SHFARAM, Israel, Aug. 5 -- Shortly after noon Friday, two wood coffins bobbed on a dozen backs down an alley toward the crowded apartments of the Turki family. The parade of men and women, most of them cloaked and crying, spilled through the small living room to a plot in the back yard where the bodies of the youngest Turki sisters would pause on their way to a hilltop graveyard.
Across town, in another open-air patio filled with rows of plastic chairs, men and women bowed their heads and prayed for the souls of Nader Hayak and Michel Bahous, born and raised not far from where they were killed.
A day after a young Israeli army deserter, Eden Natan Zada, opened fire with his military-issue M-16 assault rifle inside a bus as it arrived in Shfaram at twilight, townspeople buried his four Israeli Arab victims: two sisters studying to be teachers, a grocer who never married and a bus driver who loved tinkering with Volkswagen Beetles.
The funerals -- one Muslim, one Christian -- followed different religious and emotional scripts. But they shared a bewildering sense of fear and resentment that highlighted the uneasy relationship between Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens and the Jewish state they live in.
"Why did this have to happen here, especially here in Shfaram, which has always been loyal to the state?" said Yousef Mor, a retired carpenter paying his respects to the Hayak and Bahous families at the Greek Catholic High School where they received hundreds of mourners. "Is this the price for being loyal?"
Amounting to roughly one-fifth of Israel's population, Christian and Muslim Arabs have been viewed by successive Israeli governments as a potential threat to security. The Israeli Arab population is growing quickly, especially in the south, and Israeli security services have expressed fear, particularly during times of strife, that its loyalties might lie with fellow Arabs in the territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 Middle East war.
Although Israel's leaders and much of the news media condemned Zada's killings in terms usually reserved for Palestinian terrorist attacks, many of the Israeli Arabs who came to bury friends and family held the government complicit in the crime. Some said Israel's security services, never slow to move against militant Palestinians accused of plotting against Israel, should have done the same against extremist groups such as the one Zada belonged to, an extreme wing of the settlers movement that favors expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories.
The group, known as Kach, is outlawed by the Israeli government and has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. But its members have rarely been the targets of sustained attention from Israeli security services, even during the run-up to the Gaza evacuation that has prompted some of the group's leaders to call for strident resistance to the move.
"The government knows all of them, they have lists of all of them. We need to see real action to stop these racist attacks," said Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who is from Shfaram and attended the funeral services. Noting that passengers on the bus beat Zada to death immediately after the shootings, Barakeh cautioned, "The fact that this criminal has died does not mean his crime has finished."
Led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel's political leadership denounced Zada's attack as an act designed to cause tension between Arabs and Jews in the days before the planned Aug. 15 evacuation of Gaza, known as disengagement. Sharon, who called the shooting here "a reprehensible act by a bloodthirsty Jewish terrorist," ordered the National Insurance Institute on Friday to consider the four people who died and the dozen who were wounded as victims of terrorism. The designation triggers benefits for the victims' families unavailable to those injured or killed in other ways.
Zada, 19, left his army post in June to protest the impending withdrawal from settlements in Gaza. The son of secular Jewish parents from Rishon Letzion, south of Tel Aviv, Zada moved recently to the West Bank settlement of Tapuah. The settlement of 600 people is known as a stronghold of followers of the late Meir Kahane, founder of the Kach movement.
But on Friday the mayor of Rishon Letzion said he would not allow Zada to be buried in the city cemetery, and Tapuah leaders said he was not a resident of the settlement, even though his Israeli identification card said he was. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz ruled out a military burial.
