SHFARAM/RISHON LETZION: Leaders in the Arab-Israeli town where an extremist Jewish soldier murdered four people on a bus before being lynched, have said the killings resulted from years of official discrimination and vilification of Arabs.

As the four victims — two Muslim and two Christian — were laid to rest in Shfaram on Friday, Israeli authorities expressed their disgust at the killings by refusing to allow the man responsible, 19-year-old Private Eden Nathan Zaada, to be buried in a military cemetery or the graveyard of his home town.

Amid anger and distress in Shfaram, there was division over why Zaada chose the town of about 35,000 Arabs as his target, particularly as it has a large Druze population that serves in the Israeli army. There is common agreement that Zaada, who lived in the rightwing Jewish settlement of Tapuach — where three youths were arrested on Friday in connection with the attack — and had ties to the banned extremist group Kach, was motivated by anger at Ariel Sharon’s plan to remove all Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip later this month.

But Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who lives in Shfaram, said Zaada chose to murder Arabs because the state has long identified them as the “enemy within”, in order to justify building settlements. “It’s not a lone crime. It’s the fruit of official policy against the Arab population,” he said. “Every day we listen to ministers and politicians who talk about ‘transfer’ [the forced removal of Arabs], who make racist laws against the Arab population of Israel. And then you find someone who translates this into violence.

“Every one of us expected this crime to happen. Every fascist in Israel thinks that if he kills more Arabs he can change the agenda of the state.” The army says that Zaada was a deserter who absconded with the gun used in the killings. Friends of the soldier said he absconded because he did not want to take part in the removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza. Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service was tracking Zaada’s movements because of his extremist ties. Mr Barakeh questioned why the soldier was not arrested earlier. A small shrine to the dead has grown next to the road with a shattered wing mirror from the bus laid next to bloodstained packages and the discarded shoes of the victims. Standing nearby on Friday was Rami Aboud who, with another man, charged at Zaada after he had killed his four victims and was reloading his gun. Mr Aboud pinned the soldier to the floor of the bus while the other man grabbed the weapon. “[Zaada] was scared,” he said. “I asked him: ‘What are you doing?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. I want to kill Arabs.’ I grabbed him because I was afraid he would get out of the bus and shoot people in the street.” Mr Aboud said Zaada was eventually overwhelmed by an angry crowd that beat him to death inside the bus. Zaada’s father, Yitzhak, said he had repeatedly warned the army that his son was a risk to himself. He said he did not blame the people of the Tapuach settlement for leading his son astray but the army for not listening to warnings.

Zaada’s family was unable to bury him on Friday after the Israeli defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, refused to allow him to be interred in a military cemetery and the mayor of his home town, Rishon Letzion, denied him a plot in its cemeteries.

Dozens of rightwing activists from West Bank settlements arrived for the aborted funeral. Among them was Moshe Ben Israel, a computer programmer from Tapuach who knew Zaada and blamed the government for his actions. “The phrase ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’ springs to mind,” he said. “I wonder how many other soldiers who don’t want to obey these orders to expel their brothers [from the Gaza Strip] are being ignored by their officers. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service