Shootings on the Temple Mount – Arab Discourse and State-Minority Relations in the Aftermath

The July 14th shooting attack of two Druze police officers on the Temple Mount by three Arab citizens, and its aftermath, brought to the surface internal challenges within Israel’s Arab community, deteriorated Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel, and reignited tensions surrounding control of the site.

Dr. Yonatan Mendel, Head of Manarat, The Van Leer Center for Jewish-Arab Relations, and Rawnak Natour, Co-Executive director of Sikkuy, spoke to a Task Force audience on a conference call about the complexity of the events in their broader social and political context.

In his presentation, Yonatan emphasized how any event on the Temple Mount triggers tensions along four separate axes: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish-Arab relations within Israel, Jerusalem, and then the Temple Mount itself, and suggested that careful responses to events there would be in line with efforts to find a solution to the larger conflict. Rawnak delved more deeply into Arab discourse surrounding the attack, noting that at least 95% of the Arab population is against such violence and lamented suggestions that all of Arab society are terrorists, and that their citizenship can thus be treated conditionally. She also spoke about the complexity of both the attackers and victims coming from Israel’s Arab society.