The New York Times · 9 September 1976

CP-1976-042

ISRAELI’S PROPOSAL ON ARABS DISPUTED

Controversy Is Aroused by Official’s Plan for Measures to Curb Presence in Galilee Area

By William E. Farrell

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Sept. 8 — The publication of a confidential report written by an Israeli official suggesting ways to curb the growing number and influence of Israeli Arabs in the Galilee region has provoked a sharp controversy here.

The report, written by Israel Koenig, the Ministry of Interior’s chief official in the Galilee region, said that by 1978 Israeli Arabs in the area would outnumber Jews. Such a situation, according to the report, raised the question whether Israeli rule in the area might be threatened.

The report went on to recommend that a hard line be taken against the growth of the Arab population through steps that would include a rapid increase of Jewish settlements in areas with heavy Arab concentrations, a decrease in state subsidies to Israeli Arabs with large families and a program encouraging Arab youngsters to go abroad to study and then remain there.

Report Followed Red’s Victory The report was said to have been written late last year after an Israeli Arab, Toufik Zayad, a Communist, won election as Mayor of Nazareth. It was said to have been circulated six months ago, about the time that Arabs rioted in the Galilee district.

At that time, six Israeli Arabs were killed and scores were injured in the first general protest among the 450,000 Israeli Arabs since Israel was founded in 1948.

The document was published yesterday in Al Hamishmar, the newspaper of the left-wing Mapam Party, to call attention to what the paper termed “the grave and dangerous nature of the report’s findings.”

If the authorities had accepted some of these proposals, the result would have been “a serious deterioration in the relations between Israel’s Arabs and the Jewish population,” Al Hamishmar said. Too ‘Damaging’ an Outlook The newspaper called for the removal of Mr.

Koenig from his post because “an individual possessing an outlook as potentially damaging as Koenig’s should not be responsible for so sensitive an area as the Galilee.”

The publication of the report again brought into focus one of Israel’s touchiest social questions — the role of Israeli Arabs, who have often been labeled “second-class citizens.” Its disclosure prompted a spate of editorials in papers representing the full political spectrum. Yediot Ahronot, an independent publication, said that Mr.

Koenig’s report pinpointed “a demographic threat in the Galilee that should not be lightly dismissed” but that his proposals “do not accord with Israel’s democratic regime and its world image.” At the end of 1974, Israeli Arabs constituted about 47 percent of the 520,000 residents in the northern Galilee district.

According to the Koenig report, the figure will rise to 51 percent in two years. Hatzofeh, the organ of the National Religious Party, praised the report, saying that Mr.

Koenig had taken “pains to warn us in good times of the dangers lurking in the northern part of the country where, if something is not done, the Arabs may well constitute a majority within two years.”

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