Mahmud, Tarek and a friend who does not want to give his name are three students close to reaching the age of majority. They chat animatedly on the terrace of a coastal bar in the Ajami neighborhood, in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv. They smoke shisha. And they don’t want to be questioned about the Gaza war.
“What do I think? Which is something very dark. I don’t like to talk about it. “We are told that it is better not to speak,” the one who knows the most English of the three, Tarek, briefly launches and changes the subject. His nameless friend simply picks up her cell phone to ask with the help of an Arabic-English translator: “Are you a journalist?”
The yes leads them to stop talking about the war. They just want to share their shisha and a soft drink.
The old city of Jaffa is one of the main tourist attractions in Tel Aviv when tourism still filled its streets. And close to it, to the south, is Ajami, the area where a good part of the Israeli Arab community of Tel Aviv resides, a minority in the country (almost two million people, around 20% of the little more than nine million Israelis) but even more of a minority in the largest metropolitan area of ??Israel: more than 90% of Telavivis are Jews of very diverse origins.
But in Ajami the Israeli Arabs are protagonists. And after the Hamas massacre on October 7 and the beginning of the Gaza war that left more than 20,000 dead, according to the Gazan authorities, his voice seems mute.
And it’s been almost three months.
When asking in the streets about the war the answer is always the same: “No politics.” And the same in the community centers for the Israeli Arab community. In one of them, a directive says that “I cannot and do not want to talk about politics.” In the other, an employee assures that the moment is “tense” and that talking about it, in fact, “is prohibited.”
Forbidden?
Amir Badran is a lawyer and the reference to the one who runs the neighborhood youth center by insisting on it. He is a municipal candidate for the list that includes Israelis of Arab origin and Jews and believes that with his answers the neighbors are only trying “not to bother. The fear of speaking is in Ajami, in Jaffa, Ramla and everywhere. The police have arrested many people even for sharing short videos about what is happening in Gaza, because the legislation allows it in the fight against terrorism.”
He puts them at around 300 since the start of the war. “The majority are Arab Israelis, although there are also other denominations, including Jews,” he continues.
Badran also warns that there is also fear of a return to past violence against the Arab minority at the hands of right-wing extremists. And perhaps that is why, in Ajami, if he asks about Gaza, he almost always responds with a strange, inquisitive look, adding more than once, twice and three times a “is someone sending you?”
Silence is the only thing that wins – rather it devastates – in a neighborhood of streets that accumulate dust, immaculate and new buildings next to old and dilapidated ones, mostly low in comparison with the very crystalline skyscrapers of the center of Tel Aviv. In Ajami the signs are in Arabic, Hebrew and English, many women wear veils, in the stores people discuss and laugh in Arabic, the many cats walk calmly up and down. The muezzin’s call to prayer from a nearby mosque envelops everything. But there is also no lack of the sound of helicopters coming from the south, towards Gaza, flying quickly along the coast.
In the streets of Ajami in the morning, there are also few people. It’s almost a desert. Even the market, usually bustling, looks half empty, as do the terraces of the establishments that border it. “People work,” respond the neighbors who are asked. “The children are at school,” others add. A neighbor with European features says: “It’s complicated. You already know the situation…”
And he says goodbye.
Barely half an hour later, a rocket alert sounds, forcing everyone to take shelter in the many shelters in the city. Because rockets make no distinctions.
