Israel rabbi's edict targets Arabs

[mudplanet]

Usama Ghanaiem was at home with a group of friends when the mob attacked.

It was a Friday night in late October, and about 30 young ultra-Orthodox Jewish men walking home from synagogue began throwing rocks at the apartment building where several Arab students rent accommodation in the northern city of Safed.

One of the attackers even fired a gun; another left a message “Death to Arabs” scrawled on the front door. The police were called but most of the Jewish men had dispersed by the time they arrived. Three people have reportedly been charged.

“It was crazy,” said Mr. Ghanaiem, a 21-year-old psychology student. “We weren’t doing anything .”

Mr. Ghanaiem and his friends, all college students from a number of Arab communities in Israel, have found themselves caught up in a growing nationwide campaign against Israel’s 1.2 million Arab citizens. It began with an edict issued by Shmuel Eliahu, chief rabbi of Safed, that prohibits Jews in the city from renting or selling property to gentiles, by which he really means Arabs. Close to 300 rabbis across the country now have signed onto Rabbi Eliahu’s original statement or onto similar statements.

“Their ultimate goal is a theocratic state,” says Nachman Ben-Yehuda, a Hebrew University sociology professor whose book Theocratic Democracy has just been published. “In the meantime, they want to enforce division between the ultra-Orthodox and everyone else.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/africa-mideast/israel-rabbis-edict-targets-arabs/article1834933/