Jewish homeowner forced to flee Arab village

Ryan Jones|

Israel’s Jewish population if often portrayed as racist against the nation’s Arab minority. Arab lawmakers, despite the fact that they are able to freely participate in the democratic process, accuse the Jewish majority of discrimination and oppression.

Those accusations easily make headlines in an international media anxious to smear Israel. What doesn’t get reported are actual stories demonstrating how it is Israel’s Jews who are truly being discriminated against and even live under a certain kind of siege in their own homeland. One such story was recounted on Arutz Sheva radio this week when Kochav Segal Halevi, a Jewish security guard from northern Israel, told of how he was recently forced to flee from an Arab village in which he had purchased an apartment.

Halevi said the apartment is in the mixed Christian-Muslim Arab village of Ibilin near the port city of Haifa. He bought it from a Christian Arab who was facing foreclosure. Before moving in, Halevi said he met with several neighbors to make sure they had no problem with a Jew coming to town. They assured him all was well.

But one month ago, on the day Halevi actually moved in, those same neighbors gathered at the apartment and demanded the new Jewish owner leave town.

“The neighbor from across the road came and said forcefully ‘you will not live here,’” Halevi recalled. “That neighbor brought nine or ten other guys who told me [the same].”

The ringleader proceeded to hit Halevi in the head and “boasted that his father was serving a jail sentence after shooting another neighbor in the head… and that he is not afraid to sit in jail because of me.”

Halevi stated that he did not want any bloodshed, collected his more expensive belongings and fled.

Unfortunately, Halevi is receiving very little assistance from the authorities, who have consistently displayed an unwillingness to upset the violence-prone Arabs.

That approach has resulted in a situation where Israel’s Arabs feel their can discriminate against the nation’s Jews with impunity, that the law does not fully apply to them. It also means, as demonstrated by the above story, that while Arabs can go anywhere in Israel, Jews put their lives in very real danger by entering Arab-dominated areas.

In short, it is the Jews who are not fully free in their own country. Meanwhile, the Arab minority openly flaunts the law, while convincing the international community that they are the ones under siege.