Pogrom. That is the first word that came to mind when I heard about Huwwara. A rabid mob sowing violence, terror, fire and destruction, the terror magnified by the darkness, shops and houses and cars torched, with hundreds of injuries and – apparently by some miracle – just one death, of a man, Sameh Aqtash, who had just returned from volunteering help to victims of the earthquake in Turkey.
Horror and shame welled up close behind. This was a pogrom, but with the critical characters reversed. No longer were Jews the victims, in the classic, almost stereotypical role fixed by history and historiography for twenty-five centuries or more. Now Jews were “masters in their house”, as asserted by a minister in the new Israeli government, and determined to show it.[1]