Saturday, May 26, 2007

Khamoula-violence on Lake Kineret

"Well, if it weren't for the Arabs, we would have never woken up."
Wait, I'll start the story earlier... Some friends and I packed up our camping gear and headed to Lake Kineret. We chose a private beach along the eastern shore, and set up our tents in the thick of it, among the arsim and frechot listening to their Mizrahi music and chewing on sunflower seeds. There were campfires and people smoking narghile, there were loud teenage girls screaming until all hours of the morning.
Speaking of the morning, after a few hours of interrupted sleep, my tent-mate and I were awoken by noisy stirrings outside of our tent at six A.M.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"There's a fight," he told me after peaking his head outside. "I think it's between some Arabs."
We stayed inside the tent as the shouting got louder and closer; "Blah blah blah, bin sharmouta!" The fighting was right nearby, I heard a bang! against the pole next to our tent.
The fighting waned, and when we felt it was safe, we went outside. After about three minutes, a whole gang of young Arab men, teenagers from the looks of it, came stomping back into tent city, armed with bottles, poles-- anything they could find, really. One guy had a tambourine as a weapon.
They chased another group of young guys, who fled to their SUV, and peeled out of the place, not without having bottles and musical instruments flung at their windows.
My camping fellows explained to me that the groups were probably from different local family gangs, called khamoulas. They probably had a long-standing fight stemming from who-knows-what that played out on our campground of all places.
After the gang dispersed, the National Guard showed up, asking all kinds of questions, but none of the other campers had gotten involved and nobody could say who the fighting hooligans were.
A teenager from the next-door parley said, "Well, if it weren't for the Arabs, we would have never woken up!"