L.A. Jews’ Jerusalem Project Under Fire

The Los Angeles Jewish community was dragged in absentia into the Palestinian uprising here Monday when a right-wing Israeli politician attacked a $60-million, mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood renewal project co-sponsored by the Californians.

The politician, Danny Dayan, who is Tel Aviv branch chairman of the nationalist Tehiya (Revival) Party, said in an interview that the neighborhood’s Arab residents are “hostile toward Israel, toward Jews and toward Zionism” and that they should not benefit from contributions by Jews.

A spokesmen for Tel Aviv Mayor Shlomo Lahat and the Los Angeles Jewish Federation reaffirmed their firm support for the project and accused Dayan of playing politics in connection with Israel’s forthcoming elections.

Dayan first voiced his criticism to the Israeli press and repeated it Monday in a telephone interview with The Times. The undertaking in question is the Ajami renewal project, named after a poor section of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipal area that has a mixed population of 25,000 Jews and Arabs.

The Los Angeles Jewish community, which has sponsored renewal projects in two all-Jewish areas in Israel, agreed last year to support the Ajami project, in large part because it represented a ground-breaking effort to support a mixed neighborhood.

While the Arabs of Ajami share their Palestinian roots with the residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, where the uprising is concentrated, they are among 700,000 Arabs living within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries and sharing full citizenship with Israel’s majority Jewish population. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories, which were taken by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, live under Israeli military rule and are not citizens.

‘Lack of Loyalty’

Dayan, whose Tehiya Party advocates Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, was quoted in Monday’s Jerusalem Post as saying that the uprising in the territories has exposed “the lack of loyalty of Israel’s Arabs.” Elaborating in an interview with The Times, he charged that the Arabs of the Ajami quarter had carried out “violent riots” last December, soon after the uprising began.

Dayan said the city should use only a share of tax money proportional to Ajami’s share of the municipality’s population to rehabilitate the neighborhood--”not use money that was raised by Zionist organizations for a purpose that is hostile to Israel.”

Municipal spokesman Benny Cohen dismissed Dayan’s complaints and said that only a tiny minority supports Dayan. He said there had been only one brief instance in which Ajami Arabs demonstrated in support of the Palestinian uprising, “but nothing really continued and nothing happened.”

Mayor Lahat, who represents the dominant Herut wing of the Likud Bloc, was an early supporter who personally lobbied the Los Angeles Jewish community to co-sponsor the Ajami project. Likud also leans to the political right, but it is less extreme than Tehiya, making Lahat and Dayan political rivals.

“As far as I’m concerned, this is a local political issue,” said Wayne Feinstein, executive director of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation, who was in Jerusalem on Monday for a meeting of the Jewish Agency, an umbrella social services organization that is in charge of neighborhood renewal and help for new immigrants.

Feinstein conceded that some Los Angeles Jews share Dayan’s view but added: “The Los Angeles Jewish Federation is deeply committed to this project. We spent a long time deciding to get into it. . . . These are Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab, and we believe that we can make a difference in this project.”

The Ajami renewal effort involves about $60 million over 10 years for new and remodeled buildings, as well as a number of social programs, including drug rehabilitation and early childhood education.