Messenger Inquirer · Owensboro, Kentucky · 31 March 1976

CP-1976-006

Security forces kill 5 Arabs in Galilee

Associated Press, Nazareth, Israel

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Transcribed from the clipping

“NAZARETH, Israel (AP) — Security forces shot and killed five rioting Israeli Arabs as violent clashes shattered years of calm between Israel’s three million Jews and 500,000 Arabs… Towns in occupied West Jordan — already swept by anti-Israeli riots for more than a month — joined the strike in sympathy.

Police reports said 38 policemen were injured and 31 Arabs hospitalized.

Police arrested 285 demonstrators… In a cable to Waldheim, the 20-member league said Arabs in the occupied territories were being ‘subjected to a wave of barbaric and terroristic measures launched by the Israeli occupying authorities in the ugliest demonstration of hate and violence that the unarmed Arab population has yet faced.’… Israel’s Arab-Jewish Communist party promoted the strike against the forced sale of rocky, unused Galilee land, which the government plans to use for Jewish and Arab development projects… The west bank Arabs are not Israeli citizens.

Largely Palestinian, they have lived under Israeli occupation since the 1967 Mideast War. ‘Palestinian Arabs of the west bank are fed up with the occupation,’ said the Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij.

‘We are brothers and sisters of the Arabs of Israel, and we support them.’… ‘The clashes occurred only when police provoked the people,’ Zayad told correspondents. ‘They ran after people and shot at them. They attacked my wife and family.’

Troops stood outside Zayad’s home tossing furniture and flower pots back at demonstrators pelting them from inside the house… Arab leaders who supported the strike insisted it was strictly to protest the takeover of Arab-owned land. ‘Our lands are being confiscated,’ said Deputy Mayor Monen Jarjoura of Nazareth.

‘The number of Arabs is increasing and the size of their land is shrinking,’ protested the mayor of occupied Bethlehem. Israel’s housing minister, Avraham Ofer, however, said the land issue was a pretext for protest. ‘If you want to develop an area you have to confiscate some lands,’ the minister said.

‘We have done this very slowly with extreme consideration and much patience.’”

Context added by this archive

Three mayors and a housing minister, all quoted, on the same page. The minister’s sentence is the one that settles the argument about what the strike was about: if you want to develop an area you have to confiscate some lands. The last paragraph notes that fifty thousand West Bank Arabs went to work in Israel anyway, some because they feared losing their jobs.

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