Israeli Arab Town Stunned, Ashamed at Car Bombings : Mideast: Though torn between nation and ethnicity, community felt it was able to get along with Jews.

DABURIYA, Israel — The belief that Israeli Arabs were behind two botched car bombings last weekend has sent shock waves through a community that sees itself as oppressed second-class citizens who, nevertheless, coexist peacefully with Jews.

Nowhere is the shock and dread greater than here in the hometown of two men who were killed when the explosives-packed car they were in exploded.

On a patio outside the house of one dead suspect, Amir Masalha, stunned men and women on Tuesday sat in separate circles of black plastic chairs, drinking strong coffee in a mourning ritual. At the home of the other, Jad Azaiza, his father tearfully recalled how his son had been making plans to marry.

“I cannot understand this,” the father, Nijim, repeated numbly over and over.

Masalha and Azaiza were killed in Tiberias, a resort on the Sea of Galilee. Minutes later, a second car bomb went off in the Mediterranean port of Haifa, killing the occupant, Nazzal Karim, also an Israeli Arab, police said. Both blasts appeared timed to undermine a breakthrough peace deal signed by Israel and the Palestinians just hours earlier.

Israeli security officials have warned that growing extremism among some Israeli Arabs could translate into violence and spur ties between the Arabs and radical Islamists elsewhere. In fact, the bombing suspect who died in Haifa is the nephew of a senior Hamas leader recently sought in Jordan as part of a government crackdown there against the militant organization, neighbors and friends said Tuesday.

The bombings Sunday came one week after the slaying of two Jewish hikers, allegedly by an Israeli Arab.

Israeli Arabs have rarely participated in terrorism in the past. Unlike Palestinians, they are citizens of Israel and vote in its elections.

But they are also the victims of discrimination and face severe economic disadvantages. Many live torn lives in which their emotional and ethnic identification with Palestinians clashes with their national identification with Israel.

The suspicion that the bombings were the work of Israeli Arabs stunned both Israeli Jews, who associate terrorism exclusively with Palestinians, and the Israeli Arabs themselves, who fear a backlash in which their loyalty is called into question.

Here in Daburiya, the relatives of Masalha and Azaiza walked about in a daze Tuesday. When Palestinian militants die in bombings, their families usually say they celebrate the loss as martyrdom. By contrast, the families here were in deep mourning and, some said, ashamed.

“You won’t find anyone here calling them heroes,” said a shopkeeper. “This is really bad for the Arabs here because it’s going to cause a lot of mistrust with the Jews.”

This town of about 6,000 people, with its neat houses and hilly streets, lies six miles east of Nazareth. It is on the skirt of Mt. Tabor, which Jesus is said to have ascended with his disciples.

Israeli police raided the Masalha and Azaiza homes in the middle of the night after Sunday’s blast. They broke down the door at Masalha’s house and hauled away two brothers. The mothers of the dead men were taken in for blood samples--to be used in DNA identifications of the remains--and released.

Masalha, 26, was an imam at the mosque in the nearby village of Mashhad, friends and family said. He had married about six months ago, and his wife was pregnant. He had studied in an Islamic school in East Jerusalem. It was his car that blew up in Tiberias.

On his way out of Daburiya on Sunday, he picked up Azaiza, a 23-year-old plumber. Azaiza was moderately religious and hard-working and knew Masalha only casually, his inconsolable father said.

“I don’t know how he got into this,” Nijim Azaiza moaned as neighborhood men arrived to offer condolences. “We had no problems. We had money, we had homes, we had everything, there was nothing to worry about.”

As Amir Masalha and Azaiza headed to Tiberias, Karim headed for Haifa. Masalha and Karim, who lived in Mashhad, knew each other through the village mosque, where Karim prayed daily. Both were members of the Islamic Movement, a fundamentalist but nonviolent organization. In the police raids after the explosions, two of Azaiza’s brothers and a fifth man were also arrested.

Karim’s mother is from Kabatiya, a hard-line West Bank Palestinian town that waged a tough battle against Israeli forces at the height of the intifada, or uprising. Her brother is Mohammed Nazzal, a senior official with the radical Islamic Hamas movement. He was based in Jordan until the government there issued a warrant for his arrest Aug. 31 and shut down Hamas offices as part of a crackdown.

Hamas openly advocates the destruction of Israel and opposes the peace process. Israeli security officials said Tuesday night that they believed that Masalha was the ringleader of a branch of Hamas operating inside Israel.

The participation of Israeli Arabs poses a dilemma for Israeli security forces. A common response to an attack by a Palestinians is to put the perpetrator’s village under siege and demolish the family home. To employ the same tactics against an Israeli citizen raises additional human rights questions.

“Today, the anger here is toward the two people who did this and who put the village in this situation,” the mayor of Daburiya, Faisal Azaiza, said Tuesday. “But if [the police] carry out a collective punishment, then the anger could turn. I want to avoid that.”

The mayor exemplifies the way many Israeli Arabs live in two worlds. Photographs of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and of a menorah hang on the wall of his office next to certificates in Arabic. He moves easily from Arabic to Hebrew to field the calls pouring in on his cellular telephone.

Arabs account for a sixth of Israel’s 6 million citizens. Israeli Arab villages regularly rank among the country’s poorest, their schools and clinics inferior. Those conditions feed a festering resentment and alienation. Israeli Arabs often are viewed by Palestinians as sellouts and by Israeli Jews as a fifth column.

Zohir Bahalul, an Israeli Arab who works as a sportscaster on Israeli TV, wrote in Tuesday’s Yediot Aharonot about the divided allegiances and contradictions that characterize his community.

“Our Arabness has been an unending source of apology,” Bahalul said. “We put our nationalism on hold so as not to provoke. We repressed our voice so as not to disturb your rest. We blunted our shouts, so they wouldn’t be perceived as a threat. . . .

“Indeed, it is terrible and unforgivable to see one, two, maybe four or five of us ruining with their actions what we built with such terrible pain.”