Arab mayor says he only referred to Ben Gvir, not Israel, as his ‘enemy’ in speech

The mayor of the Arab city of Arraba said Thursday that, in a speech he delivered earlier this month, he was only referring to far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir — not the State of Israel as a whole — as his “enemy.”

Mayor Ahmad Nassar explained himself in a letter to Interior Ministry Director-General Israel Uzan, who — after a clip of Nassar’s remarks aired on TV news, with Hebrew subtitles — said he would look into pulling all budget funds set aside for the Arab municipality “until the matter is clarified publicly and clearly.”

The controversial remarks, delivered in Arabic, came during a ceremony last weekend commemorating the October 2000 riots in northern Israel, on the eve of the Second Intifada, in which police killed 13 Arab Israelis.

“Today we are dispersed, fragmented… and in dire straits. Whether we’re talking about Gaza or [inside Israel], because we have gotten to a place where we understand exactly how despicable, how barbaric our enemy is,” Nassar said.

“We are continuing on the same path of struggle, and of guarding our continued presence here, even if things have calmed down in one way or another here or there,” he was also heard saying in the clip.

In the letter on Thursday, Nassar said Uzan’s “understanding of [the] speech is not correct,” asserting: “I have never referred to the State of Israel as my enemy, not in the speech you mentioned, not in any other speeches, and not in personal conversations.”

“This was a short speech, in which the language of ‘enemies’ was a reference to the policy of Ben Gvir,” Nassar wrote. “Ben Gvir relates to us as an enemy and he asks the commanders of the police to relate to us as an enemy. And so I, like all Arab citizens, relate to him as an enemy.”

“I referred to an ‘enemy’ twice,” Nassar wrote, “in close connection to Ben Gvir and only to him.”

“The first place I referred to ‘enemies’ was in connection to the policy of suppressing expression. And this is what I said (translating liberally): ‘Our enemy has established a cruel policy against us, to the point of starting to get involved in the tiniest little details of our lives, things we are accustomed to, normal regular things,'” he recalled. “Here, I was referring to the prohibition on free expression.”

“The second place I referred to ‘enemies’ was in reference to Ben Gvir’s policy on dealing with crime. Translating liberally: The harm done to us by the enemy has been through new methods, through recruiting people unknown to us (referring to criminals among us) to harm our personal security,” he wrote.

“Every Arab citizen knows that the reference here was to Ben Gvir’s policy of giving a free hand to strangers in our midst, the criminals,” Nassar asserted. The far-right minister has failed to stem a violent crime wave that has taken hundreds of Arab Israelis’ lives.

It was not immediately clear from Nassar’s explanations, as quoted by the Walla news site, which of these references he maintained was taken out of context in the controversial clip.

No full video clip of his remarks at the memorial ceremony, or transcript of them, appeared to be available. The clip shared by the right-wing Channel 14 news outlet only showed a brief excerpt of his statements.

Ben Gvir had been among the first to react to that footage, calling Nassar a “terror supporter” who was unfit to serve the public.

In his letter Thursday, the mayor wrote: “Not only were my words legitimate and legal, they were important, as an expression of our citizens’ concerns about the policy of Ben Gvir.”

He added that “regardless of the legitimacy of my remarks, no state body is permitted to harm a municipality’s budget just over my expression. It is forbidden to carry out a policy of collective punishment against the residents of Arraba.”