The New York Times · New York, New York · 31 March 1994

CP-1994-059

After Hebron, a Fierce Test of Bedouin Loyalty

By Clyde Haberman

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Transcribed from the clipping

RAHAT, Israel, March 30 — In this Bedouin town on the northern lip of the Negev, not an Israeli flag was to be seen today. Palestinian flags were hoisted at an annual Arab protest event called Land Day, and so were green Islamic banners. But when a man tried to wave an Israeli flag, someone yanked it down and a scuffle broke out.

The fight over banners in a Rahat park was a sign of how the anger ignited by the Hebron massacre last month has yet to subside, not just in the occupied territories but also among the roughly 800,000 Arabs who are citizens of Israel.

“Not having an Israeli flag today is a way of accusing the Israeli Government and holding it responsible for the killings, including the killing of a person from this place,” said Talab al-Sana, a Rahat resident who is a member of Parliament. “Our destiny is to live with each other.

But coexistence between the two peoples has to be based on equality, not repression.” Post-Hebron resentment is keen among Israeli Arabs, especially in Rahat, 10 miles north of Beersheba, where a young man was shot to death by the police during protests that erupted soon after the massacre of Muslim worshipers by a Jewish settler.

Not without anecdotal evidence to make their case, the Israeli Arabs here are convinced that the authorities would not have fired so readily if the demonstrators had been Jews. They had as an example a daylong siege last week of a house in Yehud, near Tel Aviv, where a politically fiery rabbi and his followers had barricaded themselves and battled the police.

Those Jewish protesters had shot at police officers and thrown gasoline bombs, but still the authorities held their fire and negotiated a peaceful surrender. In Rahat last month, where the demonstrators’ main weapons were stones, the police used guns. Even Israel’s police chief, Rafi Peled, says officers were too quick on the trigger.

In an internal memo published today in Haaretz and affirmed as accurate by a police spokesman, Mr. Peled said that “in Rahat we shot too much.”

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead or date line, so its date and newspaper rest on the record it arrived with, not on anything visible in the scan.

Context added by this archive

Date check: No masthead or page date line is visible; the scan is cropped to the article, photograph and map. The dateline reads “RAHAT, Israel, March 30”, consistent with a March 31, 1994 paper, but the printed date could not be read.

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