Palestinian Citizens of Israel Are Wary, Weary and Afraid
Israeli Arabs, some 18 percent of Israel’s population, speak of heightened tensions with their neighbors, when they are willing to speak at all.

By Steven Erlanger

Steven Erlanger spoke to Palestinian citizens and residents of Israel in Lod, Ramla and East Jerusalem.

Oct. 14, 2023
Fida Shehada is a member of the City Council of Lod, a town of some 84,000 people, perhaps 30 percent of them Arab citizens of Israel.

And Ms. Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is afraid, to put it mildly, of what may come now, after the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas. “Everyone is in great distress,” she said. “There is a great fear that there will be a mighty revenge.”

In Lod, which lies just south of Tel Aviv, Jews and Arabs often live in the same building, she said, but now Arabs are reluctant to go into the air-raid shelters. “They say they see hate in the eyes of the Jews,” Ms. Shehada said. “They say they see hate, but I think what they really see is distress and fear.”

Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom want to be identified as Palestinians, make up some 18 percent of the population. They have been caught for years between their loyalty to the state and their desire for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, the creation of an independent Palestine and a better life for themselves.

Now, after this unprecedented killing of Israelis inside Israel, when an enraged Israeli Jewish population is calling for revenge, normal tensions have been raised to almost unbearable levels.

The leading Arab politicians in Israel, like Mansour Abbas and Ayman Odeh, both members of the Knesset, have clearly condemned the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that carried out the attack on Israel, and called for calm.

But people are torn in their feelings, Ms. Shehada said, and so they tend to hide them. Young Arabs at first felt pride in the resistance of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, she said. “In the first moment when the people of Gaza invaded Israel, people were happy, they felt that someone was doing something about the situation.”

But that surge of pride faded quickly, she said. “This was before we saw all the images of slaughter, kidnap and rape,” Ms. Shehada said. “This is not a legitimate form of struggle.”

In May 2021, during another Israeli-Palestinian crisis, Lod was wracked by riots and mutual hatred between Jewish and Muslim communities. Ms. Shehada, 40, says she was attacked in her own home by Jews throwing rocks.

A police officer detaining a man at a bus shelter. Two other officers stand nearby.
The Israeli police detained an Israeli Arab man during rioting and communal violence in Lod in 2021.Credit...Dan Balilty for The New York Times
Even in more normal times, Lod has deep-seated problems of poverty and crime, with Arab criminal organizations operating with little interference from the Israeli police, people here say. Even the local government is largely segregated, with separate Arab and Jewish sections within departments.

The police are the responsibility of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power party, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who has supported settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, has also been ramping up tensions with Israel’s Arab population.

He has talked of “storming” the Aqsa Mosque compound, one of the Muslim world’s holiest sites, and in late July, he led more than 1,000 ultranationalist settlers to the site, infuriating Muslims and prompting Hamas to say that it is fighting to defend Al Aqsa.

Mr. Ben-Gvir has spoken this week of renewed Arab-Israeli violence in cities like Lod and ordered the police to prepare for riots, which Ms. Shehada and others view as a dangerous provocation. ...