Extremist West Bank settlers help stir Acre violence
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada, 15 Oct 2008 (extracts)
Acre, a mixed city of approximately 52,000 people in northern Israel, recently witnessed four days of violent clashes between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jewish residents. Palestinians in Israel view the events as the product of widespread incitement and organized efforts by Jewish extremists to force them out of their homes. One of the underreported factors is the extent to which militant Israeli settlers from the West Bank, funded by donors in the US, have instigated tension in Acre and other cities in an attempt to reduce their Arab populations. Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews live in close proximity in Acre, as they have done for generations. But in recent years, extremist Jewish groups affiliated with West Bank settlers have moved in with the stated aim of making the city more Jewish. Palestinians are concentrated in the central old city and near the harbor, while Jews are established in the eastern part and outer rings. The vast majority of the Jewish residents of the city are Mizrahim — working-class Jews whose first generation came as immigrants to Israel from Arab countries. Mizrahim, although Jews, also faced severe discrimination by an Israeli state dominated by European Ashkenazi Jewish elites. Mizrahim were often pushed to the edges of Israeli Jewish society, and in many cases were housed in the former homes of expelled Palestinians. Culturally marginalized, and much poorer than Ashkenazi Jews, the Mizrahim have became the base constituency for the right-wing Likud party, Shas and other overtly racist anti-Arab parties.
Some Arab residents blamed the worsening tension, not on long-time residents, but on an influx of militant youth affiliated with the national religious West Bank settler movement. Indeed, Baruch Marzel, a settler leader from near Hebron in the West Bank, visited Acre during the riots and vowed to help Jews in the city to set up a “defense organization.” Barzel was leader of the banned Kach party founded by the late Meir Kahane which supports the expulsion of all Palestinians, and he remains a prominent leader of racist settler groups. Yeshiva Hesder Akko, founded in 2001, is a pro-settler national religious school in the midst of a now majority Arab neighborhood called Wolfson. Over the years, many of the area’s Jewish residents had become more affluent and moved out, and poorer Arabs moved in. This hesder yeshiva, a school for Israeli Jewish men who combine military service with religious study, often attracting strict adherents of the militant settler movement, is run by Yossi Stern, a rabbi from the militant West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh. Stern, who is also on the Acre city council, told the WaPo last year that he and his associates were working on projects designed to “attract Jews to Acre,” including a 350-unit housing complex designated for Jewish military families, and another yeshiva. The WaPo also reported that Palestinian residents and leaders consider these efforts to be part of a systematic assault on their presence in the city, using tactics long deployed against Palestinians in the West Bank. Some accuse Acre’s Likud mayor of supporting the efforts.
Yeshiva Hesder Akko’s own website states that “from a luxuriant Jewish neighborhood, Wolfson has turned into a decrepit Arab neighborhood.” The school’s purpose is “to try to return and strengthen the Jewish character of the city.” Although the city was “almost lost” to Jews, the site states that “the long awaited salvation has begun.” According to the website’s “About Us” page, the yeshiva was built with funds from a donor in New York. Volunteers have also raised funds from synagogues in the US, for the “special aim of the yeshiva which is to attract more young Jewish families by strengthening and maintaining the Zionist Jewish character of this ancient Jewish city.” An almost identical hesder yeshiva was recently founded in the Arab Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, also with the goal of increasing the Jewish population of that city.
Niqnaq 