Unwelcoming Committee

Campaigning for last July's national elections, U.S.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, 52, made a promise: if he won a seat in the Knesset he would travel to Umm al Fahm (pop. 25,000), the largest Arab village in Israel, as the first step in a drive to expel the country's 625,000 Arab citizens, as well as the 1 .4 million in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. Government officials were braced for trouble last week when Kahane, now a Knesset member, tried to make good on his pledge. Some 1,500 Arab residents and hundreds of Jews formed a human barrier on the main road into the village, which is 43 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. When Kahane was a mile from the village, police, disregarding his right to visit public place under parliamentary immunity, detained the rabbi, then turned him and some 100 of his supporters back.

Kahane vowed to continue his campaign. "There are no Arab villages in the state of Israel," he said. "There state are only Israeli villages inhabited by Arabs temporarily." Kahane, said Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, is "negative, dangerous and harmful."