Anti-Arab attacks 'on the rise' in Israel

Link

AFP/File – A picture taken from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan shows the Al-Aqsa (top R) and the Dome …

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Anti-Arab verbal and physical attacks inside Israel have spiked in the wake of elections held earlier this year in which right-wing parties made major gains, a human rights group said on Sunday.

The Mossawa Centre for the Rights of Arab Citizens in Israel has documented 250 incidents of aggression against Arab Israelis since the start of the year, compared to 166 in all of 2008, the group said in a report.

"The physical and verbal aggression has increased mainly in cities with mixed Arab-Jewish populations," the report said.

"The increase in incidents indicating anti-Arab racism is apparently related to the electoral campaign for the February 10 elections in which candidates played the anti-Arab card, almost giving a green light to aggression," Nidal Hotman, an attorney and spokesman for the group, told AFP.

He was referring mainly to the campaign of Avigdor Lieberman, a tough-talking immigrant from the former Soviet Union who has taken a hard line on Israeli Arabs and been called a "racist" and "fascist" by his critics.

The centerpiece of his campaign was the demand that all Israeli citizens take an oath of loyalty to the Jewish state, a policy derided as racist by many in the Arab Israeli community which makes up 20 percent of Israel's population.

Lieberman's party won 15 seats in the 120-member Israeli parliament, or Knesset, and prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu has tapped him to become the next foreign minister pending the formation of a new government.

Israel's 1.2 million Arab citizens are the descendants of the 160,000 Arabs who did not flee or were not driven out of what is now Israel during the 1948 war that followed the creation of the Jewish state.

Lieberman has said Arab population centres in Israel should be transferred to Palestinian control in a final peace settlement in exchange for Israel keeping the main Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank.