The New York Times · New York, New York · 1 March 1994

CP-1994-058

Among Israeli Arabs, Latent Anger Explodes

By Chris Hedges

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Transcribed from the clipping

RAHAT, Israel, Feb. 28 — On a windswept hill overlooking a patchwork of rolling farmland, 5,000 Arab men knelt as the body of Sami Abu Jama, who died Sunday in clashes with the police, was slowly lowered into the rocky soil. Black flags of mourning, green Islamic banners and Palestinian flags snapped taut in the wind.

Angry young men, many with their faces masked, chanted slogans vowing to avenge the death of Mr. Abu Jama, who was shot in a demonstration protesting the massacre of Muslim worshipers in Hebron. And militant Islamic leaders, their words amplified through a sound system, reminded the mourners that each Arab who fell was now a martyr in a holy struggle.

“There is a blood pact now between Palestinians who died in Hebron and here,” Raed Salah, the Mayor of Umm el Fahm, the second largest Arab city in Israel, told the crowd. “This pact reminds us that we are all an integral part of the wider Islamic and Arab world, and most of all that we are an integral part of the Palestinian people.”

The somber scene today, however, marked not just the death of another Arab youth, but the first time a Bedouin Arab living inside Israel had died in political violence. It underscored the deteriorating relations between Israeli Arabs and Israel.

And it was a signal that the aspirations for a Palestinian homeland, which have turned the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip into a battleground, are spreading to dozens of Arab towns and villages inside Israel. When the Israeli police used live ammunition against the crowd in Rahat on Sunday, killing Mr.

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Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or page date line is visible; the scan is cropped to the article and its map. The dateline reads “RAHAT, Israel, Feb. 28”, consistent with a March 1, 1994 paper, but the printed date could not be read.

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