Working to Heal, in Israeli Town With a Deep Arab Wound
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Version 0 of 1. KAFR QASSEM, Israel — When Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s recently elected president, visited this predominantly Arab town northeast of Tel Aviv on Sunday, there were no Israeli flags lining the streets. There were only black flags, marking the 58th anniversary of a painful chapter in Israel’s history, the Kafr Qassem massacre. The presidential visit was the first to be timed for the annual commemoration of the events of Oct. 29, 1956, when Israeli border police officers shot dead 49 men, women and children as they returned from work in the fields, unwittingly breaking a curfew. Mr. Rivlin’s appearance highlighted his emerging agenda: Healing Jewish-Arab relations, denouncing racism in Israeli society and urging tolerance, equality and coexistence. It also underscored the rawness of the wounds and the enduring complexity of the relationship between the Israeli state and its Arab minority, whose 1.7 million members make up just over 20 percent of Israel’s population. “We belong to two nations whose dreams and aspirations to a great extent contradict each other,” Mr. Rivlin told an audience of local notables, survivors of the massacre and Arab and Jewish schoolchildren from Kafr Qassem and the nearby, mainly Jewish town of Herzliya. “We are not doomed to live together, but we are destined to live together — or instead, to fight one another until the end of time.” He said the state of Israel was “the national home of the Jewish people, who returned to their land after two millennia of exile,” but he added that “Israel will always be the homeland of the Arab population,” describing Israel’s Arab citizens as “not a marginal group in Israeli society” but as “flesh of our flesh in this land.” Shimon Peres, Mr. Rivlin’s predecessor in the largely ceremonial role of president, visited Kafr Qassem during a Muslim holiday in December 2007 and expressed regret over the massacre. But Mr. Rivlin’s gesture, and his focus on Arab civil rights, seemed more counterintuitive. Mr. Peres was a dovish figure of the political left, but Mr. Rivlin came from the conservative Likud party, and he opposes the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, he has called for a single state under Jewish sovereignty, but with equal rights for all. Mr. Rivlin took office in July in the highly charged atmosphere of the most recent war in Gaza, just after the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank and the retaliatory killing of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem. Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for a boycott of Arab businesses that took part in a protest strike in solidarity with Gaza. Arab citizens who posted comments on Facebook expressing sympathy with the Gazans or outrage over Israel’s actions were assailed in social media postings by Jewish extremists, who demanded that their Jewish employers fire them. Mr. Rivlin has spoken out against the increasingly ugly tone of public discourse in Israel. He raised eyebrows earlier this month when he used a speech to the Academy of Sciences and Humanities to criticize what he called an “epidemic” of violence and verbal abuse. “It is time to honestly admit that Israeli society is ill, and it is our duty to treat this disease,” he told the academy. In Kafr Qassem on Sunday, Mr. Rivlin spoke of “not uncommon manifestations of racism and arrogance on the part of Jews.” Israel “recognized the crime committed here, and rightly and justly has apologized for it,” Mr. Rivlin said of the 1956 massacre at the memorial ceremony. “I, too, am here today to say a terrible crime was done here. An illegal command, over which hangs a dark cloud, was given here.” Though his presence was welcomed, many people at the ceremony had come expecting to hear him go further. “The wound has not healed,” said Adel Badir, the mayor of Kafr Qassem. “In every corner of the village, people bow their heads. They remember and don’t forget. They are furious and they don’t forgive.” Mr. Badir said his people wanted the state of Israel to accept responsibility for the massacre — something the government has never done — and to recognize the victims as war dead. Instead, the families have received only the state compensation they would have gotten if the victims had died in workplace accidents. Ibrahim Sarsour, a resident of Kafr Qassem and a member of the Israeli Parliament, said that the Reuven Rivlin he had known over the years was “brave enough to think outside the Israeli box.” Still, he said, “We did not hear today the words we all wanted to hear.” Asked if he was satisfied with the president’s speech, a survivor of the massacre — Muhammad Abbas, 84, — said that “he did not apologize explicitly but we hope nevertheless things will change for the better.” Mr. Abbas recalled that he was at work in the fields on that day in 1956, as tensions surrounding the Suez Canal were flaring into war in the Sinai. Soldiers in two jeeps arrived in Kafr Qassem late in the afternoon and told the village leader that a curfew would be imposed at 5 p.m., he said, giving the villagers only 45 minutes’ notice. The border police officers were ordered to shoot to kill if anyone violated the curfew, but the villagers in the fields had no idea it had been imposed. As they began to return home, Mr. Abbas said, “I heard a lot of shooting.” He managed to get home safely by sneaking through orchards, but dozens of his neighbors could not. “They didn’t kill, they murdered,” he said of the officers. Eleven officers were put on trial on murder charges, and eight were convicted despite their defense that they were following orders. The court’s precedent-setting verdict said that soldiers and border police officers must refuse to follow a “patently illegal order” that carries a “black flag” of criminality. The convicted officers’ sentences were later reduced by presidential pardons and a special committee, and none served more than three and a half years in prison. Mr. Rivlin’s visit to Kafr Qassem on Sunday walked a careful line between recognizing the tragic events and accepting responsibility for them, a distinction that was discernible even in what he brought to lay at the marble monument to the 49 victims: not an official wreath, but a simple bunch of white flowers. |