Lamiss Al-Jaar believed her last hour had come and still can’t sleep. The young Israeli Bedouin woman remains haunted by the violence of Jewish settlers that she and her family were victims of, and which arouses indignation and signs of solidarity in Israel.
This Friday, August 9, she left by car from Rahat, a city in the Negev, the desert in southern Israel, with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, two of her sisters and a niece for Nablus, a large Palestinian city in the north of the occupied West Bank.
“We got lost,” her sister Raghda Al-Jaar, 29, told AFP. According to her testimony, a man they asked for directions put them on the wrong track before blocking their path with his car when they tried to turn around.
According to the Israeli police, they then suffered a “serious attack” – “stones being thrown”, “threats with weapons” and their car being “set on fire” – after having “accidentally entered” “Givat Ronen”.
Lamiss Al-Jaar says a man directly threatened her daughter Elaf with his gun.
Givat Ronen, an outpost of the Jewish settlement of Har Bracha, south of Nablus, is run by members of the “hilltop youth”, as they call themselves, a radical movement of religious Zionism dreaming of making the West Bank a Jewish homeland by invoking the times of biblical Israel.
“About ten armed settlers broke all the windows of the car” and “sprayed us with tear gas,” continues Raghda Al-Jaar in her family’s home in Rahat.
“I said […] that we were Israeli citizens” and when one of the attackers “realized that I was talking to the police” on the phone, he threw a big rock at my foot,” she says. “You’re not getting out of here alive!” he threatens them.
Five arrests
Left leg in plaster under his black abaya, Mme Al-Jaar, who also said she suffered a head injury, uses a walker to get around.
Her sister Lamiss, a 22-year-old childminder, shows her fractured fingers and talks about her “broken” back.
With their niece Hind Al-Jaar, a 22-year-old nurse, they say they fled as fast as they could before finally being rescued by Israeli police and soldiers.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog called their father, Adnan Al-Jaar, to tell him he was “shocked” by the violence and to assure him that “all citizens of Israel are entitled to equal and decent treatment,” according to his office.
Descendants of Muslim shepherds who once roamed freely across desert expanses far beyond the current borders of the Jewish state, Israel’s Bedouins, like other Arab minorities in the country, complain of discrimination, even though many of them serve in the army or police.
Expressing comfort from Mr. Herzog’s call, Mr. Al-Jaar, who, like his daughters, alternates between Hebrew and Arabic, said busloads of Jewish and Arab Israelis come to show their support. “It makes us feel good.”
Met in the family home, opposition MP Matan Kahana (centre) said he was “reassured that the majority of the Israeli people condemn this act”.
Police announced the arrest of five suspects, four of whom are still in custody and the fifth under house arrest.
“Living together”
Mr Al-Jaar, a 59-year-old truck driver, nevertheless fears that the case will end up being closed without further action, like so many others.
Deemed illegal under international law by the UN, Israeli colonization in the West Bank has continued under all governments, left and right, after Israel conquered this Palestinian territory in 1967.
It has clearly intensified, as has the violence in this region, since the formation in December 2022 of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right), which includes several far-right ministers who support the pure and simple annexation of the entire West Bank, and even more so with the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip since October 7.
Rabbi Benny Lau, a leading figure in Orthodox Judaism that is concerned with openness, reported on Facebook about a meeting with Mr. Al-Jaar, emphasizing the aspirations of “millions” of Israelis who want to “live together.”
Amit Segal, a TV star known for his right-wing views, accused a far-right parliamentarian of collusion with “supporters of terrorism” who had sought to shift the blame onto the victims.
In Rahat, Noa Epstein Tennenhaus, a 41-year-old entrepreneur from Kfar Saba, further north, came to show her empathy by bringing a gift for Elaf with her husband and their four young children.
“I cried” when she heard about the tragedy, she told AFP. “I imagined myself in Lamiss’ place […] attacked by these monsters.” “Blind hatred will eventually kill us all if we don’t stand up to it.”