The ancient Palestinian coastal city of Acre was the scene of four days of rioting following an incident that took place on the night of October 8, when a mob of Jewish fundamentalists attempted to lynch three Palestinians for the "crime" of driving a car on the Yom Kippur religious holiday.
Hard-line Jews consider driving on Yom Kippur to be immoral.
While the mainstream media has portrayed the disturbances as clashes between Arabs and Jews, in reality what took place was an organised pogrom, instigated by religious extremists, that is part of an ongoing state-supported campaign of ethnic cleansing.
While the whole of Palestine is controlled by Israel, it is divided between those territories on which the Jewish state was established in 1948 ("Israel-proper") and those seized in 1967 (the West Bank and Gaza Strip).
The establishment of Israel in 1948 was accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of most of the Palestinian population from the territory it then controlled.
In 1948, 87% of Acre's population was expelled or murdered. Today 27% of the city's population is Palestinian.
The recent violence in Acre sheds light on the precarious existance of Palestinians in Israel.
The violence began when Tawfiq Jamal drove with his teenage son and his friend to collect his daughter from the home of relatives, where she was helping prepare for a wedding.
Upon arrival at the relatives' home, they were set upon by a 300-strong mob chanting "Death to the Arabs!", and hurling rocks. Jamal's son was injured.
The family called emergency services and police arrived but were unwilling to confront the mob. The police left the scene and Jamal's family were only saved from lynching by a Jewish security guard, who hid them.
Over the next four days, Jewish mobs up to 1500-strong roamed Acre attacking Palestinians and their property. Cars were torched, shops damaged and a dozen homes razed to the ground.
Leaflets, texts and internet messages circulated calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from the city, with statements such as, "The Jew is the son of an angel and the Arab is the son of a dog".
While the police made some attempts at controlling the rioters, this did not extend to providing security to Palestinians being driven from their homes or returning to collect possessions.
Equal numbers of Jewish rioters and their Palestinian victims were arrested, but while the former have all been released many of the latter remain in detention.
The story of the Sa'adi family is typical. After their house was attacked by a Jewish mob on October 9, their calls to the police received no response for two days.
Eventually, they were evacuated by a police vehicle, only for the four adult members of the family to be arrested. Three remain in detention.
On October 13, Jamal was arrested and remains in detention, accused of "hurting religious sentiments" by driving on Yom Kippur, although this is not actually a crime under Israeli law.
The police's tolerant approach to stone-throwing by Jewish citizens of Israel contrasts with their response when Palestinian citizens of Israel do the same. In October 2000, authorities responded to stone-throwing by Israeli Palestinians, demonstrating in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, by opening fire with live ammunition, killing 13 protesters.
While the Jewish population of Acre (predominantly Mizrahim — descendants of Jewish migrants from Arab countries) have traditionally supported right-wing anti-Palestinian parties, the violence in Acre was predominantly the work of outsiders.
The pogrom was the work of religious fundamentalists from the West Bank settler movement, predominantly European-descended Jews, or Ashkanazim, including many ideologically motivated recent immigrants from North America.
The October 12 Jerusalem Post reported at least one instance of the mobs attacking a local Mizrahi Jew who they had mistaken for a Palestinian.
In the past decade, the religious settler movement has been establishing communities and hesder-yeshiva (institutions that combine religious and military training) in Acre, Jaffa and other Israeli communities that have a high Palestinian population.
This represents a deliberate campaign to reduce the Palestinian population of Israel-proper. Currently 18% of Israeli citizens, 1.5 million people, are Palestinian.
As with the religious settlers' violence in the post-1967 occupied territories, the response of Israeli authorities is a mixture of half-hearted condemnation, ineffectual attempts at restraint and policies that reward the extremists' illegal actions.
This is because, despite the extremists' disregard for Israeli law and their fundamentalist brand of Judaism being alien to the beliefs of most Israeli Jews, the entire Israeli establishment shares their goal: the perpetuation of an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine.
Israeli politicians frequently speak of the "demographic threat" — a racist anxiety over Palestinian birth rates.
While Israeli bulldozers removing olive trees from Palestinian farmers' land is an image generally associated with the West Bank, it has also been occurring in Israel-proper.
In rural Galilee, Palestinians comprise 72% of the population but own only 16% of the land. This disparity has not stopped Israeli authorities from confiscating Palestinian-owned farmland to build suburbs for newly arrived Jewish immigrants, as is occurring in the village of Al-Mahad.
In urban areas, mass-eviction of Palestinan public housing tenants is often used to counter the "demographic threat", for example, the May 2007 eviction of 497 Palestinian families in Jaffa.