By Mark Lavie
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2000; 1:00 a.m. EDT

YUVALIM, Israel –– Tami Dumai's elementary school, set up to promote Jewish-Arab cooperation, has been closed this week.

The students can't get here because of rock-throwing riots by thousands of Israel's Arab citizens who have blocked roads and sent residents of Jewish communities in northern Israel into a fearful seclusion.

Dumai said that so far none of the parents have pulled the children out and none of the teachers quit. "This is the test," she said of the survival chances of her educational experiment in the midst of the worst internal rebellion Israel has experienced since its founding.

Ten Arab residents have been killed in three days of clashes with Israeli riot police in the wooded, picturesque Galilee region, four more than in the 1976 watershed protests against the confiscation of Arab-owned land for the expansion of Jewish communities that first galvanized Israel's 1 million Arabs.

The clashes started in Jerusalem on Thursday after a hawkish Israeli politician, opposition leader Ariel Sharon, visited a disputed hill there, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims. The riots quickly spread to the West Bank and Gaza and spilled over into Israel's Arab communities – predominantly Muslim – with the six-day death toll now nearing 60.

On Tuesday, two dozen forest fires sprang up near Jewish communities in the Galilee, threatening to engulf houses. Firefighters assumed they were set by Israeli Arabs, angry over rising casualties among their Palestinian brethren, and angry over their own plight as second-class citizens in the Jewish state.

Jews were angry, too. Arab demonstrators blocked main roads for two days, trapping Jews in their villages. Radio traffic reports listed the closed roads and intersections, an unprecedented addition to the usual traffic jams.

Watching his political plans evaporate, Prime Minister Ehud Barak sat with Israeli Arab leaders for more than three hours Tuesday, trying to persuade them to try to stop the rioting, and hoping that they would continue to back his government.

When Israel's parliament reconvenes in October, Barak will need the votes of all 10 Arab members of the 120-seat parliament to keep his government from falling, forcing elections. One Arab legislator said flatly that after what he called the massacre of his people, he would never vote with Barak again.

Barak said he instructed the police to refrain from shooting at Israeli Arabs and "make a supreme effort to prevent further casualties."

Arabs make up about one-sixth of Israel's population. Their villages are within the original borders of Israel, before Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war. They are full citizens, but they complain that have never been given equal treatment.

For decades, the two peoples have been living and working side by side with few incidents. Arabs have complained often about their living conditions, a result of discriminatory budget allocations, and occasionally they demonstrate. But it has never been this violent, and their Jewish neighbors have not felt they were targets.

On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers moved in to beef up security around Jewish villages for the first time since 1976.

The riots are "the result of 50 years of discrimination," said Jalal Bana, an Israeli Arab journalist. He said that most Arab villages have no basic infrastructure, like sewage systems, and the people are fed up. "They see how their Jewish neighbors live," he said.

Dumai lives in Yuvalim, a village with about 800 residents. Her school has 84 pupils in the first three grades. The message is equality, Dumai said. Each class uses Hebrew and Arabic equally and has two teachers.

Just down the road from Yuvalim, police clashed with Arabs in Kfar Manda, a dusty village. One resident was killed there Tuesday evening, a few hours after the funeral of another Arab, killed Monday in Sakhnin, next to Yuvalim.

Police blocked the road between Yuvalim and Sakhnin. For Dumai, 54, it was both a literal and figurative barrier. "I have students there," she said. "It's a difficult feeling."

Others expressed rage. Rafael Eitan, a retired right-wing politician who lives nearby, demanded that the police send tanks into the Arab villages and crush the uprising, whatever the cost. He said it was unacceptable for anyone to block roads.

"Tanks are not the answer," Dumai said. "The school is the answer."