Thoughts on Akko

1. While religion (an Arab driving in a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur) was used to ignite the riots, it is really nationalism and inter-ethnic tension that caused it. Religion was a pretense.

2. Both Jews and Arabs have acted wrongly in this matter, since both have been involved in the fighting and destruction of people's property.

3. The reasons the Jews started the riot was because they were angered by the Arab driving in the Jewish neighborhood on shabbat. The thought that religious (or in this case, tradtional) Jews have the right to have no cars drive in their neighborhood in shabbat (or in this case, Yom Kippur) has slipped into the national culture from the charedim, who have their neighborhoods closed off to traffic on shabbat, and sometimes throw stones at cars that drive through those streets not closed to traffic. It has been aided by religious enclaves, such as Bney Brak, where the entire city is officially closed to traffic on shabbat, and even by more modern orthodox/religious nationalist yishuvim, where when one agrees to live in the yishuv, one agrees to not violate shabbat. (or at least, not violate shabbat in public) The police's arrest of the Arab man who drove through the neighborhood only reinforces the notion that the Jews have a right to have no one, not even a non-Jew, drive in their streets on sacred days.

Instead, the government should be reinforcing the idea that non-Jews and non-religious Jews do have the right to drive where they wish on shabbat and holidays, provided the street they drive on is not officially closed off to traffic. Should Jewish religious residents have a problem with this, the proper thing is to ask for the street to be closed off, not to throw stones at drivers. Throwing stones will not be tolerated. The arrest of the Arab driver is particularly discouraging because he did not brake a law by driving there, and he has apologized for doing so, and expressed a desire for coexistence.

4. This problem was caused by Israel's mistreatment both of Sefardi Jews and of Israeli Arabs. Sefardi Jews faced discrimination for a long time, and while this discrimination is diminishing, the fact is that many Sefardi Jews are on the lower end of the socioeonomic spectrum, and this is because climbing out of the hole dug by discrimination takes time, even after the discrimination has ended. (In this sense, they are somewhat similar to African-Americans, who faced discrimination until recently. Now, even though that discrimination has, for the most part, ended, and the number of African Americans in the middle and upper classes has been steadily  increasing for the past ten years, many African Americans still find themselves born into poorer homes or crime-ridden neighborhoods with bad schools as part of the lingering after-effects of 200 years of discrimination. For Sefardim, the era of discrimination is much shorter, but the concept is the same.)

Israeli Arabs, while equal under the law, still face much unofficial discrimination. No real effort has been made to absorb them into the Israeli economic system, and most are lower class. When two different lower class ethnic groups are put into a small area and forced to live together, it takes nothing but a small spark to ignite tensions between them. This can be seen from race riots in the US, which were usually between working class whites and working class blacks. Underlying the riots is the issue of economic competition when two groups of people are each lacking material wealth, with each group being jealous (at least subconciously) of the others' possessions.

Using racial and ethnic tensions is an excellent way for the capitalist enterprise to deflect proletariat hatred of the bourgeois onto fellow proletariats, who are defined as "the other", the enemy, based on ethnicity. This ethnic division distracts the proletariat from what they have in common: their working class lifestyle, and that they are both being unfairly used by the capitalist system. By disuniting the proletariat, the system ensures there is no proletariat revolution. This is not a conscious decision on behalf of the bourgeois elite, but a natural consequence of the capitalist system. In an era of material wealth, in which the proletariat is disconnected from his material possessions, never feeling the full right to them because he has been so divorced from their material production, (for producing something earns the right to said thing; man is meant to eat the fruits of his labor, and eating the fruits of someone else's labour, without offering something of one's own labor in return, goes against the natural order of things. Money is not a tangible fruit of ones own labour, but a poor substitute, a piece of paper certifying that one has worked - in the case of the bourgeios, this work is not physical and tangible, but intellectual and not physically substantive. Thus the feeling of ownership of ones labour, as well as the feeling of earning something for that labour, is obscured: the labour is not real, and the payoff is a piece of paper whose production one has no part in.) one focuses on other things to make life seem meaningful. These things can be as trivial as an aesthetic sensibility and philosophy of fashion, in which couture is transformed into high art. They can also be as spiritual as religion. This bourgeois value mutates as it trickles down to the proletariat, but it is nonetheless absorbed by them in some form. In the United States, where the upper class idolizes fashion, lower-class people have begun buying cheap "designer" clothing, like Isaac Mizrahi for Target, and name their children names such as "Gucci".

In this case, the unique political situation gave rise to a focus on ethnicity. This focus was exacerbated by an extremist religious nationalist yeshiva that opened recently. It distributed leaflets saying that Arabs are sons of dogs, and tried to boycott Arab businesses. That such a stream of thought is found among the religious nationalist camp is disturbing. In this case, given the close proximity of Jews and Arabs, it provided the match that would be lit by a car driving in a Jewish neighborhood on the Day of Atonement - an ironic day for a riot to start. A day that perhaps showed how much there is to atone for.

Sending police in might quell the riots, but in order to ensure similar riots don't happen in the future, whether in Akko or in other cities, is to absorb Sefardim, Arabs and other minorities into the economic framework, to help them to move up on the socioeconomic scale and to encourage them to go to university. Such a challenge is daunting, especially given the current economic climate - but in order to ensure peaceful coexistence, one must first ensurethe  sustainable, respectable existence of each group.