Pogrom at Home?

Infiltration by secret agents. Reprisals against "negative" citizens. Systematic job discrimination and measures to encourage emigration. To many Israelis, it all sounded like a prescription for a pogrom against Jews. In fact, they were an Israeli civil servant's proposals for controlling Israel's exploding Arab population. The Koenig report, named for the official who drafted it, has caused a storm since it was leaked last month. Last week angry Arabs in Israel's Galilee district walked off their jobs for two hours in protest.

The report was written six months ago by Israel Koenig, 45, a Polish-born member of Israel's highly conservative National Religious Party and, since 1967, the Interior Ministry's top officer for Galilee. Koenig's report, never intended for publication, was meant to spotlight what many Jews consider the country's most serious domestic problem at present: the growing numerical strength and rising nationalism of Israel's Arab citizens. They now number 430,000, or one-seventh of Israel's total population, and their birth rate is four times as high as that of Israel's Jews.

In Galilee, Arabs now account for 47% of the population. Within a decade, Koenig warned, "it is seriously to be feared that there will be an Arab takeover, demographically and politically, in Acre and Nazareth."

Koenig was also concerned that Israeli Arabs might feel "a hope that time is working on their side." One consequence, he feared, would be "an uncontrollable outburst" of anti-Jewish violence some day. In fact, while Koenig was preparing his report last spring, six Arabs were killed by police in bloody rioting in Galilee over government expropriation of their land.

Koenig suggested ways of "thinning out" Arab concentrations in Israel. The government, he urged, should set up a political party for the Arabs that could be infiltrated by agents who would keep track of Arab aims. Emigration restrictions on Arab students ought to be eased, he said, and re-entry made next to impossible. Arab families ought to be stripped of government grants. In Galilee, where Arab workers constitute half the labor force in some Jewish-owned businesses, there should be an Arab job ceiling of 20%. That way, Koenig argued, economic insecurity would keep Arab minds off "thoughts of a so-called cultural-nationalistic nature." Koenig insisted that "the nature of the Levantine character is superficial, does not probe in depth, and has an imagination that gains the upper hand over national thinking." Complained Nazareth's Communist Mayor Tawfiq Zayad: "Many of Koenig's recommendations are already official policy. We are constantly spied on, we are discriminated against in the schools, our land is confiscated, and there are no government industries in the Arab sector." Even though Koenig's recommendations were considered unacceptable in Jerusalem, Haim Kubersky, Director-General of the Interior Ministry, supported Koenig's right to make them. Said Kubersky: "A Jewish majority in Galilee is a legitimate goal." Perhaps. But if anything seemed bound to stir up the kind of political consciousness among Israeli Arabs that worried Koenig, it was exactly the type of program that Koenig proposed.

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