“I was in Rome a week ago. My daughter calls me up at about noon and says, ‘I’m on my way back from school, and there’s shooting on the street.’ Probably some criminal chasing another criminal. I find myself helpless. I tell her, ‘Run and hide in one of the houses.’ Another time, my little son, 7 years old, told me he was in the car with his mother and saw someone shooting ‘at God in the sky.’ I didn’t understand. My wife told me that the driver of the car in front of them at an intersection had stuck his arm out of the car, holding a gun, and started shooting upward. This all happens in the State of Israel, 10 minutes from Tel Aviv, and life goes on. This is the routine in Kfar Qasim, an Arab town in the center of Israel.”

Meretz Knesset member Issawi Frej is the person recounting this story from the State of Israel's “backyard.” Frej, an Arab, was born in Kfar Qasim in 1963 and has lived there since, as have his elderly parents. He got married in Kfar Qasim and raised seven kids there.

Sometimes a banal description of a routine event — such as a 7-year-old boy speaking calmly about gunshots fired next to him or a girl on her way from school seeking shelter from a gunfight — helps one understand that something bad is actually afoot. Al-Monitor’s interview with Frej offers a firsthand account of the state’s persistent disregard of illegal weapons in the Arab sector, a phenomenon that has been covered in Al-Monitor. Frej and local Arab leaders have been warning for years about the dangers and implications of the abundance of unregistered weapons. It was only when an Arab Israeli, Nashat Milhem, carried out an attack in Tel Aviv on Jan. 1, using a weapon that belonged to his father, that the government began to pay attention.

Every Israeli should read the interview with Frej, because it describes the death of a dream. It reveals Frej's desire, as an Arab citizen of Israel, to raise his children in an egalitarian and just society and serve the public as a politician in a Zionist party, a dream that daily crashes into the walls erected by those who set the tone in Israel these days, Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Culture Minister Miri Regev.