Anger and Disappointment Trigger Arab Demonstrations Inside Israel

By Marda Dunsky

Palestinian anger in the wake of the Hebron massacre spilled over the "Green Line" into Israel in the days following the Feb. 25 killings, with tens of thousands of Arab citizens staging unprecedented demonstrations, some of which turned violent, throughout the country.

Arab leaders called for a reordering of priorities if the peace process is to continue, with the removal of Jewish settlements from the occupied territories to be addressed as a primary issue. They also proclaimed a day-long general strike on Feb. 26 in which municipal offices and shops were shut down in scores of Arab towns and villages, while thousands took to the streets to protest the slaughter of up to 54 Palestinian worshippers and demonstrators in the West Bank town of Hebron the day before.

There are 825,000 Arab citizens of Israel living inside Israel's "Green Line," comprising roughly 18 percent of the Israeli population. Nor do these figures, which account for nearly 13 percent of Palestinians worldwide, include those living in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Several Arab demonstrations within Israel turned violent on the day after the massacre. Police and army patrols used tear gas to restrain stone-throwing demonstrators in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, with a population of 60,000. Nazareth police, four of whom were injured, arrested 40 protesters among the crowd of 2,000 that assembled in this northern town in the heart of Galilee, in scenes resembling those played out in the West Bank and Gaza during the six-year course of the intifada.

In Baka el-Gharbiyya, which borders the West Bank in the center of the country, Israeli security forces also battled with stone-throwing Israeli Arabs. Still another demonstration by 10,000 Arabs in the town of Umm el-Fahm ended peacefully.

Most surprising were disturbances in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv, where Arabs comprise roughly a third of the 40,000 residents. Five demonstrators were injured and dozens of stone-throwing protesters were arrested for attacking police officers and cars in this coastal town whose Arab and Jewish inhabitants historically have enjoyed good relations. After an interim period of afternoon calm, disturbances broke out again in Jaffa, with 21 youths arrested by late evening. The Feb. 27 edition of the Tel Aviv Hebrew daily Yediot Ahronot headlined its two-page, three photo spread on the events, "This isn't Gaza-It's Jaffa."

Sporadic strikes and demonstrations continued for another two days, with 25 arrested in Jaffa and 1 killed in a Bedouin settlement as a result of unrest in the Negev on Feb. 27.

With demonstrations having occurred in virtually every Arab town and village in Israel, commentators speculated that the intifada, finally had crossed the Green Line into Israel proper. But Arab Knesset member Hashem Mahamid of the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality told state-run Israel television that this was not the case. The Palestinian response inside Israel was natural, he said, given the proportions of the Hebron tragedy.

"We are sons of the same people," Mahamid. said. "How can we sit by quietly?" In light of the massacre, he said, "the peace process that started on the basis of Gaza and Jericho first must now address the settlements. I don't believe there will be peace as long as the same people [settlers] who are singing and dancing in Kiryat Arba after this tragedy are allowed to remain."

Baruch Goldstein, perpetrator of the killings in the Hebron mosque, was a resident of the branch of the Kiryat Arba settlement located in the middle of Hebron. A special government commission of inquiry was formed to determine whether soldiers shot to death the rest of the Hebron victims as they rushed out of the mosque.

The dozens of Arab demonstrations staged throughout Israel on the day following the massacre were for the most part nonviolent, with protesters raising symbolic empty coffins and holding aloft Palestinian flags and black flags of mourning.

In the Galilee village of Ibillin, 15 miles east of Haifa, 350 demonstrators marched silently through the streets to the larger of two local mosques. There the two imams addressed the crowd, one denouncing the slaying of worshippers in the middle of Ramadan prayers, and noting that the victims had met their fate "only because they were Arabs."

Salih Murshid Selim, the elected head of the Ibillin local council, told the crowd, "we are tired of [Israeli government] denunciations and apologiesafter these things happen. They say it is the action of one crazy person. But it is the government of Israel that is responsible. Yitzhak Rabin is responsible. "

"The official policy as a whole is responsible," said Salih Baransi, general director of the Research Center for Arab Heritage in Tayibeh and a leading figure in Arab nationalist circles in Israel. "The extremists in the Jewish religious movement are only exploiting official policy to the maximum."

"The Israelis don't think of themselves as occupiers."

That policy, he said, makes use of state informational institutions to portray Arabs as "murderers, terrorists, monsters-without a sense of humanity. With such an official policy, the [Jewish] public behaves accordingly toward Arabs."

The occupation also figures prominently in official policy, Baransi said. "Comparisons are made between acts of Palestinian resistance and what happened in Hebron, without taking into account that the Palestinians as an occupied people have the right to resist their occupier.

"But they [the Israelis] don't think of themselves as occupiers—and that's the problem," Baransi said. "As long as this problem is not addressed, there will be no real solution to the Palestinian problem. There has to be a discussion of 'what is mine and what is yours'—and none of the agreements to date have addressed this issue."

Selim, along with Mahamid and others, called on the Israeli government to initiate a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, beginning with the Jewish settlers * "They talk about terrorism," Selim said. "But we recognize where the real terrorism is coming from."

The Hebron events aggravated a general sense of disappointment with the peace process within the Palestinian Arab community in Israel, according to Mufid Qassoum, executive director of the Public Association for Culture and Art in Ibillin.

"People are very angry; they feel powerless, without any assurances for the protection of Palestinians [in the territories] living among 120,000 armed settlers, who are a potential army, " Qassoum said. "There is a feeling that there is no real peace—and there will be no genuine peace until the Israelis withdraw."

Marda Dunsky, a Ph.D. candidate in modem Mideast history at the University of Chicago, is living in the Arab town of Ibillin in Israel.