Do we belong?

摘要

For Israelis looking for a harmonious co-existence between Jews and Arabs, the town of Safed offered hope. The city's Jewish mayor, Ilan Shochat, aspiring for it to become a hub of eastern Galilee, attracted some 1,500 Arabs to its colleges, restoring a multicultural feel to a city that for 60 years had been homogeneously Jewish. He even spoke of welcoming Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, who was born there, as part of a drive to attract tourists to a city steeped in Jewish and Muslim historical buildings and traditions. But Israel's war in Gaza is spoiling Arab-Jewish relations, there and elsewhere in Israel, a fifth of whose 8m citizens are Arab. Israel's Jews think their soldiers are defending their homeland from terrorists with long-range rockets; Israel's Arabs see them as massacring their Gazan kin. Several Israeli mayors, including Mr Shochat, have suspended Arab workers for posting support for Gaza's fighters on Facebook. Yair Revivo, mayor of the mixed city of Lod, said they had been dismissed for "disloyalty to the state". Some Israeli universities, hospitals and even mobile-phone companies have followed suit.