Handcuffed to a wooden chair in the middle of the night, Rafat Awaysha wasn’t sure what crime he had committed.
He had announced a demonstration against the war in Gaza in a July 11 Facebook post. Soon afterward, he received a call from the police, who came to his dormitory and took him in for questioning.
Released after an hour, Awaysha, the head of the Arab-Israeli Balad Party student group at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva, thought the ordeal was over. But at 3 p.m. the police returned.
“You have the right to express yourself in a democratic process,” Awaysha, 20, said. “You don’t need to be in an interrogation for 12 hours for participating in a protest.”
Awaysha was one of approximately 1,500 Israeli Arabs arrested for involvement in protests against Israel’s operation in Gaza, according to NGOs and Israeli media reports. Mossawa, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for the equal treatment of Israel’s Arab minority, said that at least 70 Israeli Arabs were illegally fired, reprimanded or suspended from work for publicly opposing the war.
A police spokesman confirmed the total number of arrests but would not confirm or deny Awaysha’s account.
Israeli Arab opposition to the recent conflict, which ended with a late August truce, brought the predicament of Israel’s 1.7 million Arabs into stark relief.
Community activists advocating for Israeli Arab advancement and civil liberties say that most Israeli Arabs opposed Israel’s Gaza operation because of the grave risk it posed to Palestinians there. An Aug. 11-12 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute think tank found that 62 percent of Israel’s Arabs opposed the war, as opposed to 24 percent who said they supported it.
Israeli Arabs “are not being patriotic enough for the Israelis, but at the same time they are called traitors by their own people because they are not joining the struggle against Israel,” said Thabet Abu Rass, co-executive director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, which promotes Arab-Jewish coexistence.
Throughout the war, Israeli Arabs faced discrimination from the streets, where Jewish protesters chanted “Death to Arabs,” and from the halls of the Knesset, where Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman called for a boycott of businesses owned by Israeli Arabs who participated in a one-day strike to oppose the war. And last month, some right-wing Knesset members proposed a bill to demote Arabic from being an official language of Israel.
In a poll last year, the Israel Democracy Institute found that nearly half of Jewish Israelis believed that Jews should have more rights than Arabs in Israel, and that nearly half would not want to live next to an Arab family.
For Israeli Arabs, the climate of fear and animosity had intensified even before the most recent conflict in Gaza. Earlier this year, a spate of so-called “price tag” attacks targeted their communities. Perpetrated by Jewish Israeli right-wing extremists in response to perceived anti-settlement policies, the attacks ranged from graffiti on mosques and businesses to tires slashed on cars owned by Arabs.
Tensions spiked when Jewish extremists kidnapped and burned alive a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, on July 2 in a revenge attack following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in June. Outraged by the incident, Israeli Arabs gathered in mass protests in Jerusalem and northern Israel. Demonstrators blocked roads and burned tires, and vandals damaged Jerusalem light rail stations in the eastern part of the city. Demonstrations continued across Israel throughout the war.
Thousands of Jewish Israelis, it should be noted, protested alongside their Arab counterparts during the war, and a handful of those Jewish demonstrators were arrested.
“More and more young people feel the democratic methods of struggle adopted by the political leaders of the Arab community haven’t been effective,” said Jafar Sarah, Mossawa’s director. “More and more people will take the risk of using illegal methods,” such as riots and violence against property.
Following a demonstration by Israeli Arabs last week celebrating the Palestinians “Gaza victory,” Liberman said Israel should treat the demonstrators “as traitors and supporters of a terror organization, to put them to justice and to give them the ‘right’ to stand for a moment of silence, as they did during the demonstration, in jail cells.”