The New York Times · 29 September 1976

CP-1976-044

Israeli Arabs Halt Work in a Call For Ouster of Top Galilee Official

By William E. Farrell

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Transcribed from the clipping

JERUSALEM, Sept. 28 — Israeli Arabs from the Galilee region quietly demonstrated today to back demands for the dismissal of an Israeli official who provoked a furor with his report recommending measures to curb the growth and influence of the country’s Arab population.

Sympathy strikes for the Israeli Arabs were held by Palestinian Arabs in Israeli-occupied towns of the West Bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip. There were violent incidents, mainly involving clashes between Israeli security forces and stone-throwing bands of Arab youths in a number of towns, including Nablus, Hebron, Gaza and Tulkarm.

The Israeli-Arab protest, which took the form of a two-hour work stoppage by municipal employees in many communities in the Galilee, was in sharp contrast with one last March 30, which erupted into riots that left six Israeli-Arabs dead and scores injured.

One resident of Nazareth contrasted today’s Israeli Arab protest with the Arab disturbances in the territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 war, and said it demonstrated that “Israeli Arabs are Israelis first and Arabs second although some Israeli Jews tend to put us in the same basket.” Israel’s Arab population currently numbers about 450,000.

From 1948, when the state of Israel was formed, until the March 30 protest, the Israeli Arabs were generally quiet and nonmilitant. But that is changing. Growing numbers of Israeli Arabs are fighting against what they term their “second-class”citizenship in Israel.

The latest focus of their discontent occurred about three weeks ago with the publication in a newspaper here of a secret report written by Israel Koenig, the chief Israeli official in the Galilee region, that Israeli Arabs have labeled “racist and fascist.” Mr.

Koenig said that in two years, the Israeli Arabs would constitute a majority in the Galilee region and that “their increase in the Galilee contains a threat to our very rule in the region.”

He recommended a number of proposals to curb the growth and influence of Israel’s Arabs, including a decrease in state subsidies to large Arab families and other recommendations offensive to Israel’s Arabs. These have been disavowed by a number of Israeli leaders as contrary to official policy.

But the disavowals have been regarded as inadequate by Israeli Arab leaders, who are calling for Mr. Koenig’s ouster from his post in the Galilee. “There is more bitterness today because this [Mr. Koenig’s report] affects everyone,” an Israeli Arab journalist said. The Israeli Arab demand for Mr.

Koenig’s ouster provided a new impetus for demonstrations by Arabs in the Israeli-occupied territories. In the West Bank town of Nablus, the evidence of a protest was far more visible than in Nazareth, where shops were open and clusters of tourists wandered through winding streets.

In Nablus, stores were shuttered and for most of the day roving bands of Arab youths periodically occupied a main square burning tires, stoning a branch of an Israeli bank and taunting Israeli security forces and pelting them with rocks.

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