It was the third terrorist attack attributed to Israeli Arabs in three weeks. On that same day, Israeli Arab Nizal Krayim died in an attempted car bombing in Haifa. And last week Israeli officials indicted an Arab from a Galilee village who confessed to the fatal stabbing of two Israeli picnickers in a forest near Megiddo on Aug. 30. Police are holding six other Israeli Arabs believed to be linked to the attacks. And intelligence officials are worried that there may be more strikes to come: they believe the country’s 1 million Arabs may be harboring a fifth column of potential terrorists tied to Hamas. Security officials say the devices used in the car bombings resembled those typically used by the Islamic fundamentalist group. “There’s no question Hamas is involved in this,” says Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s deputy minister of Defense. “There is a security problem in the fact that these people are turning against a state which is supposed to be their own.”
Israeli Arabs are an obvious choice for Hamas. They make up 20 percent of the population, and have lived peacefully for the most part beside their Jewish neighbors since they were granted citizenship when Israel won independence in 1948. While Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza must pass through Army checkpoints to enter Israel, Israeli Arabs can travel freely in and out of the country, making it easy for them to forge ties with Hamas cells. Observers believe Hamas may be using Israeli citizens to avoid the crackdown on its West Bank and Gaza leadership that follows whenever an attack is traced there. “What better way for Hamas to conceal their tracks than to use Israeli Arabs?” says Magnus Ranstorp, deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “It’s natural for the movement to exploit the Israeli Arabs.”
Now many Israeli Arabs feel they are being unfairly punished for the wicked actions of a few. An intelligence chief recently refused to brief a Knesset committee about certain security issues because one of its members is an Arab. The Knesset, on recess for the Jewish New Year, convened last week for an emergency session on Israeli Arab terrorism. But it quickly degenerated into a shouting match between right-wing Jews and Arab members, several of whom had attended the funeral of the Tiberias car bombers. Likud, the second largest party, demanded the death penalty for Israeli Arabs involved in terrorism and blamed Israel’s Islamic Movement for stirring up anti-Semitism. “Their leaders put ideas into the heads of the youth that they should become fighters,” says Reuven Rivlin, a leading Likud politician. “This is easy for Hamas to exploit.” Islamic Movement chairman Abdul Malik Dahamshe fought back, blaming the terrorist attacks on “Jewish extremists who are against Arab rights and the peace process.”
But it is hard to completely overlook the connection between Israel’s Islamic Movement and Hamas. Dahamshe, a lawyer, represented Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin during his imprisonment in Israeli jails. And Islamic Movement leaders were behind vicious riots in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm last year, after the Army confiscated farmland for a firing range. To be sure, Israeli Arabs often struggle with conflicting feelings of loyalty to their homeland and to their people. It doesn’t help that inside the Jewish state, many feel like second-class citizens: more than 30 percent of Arabs live in poverty, compared with 13 percent of Jews. Still, the Islamists argue, that doesn’t mean they advocate murder.
In Mashhad, the Galilee village that was home to Nizal Krayim, there is no enthusiasm for the “martyrdom” of the Haifa bomber, who blew himself up while priming a car bomb in a parking lot. Krayim was buried quickly and without the reading of passages from the Koran in the village mosque. “The people are very angry about [Krayim],” says Hassan Sabieh, the secretary of the village council. They are angry, too, about the imam of the local mosque, who they believe encouraged the unemployed Krayim to become more religious and drew him into his act of hate. Their suspicions, it turns out, are well founded: the imam, Amir Masalha, was one of the two who died in the Tiberias car bomb, just moments before Krayim.
