In their manhunt for Nashat Milhem, the suspect in last Friday’s deadly Tel Aviv shooting, police have been raiding and searching the residences of Arab men and women who are students at Tel Aviv University. Several such reports have been made by students who are Hadash activists living in university dormitories or in apartments nearby the university.
Police conduct house-to-house searches for the suspect in a shooting that killed two people in central Tel Aviv, January 1, 2016. (Photo: Activestills)
The secretary the Hadash at Tel Aviv University, Hassan Masarwa, told +972’s Hebrew-language site that he knows of a significant number of such cases. Joint List chairman, MK Ayman Odeh (Hadash), responded that the raids and searches of Arab students’ residences at Tel Aviv University raise a number of difficult questions about the actions of both the police and the university. “The police are once again trampling on the rights of Arab citizens and threatening young students in contravention of every police and legal procedure,” Odeh said.
Two Jewish Israelis were killed and several others injured when an assailant opened fire in a bar in central Tel Aviv on Friday, January 1 at about 2:30 p.m. Police believe that 29-year-old Nesha’at Milhem, an Arab-Palestinian citizen of Israel from the village of Arara, carried out the attack and is still at large. “We will dramatically increase law enforcement services in the Arab sector,” Benjamin Netanyahu told the press on Sunday at the site of the shooting. “We will open new police stations, recruit more police officers, go into all the towns and demand from everyone loyalty to the laws of the state.” Netanyahu also accused the Palestinian minority of “incitement” and being gripped by “radical Islam,” calling on Arab members of the Knesset, to “clearly and unequivocally” denounce the deadly shooting in Tel Aviv. “I will not accept two nations within Israel: a lawful nation for all its citizens and a [separate] nation within a nation for some of its citizens, in pockets of lawlessness,” he said.
MK Yousef Jabareen (Hadash – Joint List), accused Netanyahu of continuing his campaign of de-legitimization of the Arab-Palestinian national minority in Israel. “This speech was full of incitement against the Arab community,” said Jabareen, arguing that the government has ignored gun violence within Israel’s Palestinian communities for years. “The government does nothing about killings in [Arab villages], but now that the same weapons are used against Jews, suddenly they declare harsh measures.”
Jafar Farah, director of the Haifa-based Moussawa (Equality) civil rights group, said that merely increasing law enforcement in Palestinian towns and villages ignores the root causes of violent incidents. “Netanyahu is exploiting the current opportunity to attack the entire community, as he has done for years,” said Farah. “More law enforcement is not the solution,” he said. “The solution is to deal with core issues from the occupation to systematic discrimination.” Farah said that half of Palestinian children in Israel live below the poverty line, while the community as a whole endures “discrimination in the job market, welfare services and access to education.”
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