Jewish victim of anti-Arab stabbing laments racism

Uriel Razkan, a Jewish grocer from the northern town of Kiryat Ata, recounted Wednesday how a Jewish attacker who mistook him for an Arab stabbed him in an attempted revenge attack for recent Palestinian terrorism.

“I’m working, and suddenly I feel four knife stabs in my back,” Razkan told Army Radio Wednesday morning.

“I heard a shout, ‘You deserve it, you deserve it, Arab bastards!’ When I turn around I see a Haredi man. I shouted to him, ‘I’m a Jew,’ but he tried to continue. I just ran away; otherwise I would have been killed,” Razkan said.

He lamented the racism evidenced in the attack.

“If I were Arab, it still wouldn’t have been okay. You shouldn’t stab anybody,” Razkan said.

Razkan was attacked in a parking lot outside the Ikea furniture store in the Haifa suburb. He was hospitalized with light to moderate wounds.

His attacker was remanded in custody on Wednesday.

According to reports, the attacker first approached an Arab man and asked him if he was Arab. The Arab man was reportedly frightened by the question, and said he was not.

The recent wave of violence in Israel has included, alongside deadly Palestinian attacks against Jewish Israelis, several acts of revenge by Jews. On Friday an Israeli teenager went on a stabbing spree in the southern city of Dimona, wounding three Palestinian men and a Bedouin Arab.

The northern city of Afula, the site of a stabbing attack Thursday against an Israeli soldier, saw anti-Arab protests later that day. An enraged mob also converged on a Channel 2 news crew and its reporter Fourat Nassar near the scene of the stabbing.

Thursday evening in Jerusalem, activists from the anti-Arab Lehava group, along with far-right fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, marched to the Old City, chanting slogans including “Death to the Arabs” and “Muhammad is dead.”

In the coastal city of Netanya that day, an enraged mob beat an Arab man. Five Israelis were arrested.

On Tuesday, two Israeli men were arrested on suspicion of intending to attack an Arab man with a knife in northern Israel, police said.