Arab activist addresses Tel Aviv rally, says government ‘happy’ about Arab crime wave

Hundreds of anti-government protesters rally at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, with one column marching to the plaza in the city center from near Jaffa, where a pregnant Arab woman was pepper-sprayed in what police say was a racist attack last Saturday.

The marchers — many clad in the purple shirts of Israeli-Palestinian left-wing group Standing Together — chant “Democracy for everyone.”

The rally features a rare Arab speaker, political activist Somaya Bashir, who hails from the northern Arab village of Jatt.

“I stand here tonight as an Arab, Israeli, Muslim Palestinian woman, a citizen of this country and proud of my identity,” says Bashir, who wears a hijab, to applause.

She accuses the government of turning a blind eye to the woman who was attacked in Jaffa last week, Arab bus drivers assaulted by Jewish youth in Jerusalem and soaring crime rates in the Arab community.

“The leadership legitimizes hate and is emboldened by hate,” she says. “They don’t condemn it when citizens are killed in the street or when Arabs are murdered almost daily, because they’re happy about it — that’s their goal,” she says.

“I believe in all my heart that there is no way to get out of the pit that Israeli society is in without bold, Jewish-Israeli partnership,” she says. “Not a silent coexistence, but true partnership.”

“The government of Israel is abandoning all of us — Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, poor and rich, residents of Israel and of Gaza — all of us,” she says. “I don’t let the darkness take over me. I don’t pick despair — I pick light and I pick partnership.”