Israel’s Arab Moment
During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Islamist militia, I was sitting in a restaurant in the city of Haifa when the siren warning of an incoming rocket interrupted my meal. Arab and Jewish diners found shelter in the narrow kitchen, crowding against one another in awkward silence. “Coexistence,” one woman finally said, with palpable irony.
Today, Israel faces its first national threat that isn’t security related, our first civil emergency that has nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. In the coronavirus, Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens are facing a crisis that is finally bringing us together.
Israeli media regularly feature stories of Arab-Jewish intimacy in the quarantine wards. The newspaper published a four-page photo essay of Arab and Jewish nurses—the first time in memory it featured Arabs as Israeli heroes. A video
