Mobile Press · 31 March 1976

CP-1976-007

Galilee quiet as Arabs prepare to bury strike riot dead

By David Lancashire, Associated Press Writer, Tel Aviv, Israel

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Transcribed from the clipping

“TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli police patrolled in force in tense but calm Arab villages in Galilee today as villagers in northern Israel prepared to bury six Arabs killed by police and army gunfire… Five of the Arabs were killed Tuesday during riots that accompanied a 24-hour strike by Arab citizens of Israel which the Israeli Communist party called to protest government purchase of some 1,600 acres of arid Arab land for housing and development projects… Tewfik Zayad, the Communist mayor of Nazareth and the leader of the strike, charged the clashes came only ‘when police provoked the people.’

He claimed police ‘ran after people and shot at them.’ Zayad is also a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Rakah, the Communist party, introduced a motion of no confidence accusing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government of aggression against Israel’s 500,000 Arab citizens.

The fighting was the first between Israeli troops and Arab citizens of the Jewish state since Israel became a state in 1948. The Arabs who chose Israeli citizenship then rather than joining the Palestinian exodus to Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and their children now make up 16 per cent of the population of Israel.

They have equal rights with Jews under the constitution and enjoy the highest Arab standard of living in the Middle East. But they have not been allowed to form their own political parties, and the younger generation has turned away from Israel’s ruling Labor party to the anti-Zionist Communist party and to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

‘We were wrong for 28 years in thinking we could ignore the ethnic difference,’ said Defense Minister Shimon Perez. ‘You can’t expect an Arab to be a Zionist, support Jewish immigration to Israel and sing the national anthem.’

However, Justice Minister Haim Zadok said the importance of the unrest should not be exaggerated and that the rioting did not mean an ‘uprising’ by Arab citizens… ‘Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank are fed up with the occupation,’ said the mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij.

‘We are brothers and sisters of the Arabs of Israel, and we support them.’”

Context added by this archive

The Alabama version, and it carries the line the others do not: the Israeli defense minister saying you cannot expect an Arab to be a Zionist or sing the national anthem, and admitting twenty-eight years of being wrong about it. Printed beside a life insurance recruitment advertisement and notice of a 1932 high school reunion.

Cite this clipping

More from the 1970s

• Palestinians and Leftist Factions Open an Offensive in BeirutThe New York Times · 8 January 1976
• Equation Of Zionism With Racism Shocked CleaverPaducah Sun · 13 January 1976
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• Drive to liberate Palestine intensifiesChicago Tribune · 29 February 1976
• Zionism and RacismHonolulu Star-Bulletin · 12 March 1976
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• All 338 clippings from the 1970s →

In these collections

The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Galilee Calm; Arabs Set BurialsThe Evening SunBaltimore, Maryland31 March 1976CP-1976-004

Most of the shorter text appears in the longer one. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.