The New York Times · New York, New York · 8 September 1999

CP-1999-019

Of Bombs and Israeli Arabs, and Years of Loyalty

By JOEL GREENBERG

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Transcribed from the clipping

MASHHAD, Israel, Sept. 7 — There was no funeral in this village today for Nazal Krayim, an Israeli Arab who was killed on Sunday when a car he was in blew up in the port city of Haifa. His body was not brought home, but taken directly to the cemetery. There were no mosque prayers, no wreaths, no Koran verses broadcast over loudspeakers.

There was only a heavy sense of grief and shame hanging over this community of [illegible],000, in the hills of Galilee near Nazareth. Mr.

Krayim’s death, along with those of two other Israeli Arabs in a second car that exploded in the resort at Tiberias, sent shock waves through Israeli Arab communities today after the identities of the men were made public by the police.

Here and in nearby Daburiya, which was home to the other two men, people struggled to come to terms with what looked like the first suicide car-bombing attempts by Israeli Arabs — the kind of attacks carried out previously by Palestinian militants from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Although doubts about the loyalty of the one million Arab citizens of Israel linger among Jewish Israelis, and although the Israeli Arabs sympathize with the national aspirations of their Palestinian brothers, few Israeli Arabs have been involved in anti-Jewish attacks.

So the revelation that Israeli Arabs were involved in the explosions on Sunday horrified many here, raising fears that they might all be tarred with the same brush. “This is the blackest day of my life,” said Mr. Krayim’s brother, Mohammed, a 56-year-old schoolteacher, as he sat in his house with stunned relatives.

“In my worst nightmares I never imagined such a thing. The whole family condemns this and we feel ashamed. “We are proud of our loyalty to the state, and we seek peace and coexistence. We beg forgiveness from all the people of Israel, first of all the Jews, as well as the Arabs. Islam calls for mercy, not only to human beings but to animals and the trees.

A person who carries out terrorist attacks is a heretic.” Just a few years ago, Mr. Krayim recalled, he had gathered his students to demonstrate on the streets of Mashhad against suicide bombings by Palestinian militants that had killed dozens of people in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. “I drew 20 signs,” he said.

“We stood in the main street and cried out against the despicable suicide acts. God hates murder most of all.

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: The running head reads “THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEDNESDAY, SEPT…” — the day number and year are cropped off the right edge. Sept. 8, 1999 was a Wednesday, and the story dateline reads “MASHHAD, Israel, Sept. 7”, both consistent with the slide date.

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