What the death of my Arab student revealed about Israel

Mint

8 hours ago

On the night of June 13, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iranian nuclear and military sites. Iran responded by firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, many aimed at civilian targets. Israel's defense systems blunted the barrage, but many missiles still got through, striking homes and killing 24 civilians. One of the victims was my student Shada Khatib, a smart, accomplished, 20-year-old Palestinian-Israeli. She died on June 15 alongside her 13-year-old sister Hala, their mother Manar and their aunt Manal, in the Arab town of Tamra in northern Israel.
Last year Shada took my class on the history of political thought, which is mandatory for law students at the University of Haifa. She had applied to work as my teaching assistant next year, and I was supposed to interview her this week. Shada 'was the youngest among the students and the most prominent presence," her academic adviser, human rights attorney Abeer Baker, told me in a private message, 'with her smile, tenderness and endless courage to participate in the discussions despite all the challenges Palestinian students face in Israeli universities."
She was an outstanding student at the law faculty's legal clinic for human rights, which has litigated dozens of court cases on behalf of underprivileged populations, with notable success in cases of housing rights and asylum seekers' right to education. Another of her law professors, Itamar Mann, wrote on his Facebook page that Shada 'surprised me with her clear and quick answers, to the point that I asked with a smile if she would like to teach in my place. Her quick answer: 'Yes, maybe in a few years.'" His commemorative post went viral.
The pain of Shada's death has reached far beyond the town of Tamra and the University of Haifa. The Khatib family's funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners—Jewish and Arab, neighbors and academics, lawyers and political activists. Shada's mother, Manar, was a teacher; her bereaved father, Raja, is a prominent real estate lawyer in northern Israel and deputy chair of the Haifa District Bar Association. Raja's brother Ihab, who lost his wife Manal to the same Iranian missile, is a member of the bar's ethics commission.
Few people outside Israel are aware of its flourishing Arab middle class, especially in Haifa and the Galilee. At the University of Haifa, around 40% of the students are Arab Israeli citizens—or Palestinian-Israeli, as many prefer to identify themselves. In the law faculty, where I teach, around 25% of students are members of the Arab and Druze minorities, and over 50% of those students are women. The academic head of the university, the neurobiologist Mouna Maroun, is the first Arab woman to be appointed rector of an Israeli university.
For many years, liberal Israelis like myself have taken pride in these signs of rising equality between Jews and Arabs. But Shada Khatib's death is also a reminder of how much inequality remains. The Khatib home had an operative safe room, which the four victims couldn't reach in time. But Tamra, like many Arab residential areas in Israel, has almost no government-funded air raid shelters. According to a recent report from the Israeli Democracy Institute, 46% of Israel's Arab population lives in buildings that do not have certified air raid shelters, as opposed to 26% of the population as a whole.
The attack also exposed the unbridled racism against Arab citizens that has erupted among a small but shrill minority of Israelis in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, the Israel-Hamas war and the Israel-Iran war. Soon after the missile hit Tamra, an anonymous video was posted on social media that showed young Jewish men celebrating. They danced and chanted 'May your village burn!", a song by a DJ named Yehuda Mor that has become an anthem for the extreme right and fans of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club. It was originally written to taunt a rival Arab soccer team: 'Listen well, you Arabs, we don't do reconciliations, may your village burn!" Recently the song has been directed not only against Palestinians but also against liberal and leftist Jews, including demonstrators demanding the release of Israeli hostages and an end to the war in Gaza.
The normalization of hate speech isn't just a consequence of Israelis' collective trauma. It is fueled and encouraged by several openly racist government ministers and parliamentarians, notably Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Almog Cohen. The latter, for example, said of Arab Knesset members that they 'are not even worthy of being sheep, they are not human."
For the majority of Haifa residents and Israeli liberals, the killing of Shada Khatib and her relatives is a private calamity embedded in a public one. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites to defend the country—rightly, in my view. But the current Israeli government has failed in multiple ways to defend its citizens, both Jewish and Arab.
The greatest failure, of course, was Hamas's surprise attack. Another is the rise of anti-Arab and anti-liberal political actors with tremendous legislative power and media impact. The Netanyahu government has been trying for more than two years to limit the authority of the Israeli Supreme Court, which is committed to defending the rights of minorities.
This week, a Knesset committee voted to oust Ayman Odeh, a veteran Arab Israeli politician, from his seat in the legislature, because he made public statements including the words 'Gaza has won, and Gaza will win." Unpleasant as they are to Jewish Israeli ears, his statements were well within the legal definition of freedom of speech.
Odeh has always been deeply critical of Israeli policy but fully committed to the rule of law. He is himself a Haifa-born lawyer, from the same milieu as the Khatib family. The government's majority in the Knesset means that the move against him will pass, but the Supreme Court is likely to block it. Had Shada been alive, she would have followed the process with anger—and, I would like to think, some hope.
The Khatib family was killed by Iran, and they represent the exact opposite of the ayatollahs' regime. They are democrats, moderates—crucial partners in any future Israeli society that might emerge from the current ruins and smoke. In an interview with the Associated Press, Raja Khatib said he believed his family's tragedy showed that Jews and Arabs 'have a common future. We need to understand that we have a common destiny."
Moderate Zionist Jews like me may have political disagreements with Arab Israelis like the Khatibs, but I would much rather have them as my neighbors and fellow citizens than many a Jewish Israeli ultranationalist. May the memory of Shada and the other members of her family be a blessing.
Fania Oz-Salzberger is professor emerita at the University of Haifa's Law School and the co-author, with Amos Oz, of 'Jews and Words."