For Intisar Hijazi, last Monday (7 October) began as usual, with her heading in to the school where she works as a counsellor. It ended with Hijazi in handcuffs, blindfolded and sitting in the back of a police car. The cause: she had earlier used TikTok’s “On this Day” feature to repost a year-old video of her dancing to the song “Good Times” by Chic. The subtext: that video had originally been uploaded on the morning of 7 October 2023.
It was part of an online trend from September 2023, and she uploaded the clip before she learned of the events of that day. In retrospect it was bad timing, but she was clearly not celebrating the attacks: few of her social media posts had any political content, and she made other posts mourning the Israeli victims of the Hamas massacre. Nonetheless, upon seeing the video a few days ago, the minister for national security Itamar Ben Gvir ordered her arrest. He later posted a photograph of her in the back of a police car stating he had “forwarded the video to the team for dealing with incitement” to terrorism, leading to Hijazi being “immediately arrested at her home”.
That Hijazi was blindfolded in this manner – an unnecessary measure, generally deployed for dangerous and violent criminals – was gratuitous and designed to humiliate. She was held for 72 hours, allegedly being left overnight in a police van at one point, before being released without charge. Far from being an isolated wrong, the case is part of a worrying trend. When people make inaccurate, anachronistic and lazy comparisons of Israel to apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow-era South in the US, a common riposte is that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have the same rights as anyone else, number among the judges on the Supreme Court and the MPs in the Knesset, and feature at the highest levels of medicine, law, academia and commerce.
All of this is true. But since 7 October, there has been increasing legal and extra-legal pressure on the Palestinian citizens of the country. A report to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee of the Knesset in February of this year found that 394 investigations of allegations of incitement to terrorism had been initiated since 7 October, compared with just 78 such investigations during the period 2018-22. In nearly all of these cases, those investigated were Arab Israelis.
The personal involvement of Ben Gvir in Hijazi’s case also reflects how the police force is becoming increasingly politicised. Ben Gvir had already been warned about this kind of behaviour in March 2023, when Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit chided him for interfering with the police, stating that Ben Gvir “must refrain from giving operative instructions, either directly or indirectly”. But he is not the only member of the government engaging in such behaviour. Recently, the minister of culture Miki Zohar ordered police in the coastal city of Jaffa to prevent the screening of a documentary film, Lyd, which uses archive footage to recount the seizure of the city of Lod and the dispossession of its Palestinian inhabitants during the war of 1948.
The liberal paper Haaretz reported that the police told Mahmoud Abu Arisha – manager of the Al-Saraya cinema – that the screening could not go ahead since he did not request permission to show the film. But since the film is not prohibited for distribution, no permission should be required. Abu Arisha added that the police told him to contact them for pre-approval of any film that will be screened in the future, and summoned him to come to a police station, without stating the reason why. Abu Arisha says that he refused, adding that, “We are not yet in a police state.”
In addition to legal pressure, the physical safety of Palestinian Israelis has also become more precarious. A few months ago, I heard shots from my balcony in Jaffa: there was a scuffle on the street below, between an off-duty police officer and a Palestinian Israeli. Apparently, they were arguing over a parking space, got into blows, and were separated by bystanders, at which point the cop drew his gun and fired ten shots into his fellow citizen, killing him instantly. This attracted media attention at the time, perhaps because the victim, Jacob Toukhy, worked at the US embassy. But that case has been long forgotten.
This is all illustrative of a general intensifying of martial culture in Israel. Already since 7 October, the incongruous and quintessentially Israeli sight of a young man or woman taking their assault rifle to a bar while they drink beer has become more frequent. Between 7 October and mid-November 2023, Israeli citizens filed more requests for gun permits than in the previous 20 years. When six Israelis were killed and ten wounded in a terrorist attack on Jerusalem Boulevard in Jaffa last month the assailants were shot dead by armed civilians.
In that case, the terrorists were not Arab Israelis – they were from the West Bank city of Hebron. But the situation in Jaffa and other “mixed cities”, where Jews and Arabs live side by side, has become ever-more tense. As I wrote almost a year ago, the most notable thing about the Palestinians of Jaffa since 7 October was how they had continued with daily life. This contrasts with May 2021, when the clearance of Arab families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem sparked vicious riots in Jaffa and other mixed cities. Mobs of Jewish and Arab Israelis beat each other in the streets, burned homes and looted businesses. There has been no repeat of these incidents yet, and hopefully this will remain the case.
Though the military manoeuvres of the past few weeks have rallied Israeli public opinion behind the war effort and focused international commentary on the potential for “reshaping the Middle East”, these tensions continue to simmer under the surface. The trauma of 7 October, combined with the most right-wing government in Israeli history, has increased the risks to Palestinian citizens – in terms of their liberty, livelihoods, and their lives.
[See also: A year after 7 October, what does it mean to be human now?]
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