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A festering wound It's a sunny afternoon on the Haifa University campus. Students are eating lunch on the lawn, and literature major Sahar Awad, sitting at a table with other Arab students, is crying. 'It's like Arabs don't count for anything in this country,' she says, 'and we can be killed just like that because we're not seen as human beings.' In the lobby of the administration building, Tal Peleg, a philosophy student, says that on the surface, Jews and Arabs get along on campus, but underneath there is a thick, unspoken tension. 'I feel like we're sitting on a volcano that's going to explode,' says Peleg. The Israeli Arab riots of last month have subsided, but the distance between the country's Arab minority and Jewish majority has possibly never been so great, nor feelings between them so hostile, as they are now. Standing on a Galilee cliff where policemen killed three Arab rioters from the villages below, Misgav regional council head Erez Kreisler recalls that there were no more than four policemen, and they had nothing left but live ammunition, having used up their tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. The Arabs were pelting them with rocks and Molotov cocktails and shouting, 'death to the Jews,' says Kreisler. He asks, 'When you're a policeman facing a mob of 100 people with murder in their eyes, what do you do, run away?' On October 2, while some 2,000 Arabs were rioting against police in an olive tree orchard in the village of Arrabeh, 17-year-old Assil Assleh was shot to death by Border Policemen. His family says Assil, a participant in the 'Seeds of Peace' Arab-Jewish coexistence program, had gone out to try and stop his friends from throwing stones at police. Sitting in her living room, Jamila Assleh, mother of Assil and a counselor at an Arrabeh junior high school, says, 'They murdered a whole generation.' A colleague who came from Umm el-Fahm to pay his condolences adds, 'Our children can't sleep at night - they're afraid.' The Jews are afraid, too. Last week Israel Police Insp.-Gen. Yehuda Wilk called on Jews to once again return to visiting Arab towns and villages - a call meant not only for Jews who used to eat and shop in the Arab towns and now don't out of fear and resentment, but also for gas, telephone, and electric servicemen who since the riots have largely refused to enter the Arab sector without police escort. In Haifa, the national symbol of coexistence, Jewish residents used to flock to the quaint Wadi Nisnas Arab quarter on Shabbat to buy fresh pita and baklawa. But no more, says political science student Yoni Walter, sitting with some friends on the university campus. For Jewish students, the question of what the Arab students may be planning for this semester is the, 'talk of the day,' says Peleg. 'There'll be riots here too,' predicts law student Itzik Zakai. THIRTEEN Arabs were killed by police, and one Jew was killed by a rock thrown at his car from an Arab village. Prime Minister Ehud Barak has appointed a fact-finding commission to investigate the riots. But Arab civil leaders say they smell a whitewash. They demand a full commission of inquiry with the power to subpoena and indict, and insist that the panel include a European judge, an Arab judge of their choosing, and an American observer. Just as the riots ended, Barak unveiled a plan to invest NIS 4 billion in Arab cities and villages over the next four years to help 'close the gaps' between them and their Jewish counterparts. Science and Culture Minister Matan Vilnai, the government's chief liaison to the Arab community, insists the program could have been announced months before if not for various political distractions, and that the timing of the announcement, 'has nothing whatsoever to do with recent events.' Vilnai's implied message is that no one should get the idea the Arabs are getting a prize for violence, but Kreisler says 'any idiot' can see they're getting just that. Each side, the Arabs and the Jews, have legitimate complaints against the other. The Arabs have suffered systematic discrimination for 52 years. Asked at a news conference if this wasn't the result of simple racism, Vilnai shot back that this was a, 'provocative question.' However, Yossi Kucik, director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, admitted, 'When you look at the gaps between the Arab and Jewish sectors, you can't call it a badge of honor for the State of Israel.' And while Wilk said Israeli Arabs, 'owe the police a debt of gratitude' for their restraint during the riots, criminologists, civil rights workers and legal investigators say as a matter of course that Israeli police have always tended to be more brutal towards Arabs than towards Jews. During the riots in Nazareth, police were filmed by a TV cameraman attacking a defenseless Arab woman with their fists, boots and rifle butts, then spraying Arab onlookers with rubber bullets. The policemen were suspended amid official expressions of shock and dismay. Yet, on the other hand, it was not as if the Israeli Arabs were holding a series of peace rallies. They cut off the Galilee from the rest of the country, attacking police and passing cars on the highways. They set dozens of fires in forests and Jewish-owned fields. In Umm el-Fahm they burned banks and a gas station (Arab-owned, as it turned out), as the pro-Hamas Islamic Movement and the cry of 'death to the Jews' became increasingly common. And they did this at a time when Israel was facing an out-and-out guerrilla war in the territories and Hizbullah kidnappings on the northern border. Many Arab political leaders incited the insurrection. Hadash MK Mohammed Barakeh, sharing a panel in Ramallah with Palestinian intifada leader Marwan Barghouti, said the intifada should rage on and that Israeli Arabs should join it. Arab arsonists burned synagogues. Jewish mobs retaliated by burning mosques. In the worst mob violence, Jews from Upper Nazareth attacked Arabs in Nazareth, shooting and killing two. In at least two incidents, Jews were pulled out of their cars and beaten by Arab marauders - then saved by other Arabs in the crowd. Both sides suffered, but the Arabs suffered much worse. Kreisler acknowledges that in the Misgav riots, no policeman suffered more than mild injuries. The shooting incidents reported might well have been shots fired in the air. The gravest threat to a community came when fires approached the homes of Kibbutz Lotem, but the dozen or so families evacuated were able to return home within hours. AT HAIFA University, literature student Sahar Awad, 19, of Tamra smiles, saying her fears of tension between Jewish and Arab students haven't been borne out. Sitting next to her, Walid Shehadi, who studies at the Technion, says he isn't aware of any Jewish-Arab tension at his campus because he, 'doesn't have anything to do with the Jewish students there.' Rafat Ayashi, also a Technion student, says Arab students' main academically-related concern is that because of the riots, the Israeli job market will be closed to them when they graduate. But as the discussion moves beyond campus issues to national ones, Awad opens her notebook to where she's pasted in the now-famous photo of 12-year-old Mohammed Aldura, crouching next to his father before his death in an Israeli-Palestinian shootout. She begins to cry. 'Was a 12-year-old boy a threat to anyone's life?' she asks. She turns to the page where she's pasted in a photo grid of 12 of the 13 Israeli Arabs killed in the riots. 'Somebody throws a stone, and they take out a gun to kill him?' she exclaims. Awad opens her wallet to the photo display window; amid pictures of her family is one of Assil Assleh. In the administration building lobby, Itzik Zakai, 26, insists that for now, there is no problem between Jewish and Arab students. 'I just made two friends in class - an Arab guy and an Arab woman,' he notes. He has little patience for the Arabs' political gestures. On the first day of class, Arab students stood for a minute of silence for the 13 killed in the riots, but Zakai says he 'ignored it. It was the first day of class and I had other things on my mind.' A right-wing Jewish student activist comes up to Zakai and his friends and tells them he's heard that the Arab students are planning a demonstration - this despite the university-wide ban on political activity for this semester. 'They're going to bring Palestinian flags, can you believe it?' says the activist, who won't give his name because he doesn't trust the media. Tal Peleg, the philosophy student, says the prospect of Arab unrest on campus has a titillating effect on the Jewish students. 'It's like they're hoping it'll happen,' she says. Erez Kreisler, the Misgav regional council head, says he has bent over backwards to help his Arab neighbors, but they failed him during the riots. Misgav built a Jewish- Arab school, lured Jewish tourism to the Arab villages, and planned joint industrial projects with the Arab city of Sakhnin. 'A few months ago I went with the mayor of Sahknin, Mustafa Abu Raya, to Barak's office to get the approval. Now he won't talk to me about anything but land,' Kreisler says, referring to the land expropriated from Sahknin to build Misgav in the early 1980s as part of the 'Judaize the Galilee' campaign. 'If they had any grievances against Misgav, they should have talked to us about it instead of using violence,' he says. After all he's done for them, Kreisler complains, the Arab mayors didn't warn him to expect riots on such-and-such day and hour. Inequality isn't the only thing to blame for the riots, he adds; poor Arab political leadership is also at fault. 'As a Jew, I'm ready to accept half the blame as long as the Arabs are ready to accept the other half. But they're not,' Kreisler laments. ASSIL Assleh had Jewish friends in Misgav; since his death nearly 2,000 Jewish and Arab youngsters have paid their condolences at the home, says his father. Via Internet - Assleh was a computer buff - he kept up with the friends he made as part of a Seeds of Peace delegation to the US. His father, grocery store owner Hassan Assleh, a formergroup leader at the mixed Jewish-Arab village Neveh Shalom, says he 'educated his children towards peace, to respect others regardless of their race or religion.' Hassan says he went out to the day of his son's death 'tell people not to confront the line of police, and not to throw stones.' Outside he says he saw Assil sitting under an olive tree about 40 meters away. The riots seemed to be calming down. But then a group of Border Policemen began firing tear gas, smoke grenades and finally live ammunition at the crowd. 'I shouted to Assil to run,' his father says. The boy ran, and three Border Policemen ran after him. According to Hassan, one knocked him down with his rifle butt, the others kicked him. 'Then they got him to a place where I couldn't see him. He called out, 'Father, father,' and then I heard shots. I yelled, 'Assil, Assil,' and then I fainted,' Hassan recalls. Assil died later that day at Nahariya Medical Center from a bullet wound in the neck. Hassan says a number of his neighbors have told him they saw the shooting. One of them says that as the Border Policemen walked away, one told the people watching, 'Now you can have him.' Assil's death is being investigated by the State Prosecutor's Office, along with the other 12 Arab deaths. Is there a way to stop such bloodshed, a way that will allow Arabs and Jews to live together decently in this country? 'I don't know,' replies Sahar Awad, shaking her head. Then, 'No,' she says, 'there is no answer.' Is it irreversible? 'Nothing is irreversible,' insists Kreisler. And does Hassan Assleh still educate his remaining three children towards peace between Arabs and Jews? 'Yes I do - still,' he replies. 'There is so much more work that needs to be done.'
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