Middle East The Enemy Within

Even by the brutal standards of the Middle East, it was a savage assault. As midnight approached, four Arab men stole into an Israeli army camp and, using a huge ax and several knives, hacked three soldiers to death. Assuming the killers were Palestinians from the occupied territories, Jews at first saw the attack as yet another terrorist engagement that fell within the unwritten rules of the region’s slow-burn war. But then came the stunner: the alleged assailants, apprehended last month, were not aggrieved residents of the territories but citizens of Israel — Arab citizens, “our Arabs,” as Jewish Israelis think of this normally pacific minority. Suddenly, it looked to the country’s Jewish majority as if the enemy was now truly in their midst.

Israeli authorities have long feared that the intifadeh, the Palestinian uprising in the territories, would spread to the country’s 710,000 Arab citizens, who make up 14% of the population. Now they are wondering if the February murders, near the northern kibbutz of Galed, were just an opening act. Leaders of the Arab community are at pains to stress that the attack was an aberration, that their people remain loyal citizens of the state. But no amount of oath swearing can dispel the truth that the Arabs of Israel have + become increasingly radicalized, both by the spirit of the intifadeh and the attractions of Islamic extremism.

Nationalistic fervor, once quiescent among Israeli Arabs, has grown steadily since Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. That put the Arabs in direct contact with their Palestinian brethren in the territories. With the start of the intifadeh in 1987, Israeli Arabs, in limited numbers, began to throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Jews, to fly the banned Palestinian flag and to paint radical slogans on town walls.

The February hackings near Galed underscored a potentially more disruptive development: the rise among Israeli Arabs of Islamic fervor, complete with a fanatic streak. The four Arabs charged with the killings were all followers of the Islamic Movement, a fundamentalist organization that is legal in Israel. Police say they were also members of Islamic Jihad, the outlawed militant group that is Mideast-wide.

Leaders of the Islamic Movement, who officially eschew violence, were quick to deplore the killings. But authorities are worried that when they speak and write of the need for a spiritual Jihad, ostensibly a struggle for the soul of the individual believer, their devotees hear in that call a traditional summons for a holy war against non-Muslims, especially the Jews of Israel. “The killings near Galed didn’t come out of a vacuum,” says Elie Rekhess, an expert on Israeli Arabs at Tel Aviv University.

Officially, the Islamic Movement’s main mission is to revitalize religion among the Muslims of Israel, who constitute 86% of the Arab population; the rest are Christian. But it also supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, a view held by the vast majority of Israeli Arabs — who simultaneously say they would not live there. Beyond that, the Islamic Movement, like its counterparts elsewhere, supports the idea of a Muslim regime eventually ruling the entire Middle East — including Israel and its Jewish majority. Says Abdul-Rahman Hashem, deputy mayor of Umm el-Fahm, an Arab town in Israel’s north: “As long as we are using legal means, why not?”

Naturally, such comments make Jewish officials squirm. “To say the least, we don’t like their ideology,” says Alexander Bligh, the Prime Minister’s adviser on Arab affairs. “We can live with it as long as it’s not translated into violent acts.” But the Galed attack has made the government more wary of the movement.

That task is growing more difficult as the movement expands. In local elections in 1989, the group took 28.7% of the seats in the 12 purely Arab municipalities in which it ran, winning control of five town councils and later adding two more in subsequent contests. By all accounts, the organization’s influence has increased since those elections. The movement has inherited some support from Israel’s largely discredited Communist Party, previously the most successful vote getter among Israeli Arabs, and has bolstered its standing by providing relatively clean and efficient administrations.

At the same time, the blatant discrimination Arabs suffer in Israeli society makes the community fertile ground for radicalism. For every shekel the central government spends on an Arab citizen, it spends 2.5 on a Jewish one. While 11% of Israel’s Jews live below the poverty line, 52% of its Arabs do. No Arab has ever been a full Cabinet minister, and even the Prime Minister’s adviser on Arab affairs is and always has been a Jew.

Israeli officials profess a commitment to closing the economic gap between the Arabs and Jews. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s declared goal is to equalize government spending on citizens in four years. Even if that happens, growing numbers of Israel’s Arab citizens will be in an anomalous position: as long as the Palestinian problem is unresolved, their own country will be at war with them. In this case, says Ibrahim Sarsur, the Islamicist mayor of Kfar Qasim, “the circle of bloodshed will not be broken.” If more Arab Israelis take up the battle for Islamic supremacy even in the land of the Jews, the prospects are grimmer still.