Last year I went on a tour of Palestinian communities inside Israel and our tour-leader Hannah Mermelstein said she would show us apartheid inside Israel. Well, here’s an article in Haaretz about a little Palestinian town outside Haifa that is so overcrowded it wants some land on which to expand. And the regional planning council is saying, OK, we need to take some acres from Jewish neighbors, Ma’agan Michael, Beit Hanina, and Caesarea.
Haaretz’s headline is: “Expansion of impoverished Israeli Arab town angers Jewish neighbors.”
“The proximity to Jisr [al-Zarqa] that would ensue in the wake of the plans would spell the end of our community,” says Beit Hanina council member Arieh Freedman, who sees his community as the principal victim of the expansion plan. “We are in favor of coexistence and peace. Despite the differences in mentality, we are doing a lot in this regard.
“We are not opposed [to the scheme] because they are Arabs; they are good neighbors and we have no beef with them. But rerouting the coastal road would bring them closer to us, and our assets – both from the point of view of the value of the land and of our standard of living – would depreciate.
“The official who lives in Haifa hasn’t heard the noise from the weddings or the muezzin from a distance of one kilometer from our homes. There are two mosques there, and they compete to see who is louder. I want to live with them in coexistence and peace – but from a national perspective, too, I am opposed to the idea of taking land from a Jew to give to an Arab, even if he is an equal citizen, more or less, because he doesn’t serve in the army.
“From our point of view, there is no room for compromise,” says Freedman. “We have acted with kid gloves until now, but we will take to the streets, and like the Rothschild encampment, we will set up an encampment on Route 2.
