Mob violence that killed and wounded dozens of people across Israel over the past few days — apartments and synagogues burned, stones thrown, Jewish vigilantes clashing with Arab rioters — has profoundly shaken the country. And it has resurfaced painful questions about whether years of victories for the Israeli far-right have crippled any chance of peaceful — if, as some Arabs would argue, not necessarily equal — coexistence.
About 800 people have been arrested across Israel over the past week, about 80 percent of them Arabs.
A Jewish woman told Kan Radio, the Israeli public broadcaster, that a group of Arab Israelis had hurled a homemade bomb at her, two friends and her baby in the mixed city of Lod, midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, though they missed.
A “war room” of Jewish volunteers, some armed, formed in Lod a day after fiery street clashes broke out there, further destabilizing one of the few remaining places in Israel where Arabs and Jews share not only neighborhoods but buildings. On Friday night, clashes broke out in Lod between Arabs and Israeli police at a mosque.
And the bullhorns of war kept drowning out pleas for peace.
“They attacked our capital. They fired missiles on our cities. They are paying and will continue to pay a high price for that,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said of Hamas disciples in a video statement on Friday afternoon.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/middleeast/gaza.html
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