Yigal Yehoshua died after being pelted with rocks amid clashes between Arabs and Jews in Israel's mixed city of Lod.

The ethnic violence was triggered by protests and clashes in Jerusalem that also ignited an 11-day Gaza War.

Randa Aweis, a 58-year-old mother of six, received one of Yehoshua's kidneys after the 56-year-old man succumbed to his injuries a week after being attacked.

Aweis had been waiting for a kidney transplant for 10 years. Yehoshua was registered as an organ donor; the Jewish man and the Arab woman were medically a match.

"I could not believe it," Aweis said in an interview at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. "I'm telling you, I couldn't believe it."

"They saved me," she said. "People say he was a good man, that he didn't do any harm, so why was he murdered? That's forbidden. There must be peace between Jews and Arabs, real peace."

Aweis never met Yehoshua, but she spoke to his widow on a tearful video call. She hopes to visit his family in person once she has recovered from the transplant.

"I will tell Yigal's family thank you. They should not feel any more suffering. Yigal is going to heaven where it is better than here," she said.

And she has a message for the Jews and Arabs of the region: "We should live together. We should have peace. We should be happy."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the attacks as "unacceptable," saying in a statement: "Nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs and nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews."

Yehoshua's brother Efi, spoke at his funeral, saying his brother "believed in coexistence."

"You said to me it would not happen. You believed if you put your head out everything will be fine: ‘They know Yigal.' And the worst thing happened," he said.

Police have arrested several suspects in connection with the violence.

Sources

Religion News

CNN

Messages "to the sons of monkeys and pigs" were left on the homepages at dunbarsloane.co.nz and dunbarsloane.com. The auction house uses both domain names in its promotions. Continue reading

Newspapers this summer have been full of little else.

Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.

A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer's events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.

When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important.

People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents.

I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel's soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point.

But they don't.

This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last.

The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country's own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.

The lasting importance of this summer's war, I believe, doesn't lie in the war itself.

It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews.

The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists.

It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues. Continue reading

Source

• Mattie Friedman in Tablet

Matti Friedman's work as a reporter has taken him to Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington, DC, and to conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus.