Jews and Arabs Join Forces to Help War Victims and Prevent Riots
By Netta Ahituv and Nadin Abou Laban
Haaretz
October 12, 2023
"'On Sunday, the second day of the war, we saw that there was enormous chaos and realized we must do something,' said Sleman Shlebe, a Bedouin resident of the northern Negev, who in a short time recruited some 600 volunteers… who arrived with their ATVs and created emergency teams to search for missing Israelis.
"'We had heard about people missing from both the Arab and Jewish communities, and knew that thanks to our exceptional familiarity with the south we could help,' he said. 'We divided ourselves up in the cars so that there would be people responsible for different things: gathering information, rescuing and administering first aid.' …
"Shlebe lives in Bir Hadaj, an agricultural Bedouin village that was officially recognized by the state in 2003. But most of the volunteers joining the search and rescue effort live in non-recognized villages in the desert, along Highway 40, where no air-raid sirens can be heard and there are no bomb shelters. Some of their villages don’t even have proper schools.
"'Many of us feel that the state has abandoned us, but we haven’t abandoned it,' said Shlebe…
Social activist Amal Abo Alkom, who among other things serves as director of the Bedouin Women for Themselves NGO in Segev Shalom, also refused to stand by and do nothing after the war erupted. She launched a command center to assist local Bedouin and Jews in distress…
On Saturday evening, a message was sent to members of a host of activist WhatsApp groups about the establishment of a joint Arab-Jewish civil guard in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Its goal: to protect local residents, regardless of religion or ethnic background, should clashes erupt among them. Within hours, some 1,000 people joined the guard’s new WhatsApp group…
The Arab-Jewish group in Jaffa could take a page from the book of a similar partnership, between the communities of Carmel and Fureidis, south of Haifa. Arabs and Jews there joined an initiative, called Neighbors at Peace, 'with the understanding that we cannot prevent violence alone, only together,' according to Boaz Peled, one of the founders. The group holds frequent events, conferences and outings in an effort to foment honest and open dialogue between the locales…
Palestinian activist Sally Abed, one of the founders of Rov Ha’ir (Most of the City), a Jewish-Arab social movement that is running for the municipal council, decided to harness the collective mourning and anxiety: 'I’m drained,' she admitted. 'What’s going on is challenging everything that I thought, it shakes things up in the deepest personal and political way. We [already] had a big organization of Arabs and Jews in Haifa, and it was clear to us that we could ‘convert’ it into activity at this moment. We decided what would be the biggest act of solidarity that we could undertake that would not involve political dialogue, because it’s not the time for talk, but for deeds…'"
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