“There’s been a campaign where I live since not long after October 7^th against allowing any Arabs to work in our town. With slogans like ‘We won’t go back to October 6^th,’ and ‘Our lives are in your hands – Who are you employing?’ the trauma and fear of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7^th are summoned to convince residents that it is foolish and dangerous to let potential terrorists who are most likely terror supporters work in our midst. Over the past months, I have passed by the many posters and bumper stickers with a mixture of anger, unease, sadness and impotence. How can you fight people’s fears after October 7^th? The campaign was created by regular moms, with real fear for their safety and the safety of their children. I completely understand them and share the fear.

But it was a post on a local Facebook group that convinced me to formulate a response. Reacting to the Efrat municipality’s recent decision, made in coordination with the IDF, to begin allowing Palestinian workers back in, the post’s author asked why we spent so much money on new gates ‘if we are just going to be freely letting the vermin into our city?’ The post had been up for two hours, multiple people had responded, but other than someone suggesting that the use of the word ‘vermin’ might not be helpful to attract new recruits, no one had clearly and unequivocally condemned language that dehumanizes people based solely on their ethnic origin.

I replied, and thankfully, since then, a lively, relatively respectful conversation has been ongoing, with many other voices joining mine and asserting that there is a difference between real security concerns and outright racism. But in the end, the conversation inevitably returns to the very real fear, and the reasonable argument, as expressed by one neighbor: Why would we want to take on any risk ourselves unless there’s a substantial reason for doing so?”

Read Avidan’s full article on Times of Israel.