Cabinet Picks Israeli Arabs for High Posts : Mideast: Two are named deputy ministers. Appointments are first of their kind in 19 years.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cabinet on Sunday named two Israeli Arabs to high-ranking jobs, the first such government appointments in 19 years.

“Members of Parliament Nawaf Massalha and Walid Zadik were approved by the Cabinet as deputy ministers,” Health Minister Haim Ramon said.

A government official said the Cabinet also accepted a U.S. invitation to resume peace talks in Washington on Aug. 24, the first session since Rabin’s Labor Party won a June election.

Rabin has pledged to speed the U.S.-brokered talks with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinians, which began in Madrid last October and stalled in five rounds under right-wing former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Arab votes helped Labor’s election victory. Rabin’s Labor-led coalition controls 62 of Parliament’s 120 votes. Five members of Arab parties back the government from outside.

Massalha, 48, of Rabin’s Labor Party, is a deputy health minister, and Zadik, 53, of the left-wing Meretz faction, is assigned temporarily as a deputy prime minister in Rabin’s office. They were among nine deputy ministers appointed Sunday.

Zadik said he hopes to contribute to Middle East peacemaking as well as improve the lives of Israeli Arabs.

“I feel I have been given a serious challenge, and if I am delegated some real authority, and I am not just a token, there is a lot I can do,” he said in a telephone interview.

About 900,000 of Israel’s 5 million citizens are Arab. Arabs have served in Parliament since the first elections in 1949.

Three Israeli Arabs have served as deputy ministers in the past. The latest was Abdelaziz Zoabi of the socialist Mapam party, who served in the Health Ministry in 1973. Deputy minister is the highest official position Arabs have ever held in Israel.

Massalha, a native of the Arab village of Kafr Kara north of Tel Aviv, joined the Labor Party while attending Tel Aviv University. He works for the Histadrut labor union and was deputy chairman of the last Parliament.

Zadik is from Taibe, northeast of Tel Aviv. He has a master’s in sociology from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, was a high school principal and also owns a farm.

He said he hopes to eventually be named a deputy agriculture minister so he can help negotiate the sharing of water rights between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Then I can make my contribution as an Arab, a Palestinian and an Israeli,” he said.