In the middle of Israel, 16 miles outside of Tel Aviv, sits the city of Lod (Lydda). One-third of its population of 77,000 is Arab; it has been a source of local pride that Arabs and Jews have gotten along so well, and that the Arabs have flourished. Starting with an Arab population of 1,600 in Lod in 1949, the Arabs now number 25,700, a colossal increase of more than 1500%. Obviously, living in Lod agrees with them.
But in recent days, Arab mobs in Lod have been roaming the city, attacking Jews, burning cars, throwing petrol bombs into Jewish homes and shops, setting three synagogues on fire..
A report on this grim spectacle is here: “‘Kristallnacht in Lod’: State of emergency as Arab mobs set synagogues on fire,” Times of Israel, May 12, 2021:
Intense Arab rioting broke out in the central Israeli city of Lod late Tuesday, with three synagogues and numerous shops reportedly set on fire, along with dozens of cars. The government declared a state of emergency in the Jewish-Arab city, and urgently dispatched several Border Police companies to work to restore order.
Some residents reported power was cut in their homes and petrol bombs were thrown through their windows, Channel 12 news said, and police acknowledged having to escort some residents from a community center to their homes as Arab mobs marauded in the streets. A local man, 56, was seriously hurt when hit by a slab on his car, and was hospitalized. Another local resident was seriously hurt.
Jewish shops were set on fire, three synagogues burned, gasoline bombs thrown into Jewish homes. It is a miracle that no one so far has burned to death, though several Jews have been seriously wounded by Arabs, and one Arab man was shot dead while attacking Jews. Meanwhile Arab mobs for two days and nights roamed the streets, looking for Jews and Jewish property to attack. Some Jews had to be escorted home by the police, for fear of what might happen to them at the hands of the maddened Muslim marauders.
The mayor, Yair Revivo, said City Hall and a local museum were also attacked, and compared the situation to the Nazis’ 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. “Civil war” is breaking out, he said, lamenting that decades of coexistence efforts had collapsed.
“Kristallnacht pogrom” is exactly the right description. In Lod, the Arab mobs have been attacking Jewish homes, Jewish shops, Jewish places of worship, just as the Nazis did on November 9-10, 1938, and hoping thereby to terrorize the Jews into psychological submission or, some might say, dhimmitude.
After Revivo appealed directly to the prime minister for urgent help, a state of emergency was declared in the city for the first time in decades, and large Border Police forces deployed to work to restore order. “Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu directed that lawbreakers be dealt with severely and that units on the ground be reinforced in order to restore quiet and order to the city forthwith,” a government statement said….
Footage posted on social media showed a torched synagogue and two Torah scrolls being salvaged — unharmed — from its ruins.
The rioting by Israeli Arabs in October 2000 did not include attempts to set fire, with petrol bombs, to Jewish homes and shops, nor were synagogues set on fire. In 2000, chanting Israeli Arabs protested all across the country, declared their solidarity with Palestinian terror groups, and when the protesters got completely out of hand and became rioting mobs intent on attacking Jews, 13 of the Arabs rioting throughout Israel were shot.
Arab violence erupted in numerous other cities across Israel, and there were also reports of Jewish revenge attacks, including in Lod, where a Muslim cemetery was set ablaze.
Setting a cemetery ablaze causes damage, but does no harm to anyone living; everyone in the cemetery is already dead. But the targets of the Arab mobs in Lod were very much alive and at risk of death – the Jewish shopkeepers in their shops that were set alight, the Jewish families in their homes, when petrol bombs were thrown through the windows, the Jews praying in synagogues where flames suddenly erupted. No Jews in Lod have attacked Arab-owned shops or houses, or mosques. The difference matters.
Attacks were reported on Jewish homes in Ramle, where cars were also stoned. In Acre, a restaurant and a hotel were set ablaze.
Roads were blocked in Umm al-Fahm, an Arab town. There were confrontations reported after midnight in Jaffa, where a car was overturned and set alight, and minor fights reported in Tel Aviv’s Habimah Square.
Throughout central Israel, the Arab attacks spread: in Ramle, right near Lod, more attacks on Jewish homes and cars; major fires consumed a restaurant and hotel. In the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, the locals blocked roads so that the forces of order – the Israeli police – would keep out. On the coast, in Jaffa, a car was set on fire and Arabs and Jews clashed, Even in the overwhelmingly Jewish Tel Aviv, fights broke out between Arabs and Jews in the very center, Habimah Square, of the city.
The surge in violence came hours after Hamas fired some 130 rockets at central Israel, and claimed “victory” in what its leader Ismail Haniyeh said was “the battle for Jerusalem.” Hamas later hailed Arab Israelis for joining the struggle against Israel.
The rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza emboldened the local Arabs, who now wanted to show that they could make common cause with Hamas in helping to “strike terror” at Israelis from within.
Lod resident Shiloh Fried told Channel 12: “Gangs of Arab youths are going street to street, burning stores, smashing windows… Jewish families are huddled at home, terrified of going out… Their cars are being set alight outside… Police are nowhere to be seen.”
Israel was supposed to be the Jewish National Home, a refuge for world Jewry. The Israelis are used to fighting for their survival against the armies of Arab states. They are used to fighting terror groups, too — Hamas, Hezbollah, PFLP, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But in Lod, many of the Arabs with whom they have lived side-by-side, among whom they had grown up, people whom they had allowed themselves to believe were reasonably content as citizens of Israel, with all the civil, religious, and political rights of Israeli Jews, suddenly turned on their Jewish neighbors. Within two days of the first Hamas rockets landing in southern Israel, and just a week after Arabs on the Temple Mount had started flinging rocks and Molotov cocktails at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall below, and at the Israeli police on the Temple Mount itself, and only a few weeks since Arabs had begun to attack Jews on the streets of Jerusalem, and to upload using the TikTok app videos of their attacks, to share them with other Arabs who they were sure would enjoy the spectacle, the Arabs of Lod went on a rampage.
There were reports that some residents were avoiding using public shelters during rocket sirens out of fear they would be attacked by mobs.
Some Jews in Lod were caught between the rockets fired at the city by Hamas in Gaza, and the Israeli Arabs, whose vicious fanatical frenzy worried them so much that they did not use public shelters lest they be “attacked by mobs” of hysterical Arabs.
Channel 12 also showed footage of Jewish residents of Lod hurling rocks at cars of Arab residents, though Fried said these incidents were minor ones compared to the scope of Arab rioting. An Arab resident was killed on Monday night amid violence, in what Jewish eyewitnesses said was self-defense against Arab assailants.
Having endured the violence of Arab mobs setting on fire Jewish shops, homes, cars, and synagogues, the Jews of Lod — many of whose parents were refugees from Arab lands – managed to get back in the only way they could, with what were apparently two or three incidents of rock-throwing at Arab cars (no one hurt as a result), an understandable reaction to being goaded beyond endurance by so much Arab mob violence.
Before the army was sent in, Lod Mayor Revivo had warned “this is too big for the police.”
“This is Kristallnacht in Lod,” Revivo said on Channel 12. “I have called on the prime minister to declare a state of emergency in Lod. To call in the IDF. To impose a curfew. To restore quiet… There is a failure of governance…This is a giant incident — an intifada of Arab Israelis. All the work we have done here for years [on coexistence] has gone down the drain.”
“All of Israel should know, this is a complete loss of control,” Revivo added, sounding desperate. “This is unthinkable. Synagogues are being burned. Hundreds of cars set alight. Hundreds of Arab thugs are roaming the streets… Civil war has erupted in Lod… The Orthodox-nationalist community here has guns. I’m imploring them to go back home but they understandably want to protect their homes. Molotov cocktails are being thrown into [Jewish] homes. The situation is incendiary.”
Reacting to the ongoing riots in Arab-Jewish cities across Israel, Meretz MK Isawi Frej said “anyone who calls themselves a public figure in Arab society must call for restoring calm.”
“I call on [the Joint List’s] Ahmad Tibi, Ayman Odeh along with Arab mayors: This is the test of your leadership. Don’t hide. Don’t only speak out during elections. It’s your job to go out and influence,” Frej said….
Frej, an Arab, called on Arab MKs and mayors to denounce the rioters and call for calm. So far he has gone unheeded. No other Arab leader has yet spoken out. That failure must certainly alarm Israeli Jews.
What must Israeli Jews be thinking when they confront the spectacle of those whom they thought of as their peaceful Arab neighbors, with whom they shared so much, suddenly allowing themselves to be whipped up enough to set fire, in Lod alone, to three synagogues, to destroy Jewish-owned shops, to firebomb Jewish-owned homes, and to attack at random Jews whom they came upon in the streets of Lod?
In his statement, Rivlin said he asked Younes “to do everything in his power to calm things down. The people of Israel, Jews and Arabs alike, must hear the Arab leadership sounding a clear and strident [si] voice against this wild violence, against damage to synagogues, against this wild behavior. The police will do all that is required to restore the peace. I ask for cooperation from the Arab leadership to restore calm and law and order to our streets.”
Rivlin’s cri de coeur for Israeli Arab leaders to speak out has still not, by the following week, been heeded. The Border Police have been called in to restore order in Lod, where the Arab mob violence has finally been suppressed. But the former trust between Arab and Jew in Lod, and in other mixed cities, too, have been broken by the Arab mobs that have been attacking, sometimes murderously, the Jews among whom they live and who have done nothing to deserve such treatment.
President Rivlin, normally so measured and soft-spoken in his remarks, said that “the sight of the pogrom in Lod and the disturbances across the country by an incited and bloodthirsty Arab mob… is unforgivable.” In a mixed city that prided itself on how Jews and Arabs got along. Too many Arabs suddenly turned on their Jewish neighbors, and became unhinged predators. The Jews of Israel, even those on the far left, will neither forgive nor forget what happened in Lod.
And nor, of course, should we.
Infidel says
Israel needs to seriously roll back the rights of muslims everywhere in Israel. That’s needed not just for Jews but Christians and others as well, so that, for example, muslims can’t bully Christians in Nazareth. Similarly in places like Lod and others, read muslims the riot act and warn them that they’d be deported to Gaza if they dare act up this way. Better yet, treat them like they are already Hamas militants and kill them: like Hamas, they too are engaged in a jihad.
Like I said yesterday, make it clear to Mahmoud Abbas that Israel’s retaliation won’t be limited to Hamas, if Abbas can’t or doesn’t rein Hamas in, and that he too would lose his status as a result of Israel re-expelling all Palis out of not just Gaza, but West Bank as well.
Oh, and give Comrades Ilhan and Rashida the ?
commonsense says
“Better yet, treat them like they are already Hamas militants and kill them: like Hamas, they too are engaged in a jihad.”
Agree wholeheartedly. Infidel.
Mauricio says
Infidel wrote:
“…so that, for example, muslims can’t bully Christians in Nazareth.”
Do you have any proof for this? Because reports I have gotten from the greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem express the opposite: that the Jews are the ones who spit on Christians, at least, out of the walls from the Old city of Jerusalem.
Infidel says
Yeah, years ago, I had read about it in the Jerusalem post – of Christians in Nazareth living in fear of, not Jews, but muslims
Mauricio says
Thanks anyways, Infidel.
gravenimage says
+1
gravenimage says
Muslims are opressing, driving out, and murdering Christians in the “Palestinian territories”. Israel is the only place in the region where Christians have equal rights.
Andalusia Christos says
This is behavior that is recommended in the Quran for Muslims to surely follow. Even if Israel DID NOT exist this would be Arab behavior because it is considered recommended by Muhammad in Sura 9:29. The West is too lazy to read the Bible much less the Quran so therefore this behavior shall INCREASE all the way up to Armageddon when the poop is really gonna hit the fan.
Walter Sieruk says
It happened again ! Islam drove those Muslims into the madness and evil of assaults ,vandalism and arson.
Such despicable violence are of the heinous fruits of Islam.
Jesus taught “By their fruits you will recognize them. Matthew 7:20. [N.I.V.]
David says
Muslims are a clear and present danger. Can people now see this?
born saturday says
beasts that worship the satan and commit his deeds upon the earth timelessly…. real animals of their satanic prophet with audacity of a thousant apes each….. their ugly faces depict their satanic souls… ruthless murderers that should have been canceled before birth….
commonsense says
How often throughout history and in myriad places throughout the globe have we heard of Muslims turning against their non-Muslim neighbors, murdering, raping, and destroying property? Muslim (and Arabized Christian) Jew-hatred always simmered just below the boiling point against Israeli Jews, held in check by fear of reprisals by the dominant Jewish authorities and the Jewish majority should the Muslims and their faux-Arab dhimmi Christians act on their hateful impulses. But it is now clear that this population was always a fifth column, needing only to be emboldened by a belief that Israel, under serious attack by what is probably the worst Muslim onslaught in many years, is now weak enough, even if only temporarily, to allow all restraint to be abandoned and give free rein to their blood lust against their Jewish neighbors. A lesson to be learned, yet again.
Boycott Turkey says
I thought the Arab Israelis co existed peacefully with Israelis until now I guess they where biding there time like islam instructs how many Arab Israelis are there in Israel? Maybe Israel should tell them to live in the West Bank or Gaza where the Palestinians are
Eva says
It’s not the west bank, it’s Judea and Samaria.
This proves totally that an arab is an arab is an arab, and a moslem is a moslem is a moslem, regardless of the lies they tell to fool the intentionally over-optimistic, the stupid, or the willfully blind and gullible.
They all need to go, or Israel and the Israelis will never be safe and peaceful.
GOLDMANN says
Eva ?? ?correct . and the correct name is Samaria Judea .NOT “west bank” ?
Infidel says
Eva and Goldmann
I’ve looked hard, but could never find an actual map demarcating Judea from Samaria. Can anyone indicate where one ends and the other begins?
Also, looking at the ancient Jewish kingdoms, the various regions – Judea, Samaria, Galilee, Negev – were they all the regions/states of the Israelites, or were there more?
Mr X says
Did the 1922 mandate for palestine got expired after the UN partition plan of 1947 or is it still valid?
Infidel says
Did the Arab conquest of Palestine invalidate the previous Byzantine rule there? Or at the other end, did the Ottoman conquest of Palestine invalidate Arab rule and claims?
In other words, what’s so sacred about 1922 or 1947?
gravenimage says
Note that the dishonest Mr X *still* will not say anything critical about Jihad terror.
jewdog says
It’s the same pattern as before ’48: Zionist investment creates economic prosperity which then attracts Muslims, who then find a pretext to attack Jews. Maybe learn a lesson and take preventative action next time. Do your own labor, Jews.
commonsense says
Exactly, jd.
Wellington says
I think it far less likely that what is now going on in Israel would be occurring if Trump were still President. With Biden, the bad guys of the world sense weakness and are acting accordingly. Another example is the highly elevated activity on our southern by the drug cartels and sex traffickers.
Biden oozes weakness and indecision. Asserting that Biden is a strong, dynamic leader doesn’t even pass the laugh test.
Wellington says
meant “….southern border….”
commonsense says
Damned right, Wellington.
Walter Sieruk says
Those horrendous actions are evil and malicious . To be yet more clear such despicable evil and malicious behavior are Islamic actions
gregbeetham says
Israeli Arab Muslims turn into hysterical street thugs and attack their Jewish benefactors after decades of living harmoniously side by side…gee, never saw that coming.
Are we learning yet Israel?
Get rid of all of your Muslims, toss em over any border out of Israel, who cares which one, just do it.
David says
Muslims are a ticking timebomb, wherever they live. They are both breeding and fighting.
Why has Israel allowed so many muslims to live in Israel? They must be too kind hearted. They have not read the Koran and seen the clear commands to: “Kill every Jew wherever you find them.”
They have even allowed muslims to be in the government, FFS! How many Jews in the government in Iran, or Turkey, or any muslim country? How many Jews live in Gaza? Answer: None! (I don’t think they would want to, anyway)
Crusades Were Right says
[Kristallnacht]
“Kristallnacht”, as far as I remember, was very much a one-way street in terms of victimhood in 1938 Germany. How many Germans, as opposed to Jews, died then? Indications are that the vast majority of the victims in the current Israel-Palestine violence are Arabs, not Jews.
Israel supplied Mohammedan Azerbaijan with sophisticated weapons which were used to slaughter thousands of Armenian Christians, resulting in their “ethnic cleansing” from much of Artsakh, part of the ancient Armenian homeland.
Israel fed the jihadi crocodile, and now it’s biting THEM.
What has Israel done to address the wrong done to the Armenians? Why should anyone in the Christian West give two hoots about an entity that assists Islamic terror against Christians in the region and then assumes “innocent victim” status when that terror is turned on THEM?
As far as I can see, this conflict is one between two forces, BOTH of which are hostile to Christendom. I see no friends or allies of the Christian West among the participants. MY sympathies chiefly lie with the ever-decreasing Christian population of the region. We should be focusing our attentions on rescuing THEM from the terror-mongers of WHATEVER hue who are a danger to their welfare and very existence.
Mauricio says
Armenians are not as godly as people think of them. Did you know that the Old city of Jerusalem is divided in 4 areas? One for Muslims, one for Jews, one for Christians and one for Armenians. Now, why are Christians and Armenians separated? Armenians have always strived to be independent and separated from the rest of the Christians and still would protect their own land in Israel as if they would deserve a part of the Holy land for their own. They think they are the big thing there. I think Israel acted fairly doing nothing to protect them.
Crusades Were Right says
@Mauricio:
Thanks for the info about the “godliness” of Armenians. Perhaps you can let me know about the “godliness” levels of all nations? I’ve often wondered about that. (In ascending or descending order. I’m not fussy.)
Also, good to know that Armenians and Christians are two different things. I’ve learnt something today. lol
“Doing nothing to protect them” is ONE thing…
…doing SOMETHING to harm them, quite another!
Mauricio says
@CWR
I should have probably posted in my previous comment the following thing you wrote:
“What has Israel done to address the wrong done to the Armenians? Why should anyone in the Christian West give two hoots about an entity that assists Islamic terror against Christians in the region and then assumes “innocent victim” status when that terror is turned on THEM?”
Because I was actually referring to this statement of yours.
I don’t think Israel should do anything regarding the Armenian conflict, I don’t think Israel at this moment is assuming “victim status” and I don’t think that selling or supplying arms to an Allie means that Israel is responsible for that war. If you think that way then the less godly country in your list would be the USA, since they are the ones who have supplied more arms to other countries, equaling, or very near to Russia.
gravenimage says
Israel *should* recognize the Armenian Genocide–but sadly few have doen so. Even the US did not do so for many decades.
The idea that one of our greatest allies deserves to fall victim to the horrors of Jihad terror is just sickening.
And Christians have full equal rights in Israel–that is not true of any of the Muslim nations in the Middle East.
gravenimage says
Kristallnacht In Israel: Muslim Mobs in Lod Attack Jews, Burn Cars, Set Synagogues On Fire
……………
Just terrifying. I had worried about when Muslims in Israel were going to reveal themselves as a full-blown Fifth Column.