Riots Shatter Veneer of Coexistence in Israel’s Mixed Towns - The New York Times

Riots Shatter Veneer of Coexistence in Israel’s Mixed Towns

"Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian communities looked past each other until violence and bloodshed forced a reckoning.

Seventy-three years after Israel’s birth in the 1948 Independence War, in which hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out at gunpoint, Jews and Arabs in Israel live side by side but largely blind to

They had seen their status and their language downgraded by the nation-state law of 2018 that said the right to self-determination was “unique to the Jewish people.” The bill stated in plain language what discrimination in land regulations, education and other areas of life had felt like for decades.

“We are second-class,” said Ashraf Amer, a Palestinian social worker and activist in Acre. “When the Jews can see us at all.”

Riots Shatter Veneer of Coexistence in Israel’s Mixed Towns - The New York Times