Edgy Israelis Devise New Ways to Control Palestinians

“I call it war,” declared Mayor Giora Lev, a burly former general who intends to do his part by sweeping the streets of this city clean of Palestinian day labor. “The Arabs are not welcome here. Ask the people.”

In an atmosphere inflamed by increasing violence here in Israel and in the occupied territories, the mayor, backed by an overwhelming majority of his city council, has designated a spot on the edge of town where Arabs seeking casual day labor must wait to be hired. They will no longer be permitted to walk the streets of Petah Tikva in search of jobs, or for any other reason.

Fear and suspicion fueled by the 17-month-old uprising of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the intifada, have spurred demands for Israeli controls at various levels. For instance:

-- In the occupied Gaza Strip, home to more than 650,000 Palestinians, most of them living in squalid refugee camps, the Israeli army is preparing to introduce a program next week requiring workers with jobs within Israel to carry special identity cards, similar to plastic credit cards, according to press reports. In effect, the card will be an exit permit from Gaza, and any Gazan found within Israel without the permit will be detained.

More than 50,000 Gazans have been working in Israel, but no Palestinian has been permitted to leave the territory since early last month when two Israeli soldiers hitchhiking in the area disappeared. One was later found buried in a shallow grave, igniting a rage for vengeance among Jews who blamed Arabs for the death.

-- At Ariel, a Jewish settlement of 8,000 in the occupied West Bank, leaders decided to force Arab day workers there to wear badges identifying themselves as “foreign workers” for security reasons. When Jewish critics complained that the program had overtones of the yellow Star of David that Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule in Europe, the Ariel leadership retreated and changed the regulation to require all visitors of the settlement, Arab or Jew, to wear a special badge.

Nonetheless, the practice was assailed Thursday in Washington.

“We would find this practice offensive and in our view . . . incompatible with democratic values,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news briefing.

In Petah Tikva, in the heart of Israel just east of Tel Aviv, Mayor Lev insists that special circumstances apply.

“Petah Tikva is not Haifa, it’s not Jaffa,” he explained, mentioning two cities with Israeli Arab communities. “Petah Tikva is a purely Jewish city, and it’s been one for 110 years.”

‘Mother of Settlements’

An industrial center of 140,000 people, Petah Tikva is called “the mother of settlements” in Israel. It was formed late last century by European Zionists in what was then a largely Arab Palestine under Ottoman Turkish rule. The name means Gate of Hope.

Its 800 factories depend in part on Arab labor from the outside and, the mayor said, “many thousands” work here. Before the intifada, he said, there had been little tension between Arab and Jew here, but now, Lev remarked, “people have the feeling that the war from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) has come home.”

Casual Laborers a Concern

The vast majority of the city’s Arab workers have regular jobs in the factories and shops and, the mayor said, are no cause for concern. But casual laborers are another matter to him.

In the past two months, Lev said, four small bombs have exploded in the city, though without causing injuries. He blames the Palestinians. And, he asserts, “In my neighborhood we had girls raped by Arabs.

“From a security point of view, we have a problem,” he insisted. “We also have a crime problem.”

As Lev sees it, the problems began when day laborers, who used to wait at the edge of town for the chance of work, began drifting farther into the center of the city.

“Now they’re walking all over the streets,” he said, and he wants them off. “They steal laundry,” he asserted. “They use people’s yards to relieve themselves.”

Denying his remarks smacked of racism, Lev responded: “I don’t hate the Arab. It’s a fact.”

Mayor Plans a ‘Shade’

His solution is to designate a junction near the city limits. He calls it a “shade”--green plastic stretched over an open-sided tubular steel frame on a patch of hard-packed stone about 10 feet by 40 feet. The mayor figures his shade will provide comfort for 200 to 300 day laborers as they wait for employers to come by in the early morning to offer them jobs. They will be driven to the workplace, and returned to the shade at the end of the day.

“I see it as a sort of employment center,” the mayor said. Others see it as a plan to separate Arab and Jew without cause, or at least without due process.

The Petah Tikva police chief, Gabi Gal, told an Israeli reporter early this week: “We are going to act only according to the law, and not according to orders from the mayor. . . . We deal with offenses and disturbances of public peace, but we are . . . simply not interested in this invention.”

Mayor Won’t Expound

For his part, the mayor would not say what would happen to an Arab found in the center of his town, other than to remark that with the establishment of his makeshift employment center, “the people of Petah Tikva will know an Arab in the street is not looking for a job, he’s looking for something else.”

The mayor insists that his project is for the benefit of the Arabs in difficult times, yet he adds, “In my opinion, every Arab is a security risk.”

But another police officer told the Jerusalem Post: “This is not a very clever idea to suggest now. We are already working far beyond our means to calm the atmosphere.”

Mayor Lev describes that atmosphere by telling the story of a teacher at a local kindergarten. Arab workers in the town had taken to sitting on a wall in the shade of a tree in the schoolyard. The teacher--alarmed, he said, for the safety of her pupils--chopped down the tree. No more shade for the Arabs, and none for her pupils either.