claim to be friends. Nothing could better sum up the contradictions of inter–ethnic relations in Acco than this curiosity. The relationship between Acco’s intermittent violence and state discrimination has not gone ignored in Israel. After a violent Arab uprising in October 2000 across the country left 13 Arabs dead, the Israeli government ordered an inquiry to probe the causes of the violence. The Orr Commission Report, headed by Israeli Supreme Court Justice Theodore Orr, argued that neglect and discrimination “constituted a fundamental contribution to the outbreak of the events.” According to the commission’s findings, discrimination was evident “in the allocation of government budgets and resources in various areas such as development, employment, education, religion and welfare.” A subsequent report three years later observed that “very little, if anything, has been done to achieve equality for Arab citizens and remove the blemish of discrimination.” In 2006, three years after the first updated findings, the Israeli government was still spending 33% more per capita on its Jewish citizens than its Arab citizens. Though policymakers seem to have ignored the Orr Commission, it remains a remarkable governmental acknowledgement of the connection between discrimination and violence in the Arab sector. While October’s riots were a shock to many, the government knew that the conditions—brought about by the government’s own discriminatory policies—were ripe for an outburst.
Acco’s Arab–Jewish tensions should not be oversimplified. Among Arabs there are deep resentments over the displacement of their family members and friends during the 1948 war as well as bitterness at Israeli policies regarding the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, many Jews suspect that the Arab population’s allegiances lie with the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, and that they would not defend Israel. For many Mizrahi (Jewish immigrants from mainly Arabic speaking countries) Jews, vivid fears remain of the political discrimination that forced them to flee their homes in Arab countries. Many Jews have grown uneasy with the high birth rate among Arab citizens in Israel, which they fear could threaten the state’s Jewish character. While these historical factors play an important role, they alone cannot explain the sustained level of tension and conflict in Acco. Governmental policies have preserved the volatility of interethnic relations. Strategies of “Judaization” and preferential treatment that segregate and alienate Acco’s residents from each other have partitioned the two communities, accentuating the historical and cultural obstacles to coexistence. Moreover, government discrimination prevents dialogue on other issues by placing Jews and Arabs directly at odds with one another. In this zero–sum game, Arabs are cheated by discriminatory policies as Israelis benefit from them. With sustained conflict, it becomes far more difficult to discuss a shared future.
It is, however, not only a shared future that has become obscured. The discrimination also threatens to undermine the foundations of the state. It is difficult to justify the different treatment of Arabs and Jews with the egalitarian language of Israeli law as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which promises to “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex.” Indeed, the visions of Zionism’s greatest theorists were fervently committed to justice for all peoples. Although Acco’s reactionary nationalist element argues that demographic trends and terrorist organizations endanger Zionism, the Israeli government could be harming Zionist principles on an equally threatening level. Discrimination certainly doesn’t bode well for Israel’s balancing act of Judaism and democracy.
A recent article by journalist Shlomo Avineri examined a brief episode from the novel “Altneuland” (“The Old New Land”). Written by Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, the novel examines a racist Jewish faction in a utopian Jewish state that rises to prominence by proposing the disfranchisement of all non–Jews, on the grounds that only Jews can be citizens in a Jewish state. A liberal faction responds with a fierce defense of the universal right to vote based on a mixture of democratic theory and traditional Jewish values. The liberals win. For Herzl, democracy could not be subverted for nationalistic goals. Egalitarian democracy was part of those goals—what he called Zionism.
Between the recent Gaza war and an election in which Israelis largely rejected the country’s current political leadership, Israel is in transition. Every discriminatory act in Acco and elsewhere drives Israel further from its foundational conception. Israel must fulfill its pledge of equality to all of its citizens—Arabs in particular. Radical change will be necessary to bring reality to what is now merely the myth of coexistence in Acco and throughout Israel.
Above: An Israeli woman and an Arab woman exchange heated words in front of an Acco municipality building. Often hailed as a paragon of Israeli-Arab coexistence, Acco has recently become the epicenter of a growing schism between Israel’s Jewish and Arab residents. Photo © Oren Ziv
LEO GOLDBERG is a Columbia College junior studying history. He can be reached at lmg2168@columbia.edu.