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Reaping the whirlwind Battles between Arabs and Jews on the streets of Israel. Shots fired in Acre and Nazareth, streets blocked in the heart of Haifa and Jaffa. Attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and calls of 'Death to the Jews' by Arabs who just days before lived in peace and cooperation with their Jewish neighbors. To some, it may have seemed like a reprise of the intifada, or a return to 1948 - but these events took place well inside the Green Line in the year 2000. This week's riots by Israeli Arabs may be cited as vindication by all sides of the political debate: Jews and Arabs who warned that decades of discrimination would inevitably lead to an explosion among Israel's one million Arab citizens; those who describe Israeli Arabs as an increasingly radical, pro-Palestinian fifth column that cannot be trusted; and those in the Arab community who say that Israel is a racist state which reacts in an unnecessarily harsh and punitive way towards protests by Arab citizens, out of all proportion to the way it handles civil disturbances in the Jewish population. They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind, says Hosea - but the question remains whether the wind has been sown by a state that has failed to treat Israeli Arabs as full citizens during the last 52 years, or by Israeli Arab leaders whose messages of alienation and confrontation may incite their constituents to rebellion. As peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority lurch uncertainly toward their endgame, the events of the past week seem to show that the peace process will not solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but only bring it into the heart of Israel proper. FIGURES like Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus have been warning for years that Palestinian Authority appeals to Israeli Arabs have gradually eroded their sense of allegiance to the state, replacing a hesitant sense of Israeliness with a renewed Palestinian identity. Indeed, Israeli Arab politicians have grown unprecedentedly bold in their attacks on the State of Israel, increasingly referring to themselves as Palestinians and telling their voters that the blue Israeli identity card they carry is merely a legal necessity that establishes their place of residence, not their nationality. Support for commemoration of the Nakba - the 'catastrophe' of Israel's establishment in 1948 - and opposition to Israeli Independence Day have grown unprecedentedly violent in recent years. Two leading Arab politicians, MKs Abdul Malik Dahamshe (United Arab List) and Mohammed Barakei (Hadash), have recently been accused of incitement for their role in violent clashes with the authorities and for their calls to Arab citizens to resist police efforts with force if need be. Yet few if any voices from within the Israeli Arab community have questioned their leaders' role in the recent deterioration of relations with the state. Instead, they have closed ranks against Jewish politicians and law- enforcement authorities, justifying the recent riots in Galilee and laying the blame for the violence, which resulted in the deaths of 10 Israeli Arabs, squarely at the feet of the police and the government. 'We don't want victims. It's the police, the government, and the policies of [Prime Minister Ehud] Barak that are responsible,' says Dahamshe, shortly after attending the funeral of one Israeli Arab killed in a standoff with police. 'If they don't come here and provoke us, we want quiet. We're not going after the police, they're coming after us.' Dahamshe and others blame the riots on the visit last week of MK Ariel Sharon (Likud) to the Temple Mount, though Sharon and other Israeli politicians of all stripes have visited the Temple Mount many times in the past without igniting a conflagration. 'The message is that when it comes down to Al-Aksa, the holy of holies for the Palestinians, there are no limits, no Green Line. When they touch Al-Aksa, every Arab and every Moslem in the whole world says, 'this cannot be,'' Dahamshe says. 'We want to protect Al-Aksa with our spirit and our blood. It's our responsibility to stand with our people in a just protest to protect our holy places.' Even if Arab rioters did get a little out of hand - blocking main highways, challenging police with rocks and firebombs, trashing stores, and setting fire to post offices and banks - police must not react with gunfire, Dahamshe says. 'It's time that the State of Israel treated us like a government treats its citizens, not as conquerors treat enemies,' Dahamshe says. 'I want to see that Barak learned his lesson and comes to apologize to the Arab public for its victims and martyrs.' In an extended meeting Tuesday with Arab MKs and community leaders - the first in his 15 months as prime minister - Barak called for a committee to investigate claims of police brutality in its handling of the riots. He also ordered police to fire on rioters only when their lives are endangered. Shfaram Mayor Ursan Yassin was one of the few Arab public figures who praised the police for their role in containing the riots, saying they acted with a restraint that kept the number of casualties to a minimum. 'I don't blame the police. They did their work, what they had to do,' says Yassin, who is regularly derided in Israeli Arab circles as an Uncle Tom. 'We have leaders in the Arab sector who want to gain political capital from everything that happens. They're playing it like a card. Politics must not be injected into this.' Far more common, however, was the reaction of Abd Inbitawi, spokesman for the Supreme Arab Monitoring Committee, a grouping of Arab municipal council heads. 'The massive and aggressive [police] presence in these days incited people in a provocative way,' Inbitawi says. 'What happened against the Arab citizens was directed according to prior plans, and murder was its clear purpose. If you examine the events in a clear manner, you see that it's not riots, it's a massacre by police.' The reaction of Deputy Foreign Minister Nawaf Massalha, the highest-ranking Arab in Barak's government, was more subtle. 'Some Arabs say it's a massacre - you know the Arabs - but it's a tragedy, worse even than Land Day 24 years ago' when six Israeli Arabs were killed by police in a violent protest over land expropriations, Massalha says. 'No one is is allowed to take the law into his own hands and do whatever he wants, and when the young people did some crazy things that we couldn't control, we condemned that. But hurting them only makes things worse, and in this case the police acted like judge, jury, and executioner. 'Why do you treat us like our brothers the Palestinians?' Massalha continues. 'The Palestinians have guns in their hands and are fighting you, but we are only demonstrating - with violence, maybe, but not with guns.' Yet this week's events represent a worrisome development that bodes ill for the future, according to MK Gideon Ezra (Likud). If Israeli Arabs riot now in solidarity with Palestinian gunfighters in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, what would happen in the event of a full- fledged war, Ezra asks. 'Tomorrow if we have a war with Hizbullah and we want to call up reserve soldiers, they'll block the roads,' says Ezra, a former deputy head of the General Security Service. 'What the Israeli Arabs did this week must never happen at any time.' IT'S no secret that Israeli Arabs have been the stepchildren of the state for the past 52 years, routinely given smaller budgets than their Jewish counterparts, wildly underrepresented in government, academia, and state jobs, and overrepresented on unemployment rolls and court dockets. This discrimination is to blame for their alienation from the state, say most Israeli Arab leaders. 'It's a question of attitude [toward Israeli Arabs], not budgets,' Massalha says. 'We are not spilling the blood of our brothers for budgets.' Although the situation of Israeli Arabs has improved markedly over the past decade, this has not been translated into greater feelings of loyalty to the State of Israel, but precisely the opposite - increased radicalization, greater willingness to denounce the state and its organs, and a marked rise in Palestinian national sentiment since the formation of the Palestinian Authority just across the Green Line. Even as they demand to be treated like full partners in Israel, Israeli Arab leaders also say that the Jews must accept that they are first and foremost Palestinians, who will work within Israel's democratic system for their rights as a Palestinian national minority and the furtherance of Palestinian Authority negotiating positions. Some, like Ezra, conclude that the claims of discrimination mask a deep-seated refusal to accept the outcome of the War of Independence 52 years ago. Ezra this week recommended that all citizens, Arabs and Jews, be made to sign a pledge of allegiance to the State of Israel before receiving any social benefits. 'Everyone wants improvement in his situation, of course,' Ezra says. 'They have reasons not to be content, but from there to a desire to kill Jews is quite a distance. Many [Israeli Arabs] want to live here and enjoy the benefits while dismantling the State of Israel.' In many ways, it is a chicken-or-egg situation: is it the decades of discrimination and alleged Jewish racism that have alienated Israeli Arabs and sparked their criticism of the state, or has the Arabs' ambivalent position toward Israel made the Jewish majority suspicious and slowed the Arabs' full integration into Israeli society? Ezra's position is opposed by many on the Left who argue that the rights of a citizen are absolute and inviolate, while his responsibilities to the state are relative. No loyalty test is demanded of Jewish citizens, who are free to take any position for or against government policy, a spokesman for Justice Minister Yossi Beilin says. 'We are doing what we are doing openly and not underground, through declarations in the Israeli parliament and the norms of protocol,' Massalha says. While they support Palestinian Authority, rather than Israeli, positions in the peace negotiations, 'we're not saying we want to take up arms and shoot the Jews if they don't agree. Look, 95 percent of [Israeli] Arabs voted for General Barak and General Rabin and the Zionist Peres. What do they have to do to prove their loyalty?' At the least, the recent riots have pushed the plight of Israeli Arabs to the forefront of the national agenda, said Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, head of the the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace in the Givat Haviva Seminary. 'It took three days of riots for the prime minister to meet representatives of 20% of his citizens,' Ozacky-Lazar says. 'For a year and a half they crawled to him, cried out to him to meet with them. They elected him and he ignored them completely. Only yesterday he found the time for them.' Givat Haviva spokesman Mohammed Darawshe, one of the leaders of the Democratic Arab Party, says that the trauma of the riots has opened the door for a reevaluation of Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel. 'This discussion should have been started without the need for this confrontation and the heavy price that has been paid, but it should not be in vain and it should not go down as just one more event in the history of the state,' Darawshe says. 'It should open up new prospects and opportunities. Government authorities cannot keep looking the other way when it comes to the issues of the Arab community in Israel. A deep wound has been opened, and it cannot be healed without deep attention and treatment for the Arab community. The Arab community is looking for empathy to replace the apathy that exists in the Israeli public and political system.' HOW, though, will the recent riots, the rise in identification with the Palestinian cause, and the vehement statements against the state increase the Jewish majority's sense that the Arab minority can be trusted as a partner? 'Certainly it does not help the cause,' Darawshe says, and extremists are likely to use it to further widen the chasm between Jews and Arabs in Israel. 'Many in the Arab community were dancing on the blood [of the riot victims], because this gave their old separatist theories some weight. They say, 'We told you so, there is no other way.'' Darawshe says. 'It's a wave that [leaders like Barakei, Dahamshe, and Umm el-Fahm Mayor Raed Salah, one of the heads of the Islamic Movement] are riding. I think they have succeeded in being very representative of the anger in the Arab community and to some extent using it for their political interests, which is legitimate most of the time. Their success depends on how long this wave will continue, and also on what other alternative forces can be brought into play.' By taking a conciliatory line in this week's meeting with Israeli Arab leaders, Barak was 'brilliant,' Darawshe says. 'It reduced the pressure on the Arab leadership, and [undermined] the radicals among them,' he says. While overt criticism of their own actions is exceedingly rare in the Arab community, such criticism is implicit in the calls by Darawshe and others for the state to cultivate a moderate Arab leadership that can challenge the radicals for preeminence. 'I'm against the statements of Barakei and Dahamshe. I support the law, I want to trust the state I live in and support its laws,' Shfaram mayor Yassin says. 'But the government doesn't allow the moderates to advance. There are a lot of people who feel as I do, but the government doesn't give us power, it doesn't support us as it should against the extremists.' Darawshe, too, says that more moderate voices among the Arab community need to be encouraged to counteract the recent damage to Jewish-Arab relations. 'It's important to allow alternative routes [of leadership]. Otherwise the voice of confrontation will probably win out,' he says. 'The Arabs should be embraced by the state, not crushed by it. The last few days have been really crushing.'
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