Human Rights Watch issued a report on the riots in Lod in May, accusing Israel of “abusive policing” against Arabs and of treating Jewish attackers with more deference than Arabs.
“Israeli authorities responded to the May events in Lod by forcibly dispersing Palestinians protesting peacefully, while using inflammatory rhetoric and failing to act even-handedly as Jewish ultra-nationalists attacked Palestinians,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “This apparent discriminatory response underscores the reality that the Israeli state apparatus privileges Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians, wherever they live and irrespective of their legal status.”
As always with HRW, the conclusions were reached before any research was done. (Shakir made a career of being anti-Israel before he was hired by HRW.) The bias is clear with HRW referring to Arab Israelis as Palestinians, a term that most of them do not use.
In this case, this isn’t even anti-Israel bias. The main responses to the Arab rioting were from local authorities, not the Israeli government. It is anti-Jewish bias.
A good indication of HRW’s hate for Jews comes in its background information:
Lod, a mixed Jewish and Palestinian city in central Israel, has experienced the rising influence of an ultra-nationalist group, the Garin Torani, which has sought to promote the city’s Jewish identity amid longstanding discrimination against the country’s Palestinian citizens. In 2013, an alleged Garin Torani sympathizer, Yair Revivo of the Likud Party, was elected mayor and has served continuously since then.
Garin Torani is not a violent group. They work to strengthen the Jewish communities in mixed cities but they serve Arab residents as well. They have been in Lod for decades without causing any clashes with Arabs. They opened up a community center for all, and it includes help for people with special needs – Jew and Arab.
But HRW’s link to Garin Torani is not to its webpage or Wikipedia page. No, it is to a Haaretz article that takes as a given that Garin Torani is a racist, anti-Arab group and then uses that as a springboard to say that all of Zionism is “arrogant, insensitive, condescending and blinded by racist ideology.”
That by itself shows that HRW is not interested in facts but in using the May events as a springboard to push its antisemitic agenda.
Here is how HRW describes the events of the Monday night of May 10:
Around 9:30 p.m. on May 10, a group of Palestinian residents of Lod organized a protest outside the al-Omari mosque against the anticipated takeover of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Two civil society lawyers and a city council member said that the police had approved the protest following requests made around noon. Witnesses said that protesters demonstrated peacefully when police used teargas, rubber bullets, and a stun grenade to disperse the crowd after a protester replaced an Israeli flag on an electric pole with a Palestinian one.
The link to the words “demonstrated peacefully” shows a person putting up the Palestinian flag while the crowd chants. However, you can see that members of this “peaceful protest” had set a large fire; the flames and smoke is seen behind him.
Maybe setting fires is considered “peaceful protest” to HRW, but it seems pretty violent to me. And it is consistent with the chanting you can hear, “We will liberate Al Aqsa with blood and fire.”
HRW continues to soft-pedal Arab violence in Lod:
Later that night, some Palestinian demonstrators set trash cans, cars, and tires alight near the al-Omari mosque and tensions flared in other parts of the city.
That is their entire description of Arab violence that night.
Compare with Times of Israel:
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| Jewish religious items store trashed |
The violent protest, during which Arab participants raised Palestinian and Hamas flags, called to “liberate Palestine,” and attacked a school, a synagogue, a pre-army military academy and city hall, according to Israel Radio, was one of several large demonstrations in Arab communities.“It was like Kristallnacht… in a city in central Israel,” a local Jewish resident, Hadar Miller, told Army Radio on Tuesday. She said she and her family have lived in Lod for 12 years and were “proud of the co-existence” in the Jewish-Arab city. But the situation had been deteriorating for months, “and yesterday all the lines were crossed… Now a friend of mine is in detention for defending himself.”The mob of local Arab residents also attacked medical staff at Assaf Harofeh, Israel Radio reported, targeting Arab medical staff and castigating them for working there. Medical staff had to evacuate some patients to keep them from the mob, the radio report said.Shlomo Lahyani, a local Jewish resident, said an Arab mob attacked a synagogue and a school, and threw slabs and rocks at Jewish locals during hours of rioting. “They came with murder in their eyes,” he told Israel Radio on Tuesday morning. “They called out, in Hebrew, ‘We are terrorists.’”He said locals Jews called the police, who did not come to the scene for over an hour. In the meantime, Jewish residents fired shots in the air to try to keep the Arab rioters at bay.
HRW purposefully omits the context of Jewish residents in fear for their lives, and of police not protecting them.
Throughout the week of violence, the bulk of the violence was done by Arabs. Several synagogues were torched along with Jewish-owned shops.
All of this happened in the context of Hamas firing thousands of rockets at Israel and of Arabs attacking Jews in other mixed cities. HRW doesn’t mention that the Arab rioters were chanting pro-Hamas slogans, and as such could be seen as a fifth column during a war that HRW barely mentions (except to say that Israel committed human rights violations!)
HRW ignores all of this context. While it is logical that police would spend more effort going after the group that was responsible for the majority of the rioting, HRW positions it as a “both sides” story. The “human rights group” even is angry at the Lod mayor’s characterization of the attacks on Jewish-owned shops and synagogues as being like Kristallnacht, saying “This statement was neither accurate nor balanced, given that both Jews and Palestinians were attacking one another.“
The Arabs were attacking. The Jews of Lod were largely defending themselves.
Later, some more violent Jews did come from the outside into Lod and made things worse. On Thursday night, a Muslim cemetery was attacked (as another synagogue was torched.) Those attackers were not from Garin Torani, as HRW implies. The mayor tried to close off the city from outsiders coming in to stoke the flames. HRW doesn’t mention any of this.
As usual, HRW wrote the narrative first, and then did their “research” to confirm their bias, highlighting anything that seems to support their story and ignoring anything that contradicts it.
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