Advertisement

Israeli Arabs Face Decision

Share
Times Staff Writer

Nobody tells Avraham Ouda where he can and can’t live. Five generations of his family have called this seaside city home, and Ouda has no intention of breaking the chain.

So on Thursday morning, Ouda, 71, puttered around his fruit shop, puffed on a cigarette and poured scorn on an appeal by a fellow Arab. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah had called on Arabs to flee this city in northern Israel or risk being hit by rockets fired by the Shiite Muslim militia from across the Lebanese border.

“I was born here and my father was born here and my grandfather was born here. My destiny is in Haifa, and if it’s my day to go, it’s my day to go,” Ouda said with a philosophical wave of smoke from his stubby cigarette. “I’m happy to stay.”

Advertisement

Dalia Sheety is staying too, but she’s not so happy about it. If she could, she would quit her job at a local hospital, bid goodbye to her family’s deli where she helps out and move to southern Israel, far away from the Katyusha rockets raining down death and destruction.

“I don’t want to die. I’m very young -- I have a lot of plans,” said Sheety, 35, a radiology technician.

Members of Haifa’s small but historic Arab community awoke to a new reality Thursday, a day after Nasrallah urged them to remove themselves from harm’s way as fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah stretched into a fifth week.

“To the Arab inhabitants of Haifa, I am very sad, but I’m telling you, please leave your city ... because you will relieve us from being hesitant to hit Haifa,” he said in a televised address in Lebanon.

Those who ignored the warning expressed fear and defiance. But there were others, unnerved by the threat of a surge in rocket attacks, who packed up and sought shelter with friends and relatives elsewhere.

Although Haifa has not been hit by as large a barrage as towns along the Israeli-Lebanese border, more people have been killed by rocket strikes on this densely populated city -- Israel’s third-largest -- than in any other place. When sirens wail, which happens several times a day, residents disappear into bunkers and “safe rooms,” motorists stop their cars in the middle of the street and run for cover, and an eerie silence descends while everyone counts down 90 seconds to see if anything hits.

Advertisement

The last fatal strike was Sunday, when rockets slammed into seven residential locations in the city. The impact killed three people, and a fourth person died of fright. Two of the dead were Israeli Arabs, neighbors linked by marriage who lived in a crowded but charming warren of honey-colored limestone buildings where poets, writers and intellectuals used to hold salons.

Israel’s Arab minority has borne a disproportionate number of the country’s civilian deaths in the war. Although they make up just 20% of the population, Israeli Arabs account for 41% of those killed, or 17 out of 41 people.

Many live in the north, within range of Hezbollah rockets, in cities such as Haifa and Nazareth or villages such as Deir al Assad, where rocket fire killed two more Israeli Arabs on Thursday: a woman and her 5-year-old son. A second son, even younger, was seriously wounded.

“Hezbollah means ‘Party of God.’ If he believes he’s the party of God, I’d tell him he’s mistaken,” Diana Hajad, an Arab Christian in Haifa, said of Nasrallah. “God hates killing.”

Although Hajad, a fishmonger, feels a stab of fear every time the sirens sound, she shrugged off Nasrallah’s warning to Haifa’s Arabs in the same dismissive manner in which she wiped her hands on her apron. “He’s insulting people’s intelligence. He knows that this is a mixed population here.”

A city perched high above the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea, Haifa prides itself on being a symbol of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs, beginning decades before Israel achieved statehood in 1948. After the country’s founding, many Arabs stayed on in Haifa and became Israeli citizens.

Advertisement

Like their counterparts elsewhere in Israel, those of Arab descent here feel torn whenever violence erupts between their fellow Israelis and their fellow Arabs, whether they are Palestinians, Lebanese or others. But mindful of their minority status in a country where some Jewish residents consider their community a potential fifth column, the Arabs in Haifa have been careful to apportion blame in the present war to both sides, the Israeli government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the Hezbollah leadership.

“I blame both sides for bombing civilians,” said shopkeeper Abu Mohammed Osman, 47. “We bombard Lebanon, and they bombard us. We both kill Arabs.”

Nasrallah’s call to Arabs in Haifa to leave was a piece of “psychological warfare,” Osman said, designed to put pressure on Olmert’s government to accept a cease-fire or face a flood of internal refugees abandoning northern Israel and moving to the south.

Still, some of Osman’s friends panicked after the warning and decided to quit the city, at least temporarily. Sheety, the radiology technician, has sisters who are frantically searching for accommodations elsewhere.

Hajad said that many families on her street had packed up and left. She was getting ready to bundle off her mother and her son Thursday for the day, if not longer, when the siren went off around noon. She quickly pressed her young son against an interior wall of her seafood store until the danger had passed and they could leave.

Then she got ready to go back to work.

“You have to be careful,” Hajad said, “but you don’t have to run away.”

Advertisement