Israeli Press
Rawia Handaqlo says Israel uses sulha to abandon its Arab citizens
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The Israeli news site Ynet published an opinion piece on Monday by Rawia Handaqlo, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, arguing that the state has turned a village custom into an instrument for withdrawing from its own duty to protect her.
Sulha — the traditional reconciliation ceremony that ends a dispute between families — is being asked, in her account, to do work it was never built for. Under it a crime becomes "a conflict" and the person harmed is expected to "compromise".
Handaqlo wrote that the state reaches for sulha when it suits and opposes it when it does not, and that the pattern is not confusion but convenience.
Her sharpest passage concerns who is empowered by that choice. When the state gives standing to an informal settlement, she wrote, it gives standing to whoever controls the informal settlement — and in Arab towns today that is often the criminal organisations themselves.
"I do not need the state to protect me from my culture. I am proud of it."
Rawia Handaqlo, writing in Ynet
She asked instead for the ordinary thing: one law, enforced equally, and institutions that answer to her as a citizen.
The argument arrives beside a hard set of numbers. At a Democrats party event in Nazareth on Sunday, Yair Golan launched a billion-shekel emergency plan against crime in Arab society, citing 889 people killed during the current government's term, 49 of them children.
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