I was forewarned before Yom Kippur that if you drive anywhere in Israel on the Day of Atonement, people will throw rocks at your car.
Apparently driving on Yom Kippur is also a good way to get yourself nearly killed in Akka.
I am of the mind that this type of social behavior, the kind that forces your religious observations onto other people through violence, shows just how much Israel has in common with some other states in the region. (cough*IRAN*cough)
Additionally – and this is curiously enough not on the English site of Al Jazeera – a large group of Israeli settlers, and the soldiers protecting them, entered the Haram Al-Sharif today. If you’ll recall, the last time something like this happened, the second intifada broke out.
Related posts:
- He died for our sins…
- Happy Yom Kippur!
- Just like the good old days…
- 60 Years Later, Nakba Front Page News
- Walls of Shame
The second link is a lot more important than the first. As for the first link, it’s a fucked-up minority — secular Jews, the majority (and the people secular Arabs should be looking at as the least worst allies against religious types on both sides), really wouldn’t give a shit who does what on Yom Kippur.
(And as I’ve said before, Yom Kippur is a fucked-up holiday anyhow, for the same reasons that Ramadan is.)
This is what happens when religious people get emboldened, unfortunately. We need to actively resist them; here in America, in Israel, in the Arab world.
Posted by Joe | October 9, 2008, 9:44 pmEmily, your posts are so full of disinformation that I am starting to wonder if you really are located in Israel.
There is no law forbidding cars from driving on Yom Kippur. None. If Israel were to enforce the religious prohibition against driving on the Jewish holy days, then there would be no cars on the roads from Friday afternoon to Sunday night, every week. If this were the case, then perhaps your silly, populist comparison with Iran would have some merit. But in fact not driving on Yom Kippur is just a custom that evolved in the secular-Jewish community. It is not observed in majority-Arab towns, where it’s business as usual on Yom Kippur.
In majority-Jewish towns it’s actually the secular majority who look forward to the one day when you can bicycle and walk down the middle of normally car-clogged roads. In Tel Aviv you can hear plenty of Palestinian kids on bicycles yelling in Arabic as they race around the city on their bicycles. They – and the children of the foreign workers from all over the world – look forward to the no-car day, too.
It’s certainly not the religious who benefit from the no-car custom; they are all praying in the synagogue all day, and anyway, they are forbidden from riding bicycles on the holy day.
Here in Tel Aviv, where I live, I did see a few drivers on the roads on Yom Kippur. Not many, but a few. Nobody stoned them, although they did have to drive extra slowly to avoid running over the many children who had plonked themselves down in the middle of the road, just to enjoy the novelty; nobody even said a word to the few drivers who spoiled the one car-free day of the year. Well, that’s not quite true: I saw a couple of Ghanan kids on bicycles making disappointed faces at having their fun spoiled. But mostly, people just parted to let the cars through.
As for Acre, which you clearly don’t know at all, there has been tension between Jews and Arabs there for awhile, just as there is tension between the Jets and the Sharks on West Side Story. That’s what you get when the majority of the population is undereducated, unemployed, underemployed or working poor – which is the case for most Jews *and* Arabs in Acre.
This is equal opportunity rioting between two socially disadvantaged groups. The fact that they are Jews and Arabs – rather than Jets and Sharks – is just grist for sensation-seeking, agenda-driven bloggers like you. And I suppose that, since you are preaching to the reflexively anti-Israel (and no nuance, please) choir on this blog, no-one will bother to question your nonsense.
-Jackie
Posted by Anonymous | October 11, 2008, 10:03 am