People say to me, ‘You have to be realistic, you’re dreaming of peace, and you’re dreaming of collaboration between Arabs and Jews, but you’re not realistic,’” she said while slapping a sticker on a lamppost. “People just lost faith.”
The night’s ringleader is Yeheli Cialic, 23, a Jewish Israeli who grew up in a “mainstream family” but now describes himself as a communist and an “anti-Zionist.” He says helping Arabs negotiate the institutionalized prejudice they face in Israel is the civil guard’s priority.
This feeling of anti-Arab discrimination has only grown under the successive governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And since the attacks, advocacy groups say Israeli authorities have eroded free speech by treating many expressions of Palestinian solidarity as incitement…
The crew is mostly young. Among them is Amit Okin, 23, who ran away from his yeshiva and his increasingly religious family to become a self-described anarchist with safety pins in his ears and a half-shaved head.
“I didn’t understand it, I didn’t understand why we can’t love everybody,” he says, unnecessarily apologizing for his almost-perfect English. “We are always told that they hate us, so we need to hate them. I always felt something was wrong there.”
Dialogue and friendship in Jaffa in a time of war
Ben Harris-Roxas
@ben_hr