Arab Attacks on Jews Spark Israeli Furor : Crackdown on Terror Urged After Apparently Random Assaults

A series of apparently random attacks against Jews by Arabs in the last few days has caused a furor in Israel over the state of the country’s internal security services and led to calls for tougher action against terrorism.

Rafael Eitan, a member of Parliament and a former chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, has suggested that any Arab who is found with a knife or stick in his pocket “should be killed on the spot.” The remark touched off an uproar.

Economics Minister Gad Yaacobi termed Eitan’s statement “the most blatant type of immoral racism.”

The debate began in earnest Sunday, at the weekly Cabinet meeting, when Ariel Sharon, a hard-line minister from the rightist Likud Bloc, publicly accused the security services of laxity.

“Jews are being murdered all over the country,” he said, “and nothing is being done about it.”

The charge led to a shouting match between Sharon and Ezer Weizman, a minister without portfolio who sides with the moderate Labor Alignment on matters relating to peace and security.

Weizman reportedly sprang to his feet and shouted at Sharon: “I’ll get you flung out of the government before I’m through with you. Shame on you. Shut your mouth.”

Even in terms of the months of friction caused by the unnatural coalition of Likud and Labor, the debate was regarded as particularly acrimonious. In the background was the maneuvering of politicians staking out positions in advance of the elections scheduled for next year.

The recent attacks have not been like the raids by Arab terrorists from abroad. They seem to be unorganized and undertaken at random, and this is a nightmare come true for many Israelis who live and work surrounded by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians from the occupied West Bank.

The most publicized of the incidents occurred last week during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. An army reservist named Alexander Arad was stabbed repeatedly and fatally as he stood at an intersection.

Two days earlier, two teen-agers had been attacked by Arabs near the town of Ramat Hasharon, not far from Tel Aviv.

Then another soldier, Hanoch Stephen Deneman, an emigre from Holland, was found dead in a cotton field. He had been clubbed to death.

A Jewish taxi driver in Jerusalem was stabbed five times by two Arab passengers. The police said the assailants acted out of “nationalist motives.”

After the Arad slaying, Sharon and colleagues in the Likud bloc suggested that the death penalty be imposed for murders committed under aggravated circumstances. But tempers flared when Sharon suggested that terrorism in Israel evoked only apathy these days.

‘An Atrocious Deed’

“The Arad murder was an atrocious deed for which due retribution must be extracted,” Weizman said, “but it should be seen in correct proportion--one isolated incident at a time when 200,000 Arabs come here daily to work and trade in tranquility.”

Weizman was supported by other Labor Bloc ministers, among them Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Police Minister Chaim Bar-Lev, who are responsible for internal security and seemed to be the targets of Sharon’s criticism.

In connection with the Arad murder, a Palestinian was arrested and charged and reportedly confessed. His family home was demolished by Israeli army bulldozers in retribution.

Calls for retribution increased after Arad’s funeral, and officials tried to defuse the mounting Jewish-Arab tension. Ibrahim Nimr Hussein, mayor of the Arab town of Shfaram and chairman of the national council of Arab local councils, decried the incident.

“We have to live together as brothers,” Hussein said, “and we want peace, not war or hatred.”

Israeli officials are sensitive about criticism of the internal security services because of a scandal last year over the 1984 beating deaths of two captured bus hijackers at the hands of Shin Bet agents.

None of Sharon’s Likud colleagues rose to defend his criticism of the security service and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of Sharon’s party, felt obliged to reassure Israelis that they “can remain confident that they possess a fine domestic security service.”

The controversy was rekindled by Eitan’s warning about Arabs, which caused a storm of controversy along political lines.

“Those who are trying to exploit and distort the statement should understand that it was aimed at Arab terrorists who are trying to harm Jews and who should be treated as in a war in accordance with the maxim, ‘Kill those who rise to kill you,’ ” Eitan said.

Nevertheless, two members of Parliament demanded that the attorney general investigate to see if Eitan had violated Israel’s law against incitement to racism.

“It labels every Arab with a knife a terrorist and urges every Jew to take the law into his own hands,” said Abdel Wahab Daroush, an Arab member of Parliament who lives in the town next to Eitan’s.