Arab party leader in Israel: ‘The whole state is led by the mentality of violence and revenge’

Sami Abu Shehadeh’s office is located in Jaffa, a once-thriving Arab port city that is now a mixed Jewish-Arab neighbourhood in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv. A Palestinian citizen of Israel and former member of the Israeli parliament, Abu Shehadeh is the leader of Balad, a left-wing Arab party that advocates for the separation of religion and state in Israel.

A historian by training, he describes how in 1948 when the Israeli state was formed, more than 90 per cent of the Palestinians living in Jaffa, including his own relatives, were expelled along the Mediterranean coastline to Gaza. “All the [Arab] families in Jaffa, we are Israeli citizens and the state is killing our families in Gaza, it’s not that there are two separate nations, the people are mixed,” he says, referring to the military campaign that Israel launched on Gaza following Hamas’s bloody attack on 7th October.

During previous military operations that Israel has waged against Hamas, the militant Islamist organisation that has controlled Gaza since 2007, Arab citizens, who make up around a fifth of the Israeli population, have been allowed to hold anti-war demonstrations in Israel. “From the beginning of the war, we wanted to demonstrate against the bloodshed and bringing the civilian community into the vicious cycle of violence,” says Abu Shehada, who condemns the Hamas attack on the 7th of October and believes that violence against Palestinian civilians in Gaza should not be legitimised.

So far, several attempts by Arab Israeli leaders to organise protests against the military campaign in Gaza have been stymied by the Israeli authorities. After being denied permission to hold a public demonstration, members of Balad and Hadash, a left-wing mixed Arab-Jewish party, were then prevented from hosting a large meeting in a closed hall. According to Abu Shehadeh, the hall owner was informed by the Israeli authorities that his premises would be closed down for a month if he hosted the gathering.

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The Arab Israeli group then planned to hold an event that under Israeli law does not require a licence: a standing protest of less than 50 people that has no political speeches or loudspeakers. The invite-only protest was to be held in the centre of Nazareth, the largest Arab-majority city in Israel, and involved holding one sign with “stop the war” written in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Mohammad Barakeh, a former member of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, and chair of the umbrella organisation for Palestinian political movements in Israel, notified the police in Nazareth in advance that this exempted form of protest would be held on November 9th.

While driving to the protest, Barakeh was detained by Israeli police and questioned on suspicion of attempting “to organise a demonstration that is liable to lead to incitement and harm public peace, in violation of police directives”. Abu Shehadeh, along with other former Knesset members Haneen Zoabi and Mtanes Shehadeh and Balad’s director general, Yousef Tatur, were then informed by police at the site of the planned protest in Nazareth that they would not be allowed to hold the event. They were then physically accosted by some police officers, says Abu Shehadeh, who has a visual impairment – “I have a very serious problem with my eyes ... I didn’t not see where they were pushing me to.”

When the former parliamentarians questioned why the protest could not proceed, they were arrested on the same charge as Barakeh and subsequently detained in two police stations for more than six hours, in breach of Israeli law. At one police station, Abu Shehadeh describes how Zoabi, the only female member of their group, was taken to a separate room and subjected to a “violent” body search by a female police officer. The Israeli police did not respond to a request for comment.

Before speaking with The Irish Times at his office, Abu Shehadeh attended a meeting with European diplomats where he described his detention and attempts to hold peaceful demonstrations against the war. He says that many of the diplomats are unfamiliar with the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel – “part of the world doesn’t know about our existence at all”- and were adopting an Israeli narrative regarding the war.

Abu Shehada said the main question posed by EU diplomats was: “How would you offer to punish Hamas?” European countries including Britain, Germany and France are providing Israel with “blind support” and enabling the Israeli state to commit war crimes, while Ireland, in contrast, has applied “a human standard” in relation to the conflict, he says.

“The whole [Israeli] state is led by the mentality of violence and revenge,” says Abu Shehada, who frequently hears “hashmada”, the Hebrew term for extermination, used by Israeli politicians and media in relation to Gaza. “The human, rational voice that says ‘stop the war’ is the only not legitimate voice ... what kind of society is this?”

“In the end, this war will have to stop and the sooner, the better because there will be less casualties ... but the real catastrophe is not all those who have died,” he says. “It’s those who are alive and have to deal with the trauma of what they have seen.”