Car tires slashed in Jerusalem Arab neighborhood

In suspected Jewish extremist attack, 21 vehicles vandalized in Beit Hanina, graffiti protesting stone-throwing spray-painted on wall

Vandals slashed the tires of 21 cars on Monday morning in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, less than a week after a similar attack took place in the Arab-Israeli village of Abu Ghosh outside the capital.

On one of the cars, vandals also sprayed a Star of David, and on a nearby wall they graffitied, “We will not remain silent about stone throwing.”

Recent weeks have seen a rise in stoning attacks against Jewish drivers passing through East Jerusalem villages.

Police opened an investigation on Monday morning, but have yet to make any arrests.

Jerusalem light rail passengers from Beit Hanina saw the damage as they passed by the street where it occurred. They alerted police, who arrived on the scene soon after.

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Last Tuesday, vandals in Abu Ghosh slashed the tires of 28 cars and scrawled graffiti on nearby walls that read “racism or assimilation” and “Arabs out.”

Abu Ghosh is an Arab village 10 kilometers (6 miles) west of Jerusalem, and its 6,000 residents have traditionally enjoyed cordial relations with their Jewish neighbors.

The incident in Abu Ghosh was determined to be a “price tag” attack, a term used to describe crimes, typically but not always vandalism or arson of Palestinian property, carried out by extremist Jews as ostensible retribution for Israeli government actions — such as demolition of illegal West Bank construction — which they deem contrary to settler interests.

Last month, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni (Hatnua) and Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich (Yisrael Beytenu) presented a proposal to classify these kinds of attacks as terrorism, in order to increase the tools at police disposal in the battle against a rising number of price tag attacks on non-Jewish targets, including churches and properties of Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians.

Unlike most price tag attacks, Monday morning’s vandalism in Beit Hanina, like the graffiti sprayed in the Abu Ghosh incident last week, did not actually include the phrase “price tag.”