Links
Students targeted after rabbi's anti-Arab edict
Psychology student Osama Ghanaim was woken early one night last month by a mob of 60 ultra-Orthodox Jews chanting ''Kill the Arabs'' outside his flat.
'Then they stoned my house,'' Ghanaim said this week. ''Rocks broke through my front windows.''
After the crowd dispersed, Ganaim, who is one of 1400 Arab Israeli students enrolled at Safed Academic College, in northern Israel, found a poster on his front door warning him to move out.
Advertisement: Story continues below
''The poster said they would set fire to the house, so I called the police,'' Ghanaim said. ''The police took four hours to come to my house, and they did nothing. I have not heard a thing from them since.''
One of Judaism's four holy cities, Safed has been the center of roiling ethnic tensions in recent weeks after the city's state-sponsored chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, issued a ruling forbidding Jews to rent flats or sell property to non-Jews because it ''causes evil and makes the public commit the sin of intermarriage''.
Only 70 Arab students live in private accommodation in Safed, a city of 32,000 Jews, one third of whom are ultra-Orthodox. Another 120 Arab students live in dormitories provided by the college, while the remaining 1200 commute from nearby Arab villages.