Breaking Bread: How One Israeli Restaurant Is Creating Peace Through Hummus

Wariness is rampant on both sides: The Jews are trying anxiously to avoid encounters with possibly malicious Arab neighbors, and moderate Arabs have told us that they too are afraid – of revengeful accusations or even worse from angry Jews and of repercussions from Arab extremists for speaking out and condemning this latest spate of violence.

The implication of all this indifference to the Israeli security and moral crisis is, paradoxically enough, the increase in Palestinian suffering. But another security guard mistook the Eritrean migrant for a murderer and shot him in the leg, whereupon, reprehensibly, an Israeli mob kicked and beat him to death. The week before, an Israeli Jew stabbed another Jewish man in a supermarket. The unemployment rate among Arabs in the city was about forty per cent among men and eighty-five per cent among women, Haaretz reported in 2012.

There have been other, unconfirmed reports of Jews attacking Jews or Palestinians attacking Palestinians. I know you wanted to hear more from someone local about what’s happening here and how we’re reacting. At least eight Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in near-daily stabbing and shooting attacks in the last four weeks.

In light of the turnaround nature of the incitement, one thing was made extremely clear to Garrett. In 2012, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel found that eighty-four per cent of Arab children in East Jerusalem fell below the poverty line.

While the recent violence has worsened the problem, there has been a long trend of increasingly hardening attitudes, according to Sammy Smooha, an Israeli Arab professor of sociology at the University of Haifa and who has run a survey of Arab-Jewish relations.

Tzafrir says he cooked up the promotion as a way to wipe away a few of the gloom of the current Israeli-Palestinian animosity.

With just over a month of escalating conflict in the Middle East showing little sign of easing, the Hummus Bar in the coastal city of Netanyu is doing its bit to promote peace.

Unesco has approved a resolution from the UAE and five other Arab countries criticising Israel for failing to protect heritage sites and rebuild regions destroyed by war. Oh, mujahedeen, continue your jihad against the Jews, showing determination and carrying out the commandments; terrorize them with auto bombs, disperse them in all directions, turn them into lifeless corpses and scattered body parts. It is usually touted as a place of relative coexistence, though parts of it have been swallowed up by the growth of Tel Aviv, with many Jewish Israelis moving in and gradually pricing-out the Palestinians. “Even if it was the terrorist himself, by the way, after he was shot, after he was neutralized and lying on the floor, you need to be an animal to torment him”, Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel Radio. Three hundred and twenty thousand Arabs live in East Jerusalem-although estimates vary depending on the inclusion of neighborhoods behind the separation wall-and constitute about thirty-eight per cent of the total population.

“Arabs in Israel feel that there is an itchy trigger finger”, said Eiad, 35, a Palestinian resident of Jaffa. “I have a lot of Arab friends, but it will take me a few time to trust them, and I need to heal”, she explained.

“I always had Arab clients and Arab workers that are very nice and when the last round of violence started I felt very uncomfortable”, Tzafrir said. He says it doesn’t matter what his attacker thought he was, at the end of the day it was still a crime. In fact, just as Asian-Americans have ascended to become “highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States”, we had also become subject to the same assumptions of “power”, “privilege” and “control” that classic anti-Semitic myths have referred to Jews with. I hate the feeling, but it’s real.