Eyewitness Recounts Unparalleled Groundswell Of Hatred, Resentment In Israel

Eyewitness Recounts Unparalleled Groundswell of Hatred, Resentment in Israel

The unrest and chaos in Israeli cities, which was brought on by the flare-up on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, is like a tsunami of uncontrollable hatred, which is new even for Israel with its martial law experience, Avraam Abramov, who is currently in the Israeli city of Ramla, told Sputnik

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th May, 2021) The unrest and chaos in Israeli cities, which was brought on by the flare-up on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, is like a tsunami of uncontrollable hatred, which is new even for Israel with its martial law experience, Avraam Abramov, who is currently in the Israeli city of Ramla, told Sputnik.

Abramov, who himself lives in New York, got caught in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he came to the Israeli city of Ramla just days before the flareup to support his sick father while he is in the hospital. His family is closely connected to both the Arab and Jewish sides of the population and share a lot of the common experiences.

Abramov's niece is a coordinator at Staff headquarters during wartime and can be called on duty anytime, anywhere the headquarters are located � including Gaza. His sister, on the other hand, works in the only pharmacy in an Arab neighborhood that serves cancer patients and has been dutifully giving daily shots to those who need them despite continued shelling.�

However, this time Abramov's stay with his family is very different from anything he has experienced before. While there have always been disagreements and tensions, especially in mixed cities, the country has never seen the conflict on such a scale in what he described as a "tsunami of incomprehensible revenge that captures everyone," he stressed.

Groups of young people, many of whom appeared to be teenagers, readily engage in banditry, violent extremism and vandalism, Abramov said.

"It is a fact that Arab teenagers set all the cars � of both Arab and Jewish owners � on fire. They smashed the kiosks, the owners of which were both Arabs and Jews. The way this kind of energy is released is uncontrollable," he noted.

The tensions on the border of Israel and Palestine's Gaza Strip rose in the evening of May 10. On Sunday evening, the IDF reported that some 3,100 rockets had been launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Home Front Command said 10 people were killed, about 50 seriously injured and hundreds sustained various injuries in Israel during the hostilities. Israel retaliated by launching hundreds of air strikes on the Gaza Strip, causing deaths of nearly 200 Palestinians, including 58 children, and injuring more than 1,300 people.

VIOLENCE IN ISRAELI CITIES 'ORCHESTRATED'

According to Abramov, most attacks and acts of vandalism are carried out by young Arab men, believed to be teenagers, and are most likely choreographed through social media by persons who "covertly control them and constantly pull the strings."

"Everyone says Hamas, but it's easy to say Hamas or Hezbollah. I think that thanks to all the social networks and the ability to instantly connect and collect groups, someone is doing this very carefully, more subtly than any terrorist organization. While I do not like conspiracy theories, but everything this is suspiciously too spontaneous," he speculated.

Abramov explained that such "gangs" began to beat passers-by and break shop windows just overnight in all Israeli cities. This, in turn, triggered counter attacks from the Jewish community, perpetuating the cycle of violence.

A good example of that was an incident with a bus with Jewish ultra-Orthodox Jews that was stopped in the city of Lod a couple of days ago.

"They frankly said that they came to Lod, an Arab city with an Arab Jewish population, to defend the small Jewish population from Arab pogroms. They came from different Israeli cities, but you have to understand that such a defense is also an attack, that is, they would also beat these Arab teenagers. Maybe they would stand near the houses that the Arabs want to smash, but their very appearance, their very presence in the Arab city would provoke violence and protest. The police detained them, they were not allowed into the city," Abramov noted.

Another example is the incident in Jaffa, where the police stopped a group of young extremist Arabs that were making plans on social media to go to Bat Yam to destroy Jewish businesses in response to an attack on a famous Arab ice cream shop in the neighborhood and the beating of an Arab passerby a day prior.

"They were smashing windows and everything. My sister lives in the house behind it, and she is still shocked. And exactly, that crowd pulled out the Arab driver and started beating him. He was miraculously saved by an Arab photographer who stopped the crowd for several seconds and he could survive and was taken to the hospital. It turned out that this Arab guy is a teacher, and when the riots started, he went after his students to pick them up and take them home," he recalled.

Abramov explained further that the same mechanism is used to incite such events all over Israel.

"First, there is a call on social media. Then, people gather and move somewhere, and naturally they provoke resistance from the opposite side, both from the Jewish and from the Arab," he explained. "This is all just barbarism, a sense of permissiveness, and a sense of anarchy. It's absolutely out of control."

Abramov also noted that while the law enforcement is trying to do its best, the police is very liberal and for them any person is, first of all, a person, regardless of nationality.

PEOPLE FEAR THE UNKNOWN MORE THAN ROCKETS

Abramov pointed out that there is no panic in the country, however, people are very concerned about the uncertainty and the unknown. He noted that people follow the advice given on tv and social networks, and stay home when possible to avoid unnecessary escalation. Though, he said, there were no official recommendations for people to stay home or close their businesses.

"In the evening you can see that everything is empty, quickly. The people generally quite obediently carry out all this, they do not go out into the street unnecessarily. But there is no such thing as in New York, like boarding up shops," he reminisced about his time in the US during the BLM protests.

However, according to Abramov, such behavior is not something new as everyone in the country is always ready and the whole of Israel "can be mobilized within 30 minutes, everything is in place, everyone knows how to act and everything is absolutely working." The issue now is that there is no clear enemy.

"But the people do not know who to fight against. They stop cars on the street, take out the drivers and beat them up. What does the army have to do with it? What can the army do about it? There are police posts, but the police are not the army, and the police do not have the rights that the army has. But the army cannot fight its own population. It's a strange situation when people don't know what to do," he stated.

Despite their limited abilities, the police try to monitor and control the situation by deploying helicopters and drones, Abramov added.

He stressed that every person in the country follows the news non-stop, which, in his opinion, are rather pessimistic. When asked about what people are most scared of now, rockets or young hooligans, Abramov retorted, "the unknown."

IRON DOME PROTECTS FROM ROCKETS, BUT NOT DEBRIS

Talking about increased rocket attacks, Abramov said that the Iron Dome is, indeed, effective and people are mostly hit by the debris from the intercepted rockets. According to him, there are two kinds of rockets being fired � empty and filled with chemicals.

"The day before, one rocket fell not far from my sister's house, thank God, it fell into a wasteland, because the rocket was filled. It burnt for several hours. The Iron Dome ratio is phenomenal, it's like 93-94 percent effective. Shards are falling. People mostly suffer from shrapnel. If there is no direct hit, they ask not to be on the street at this time, to go at least inside somewhere or to an elevator shaft, not to be near the window, because fragments are falling, breaking through," he said.

He added that, of course, people feel panic that a rocket may fall, but there is very little actual chance of that.

In the end, as Abramov said, both sides "understand that it's all wrong, and ... look forward to an end of the conflict, because it's in no one's interests."