ISRAEL SAYS IT WILL RESTORE SEIZED
  LAND TO ARAB VILLAGE
 
  By JOEL GREENBERG

[New York Times, 28 March]
JERUSALEM, March 27 - Interior Minister Natan Sharansky announced
today that he would restore to an Israeli Arab village part of its
land that had been taken to develop a neighboring Jewish town.

The move was the first of its kind, and it has potentially far-reaching
implications. The action contradicts decades-old policies
under which Arab-owned land had often been expropriated to build
Jewish communities.

The step was intended "to strengthen the democratic character of the
State of Israel and to provide equal opportunity to all citizens," Mr.
Sharansky, a former human rights campaigner who was jailed in the
Soviet Union, said in a statement.

Critics of the move said that it set a dangerous precedent and that it
would encourage Israeli Arab villages and towns across the country to
demand that land lost to neighboring Jewish communities be returned to
them.

The decision was another step toward equality for the one million Arab
citizens in Israel. This month, the Supreme Court ruled that an
Israeli Arab couple could not be barred from a community that had been
built just for Jews.

Mr. Sharansky said he had decided to restore 250 acres of vacant land
that had been taken from Kafr Kassem, northeast of Tel Aviv. The land
was seized decades ago for what was described as security reasons but
was later turned over to the neighboring Jewish town of Rosh Haayin
for an industrial zone.

After residents of Kafr Kassem had pressed to recover the land, an
Interior Ministry committee recommended in 1997 that the area be
restored to the village. But the interior minister at the time, Eli
Suissa of the strictly Orthodox Shas Party, did not carry out the
recommendations.

Mr. Sharansky said he had decided to restore the land after the mayor
of Rosh Haayin had rejected a proposal that the area be jointly
developed by both communities as a shared industrial zone.

Kafr Kassem could now use the site to set up its own industrial zone,
benefiting from the income, Mr. Sharansky said, adding that his
decision was meant to promote "social justice" and to help "close
gaps" between Arabs and Jews in Israel.

Mayor Yigal Yosef of Rosh Haayin warned that returning the area to
Kafr Kassem would lead other Arab communities to demand that their
boundaries be redrawn at the expense of neighboring Jewish
communities.

"They're asserting historic rights, but if we accept this claim the
whole country will be theirs," Mr. Yosef said. "The whole ideological
basis of setting up a Jewish state is slipping away."

Community leaders in Kafr Kassem, the site of a massacre of 49
villagers by Israeli border guards who were enforcing a curfew in
1956, welcomed Mr. Sharansky's decision.

"The State of Israel owes a special debt to Kafr Kassem because of the
tragedy of the massacre," said the chairman of the local council, Sami
Issa. "I hope this will be the start of a new policy of planning for
the Arab sector that will solve its problems."

Many Israeli Arab towns and villages are short of land for expansion.
Large areas have expropriated over the decades for Jewish communities.
Sheik Abdullah Nimr Darwish, a leader of the Islamic Movement in
Israel who lives in Kafr Kassem, said Mr. Sharansky's past as a Soviet
dissident had made him sensitive to the needs of Israeli Arabs.

"As a person who suffered repression," Sheik Darwish said, "he knows
that injustice breeds hatred."