Israeli Jews, Arabs clash in fourth straight night

By Ammar Awad

ACRE, Israel (Reuters) - Rioters clashed for a fourth straight night on Saturday in northern Israel, police said, raising tensions in a city once a rare bastion of peaceful relations between Arabs and Jews.

Police fired water cannons to disperse stone-throwing rioters in Acre, a former Crusader stronghold, arresting 32 from both sides on a day when three Arab homes were also torched and damaged, Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman said.

Israeli media said that three people were also hurt in the clashes on Saturday night, despite reinforced police guard that barricaded a section of the city after nightfall to contain stone-throwing clashes protests, closing it to traffic.

Trouble started in Acre after dark on Wednesday at the start of the Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, when youths attacked an Arab man who drove into a mostly Jewish district to a relative's home, disturbing the start of 24 hours during which many Jews fast and abstain from driving.

As word spread from mosque loudspeakers of Jewish youths stoning the car, Arab crowds responded angrily, causing widespread damage to cars and shops in a main city street.

There have been no serious injuries in the violence, but at least 11 Arab homes have been torched since the riots began, officials said.

Many shops and restaurants in the old town, a popular tourist destination, were either closed or bereft of any business on Saturday. Hebrew-language flyers were circulated calling for a boycott of Arab businesses.

Abbas Zakour, an Israeli Arab lawmaker from Acre, said he was trying to mediate a truce under which representatives of Arab residents would condemn the driver involved in the Yom Kippur incident.

"Despite our differences we thought we could never reach such circumstances in Acre," Zakour told Israel Radio of the town, where 46,000 Arabs and Jews live side-by-side and violence has been rare.

"These have been a few difficult days for Jews and Arabs," Zakour said. "We should sit down together. I hope we succeed."

Sami Hawary, an Arab resident who heads a group that promotes cooperation between Arabs and Jews, told Reuters: "The tension is very high here, things are on a knife-edge."

Relations between Israel's Jewish and Arab citizens have been sometimes tense, due in part to Israel's conflict with Palestinians, 60 years after the Jewish state's establishment in what was then Palestine.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed in principle on a two-state solution in which the 4 million Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, many descended from those displaced in the 1948 war, would eventually have a state.

Arabs comprise about a fifth of Israel's population.

Israeli prime minister-designate Tzipi Livni visited Acre on Friday and urged a return to calm. An escalation of the violence could hamper Livni's already tough job to form a new coalition government after the resignation of premier Ehud Olmert.

(Additional reporting by Wafa Amr in Ramallah, Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Sami Aboudi)