When Hanin Radi tried to make her dream come true of staging a marathon in her home town, the Arab Israeli received death threats from Muslims.
“I’ve run marathons everywhere, but in the streets of my town I’m afraid to run,” said Radi, who is from the Arab town of Tirah in central Israel.
The 36-year-old mother of four is among those who have stirred the wrath of Salafists increasingly asserting themselves among Israel’s Arab population.
Photo: AFP
Citing their religion, Salafists have taken their campaign to cultural institutions and local governments, opposing anything they view as immoral.
In the case of Radi, who has finished third in the Tel Aviv marathon, her running in public in exercise gear violates the Salafists’ rigid ideas about women and modesty.
She trains three times a week with about 50 other women in Tirah, but they can only run after nightfall in a closed stadium, empty of men.
“Last year we had everything organized for a marathon. We had announced a date and distributed posters, but when I went with the girls to run the course we’d laid out, we encountered the bearded [religious] men, who insulted us,” said Radi, who is herself Muslim. “Then the religious began to stir up the people against us.”
That same evening, she received death threats and abuse over the telephone, she said.
In the middle of the night, “shots were fired at my house and my car.”
Israeli police questioned a Muslim cleric suspected of inciting violence against the would-be runners, she said.
However, “the case was closed without anyone being arrested,” she said.
Israeli police spokeswoman Luba Samri said comments on social media, including Facebook, are in general “referred to the attorney general, who has the right to study them.”
She dismissed allegations that police are less stringent in addressing concerns among the Arab population than those involving Jews.
“We investigate [accusations] thoroughly, with each case measured according to its merits and circumstances,” she said.
Arab Israelis, people who remained after the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 and their descendants, make up about 17.5 percent of Israel’s 8 million population.
The vast majority are Muslim, though there are also significant Christian and Druze populations.
There are no official figures on how many consider themselves Salafists, although community leaders estimate that they number a few thousand.
The Salafists’ campaign at home has at times targeted the Arabic-language films and theatrical performances considered vital to the struggle for Arab-Israeli identity.
Recently, Muslims in several towns banned performances of a play they found inappropriate and a concert featuring Palestinian singer Haitham Khalailah, a runner-up in the finals in Beirut of the Arab Idol television singing contest.
Both were deemed as “contravening Islam and morality.”
Activists also succeeded in having a high-school Arabic teacher in the northern town of Baqa al-Gharbiya fired for showing the Oscar-nominated Palestinian film Omar to his students.
An Israeli labor tribunal ordered the teacher, Ali Mawasi, reinstated.
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