Discord Between Jewish, Arab Lawmakers Erupts in Verbal Melee in Israeli Knesset : Politics: Widely televised shouting match is unprecedented.

The growing tensions between Israel’s Arab minority and the Jewish majority exploded Monday evening in a tumultuous session of Parliament that almost resulted in members coming to blows.

The issue formally before the Knesset was the long-delayed equalization of government child-support payments to Arab and Jewish parents.

But much more was behind the unprecedented uproar: the decades of second-class status that Arabs have suffered; the government’s recent expulsion of 415 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip as Muslim fundamentalists; the pride that Israeli Arabs feel in the intifada, the Palestinian rebellion against the Israeli occupation; Jewish fears of the Arabs.

As Tawfik Ziyad, leader of the pro-Communist Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, argued from the podium for parity in child allowances, a loud voice called from the benches of the Likud Party, the main opposition party: “Arabs--they (breed) like rabbits. We should get rid of them. The country can’t afford them.”

“Racists!” the enraged Ziyad replied. “You’re nothing but damned racists!”

With that, an angry battle was joined between Ziyad, 63, a poet from Nazareth and a 20-year veteran of the Knesset, and Rehavam Zeevi, 66, leader of the right-wing Moledet Party and a bitter foe of Ziyad and his party.

“You people are crazy!” Ziyad shouted, ignoring attempts by the acting Speaker, Esther Salmovitz, a member of another right-wing party, Tsomet, to restore order as the Knesset’s normal hum of heckling turned into a roar. “You are mad, you people, absolutely crazy.”

Banging her gavel harder and harder, Salmovitz ruled Ziyad out of order and three times told him to leave the chamber. But he ignored her, and the rightists continued to hurl abuse at him in an ever-growing volume.

“You’re another (Palestinian leader Yasser) Arafat, another (Russian dictator Josef) Stalin,” Zeevi shouted at Ziyad. “You’re a terrorist!”

Shaul Guttman, 47, another Moledet member and a university professor, charged the podium, calling Ziyad “a criminal” and declaring that he intended to “deal” with him.

“You’re garbage,” Ziyad told Guttman. “Garbage, garbage, garbage!”

A Likud deputy, Silvan Shalom, 34, an economist, yelled, “You’re drunk!”

“I am going to get you!” Ziyad screamed back. “I am going to get all you nuts on the right!”

Parliamentary personnel then moved toward the podium to take Ziyad away by force. But other Arab members of the Knesset, as well as deputies from leftist parties, intervened and persuaded Ziyad to leave voluntarily.

As the parliamentary correspondent for state-run television delicately put it later, “Things were then said that had never before been said in the Knesset.”

In a scene televised on the nightly news and on public affairs and talk shows, Ziyad stormed over to the Moledet seats and, his face contorted with anger and only inches away from Zeevi’s, screamed a crude sexual remark at him.

The emotions displayed through the debate reflected the deepening tension between Israel’s Jewish majority, 4.4 million, and its Arab minority of 800,000, which increasingly sympathizes and even identifies with the 2.2 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem.

When a border policeman was abducted and murdered this month by guerrillas belonging to the militant Islamic movement Hamas, Israeli Arabs found themselves suspects in the crime and targets for hostility in the city--which has a mixed population--where the officer lived.

When the government responded by deporting 415 Palestinians suspected of supporting Hamas and other Islamic groups, Israeli Arabs were reminded of earlier deportations and reacted with outrage. On Monday, a convoy of relief supplies, organized and led by Arab members of the Knesset, was turned back by police before Israel’s border with Lebanon.

And when Hashem Mahameed, 47, a member of Ziyad’s party, told Palestinians in Gaza last week that rebellion was the natural response to occupation and that stones should not be their only weapons, many Jews interpreted his comments as an incitement to violence against Israeli troops and to treason.

“The anger every side feels toward the other is now so strong that we are not listening to one another,” Mahameed, an educator, said after a stormy, closed-door committee meeting that was considering whether to lift his parliamentary immunity and, thus, allow his prosecution.

“What one sees in the Knesset is what one finds in society,” he said. “There is great fear, great tension, great anger, great apprehension, and what understanding we had developed over years is disappearing. In our (Arab) minds, the deportations told us how Jews really regarded us. . . . The wound is deep.”

Meantime, the fate of the 415 Palestinian deportees, stranded in the no-man’s-land between Israel’s self-proclaimed “security zone” and Lebanese lines in southern Lebanon, remained unsettled and an element in every newscast.

James Jonah, the U.N. undersecretary general for political affairs, was told by Palestinian leaders that only the men’s repatriation would satisfy the community.

“Palestinians have only one land,” Faisal Husseini, the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, commented. “They must return to their homeland. They have no other place to go.”

An Israeli army review showed that seven of the Palestinians, among them a 16-year-old detained for spraying political slogans, were expelled contrary to orders given regional commanders; the number of such cases could be as high as 10. Reports in Israeli newspapers quoted officials as saying the mistakes resulted from poor coordination, mistaken identity and negligence as soldiers rounded up Palestinians for deportation and put them on buses for Lebanon.

Lebanon, saying it refuses to become a “dumping ground” for Israel, has not permitted the deportees to cross its lines, and thus the men have become stranded in a tent encampment in the no-man’s-land as both Israel and Lebanon deny the United Nations and the Red Cross permission to provide even humanitarian assistance.