They arrived, hundreds of them, packed on buses, armed with axes, clubs, and knives. They ran through the streets breaking car windows, overturning cars, breaking into houses, threatening everyone, saying that all who entered the streets would be slaughtered. Throughout, the streets rang with the cries Itbach el Yahud and Allahu Akhbar.
If this event had taken place in France, the French ambassador would have received an urgent call to report to the Foreign Ministry to receive a formal complaint. If it had occurred in Germany, the chancellor would have apologized through all available media channels for this terrible attack. But it took place in our city, Acco, a mixed city - half them, half us. The police stood by and did nothing.
A short while later, a driver drove down the streets of our city on the holiest day of the year, a day when there are no cars on the streets. He turned up his radio as high as it would get. Our young men stopped his car, threw rocks at it, threatened him. Within minutes, the muezzins of the mosques spread the word that our young men had killed the driver, even though he returned home unharmed.
Moments later, hundreds of young men, packed on buses, arrived again, armed with knives and clubs and axes. They tore through our streets; the police stood by. The police did not even try to stop them.
So our young men then went to their streets. For several days they spread destruction, though everyone returned home unharmed. If their young men hoped that their attacks would lead to our exodus from our city to create a majority for them, this did not happen. Their young men knew the police, knew the police would not stop them. The police walk away. There are towns now and neighborhoods where the police no longer even go, ever, even when chasing murderers and thieves.
This time, though, faced with their violence, we answered with our violence. Their young men looked surprised by our violence. This time, our neighbors’ youths encountered our youths, who were not prepared to suffer the clubs and the knives and the axes any more.
Our land was born so that people would no longer be at the mercy of hatred anywhere; so that we would have a state of our own where we could protect our families, lives, our homes. But their young men are not respectful of our rights. They are not respectful of equal rights, even when they do not share equal obligations. The draft, for instance, does not apply to them. Many western states now recognize the right of our neighbors to establish an independent state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. They even accept a racist policy declaring that we would not be allowed to live in such a state. But our neighbors are not satisfied with twenty-two countries of their own, or that Jordan is also a place for them* . Nor are our neighbors satisfied to establish another state for themselves in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. They demand that our state no longer be our state, a Jewish state, even though they have so many states of their own. They demand that our state be a bi-national one, so that we would soon be a minority in our own home. The violence and crime that is spread in mixed cities such as ours is no more than another tool used by those who deny our right to our state.
Perhaps this is what awaits Europe and any other place where the police face violence by means of giving in. Wherever the police do not enforce the law, where they close their eyes to clubs and knives and axes, to criminal acts, they are likely to find themselves faced with widespread devastation when an ordinary citizen decides that he is tired of living in fear in his own country - when he sees that his country is being taken from him by foreigners, and realizes that there is no one but him to protect him here in his own home.
* 70 percent of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinians; Jordan sits on three-quarters of the territory marked for the “National Home” promised the Jews in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the League of Nations’ decision of 1920.
