In the Wake of Akko Riots, Mixed Cities Compel Attention

Washington, DC.    With several days of internecine violence in Akko focusing Israeli attention on the Jewish-Arab mixed cities, the underlying issues in Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle and Lod deserve closer attention. Years of inequity and neglect have resulted in increasingly polarized relationships in these cities where “separate-and-unequal” is the reality for thousands of Israeli Arab citizens.

“The mixed cities are the front line of the battle for real equality in Israel,” said New Israel Fund CEO Larry Garber. “In housing, in education, in infrastructure and in basic civil rights, Israel’s promise of equal rights for all its citizens is a promise that has not been kept.  The Akko violence is the all-too-predictable outcome of conditions in which underprivileged Jewish communities and even poorer Arab communities need little incentive to demonize and victimize each other.”

In response to the current violence, NIF is calling upon the Israeli Government to “immediately proclaim a project of national importance in all the country’s mixed cities to consolidate Jewish-Arab communities to live together in equality and mutual respect.”  Specifically, the Government should seek to eliminate the blatant gaps in matters relating to urban, social and community infrastructures, should ensure that all neighborhoods are part of an urban master plan, and should place a moratorium on the demolition of homes in these cities. 

These steps would reinforce the efforts that the New Israel Fund, through its action arm SHATIL, began in 2003 with the establishment of the Mixed Cities Project. Working with both Arab and Jewish residents, the program strives to promote equal rights in housing, infrastructure and urban planning. To date, neighborhood residential forums for promoting housing and education rights have had contributed to the preservation of the  historic old cities of Akko, Lod and Ramle and to the provision of basic services in several previously unrecognized neighborhoods.  

Last year, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot chose architect Buthayna Dabit, the head of the Mixed Cities Project, as one of five people who most influenced the Ramle-Lod region in 2007.  The project often draws national attention; it was in the context of the project’s request to the former mayor of Ramle that street names in Arab neighborhoods reflect Arab history that the mayor made headlines with racist rants against his constituents. (http://www.nif.org/media-center/newsletters/enews-clips/ramle-protest-shatil-and.html.) In September 2004 SHATIL brought Jewish and Arab Israeli musicians together for a unique week-long concert tour of the mixed cities, drawing large and enthusiastic audiences (http://www.nif.org/media-center/multimedia/videos/on-the-road-to-existence.html.)  And day in and day out, SHATIL’s activists on the ground train community representatives to bring their own case to their neighbors and to municipal governments.

For more information and photographs, visit the SHATIL Mixed Cities report at http://www.shatil.org.il/files/mixed_cities_english.pdf.  For more background on the Mixed Cities, or to interview a SHATIL official involved with the program, please contact Naomi Paiss at 202-513-7824 or Shimon Malka at  (011 972) 73-244-5100, extension 5170.
 

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