pogrom in Jabal Mukhaber

Please read the editorial in today's Haaretz that narrates how the Jerusalem police allowed a group of extreme-right wing youth to break into the Arab neighborhood of Jabal Mukhater, smash windows and damage cars. The residents of the neighborhood sensibly chose to stay in their homes, thereby preventing massive bloodletting between the two groups. The attackers were enraged that the murderer of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav recently came from the enighborhood and that fliers had been pasted up in the area extolling the killing. So because of that, thugs should be given free run of a neighborhood, to threaten terrified men, women and children who had nothing to do with the killing or putting up the leaflets? So that is Jewish justice circa 2008; collective punishment carried out by a mob while the police shamefully look the other way?

As Haaretz notes, how laughable the claim that Arab residents of Jerusalem receive equal protection under the law. Their very lives can be put at risk by young Jewish thugs blowing off steam and the keystone cops of Jerusalem somehow cannot manage to prevent these people from reaching their targets.

As Haaretz notes, if a Jewish neighborhood anywhere in the world had suffered such an attack, Israel and Jewish organizations everywhere would rightfully be shouting that this is intolerable; that an attack on one Jew anywhere is an attack on all Jews everywhere. Yet a pogrom carried out by Jews meets largely with silence with the exception of a few brave voices like Haaretz. Question: What have we as a people come to that we would find such behavior by our own compatriots to be understandable and quasi-acceptable; so understandable and quasi acceptable that the police allow it to happen--just as they have allowed settler hooligans to beat and even kill West Bank Arabs for decades? Where is the Jewish conscience?