Fida Shehada is a member of the city council of Lod, a city of around 84,000 residents, perhaps 30 percent of whom are Arab citizens of Israel.
And Ms. Shehada, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is, to say the least, fearful of what might now come after Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians. “Everyone is in great distress,” she said. “The fear of a huge revenge is great.”
In Lod, which is south of Tel Aviv, Jews and Arabs often lived in the same building, she said, but now Arabs are reluctant to go to the bomb shelters. “They say they see hatred in the eyes of Jews,” Ms. Shehada said. “They say they see hate, but I think what they really see is grief and fear.”
Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom want to be identified as Palestinians, make up around 18 percent of the population. For years they have been caught between their loyalty to the state and their desire for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the creation of an independent Palestine and a better life for themselves.
Now, after this unprecedented killing of Israelis in Israel and an angry Israeli Jewish population clamoring for revenge, normal tensions have increased to an almost unbearable level.
Arab leaders in Israel, such as Mansour Abbas and Ayman Odeh, both members of the Knesset, have strongly condemned the actions of Hamas, the Palestinian faction that carried out the attack on Israel, and called for calm.
But people are torn in their feelings, Ms. Shehada said, and so they tend to hide them. Young Arabs are initially proud of the resistance of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, she said. “The first moment the people of Gaza invaded Israel, people were happy and felt that someone was doing something about the situation.”
But that pride quickly faded, she said. “That was before we saw all the images of carnage, kidnapping and rape,” Ms. Shehada said. “This is not a legitimate form of fighting.”
In May 2021, during another Israeli-Palestinian crisis, riots and mutual hatred between Jewish and Muslim communities broke out in Lod. Ms. Shehada, 40, says she was attacked in her own home by Jews who threw stones.
Israeli police arrested an Israeli Arab man during unrest and communal violence in Lod in 2021. Photo credit: Dan Balilty for The New York Times
Even in more normal times, Lod has deep-rooted problems with poverty and crime, as Arab criminal organizations operate without interference from Israeli police, people here say. Even local government is largely segregated, with separate Arab and Jewish departments within departments.
Responsibility for the police falls to Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power Party, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government. Mr. Ben-Gvir, who has supported settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, has also heightened tensions with Israel’s Arab population.
He has spoken of “storming” the grounds of the Aqsa Mosque, one of the Muslim world’s holiest sites, and in late July he led more than 1,000 ultranationalist settlers to the site, infuriating Muslims and Hamas prompted her to fight to defend Al Aqsa.
Mr. Ben-Gvir spoke this week of renewed Arab-Israeli violence in cities like Lod and ordered police to prepare for unrest that Ms. Shehada and others see as a dangerous provocation.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and leader of the ultranationalist Jewish Power Party, in Jerusalem last year. Photo credit: Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York Times
Mohammad Magadli, one of Israel’s best-known Arab journalists, is more optimistic. He sees that the shock of the past week brings with it a kind of stunned calm. Unlike in 2021, Arab and Jewish societies in mixed cities “are more aware of each other’s pain and can understand how destructive the consequences can be if they do not take each other’s feelings into account.”
“There is greater responsibility between the two societies,” Mr. Magadli said, “even among the leaders who from the beginning called for calming the situation.”
Ms. Shehada said her aunt was currently visiting Gaza and could not leave. Buildings on either side of where they lived had already been bombed, Ms. Shehada said, then paused, sighed and said: “I don’t think they will survive this war.”
In Ramla, a similarly mixed city nearby, the sprawling market that is usually overflowing with local vegetables and fruits was almost empty and an unusual wariness was in the air, said Mousa Mousa, 23, an Israeli Arab in a Hebrew T-shirt advertising his juice stand. “I don’t sleep,” he said. “I am afraid of the reaction of the villagers on the street to what Hamas has done.”
The market was a mix of Arabs and Jews, he said, “but the feeling is different now.”
“I feel a hostility from the people here – they don’t smile like they used to,” Mr Mousa said. “I try to keep my head up.”
He said he had contempt for the politicians who fomented hatred in every community. “They thrive on division,” Mr. Mousa said bitterly. “That is the basis of politics.”
What Hamas did profoundly changed life here, he said. “I don’t think there’s any way back,” he added. “People will no longer be the same as they were.”
The Ramla market last year. Photo credit: Amit Elkayam for The New York Times
There is also palpable tension and a more visible Israeli police presence in East Jerusalem, near the unusually empty Old City.
In normal times, they tend to stop and check out young Arab men every now and then. But Adham, 19, says he is now stopped three times while making the short walk from his father’s shop near the Damascus Gate to their home in the Old City. Each time he is asked to show his ID, lift up his shirt and pull down his pants. His father asked that her last name be kept secret out of fear for her safety in the current environment.
Adham said he admired Hamas’ boldness. “Yes, they represent the Palestinians,” he said. “They are the only ones protecting the Palestinians.”
Like many young men here, he has little respect for Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. “In our eyes, he is a traitor” because he cooperates with Israel, Adham said, particularly on security in the occupied West Bank.
Unlike the Arabs in Ramla or Lod, who are part of Israeli society, most Palestinians in East Jerusalem are not Israeli citizens and feel less torn between loyalties. When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it made Palestinians there legal residents but not citizens.
Many shops were closed on Wednesday in a commercial alley in the Old City of Jerusalem.Credit: Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse – Getty Images
Mahmoud Muna runs one of Jerusalem’s best bookstores, offering something for everyone. He identifies as a Palestinian from Jerusalem and supports a unitary state based on democracy and equality. He sees people like him as potential role models for another integrated state.
But now, he said, there is an unusually high level of “tension, anxiety, anger, confusion and fear that has grown among Palestinians, and I feel it myself.”
Police presence has been increased in and around East Jerusalem, and Mr. Muna himself has been stopped twice for checks in the last five days, always moments that can raise tensions. “Being over 40 helps you keep a cool head,” he said.
Are the Palestinians in Israel in a bind? He paused and then said, “We’re always in between.”
Friends who go to work in West Jerusalem tell him that “everyone is stressed and angry, but everyone is pretending to grimace.” People say banalities like “it’s crazy” or “it’s difficult” or “I can’t understand it,” Mr Muna said, adding: “That’s because you don’t have to say your opinion, but not saying anything is also unacceptable.”
Moments like this are also clarifying, he said: “It’s a good time to see things we don’t normally see,” such as the absence of acquaintances who were called up to the army as reservists.
“Palestinians are reminded of the extent to which Israeli society is militarized,” he said. “The ones you ate with yesterday are now at the front, and what are they doing now?”
This week summed up the entire conflict, Mr Muna said. “The high level of nationalism of us and them cannot be higher than it is now,” he said. “Resistance becomes terrorism and vice versa, and us and them, and civilians and army – all these terms are suddenly in opposition.” One side speaks of a new Holocaust, the other of a new Nakba or catastrophe, like the Palestinians their mass expulsion and expropriation during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
“This is the gravity of the moment,” Mr. Muna said, “like shrinking the entire last 100 years into a week.”
Natan Odenheimer contributed reporting.