This Palestinian rapper and Jewish mother live in the same Israeli city, but are far apart on the conflict

A Palestinian rap artist and a Jewish mother of seven live in the same, mixed neighbourhood in the Israeli city of Lod.

But Tamer Nafar and Katy Berman have very different perspectives on several days of violence that has seen local Arabs and Jews turn on each other.

The rapper likens wider Palestinian protests against Israel to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying they just want equal rights.

By contrast, Mrs Berman, who works as a teacher at a local school, hopes there will be a return to life in Lod as it was before the riots, believing that Arabs and Jews had previously lived happily together.

Here are their words.

“It’s intensive. It is I would say dangerous,” Mr Nafar said, sitting on a ground-floor balcony in his home where he lives with his wife and two children.

“Confrontations happen… any second. You can relax and any second it can just go bananas, as they say. In general, the feeling is unprotected, we as Palestinians are unprotected.”

He and Arab neighbours have even started conducting their own night patrol, wary of what the rapper claimed were Jewish settlers bussed into the city to attack Arabs.

“Settlers nowadays are walking around the city with guns, screaming ‘Death to the Arabs’ – protected by the police and I’m unarmed and there you go again,” Tamer said.

He suggested Palestinians should learn from the success of the Black Lives Matter campaign.

“Whenever I was watching the Black Lives… I was like, damn, dude this is so… may we should walk like this, act like this, the way we communicate. And the way the revolution is so cool as well. Coolness is very important,” the rapper said.

In a nearby house lives Katy Berman and her family. Frightened and appalled at the violence, she only dared step outside for the first time on Thursday since the unrest began three day earlier.

Sitting by a lemon tree in her back garden, she explained how she was feeling.

“It’s the tension,” she said.

“It is the fact that I go out of my house and I’m not sure who can I say hello to? Is it safe to walk in the streets? It was safe to walk in the streets a week ago… Now, I won’t leave the house. I left the house yesterday for the first time since Monday night. Um, I went to the supermarket and my husband came with me because I was a bit worried. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure what would happen.”

Asked why she was so scared, she said: “I’m going to get a rock in my car window. I’m scared. I’m going to get a Molotov cocktail thrown at me. I’m scared I’m going to lose control of the car because of anything that could happen around me. I’m scared for my kids to walk in the street.”

Scenes of Jews and Arabs in her city fighting “scares me more than the missiles”, she said, referring to Hamas rockets that have been fired into Israel since Monday.

Like the Palestinian rapper, her husband has also been conducting night patrols, though he has been going out with fellow Jews.

“But hopefully tonight our Arab neighbours will join us because we’re trying to keep the neighbourhood safe,” Mrs Berman said.

She said before this week’s strike, she believed Arabs and Jews had been living happily alongside each other.

She worries that this might never be the case again.

“Things will calm down, but [will we] be able to look at our neighbours and [will they be] neighbourly again… you know, like friendship. I don’t know. I don’t know. Even if the riots calm down, will anything go back to how it was before?”

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