Ugly Outbreak

Ethnic tensions flare up

Angry crowds blocked streets and stoned a bus. Vandals painted swastikas and vicious slogans on houses and cars and even on the home of a government minister. One message, scrawled on a wall in a prosperous neighborhood, suggested that the area's residents be sent "to Auschwitz and Treblinka," two of the most notorious Nazi death camps of World War II.

An ugly outbreak of anti-Semitism in the U.S. or Western Europe? Not at all. It was part of an unusually severe flare-up of ethnic tension in Israel between Sephardic Jews, who came from North Africa and other parts of the Arab and Oriental world, and Ashkenazi Jews, whose roots are in Europe. Though the Sephardic community now forms a majority in Israel, according to most authorities, and was largely responsible for bringing Prime Minister Menachem Begin to power, the more affluent Ashkenazim have long dominated the country's institutions.

The current troubles started in the Tel Aviv slum of Kfar Shalem, when Yisrael Yehoshua, a sanitation worker who migrated from Yemen 35 years ago, added a room to the two-room house that he and 18 relatives share. City authorities said that the addition was illegal, and sent a bulldozer, accompanied by an elite police squad, to tear it down. The family pleaded with the police to wait, pointing out that Yehoshua was in the process of obtaining a temporary court injunction barring the demolition, but the authorities refused to hold off". As the bulldozer rolled forward, Yehoshua's son Shimon, 25, fired his pistol from the roof. He hit no one, but a policeman quickly shot Shimon dead. His relatives insisted later that he had fired in the air or at the wheels of the bulldozer; the police said he had aimed at them. Cried his sister Dvora: "He survived the war in Lebanon, only to be shot like a dog while defending his own house!"

Overnight, ethnic agitation broke out in Tel Aviv. Demonstrators called Mayor Shlomo Lahat a murderer and threatened revenge. Swastikas appeared on the Jerusalem residence of Yosef Burg, the German-born Interior Minister who has authority over the police.

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Begin avoided all public comment, thereby drawing a rebuke from the Jerusalem Post. The paper regretted that Begin, "whose sensitivity to anti-Semitism and communal animosity is well known, should choose to remain silent." Once again, as in the aftermath of the Beirut massacre last September, it was left to President Yitzhak Navon to address the nation's conscience. Navon, a Sephardic Jew, called for an investigation and at the same time denounced the "criminal exploitation" of the tragedy. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.