The approaching holy month of Ramadan during which last year Muslims in Israel added murderous riots to the dawn-to-dusk daily fasting is making Israel’s clandestine police, the Shin Bet, uneasy. Especially since this year, Ramadan falls on the holy Jewish month of Nissan. Call it gunpowder-barrel April. The Muslim folks eat their break-fast meal and go out to the streets, especially in the mixed cities, to show their love for Allah by trying to kill their Jewish neighbors.
But as part of its preparations for Ramadan, the Shin Bet is also closely monitoring what’s happening on the Jewish side in the same mixed cities, and last week agents met with Jewish community leaders here, including with the heads of the Torani enclaves, and asked them for cooperation in providing information on local Jewish organizing against the possibility of renewed rioting (לקראת הרמדאן: השב”כ ביקש מרבנים לרסן את היהודים). Back in the old neighborhood, it was called snitching.
“People who introduced themselves as agents of the Jewish Department of the Shin Bet approached us and wanted to make sure that we were all being good children,” one community leader told Makor Rishon last Friday. He cited a Shin Bet representative who explained that “they are working very hard to be prepared for next time, in every sense of the word.”
Good to know. Perhaps not confiscating defensive weapons from local Jews would be a fitting sense of the word.
A security man in one mixed city in central Israel told Makor Rishon said that the very convening of the meeting for intelligence purposes outraged him: “In a proper reality, I would expect the Shin Bet coordinator to meet with the heads of the Jewish community ahead of Ramadan to present to them the threats and assessment and see how the community can be prepared, and not to prevent alleged illegal activity on the part of the Jews.”
“It’s annoying and insulting,” Keren Esh’har who works as a programmer in Lod and is a member of the Forum of Mixed Cities that’s affiliated with the group My Israel, told Makor Rishon. “I don’t understand how the system still operates on the notion that we are the attackers. They deserted us in our homes when hundreds of rioters roamed outside and it was a miracle they didn’t break in, so when did we become the source of danger?”
Esh’har recalled that after last May’s riots, the police wanted to confiscate the weapons of all the city’s Jews, but had a change of heart after a furious media campaign. According to her, the recent Shin Bet initiative is reminiscent of those confiscation attempts.
My Israel Chairwoman Sara Ha’etzni-Cohen also recalled how the security forces and the police “abandoned the mixed cities: first, when the Shin Bet did not anticipate this entire event of May 2021, later, when the police failed to protect the lives of Jews, and then when the justice system abandoned the Jews, did not bring the rioters to justice and mitigates their punishment. Now, for the fourth time, the Jews, who were the victims in the mixed cities, are again being turned into the enemy.”
