JAFFA — In the empty streets of Jaffa on the morning of Sunday, October 8, Kaley Halperin was packing her kids into her car with the few belongings she could gather, not knowing when she would return. Like the rest of the country, she had woken the previous day to the blare of sirens and booms of the Iron Dome intercepting rockets overhead.

Although she observed Shabbat, Halperin had asked her husband Yossi to check his phone. “There was nothing in the news, because still no one knew anything.”

An hour later, Yossi’s commanding officer called. That was to be the last she saw of him for three months.

That Saturday night, her brother told her to leave town. Fearing he was overreacting, she asked Yossi.

She recalled his reply: “‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘Go to your mother’s.’ That was the first time I was scared.”

As she buckled her kids in, Halperin was struck by a dissonance. “Everything was quiet, but it felt like everyone was frozen, looking to see if someone was going to make the first move.”

Her sense of unease sprang from memories of the trauma her community had experienced in May 2021, when Jaffa, along with Israel’s other mixed Jewish-Arab cities, erupted in the country’s worst internecine violence in years.

For eleven days, as Hamas rockets rained down and Israeli airstrikes pummeled Gaza, thousands of Arab and Jewish Israelis took to the streets in violent dueling protests that resulted in four deaths, widespread destruction of property, injuries, and scenes of shocking brutality.

War has now been raging for nine months, but despite — or perhaps thanks to — fears that October 2023 would end up like May 2021, there has been no fresh outbreak of violence between Jews and Arabs in Jaffa or any of Israel’s other mixed cities.

Jaffa’s Jews and Arabs tend to agree that shock, pragmatism and heavy policing, both by law enforcement and as part of grass-roots monitoring within communities, have been primary factors in avoiding a repeat of May 2021.

According to a source within the police, Israeli security services made 2,000 arrests in Jaffa alone on October 7 as they sought to crack down on social media messages that could be construed as support for the Hamas-led massacre.

“It was a deterrent,” admitted Majed, a popular local Islamic figure, about the arrests. Overall, he said, “people feared returning to those days, because we all paid a heavy price.”

(Like others quoted here for whom only a first name is given, Majed asked that his real name not be used due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.)

For Hadir Guti, a religious Muslim teacher raised in Jaffa, “October 7 was first and foremost a slap to Palestinians’ face, because it does not represent us. It crossed my red line as a human being.”

But in the moment, fears were rampant in Jaffa that the city could once again turn into a tinderbox.

On the morning of October 8, as fighting still raged inside Israeli territory in the south and no one was certain how deeply terrorists had infiltrated, a group of Jewish youth were seen proceeding down a main Jaffa boulevard waving flags and singing patriotic songs.

The group was associated with Jaffa’s garin torani, a community of religiously observant and often ideologically nationalist Jews who have settled as a group in the city. There are approximately 135 such groups around the country, many of them in the heart of cities like Jaffa.

Although ostensibly designed to help integrate Israel’s national religious and secular Jewish populations through community service, education, and shared living, the garin movement has drawn fire in recent years for exacerbating socioeconomic discrepancies between locals and transplants, who largely hail from

educated, middle-class families, and who are ideologically rooted in the religious Zionist settlement movement.

According to Nitzan, the community manager for the umbrella organization of Jaffa’s garin, the Jewish youths belonged to a pre-army academy run through the organization.

They “work out every day, running on the beach, ” she said, but on October 8 they held their morning procession on Jerusalem Boulevard, Jaffa’s main north-south artery, “with Israeli flags and singing Am Yisrael chai [The people of Israel lives].”

Nitzan described the procession as an attempt to bolster morale following the devastating Hamas attack.

In many cities, tensions between resident Arabs and garinim, which have been accused of attempting to “Judaize” local spaces and of practicing exclusionist policies, have festered for years. When the riots broke out in May 2021, many regarded the frictions around the garinim as a major factor at the heart of the unrest.

“I don’t think they intended to incite, but it was impossible not to hear them,” said Daniella Bronstein, a long-time Jewish resident who watched the march unfold. (Bronstein, a journalist and community activist, helped connect The Times of Israel with several sources quoted in this piece).

For the city’s Arabs, many of whom were anxiously watching the group’s procession, the only thing bolstered was their sense of disquiet.

Witnesses said the group lingered in front of mosques while singing and dancing —“nothing illegal, but you could understand their purpose, or at least that it was not appropriate right now,” said police spokesperson Maj. Mark Angert.

The imam of the third mosque said he received “dozens of calls from Arab youth who were already organizing themselves to attack the group.” History appeared to be repeating itself.

But something had changed.

“Don’t do anything,” the imam told callers. “Let us handle this quietly.” If it became necessary he would call on them, he said.

He posted a similar message on social media, which he also sent to some 1,200 youth connected with the mosque.

The imam then did something that would have been unthinkable in 2021 and still defies the common wisdom shared by Jaffa’s Jews and Arabs.

He called the police.

‘Mother of the Stranger’

Jaffa has served as a port and meeting point of civilizations continuously for the past 4,000 years, earning it one of its Arabic monikers, Umm al-Gharib, or “Mother of the Stranger,” or foreigner.

In the 19th century, during a long period under Ottoman rule, the city attracted Muslim and Arab immigrants from throughout the region, alongside Jews from North Africa who arrived in 1820 and Jews from Europe who arrived in 1840.

According to archival figures, between 1866 and 1917, when the British took control, the population grew from 5,000 to 50,000, but the share of the city that was Muslim had begun to shrink, declining from 77 percent to 60%.

At the same time, the Jewish population rose from 3% to 20%. By 1944, the population had doubled again, with Jews now comprising 30% of Jaffa’s population, and Muslims declining to 54%.

The view of Jews as “colonial infiltrators” was cemented during this period. With European support, Jews bought land outside Jaffa that became the city of Tel Aviv. By 1948, Jews comprised 75% of the area’s population. The inversions of these cities’ numbers and the accompanying shift in power was a microcosm of national dynamics.

Following the passage of the UN Partition Plan in 1947, Jaffa became a war zone. By the time Israel declared independence in May 1948, 95% of its 70,000 residents had fled, and by 1949 all 26 of its surrounding villages had been depopulated.

In the aftermath of the war, the remaining residents of several Arab villages were forcibly relocated to southern Jaffa, which was reincorporated as an annex to Tel Aviv.

There, they became neighbors with Jewish Holocaust survivors and other immigrants from Bulgaria, Morocco, Romania, and Turkey. Homes built in the 19th century and abandoned during the war were carved up into apartments housing both Jews and Arabs.

For Jewish refugees, life in the mixed city of Jaffa was a fresh start on old soil.

“My grandmother shared a kitchen with an Arab family in Jabaliyya,” a neighborhood in Jaffa also called Givat Ha’aliyah, recalled Sefi Smadja-Wasserman, whose Moroccan and Polish immigrants parents met in Jaffa in the 1950s.

“I had an ‘Uncle’ Ahmad. It was normal. We grew up together.”

For a couple of decades, Jewish life and institutions sprouted in Jaffa.

For Palestinians, it was the ghost of a former life. Guti said her family lived in Ajami, a Jaffa neighborhood where many of the city’s Arabs were forcibly concentrated. For a time, it was ringed by barbed wire, and many took to calling it “the Ajami ghetto.”

“I grew up in a family in which my mother and father didn’t speak,” she said. “They didn’t talk – not about politics or Palestine.”

The Jaffa they knew had died and in 1950 the state appropriated what was left under the Absentee Properties Law.

Over the decades, many Jews left Jaffa’s poorer inner core for new neighborhoods in other parts of the city, leaving behind the homes and synagogues they had founded alongside a nucleus of poorer Arab families who had been displaced in 1948, many of whom did not own their homes.

Eventually, Tel Aviv began a process of “rehabilitating” Jaffa by privatizing state-owned properties (largely acquired through the absentee law, which transferred ownership of former Arab homes). The policy touched off waves of gentrification as these poorer neighborhoods were redeveloped.

Opposition from Jaffa’s Arab community starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s failed to curb the remaking of the city. Luxury estates in gated communities were followed by liberal middle-class families buying more modest homes; artists, urban hippies, students and others seeking to escape Tel Aviv’s sky-high rents moved in as well, transforming Jaffa’s urban fabric.

Jews and Arabs tend to read this process through the lens of 1948. For Arabs, it reenacts the transformations of population, power, and place they equate with the Nakba — the “catastrophe” — that led to what they see as Jaffa’s death. For Jews, it retraces the steps of their forebears who founded new life on ancient soil through Israel’s independence. These strange neighbors’ inverted relationships with their shared home were the kindling for the 2021 riots.

‘A war movie’

In 2007, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali arrived in the city with a group of seven families, a nationalist religious contingent whose members have since acquired a diversity of properties throughout Jaffa to serve as homes, schools, and dorms for Jaffa’s garin torani.

Today, the garin community includes a hesder yeshiva — in which soldiers alternate between Torah study and mandatory military duty — headed by Mali, several student villages, two pre-military academies and a national service program for young women.

“People often claim ‘these settlers came to Judaize Jaffa,’” said Nitzan about how the religious Zionist community is viewed. “This is not the story.”

While Mali hailed from a West Bank settlement many involved with the garin come from inside Israel.

“I came to ‘occupy’ from Tel Aviv,” Nitzan laughed.

A representative of the yeshiva noted that there has been a modern Jewish community in Jaffa since 1825.

“Mali has never stated a desire to ‘Judaize’ Jaffa, does not buy Arab properties, and works hard to maintain positive relationships with neighbors,” he said.

Nitzan claimed that many of the group’s critics are “leftists who arrived after us, bought Arab homes — and now demonstrate in front of the yeshiva saying that religious Jews are the problem.”

According to the yeshiva representative, the yeshiva only bought its first three apartments in 2023 to use as dorms, and its subsidiaries and nearly all of their 500 students live in rented properties.

On April 18, 2021, Mali was scouting a property for sale to serve the expanding garin when he was beaten by two Arab men. The assailants mistakenly thought Mali was attempting to buy a property acquired by the state under the Absentee Properties Law; critics have alleged that such properties are being increasingly designated by the state for use by garinim at the expense of affordable housing and public spaces for economically disadvantaged locals.

Mali’s assailants were arrested but, according to Nitzan, community members felt they could not let it go without a response.

They organized a rally of 150 people, which in turn was confronted by “a mob of dozens of Arab youth,” Nitzan said. According to Bronstein, students from a sister yeshiva in Bat Yam joined. “Then the riots started.”

Although police intervened immediately, “in the blink of an eye it turned into a war movie,” said Nitzan.

Counter-demonstrations continued the next day, leading to a march on the yeshiva, also reported to have been an absentee property where a synagogue was established in the 1950s.

Two weeks later, amid rising tensions over the pending eviction of Arab families from homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and scenes of police violence in the Old City and on the Temple Mount during Ramadan, Hamas terrorists in Gaza fired a volley of rockets at Jerusalem, triggering a major Israeli military campaign against the group.

As airstrikes pounded Gaza and rockets flew out of the enclave, some of the worst sectarian violence since the state’s founding erupted inside Israel. Four people were killed, scores more were hurt, and hundreds of homes, businesses and even houses of worship were torched amid days of firebombings, shootings and brawls between Jewish and Arab gangs in cities with mixed populations.

The riots were exacerbated by Muslim religious leaders’ calls for protest and by well-documented cases of police brutality.

Although ill-prepared, the police eventually quelled the unrest. Some 2,000 people were rounded up afterward nationwide – 90% of them Arab. Some are still in jail awaiting verdicts, while those convicted often received double the prison time of Jews with similar offenses, due to “nationalist motives” being added to the charges against them.

“The government and the police treated Arabs as enemies,” said Sameh Zakout, a Palestinian citizen of Israel born in Ramle who now lives in Jaffa.

“The feeling was that police were taking an active part,” said Guti, the religious Muslim teacher. “As Arabs, if the police were in front of me, they were coming for me right now.”

According to her, the Arab youths who took part in the riots “thought they had nothing to lose: no education, no livelihood, no house in their future. Most of them lived off a mix of illegal activities, dealing drugs, stealing, or other side hustles. None went to school.”

Similar conditions prevailed in Israel’s other mixed cities that saw rioting, including chronic disinvestment in the Arab population that caused continual friction with Jewish neighbors.

“They were at-risk youth,” said Majed, the popular local figure. He said that criminal actors and Hamas successfully encouraged them to violence because for both groups, chaos served their purposes.

Keeping the peace

The same combustible mix of historical tensions and modern friction was present in October 2023, but something had changed in the intervening years.

The imam’s phone call to the Jaffa police the morning of October 8 was made possible by local and national relationships formed in reaction to the traumas of 2021.

At the height of that unrest, a representative of the Jaffa branch of the Tel Aviv municipality asked a local imam for a meeting. What developed were unprecedented ties between local religious leaders, the municipality, and local police that held the social fabric together three years later.

“It’s clear from October 7 that the community work done before then built the infrastructure,” said Angert, the police major. “You can’t do something in an emergency that you haven’t built in the day-to-day, because there is no trust between people.”

He pointed to Jaffa’s high number of community police officers, one for each neighborhood, because “every neighborhood needs something slightly different.”

When an imam unexpectedly chanted a Hamas slogan after prayers one night, he received a call from another cleric, who told him ‘This is incitement. God forbid a boy praying by you takes a knife and commits a terror attack.’ The imam apologized

On a national level, leaders of the southern branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement — affiliated with the pragmatic Islamist Ra’am political party — began calling imams they knew across factional lines around the country starting on October 7, particularly in places that had experienced riots in 2021.

The message was, “This is the time for restraint, not the time to get dragged into an intifada spurred by voices of extremists who are largely outside the country,” said Sheikh Iyad, one of the group’s national leaders.

The imams pledged to renounce anyone who did otherwise. The strategy worked.

When the Jewish youths held their march on October 8, the imam of the Jaffa mosque had already spoken with someone from the Islamic Movement and had conferred with officials from the city’s other mosques.

“Most held back,” said Majed. “Some prayed for the people killed in Gaza. Two or three smaller mosques held on to hate, but their influence is limited.”

The local leadership’s efforts to keep the peace continued to bear fruit months into the war. When the imam of a Jaffa mosque chanted a Hamas slogan after prayers one night, he received a call from another imam, saying, “This is incitement. God forbid a boy praying by you takes a knife and commits a terror attack.” The imam apologized and retracted.

Meanwhile, the city had been working with young Jaffans to avoid a repeat of 2021 since just after the riots, when a youth center launched a project with the local municipality and police. Now in its third cycle, the program has expunged the records of teens whose convictions included security offenses in 2021, and has provided them a framework for rehabilitation.

Youth programs — coordinated between mosques, the Jaffa branch of the Tel Aviv municipality and local community centers — have also kept many off the streets and away from organized crime. Over the month of Ramadan, for example, they organized a twice-weekly soccer tournament called Tournament of Tolerance, attended by 180 boys.

This network was also activated on October 7 to curb those known to incite disadvantaged youth. In the early hours of Saturday, Smadja-Wasserman called the head of Jaffa’s municipality branch: “Do something now,” she pleaded.

He was ahead of her.

“They had already spoken with the Arab community leaders to keep the kids inside and keep everything calm,” she said.

Representatives from the municipality declined to comment.

The police were also on alert. “There was a lot of tension,” said Angert. Since no one knew how deeply Hamas operatives had penetrated the country, “people were calling us constantly about any person walking too fast or too slow.”

Meanwhile, “Arabs were very afraid to go out,” he said. In addition to walking the streets to prevent any flare-ups between youth “with a lot of testosterone and not a lot of brains,” who might romanticize violence or not consider the political implications of their actions, “we told parents to keep them inside.”

The police prevented Jewish provocateurs from reaching Jaffa from the outside, used the municipality and other partners to disseminate official information and tamp down social media rumors liable to sow chaos, and called leaders across Jaffa’s divided communities telling them to make themselves available should any issue arise, and telling them to trust the police rather than try to resolve the problem themselves.

Although the imam was only one of several people who alerted the police to the boys’ presence, it was his call that was transferred to a senior officer for direct coordination. Police officers were onsite within minutes.

“We had them close up and set them off to the side to prevent anyone from provoking anyone else,” said Angert.

The police also spoke with the boys’ rabbi and the head of the pre-army academy to remind them that they were responsible for the youngsters and must not permit them to make consequential decisions independently.

Meanwhile, Jews and Arabs spontaneously formed joint groups to prevent a fresh round of violence in Jaffa.

One previously reported Jewish-Arab group was started by Amir Badran, a Jaffa native who has been a city council member for the past eight years. A conference call hastily organized by Badran to bring together community organizers drew hundreds of Jewish and Arab participants looking for ways to keep the city intact, and a WhatsApp group he established soon had 4,000 members.

The group set up a hotline in Hebrew and Arabic, collected funds, and distributed food, clothes, and blankets to Jewish and Bedouin evacuees from border communities, along with support for local Jaffans. His goal was to send the message “We are protecting each other, doing it together, different from how everyone else is describing it,” he told Times of Israel.

Islamic leaders feared a reprise of 2021, but according to Majed, they were worried not about the heavy hand of the state, but rather what it could trigger: “This would drag in not just Jaffa, but the whole Green Line, from the Negev to the Galilee. For what?”

The first Friday after October 7, the imam of Majed’s mosque told the congregation “about the need to demonstrate responsibility.”

Islamic leaders learned from 2021 the potential for local events to snowball. “We understand the implications and because of this, we made a switch,” he said.

“Today we are in respectful contact with the police, which was not the case before,” said Majed. “We do not see them as an enemy, but people who want to keep the law. We also want to live under law, not a jungle.”

The police responded to this shift in orientation: “They began working with the community as a community,” he said.

Many credit the heavy hand of Israeli law enforcement for discouraging outbreaks of violence. But Abdullah, a social worker who heads a local youth center, credits their more nuanced approach. “There’s a difference between brutal police behavior [in 2021] and keeping people detained for years versus restricting free speech [in 2023], arresting people for incitement, and releasing them” a few hours later in an “emergency situation,” he said.

Improved ties between Arabs and police or the municipality have done little, however, to increase trust between many of the city’s Jewish and Arab denizens.

Some Jews in Jaffa believe Arabs secretly celebrated October 7 but refrained from rioting for fear of repercussions. Nitzan’s view is informed by an unsettling encounter. As she walked home from synagogue that morning, “an Arab pulled up in his car beside me and said, ‘Run, hurry home! Hamas is on its way to finish you off. Your time has come.’”

Benzion, a local religious Zionist teacher, heard celebratory fireworks. He credited the ferocity of the war in Gaza with keeping his Arab neighbors in check.

“[They know] when the Jews are weak. They see what’s going on in Gaza and say, ‘The Jews are crazy now; not the time to mess with them,’” he said.

“We are always watching Gaza,” Guti confirmed. But her fear runs deeper. “You understand the destruction there can also happen to you. From the perspective of Jews inside this system, the Arab in Gaza and I are the same Arabs,” she said.

To Guti, the rising numbers of young religious Jewish men toting rifles in the neighborhood increases “the feeling that the time will come when they get the call to take to the streets and throw us out of our homes.”

The meaning of home

The riots of 2021 were fundamentally an internal Israeli affair oriented around the country’s still highly personal inversions of population, power, and place.

Though the aftermath of October 7 avoided turning into a repeat of the bloody events of May 2021, many of the same frictions between Jewish and Arab residents of Jaffa and other mixed cities remain in place.

“The issue is not waving flags,” said Abdullah, “it’s the ‘Here we are, doing whatever we want. We do not see you.’”

“They say it explicitly,” said Majed about the garin and other Jewish developers. “‘To Judaize Jaffa.’ What is this? To destroy my mosque? Stop the muezzin? Stop me from praying, walking around, living in Jaffa? We don’t need this ideology here — neither to eliminate Jews in Jaffa, nor Arabs.”

This highly charged atmosphere can make just walking around a political act.

Halperin, who arrived in 2012 but is not connected to the garin, said the 2021 riots strengthened her identity and motivated her to “reclaim the space through fear,” walking the streets wearing a traditional headscarf with her infant.

“I wanted them to know that I’m a religious Jew. I’m a part of the community, I’m raising kids here, and I have a right to feel safe in my home.”

According to Nitzan, the garin administrator, “it is not uncommon for boys leaving the yeshiva to get hit or cursed out.” She understands that many of the perpetrators are at-risk youth and comprise a small part of the population, but “at the end of the day my son can’t walk around here in peace.”

Smadja-Wasserman, who was born in Jaffa, says what distinguishes her from “New Jews” is “I’m not scared to go out even when it’s bad, because this is my home.”

But Arabs say that settling down elsewhere is a luxury they mostly don’t have.

“I lived in Bat Yam for three years,” said Abdullah. “My wife is religious, everyone looked at her like she fell out of the sky.”

“Imagine if we bought a house in Ramat Gan,” said Majed, “and turned it into a mosque, brought in twenty lads from Jaffa, Ramle, and Lod. We could call it the Garin Qurani!” He laughed. “It would never be accepted.”

Moving into other Arab towns comes with many of the same challenges, said Guti, even as gentrification prices many out of Jaffa.

She described raising her children down the street from her mother, sisters, and nieces. When as a child she moved with her own family up north, “people always gave us this look, like, ‘What did you do in Jaffa that made you flee here?’”

“We can’t just pick up and move to a new place and feel like we belong,” Guti said. “No one will welcome us in, because everyone is involved with their own families.”

Meanwhile, Arab Jaffa’s communal structure never recovered from 1948. “There used to be an elder that you go to if something happens,” Guti said. “Today, there is no singular authority.”

Even mosques compete for resources. “We have active social bodies with enormous influence,” said Majed, but they are factionalized.

“There are people that don’t talk to one another,” agreed the police’s Angert. “Talking to the leader of one group does not mean it will get to another group.”

‘No one is going anywhere’

In some ways, though, the shared traumas of the last few years have strengthened Jaffa’s social fabric.

Halperin said while she didn’t “have space to feel the other narrative, I do have space to feel my friend, Saz,” referring to Zakout by his nickname.

They had become friends at a peace retreat for musicians following the 2021 riots. When they re-established contact after October 7, Zakout told her fifty-eight members of his family in Gaza had been killed.

“They were the first people evacuated,” Zakout later told The Times of Israel. “Most of them got killed while running away, not using guns, not being part of Hamas, just being Palestinians in Gaza.”

“I told him my husband had been fighting there,” recalled Halperin. “He said, ‘He shouldn’t go back.’ He didn’t want Yossi to be taking part in killing his family.” Despite the gulf separating them, neither felt they should cut ties.

“I don’t live under occupation, but I know violence is not the way,” said Zakout. “I cannot accept killing women and children. Period.”

He blamed the war on those in power, rather than assigning collective blame to Jewish Israelis. “You want me to hate Jews? Will that have any chance of bringing my family back? So no, I will not hate,” he said.

Jaffa’s Jews and Muslims conceive of home differently, but share a basic view about the home they share: “Millions of Arabs will not vanish,” said Zakout. “At the same time millions of Jews will not vanish, either.”

“No one is going anywhere,” agreed Benzion from the yeshiva. “We want Arabs and Jews to be able to live together in Jaffa.”

The sentiment was echoed by nearly everyone who spoke to The Times of Israel.

“We need to learn to live together and accept one another,” echoed Abdullah.

Smadja-Wasserman agreed: “We are here for good and for bad, so let’s do it good together.”

During Ramadan 2023, local mosques collaborated with the municipality’s Jaffa branch to organize a communal iftar and invited an Orthodox rabbi to speak, arranging a kosher meal for him.

“The message we wanted to send to our youth was: before everything, we are people,” said Majed.

Nitzan attended the iftar to acknowledge this act of hospitality. She pointed to this event as evidence that “the majority on both sides wants to live here in peace.”

Halperin agreed: “People here a lot of the time don’t talk about identity, they just live together.”

“History never moves backward,” she said. “How do you hold space for two homelands? I don’t know. How do you build from there? I don’t have a solution. Conversation and understanding are steps.”

For Abdullah, the solution is simple: “Be a good neighbor.”

This point was made clear to Halperin on the morning of October 8. As she got into her car, the child of one of her Arab neighbors came over to warn her that there might be “mobs.” The warning was a sign to Halperin that “he’s worried about me and wants me to be safe.”

When Halperin returned a few weeks later, a Christian neighbor told her to “be in touch, and don’t tell anyone you’re home alone.” Amid broader turmoil, “at the end, the feeling of neighborhood is very strong.”

This feeling is shared by many Jaffans. Despite the chasm between their experiences, each of Jaffa’s community groups makes a point of helping the needy among the others, including the garin and the Islamic Charities’ Council.

“Whoever needs help receives it,” said Nitzan.

On October 8, as Jaffa appeared to teeter on the edge of havoc, Amal Kulab, a Muslim Jaffa native who lives next to the yeshiva, started a WhatsApp group aimed at heading off unrest by preventing the spread of misinformation that could instigate actual violence.

“It is possible to live together. We just need to respect each other,” she said. “It’s our reality, but it’s also something we have to build.”

Ehud, an educator at a mixed Jewish-Arab public school in Jaffa, agreed, “It’s easy to break relationships, and very hard to hold [onto] them.”

Maintaining a safe educational space for everyone is a constant balancing act. “In a dual Arab-Jewish environment, the symbols of one can read as a threat to the other.”

Because of the vastly different vantage points, dialogue groups are not always productive. “It’s better to do it than talk about it,” he said.

Kulab maintains friendships with Muslims, Christians, and Jews across the ideological spectrum.

“Before and after every operation that was or will be, we will maintain our friendship because we are people,” she said. “She will judge me and I will judge her and every other person based on that person alone.”

This article was produced with the help of Ashley Goldstein and Daniella Bronstein.

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The Trump administration is boycotting a high-level summit on Palestinian statehood, co-sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia, scheduled to take place at United Nations headquarters in New York City on Monday.

The event was originally planned for June with French President Emmanuel Macron in attendance but was postponed due to the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. Representatives from more than 50 nations are expected to speak at the High-level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine, with dozens of additional countries listed as participants.

State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce slammed the event as “unproductive” in a statement on Monday, noting, “This is a publicity stunt that comes in the middle of delicate diplomatic efforts to end the conflict. Far from promoting peace, the conference will prolong the war, embolden Hamas, and reward its obstruction and undermine real-world efforts to achieve peace.

TRUMP SHRUGS OFF FRANCE’S RECOGNITION OF PALESTINE AS RUBIO, PROMINENT REPUBLICANS BLAST MOVE

“As Secretary Rubio has made clear, this effort is a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th and a reward for terrorism. It keeps hostages trapped in tunnels. The United States will not participate in this insult but will continue to lead real-world efforts to end the fighting and deliver a permanent peace. Our focus remains on serious diplomacy: not stage-managed conferences designed to manufacture the appearance of relevance,” she stated.

“The fact that the French and the Saudis could not be dissuaded from manufacturing this latest stumbling block to peace is a finger in the eye to President Trump,” Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, told Fox News Digital.

“American taxpayers are paying a quarter of the costs of this U.N. monstrosity, warmongers dressed up as peaceniks. Why are we still footing U.N. bills?”

Bayefsky added, “This latest U.N. confab embodies the rejectionist culture: shove a Palestinian state down Israel’s throat, without negotiations, and without Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state. It arrogantly appropriates the right to decide land ownership and who, what, where is legal and illegal.

“After October 7, and the reality that the Palestinian Authority serves as Hamas’s wingman on the international stage, it is painfully clear that an armed Palestinian state means more war, not peace,” she said.

In an interview with La Tribune Dimanche on Sunday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said that “the prospect of a Palestinian state has never been so threatened—nor so necessary.”

“[It is] threatened by the destruction of the Gaza Strip, rampant Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank that undermines the very idea of territorial continuity, and the resignation of the international community,” he said.

“[It is] necessary, because expecting to achieve a lasting ceasefire, the release of hostages held by Hamas, and its surrender without first outlining a political horizon is an illusion,” he added.

Monday’s event comes on the backdrop of Macron’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state. The formal declaration would be made at the U.N. General Assembly in September.

President Donald Trump immediately dismissed the move, arguing that Macron’s statement “doesn’t matter.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee mocked Paris’ decision in a series of social media posts. “How clever! If Macron can just ‘declare’ the existence of a state perhaps the U.K. can ‘declare’ France a British colony!” Huckabee wrote.

TRUMP SLAMS EUROPE OVER IMMIGRATION, SAYS ‘HORRIBLE INVASION’ IS KILLING THE CONTINENT

In May, Huckabee told Fox News Digital, “If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I have a suggestion for them—carve out a piece of the French Riviera.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement condemning Paris’ move “to recognize a Palestinian state next to Tel Aviv in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre.”

Key European nations have not yet backed Macron’s initiative, with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stating on Saturday that recognizing a Palestinian state was premature.

“I am very much in favor of the State of Palestine, but I am not in favor of recognizing it prior to establishing it,” Meloni said. “If something that doesn’t exist is recognized on paper, the problem could appear to be solved when it isn’t.”

A German government spokesperson said on Friday, “Israel’s security is of paramount importance,” and therefore Berlin “has no plans to recognize a Palestinian state in the short term.”

In a video statement on Friday, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he is “working on a pathway to peace in the region focused on the practical solutions that will make a real difference to the lives of those who are suffering in this war.”

By contrast, NATO member and U.S. ally Turkey welcomed the French move, with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan congratulating Macron during a phone call between the two leaders.

Avi Pazner, former Israeli ambassador to France and Italy, told Fox News Digital that there is “no rational explanation” for Macron’s decision, as everyone understands that it is “not feasible.”

Pazner suggested that Macron may be attempting to gain credibility with France’s significant Muslim and Arab minorities, which some estimate to be between 8%- 10% of the country.

Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former negotiator at the State Department under both Democratic and Republican administrations, told Fox News Digital that Trump has his own set of objectives and sensibilities regarding the issue of Palestinian statehood.

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“It was the view of successive administrations that unilateral statehood would prejudge and undermine the conditions necessary for negotiations,” he added. “If France is recognizing a Palestinian state, within what borders? What happens to Jerusalem? What about the Jordan Valley? Would land swaps compensate for territory deemed essential by Israel for security? Declaring statehood prematurely prejudges the outcome of negotiations, and that was the position taken by these administrations.”

The French and Saudi-sponsored conference is expected to run through Tuesday.

Dozens of ministers gathered at a United Nations conference on Monday to urge the international community to work toward a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, with Israel and the United States boycotting the event.

The 193-member UN General Assembly decided in September last year that such a conference would be held in 2025. Hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, the conference was postponed in June due to the Israel-Iran war.

“We must ensure that it does not become another exercise in well-meaning rhetoric,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in opening remarks.

Days before the conference, French President Emmanuel Macron announced he would formally recognize Palestinian statehood in September, provoking strong opposition from Israel and the United States.

Luxembourg hinted Monday that it could follow France and recognize a Palestinian state in September, with the possibility that other countries could announce similar plans when the conference resumes Tuesday.

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France is hoping Britain will follow its lead. More than 200 British members of parliament on Friday voiced support for the idea, but Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that recognition of a Palestinian state “must be part of a wider plan.”

For decades, most UN members have supported a two-state solution with Israel and a Palestinian state existing side-by-side.

However, the establishment of a Palestinian state and its would-be borders appear to be increasingly shrinking after more than 21 months of devastating war in Gaza sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 terror onslaught, the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and Israeli officials declaring designs to annex the territory along with the Gaza Strip.

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French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said it would be an “illusion to think that you can get to a lasting ceasefire without having an outline of what’s going to happen in Gaza after the end of the war and having a political horizon.”

Beyond advocating for encouraging the mass migration of Palestinians from Gaza, Israel has offered little detail of what it envisions for a post-war Strip and has pushed back against international calls for the Palestinian Authority to gain a foothold in the enclave.

Barrot told reporters at the UN that while there was international consensus that the time for a political solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is now, words need to be followed up with action.

“The European Commission, on behalf of the EU, has to express its expectations and show the means that we can incentivize the Israeli government to hear this appeal,” he said.

The aim of the conference, Barrot said, was “to reverse the trend of what is happening in the region — mainly the erasure of the two-state solution, which has been for a long time the only solution that can bring peace and security in the region.”

He urged the European Commission to call on Israel to lift a financial blockade on 2 billion euros he says the Israeli government owes the Palestinian Authority; stop settlement building in the West Bank, which threatens the territorial integrity of a future Palestinian state; and end the “militarized” food delivery system in Gaza by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.. Critics of the GHF have denounced its distribution sites as “death traps,” with hundreds of Palestinians reportedly killed while trying to gather aid .

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Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon said on Monday: “This conference does not promote a solution, but rather deepens the illusion. Instead of demanding the release of the hostages and working to dismantle Hamas’s reign of terror, the conference organizers are engaging in discussions and plenaries that are disconnected from reality.”

The Trump administration tore into the “unproductive and ill-timed” UN conference, calling it a “publicity stunt that comes in the middle of delicate diplomatic efforts to end the conflict.”

“Far from promoting peace, the conference will prolong the war, embolden Hamas and reward its obstruction and undermine real-world efforts to achieve peace,” the State Department said in a statement.

The US again called out Macron for saying he will recognize a Palestinian state in September, noting that the French announcement was welcomed by Hamas. Paris’s decision was also welcomed by the more moderate PA, which backs a two-state solution with Israel.

The US statement avoided criticizing Saudi Arabia, which helped engineer Macron’s announcement and is co-hosting this week’s UN conference. Trump has a close relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has pledged to invest billions in the US economy.

The US statement did not express a broader position on the two-state solution. Trump officials have avoided weighing in on the matter, but have not criticized the Israeli government as it has taken steps in the West Bank aimed at foreclosing such a framework.

Beyond facilitating conditions for recognizing Palestine, French officials said the conference is focused on three other issues: Reforming the Palestinian Authority, disarming Hamas and excluding it from Palestinian public life, and normalizing relations between Israel and Arab states.

Saudi Arabia reiterated its stance that normalization with Israel “can only come through the establishment of a Palestinian state.”

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Speaking at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN event, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said that stance was in keeping with the position outlined a year ago by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

“It is based on a strong conviction that only through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and only through addressing the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, can we have sustainable peace and real integration in the region,” Prince Faisal said.

Israeli officials have long insisted that Riyadh would be willing to settle for less, perhaps even mere lip service to a two-state solution in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel.

Saudi officials have pushed back against that notion, demanding that Israel establish an irreversible, time-bound pathway to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Israel, under the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has long rejected such a framework and has taken steps toward formally annexing West Bank lands that Palestinians hope would be part of their future state.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa used the conference to reiterate Ramallah’s call for the release of all hostages and for Hamas to end its control of Gaza and transfer its weapons to the PA, during an address aimed at promoting a two-state solution.

“All countries bear the responsibility to act now to end the war against our people in Gaza and throughout Palestine, to ensure the release of all hostages and prisoners, and to ensure the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces,” he said.

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Mustafa added that the PA is prepared to welcome and coordinate with an international Arab force that will help stabilize Gaza after the war.

While Israel has expressed openness to assistance from Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, those countries have conditioned such support on the PA’s involvement, which Israel has long rejected, likening the Ramallah-based entity to Hamas.

“We must all work to reunify the Gaza Strip with the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, without occupation, siege, settlements, forced displacement or annexation,” Mustafa said. “We must rebuild Gaza with and for our people, end the occupation, achieve Palestinian independence, and implement the two-state solution, where Palestine and Israel live side by side, in peace and security, towards achieving regional peace, security, and prosperity.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz celebrates the demolition of buildings damaged in an Iranian missile attack last month in Holon, provoking the ire of affected residents.

The June 19 strike wounded over 20 people, including one who was seriously hurt, according to the Magen David Adom ambulance service.

Speaking at a ceremony marking the demolition, Katz hails the 12-day war against Iran as “the grandest operation in Israeli history,” and says “we plan to surprise the ayatollah regime in Iran in the future as well.”

Katz says the government knew the war would be difficult for Israel’s residents.

“It was clear to us that the resilience of the Israeli home front is an important factor,” he says. “We prepared well for this damage, and still — the images of ruined buildings and displaced families are difficult and complex.”

“You are the real heroes,” he tells the residents, “and we are committed to doing everything to let you return to life quickly. Today we demolish so we can build and be built — it’s part of the victory.”

Also at the ceremony, Holon Mayor Shai Kenan says a new road called Rising Lion Way, named for Israel’s operation against Iran’s nuclear program, would be paved in the neighborhood.

Yulia, a tenant of one of the impacted buildings, tells Army Radio that the celebratory nature of the ceremony was in poor taste.

“Maybe I should wear a wedding dress,” she says sarcastically. She adds that when she saw the notice for the ceremony — adorned with the slogan Am Yisrael Chai (The nation of Israel lives) — “it took me a day to process that it’s real. It’s incredibly disgusting. The municipality is detached from reality.”

Noam She’altiel, another resident whose home was destroyed, tells the Ynet news site: “I did not imagine that this would be how we’d say goodbye to our first home. There is champagne and food [at the ceremony] and it’s gross.”

In a statement, the Holon municipality tells Ynet that the event “is all about home, community empowerment and new beginnings,” and is meant to honor the affected residents and first responders.

“The municipality will not cooperate with attempts to create a divisive discourse at the expense of the ceremony, which is being held in a similar fashion to events in other cities,” it says in a statement.

Protesters demanding a hostage deal rallied outside the ceremony, Hebrew media reports.

Iran launched over 500 ballistic missiles at Israel during the war last month. The strikes killed 29 people and wounded over 3,000 in Israel. In all, there were 36 missile impacts and one drone strike in populated areas, causing damage to 2,305 homes in 240 buildings, along with two universities and a hospital, and leaving over 13,000 Israelis displaced.

בחולון הרסו הבוקר מבני מגורים שניזוקו קשות מפגיעת טיל איראני, והעירייה ערכה טקס לציון האירוע – שלא עבר חלק. לפני הריסת הבתים שוטרים פינו ממתחם הטקס דייר שביתו נפגע, לאחר שהפריע לראש העיר שי קינן בנאומו. בנוסף, תושבים קראו לשר הביטחון ישראל כ”ץ שנכח באירוע לפעול לשחרור 50 החטופים… pic.twitter.com/XT6Q9N57OP — כלכליסט | Calcalist (@calcalist) July 28, 2025

Speaking to reporters on the Gazan side of the Kerem Shalom Crossing, a senior officer in Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories says only limited aid is entering the Strip because of a “lack of cooperation from the international community,” while also dismissing Hamas’s “famine narrative” as a tactic used in the ongoing hostage talks.

Col. Abdullah Halabi, head of COGAT’s Coordination and Liaison Administration for Gaza, says that approximately 1,000 trucks’ worth of aid are piled up inside the Strip, awaiting collection by the United Nations and aid groups.

He says truckloads are waiting on the Gaza side of the crossing “due to a lack of cooperation from the international community and international organizations.”

“We have seen in the last two days a slight improvement in their work, especially in the UN’s position and the UN’s organizations. We invited them here as we have done several times to continue to encourage them, to check together with them what can be done to transfer this aid in,” he says.

The UN has repeatedly claimed that COGAT has refused its requests for collection and distribution authorization, and that dangerous and complex conditions inside Gaza made aid distribution very difficult.

Halabi says Israeli moves in recent weeks to facilitate the delivery of aid include “expanding” the Kerem Shalom Crossing, and opening up three other terminals in the north and center of the Strip.

“We allowed longer work hours, and we took all the necessary steps to allow the international community to bring a very large amount of humanitarian aid into [Gaza], to combat the famine narrative, which Hamas uses to fight against us,” he says.

“The State of Israel allows the entry of humanitarian aid beyond the standards of international law, without restriction. As long as the international community makes an effort to bring in the aid, we will allow them to bring it in,” he continues.

According to Halabi, the military and COGAT have identified an “intense and violent campaign” by Hamas against Israel’s humanitarian aid mechanism.

“This campaign is based on lies,” he says, referring to claims of widespread starvation in Gaza. “It was created not to help Gaza’s population receive the aid, but primarily to improve Hamas’s standings in the [hostage] negotiations that are taking place over the last few days, and it is using different means, in particular the famine narrative, to improve their standings.”

Halabi notes recent reported attacks by Hamas against the new aid distribution sites, run by the Israel and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, accusing Hamas of working “to create chaos and to create a reality in which the humanitarian situation is depicted poorly.”

There have been repeated reports of mass killings outside aid sites, most of them blamed on Israeli fire. Israel has admitted firing warning shots at groups of civilians getting too close to troops.

The depiction of the humanitarian situation in Gaza “doesn’t correspond with the 4,500 trucks that entered in the last two months, carrying everything, from personal humanitarian aid for families to medical equipment, hygienic supplies, and more,” he claims.

“We, the army and COGAT, will continue doing whatever is possible and necessary, improve the relevant conditions, strengthen our relationship with the international community and with the different humanitarian organizations, and help them to allow the entry of aid,” he continues.

“We are fighting Hamas, we will continue to fight Hamas. We will not allow a reality in which Hamas uses anything, whether it is humanitarian aid or any other means, to strengthen its interests or itself,” Halabi says.