Israeli Arabs Emboldened by Victory : Mideast: Forcing Rabin to back down on confiscating Jerusalem land boosts minority politicians' confidence.

By MARY CURTIUS

May 24, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

JERUSALEM — The day after they forced Israel’s government to back down from its plan to confiscate Palestinian-owned property here, Israeli Arab politicians vowed Tuesday to keep up the pressure on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

“This gives us Arabs inside Israel political confidence and strength,” said Taleb Sanaa, one of two members of the Arab Democratic Party, which threatened to bring Rabin’s government down with a no-confidence motion in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.

Sanaa and other Israeli Arab politicians said the government’s retreat on the confiscation opens the door to greater involvement by Israel’s 18% Arab minority in peacemaking.

“I think that we will become more politically active . . . to protect the peace process and serve the well-being of both Arabs and Jews,” Sanaa told Voice of Palestine Radio.

On Monday, Rabin’s government came perilously close to being brought down after the Arab Democratic Party and the Arab-dominated Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, known as Hadash, brought forward a Knesset no-confidence motion to protest the government’s proposed confiscation of 131 acres, most of them Palestinian-owned, in southern Jerusalem.

The government said it needed the land for a new police station and several thousand apartments for Jews.

By themselves, the Arab-dominated parties control only five seats in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset. But they were joined by the ultra-Orthodox religious parties and by Likud, the largest opposition party, giving them enough votes to become a force to be reckoned with.

“The Arabs of Israel celebrated yesterday their first Independence Day as citizens with equal rights in their country,” political commentator Ron Mayberg wrote in the mass-circulation daily Maariv. “The Arabs of Israel have waited 47 years for this moment, the moment that they would stop being used as a mute rubber stamp for any centrist government with leftist leanings, just in order to block a rightist government; the moment in which, after years of burning insults, their problems and positions ignored, and a sense of contempt and insult among their constituents, they became a real check and balance.”

Rabin’s minority government had been able to rely on votes of Arab-dominated parties to survive no-confidence motions brought by Likud or other nationalist Jewish parties. He had always been able to persuade Arab-dominated parties that any Labor-led government had to be better for their constituents than a Likud-led government.

But this time, Arab-dominated parties believed that Israel’s confiscation of land in Jerusalem would kill the peace process.

“We said from the beginning that the confiscation decision was a step by the Israeli prime minister and his government to bury the peace process,” Hadash leader Hashem Mahmid said. “On this basis, we decided to ask for the no-confidence vote unless they changed their mind.”

Faced with the defection of the Arab-dominated parties, Rabin called an emergency Cabinet session to freeze the government’s confiscation decision.

It was a rare, important political victory for Israeli Arabs, who have watched with growing consternation Israel’s slow-moving negotiations with the PLO on Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank.

Israeli Arabs have been casting about for a role to play since Israel signed a peace accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Israeli Arab politicians have acted as intermediaries--between Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip, where PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s self-governing authority is based, and between Israel and the Palestinians.

But often, Israeli Arab politicians are treated with suspicion and sometimes contempt by all sides.

Many Palestinians in the territories regard them as traitors because they are Israeli citizens.

Israeli mainstream political parties have never included them in any coalition government because their loyalties are considered suspect. And their own constituents, Israeli Arabs, often abandon them in favor of voting for one of the many Zionist parties--including Likud.

One Israeli Arab analyst said he believes that the government’s decision Monday may breathe new life into Israeli Arab parties.

“Arabs in Israel have been debating the significance of their participation in the Israeli political system,” said Ahmad Sadi, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. “Many Arabs feel that the Arab parties have so far failed to do anything worthwhile through the parliamentary channel. They seemed to just follow the government in its votes.”

But by stopping--at least temporarily--this one confiscation, Sadi said, the Israeli Arab parties “undoubtedly increased their declining popularity.”

Even jubilant Israeli Arab politicians, however, acknowledged that their victory was limited.

Several said they intend to keep fighting to brake Israeli building in Jerusalem and the West Bank, where the government still intends to put up several thousand more homes for Jews before final status talks begin next May with the PLO.