COLUMN ONE : For Arabs in Israel, Alienation : They are asking if Arab citizens can be more than refugees in their own land. Their anger is matched by hardening attitudes and suspicion from Jews.

EN HOD, Israel — Actually, there are two En Hods, but one is almost invisible.

The older En Hod, now an Israeli artists’ colony, is a village of picturesque stone houses set on a wooded hill. It is just off the old Haifa road and is clearly marked with a sign to attract tourists.

The other En Hod, an Arab village, is also set among trees, but there the similarity ends. There are no signs along the road that leads to it, and it does not appear on maps. There is no electricity. Sewage flows into the open and down a ravine from a makeshift system of pipes. The streets are unpaved and, in the summer, dusty: Appalachia on the Mediterranean.

The founders of this En Hod were once residents of what is now the artists’ colony, and their story has become a symbol of frustration for Arabs all over Israel.

They fled their homes 42 years ago, during the Israeli War of Independence, expecting to return when the war ended. But the new Israeli state has not permitted them to return. Israeli painters took over the picturesque houses and turned them into studios.

Not only have they been prevented from going home, they have been denied municipal status for their new village, and this means no electricity, no sewers, no proper schools.

They are refugees in their own country, experiencing in the extreme what many Israeli Arabs have come to know: that they do not belong and never will, that although they can vote they will never really be part of a Jewish state that is in conflict with the Arab world outside--and within.

Mohammed abu Elhijeh, who was born in the older En Hod and is the son of a village leader, recently told a reporter: “We want to know, finally, are we citizens of this state or not? We want to know, what is the difference between us and our neighbors?”

Such questions are being asked more and more by Arabs and Jews in Israel. For years, they could be dismissed. But the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has begun to spill over into Israel proper, not just into the streets but into the minds of the 650,000 Arab citizens of Israel. There is concern that Israel’s Arabs may be drifting into permanent alienation.

The Arab awakening is matched on the Jewish side by hardened attitudes and growing suspicion. A poll published at Haifa University recently showed that a majority of Israeli Jews favor a ban on Arab representation in the Knesset, the Parliament. Three out of four Israeli Jews said they would not work for an Arab.

On both sides, the ill feeling has been manifested in hostile words, and in some cases, acts.

Last month, Arab Israel erupted in unusual violence after an Israeli gunman shot and killed seven Palestinian workers at the town of Rishon Le Zion. Masked youths hurled stones and gasoline bombs at cars, smashed windows and displayed the outlawed flag of Palestine.

In Nazareth, the largest Arab city outside Jerusalem, arsonists burned down a bank. In Lod, Ramle and Haifa, Arabs took to the streets for the first time in memory.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned: “I think it ought to be said to the Arabs considered citizens of Israel that yesterday and the day before they passed the limit of what is allowed. . . . I really hope this won’t repeat itself.”

The violence came on the heels of a series of nationalistic signals: incidents of arson, discovery of an Arab summer camp where Palestinian political songs and lore were taught, the appearance of anti-Israeli graffiti on walls, polls showing that most Israeli Arabs want a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

For their part, some Israeli politicians have made explicit their feelings that their Arab fellow citizens are nothing of the sort.

Not long ago, the mayor of the Galilee town of Carmiel complained that Arabs were moving in at an alarming rate, threatening the Jewish majority. A Likud Party candidate for mayor of Acre campaigned on a promise to expel Arabs from the city’s historic Crusader-era core. (He lost; Arabs voted overwhelmingly for his opponent.)

Colliding attitudes reached a political peak in April when Shimon Peres, leader of the Labor Party, came close to unseating Prime Minister Shamir, head of Likud. Peres, a leading dove, appeared to have lined up just enough votes in the Knesset to take power, among them seven seats held by Arabs.

Likud leaders tried to put pressure on supporters of Peres by charging that his majority was “non-Jewish,” meaning dependent on Arabs. The anti-Arab charge was led by Likud’s Ehud Olmert, who, ironically, was then the minister in charge of Arab welfare.

Peres’ majority disappeared for other reasons. He was abandoned by members of religious parties who disagreed with his dovish line on settling the Palestinian conflict. But the message to Israeli Arabs was clear: Although they hold full voting rights, they may not decide the makeup of Israel’s government.

“This was a costly event for Israel,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University. “The Arabs were told they are not legitimate. It confirmed their feelings of inferiority.”

Statistics tell a depressing tale of Arab life in Israel. The rate of Arab unemployment is estimated at more than 20%, more than twice the national rate. Half of the 600,000 Israelis who live below the poverty line are Arab. Five percent of university students are Arab, although the percentage of Arabs in the population at large is 18%.

Since the Rishon Le Zion incident, Israeli authorities have gone to great lengths to counter the argument that Arabs are second-class citizens. Officials take pains to point out that Arabs in Israel are better off than many Arab citizens of neighboring states. If Arab income is only two-thirds the income of Jews, they say, it is because they started at a lower level. The reduced municipal budgets for Arab towns are explained by the lower taxes collected from the Arabs.

Israeli Jews and Arabs agree that one obstacle to Arab progress in everything from social welfare to education to acceptance in high-security jobs is their exemption from military conscription.

The army in Israel is not just a military force; military service represents a kind of passage to citizenship, a communal rite that conveys full identity with the state. A Jewish Israeli who refuses to serve faces ostracism. Arabs, already looked on with suspicion, are excluded from this most respected of national institutions.

Arabs are not drafted, although some Bedouins and Druze, the latter an offshoot sect of Islam, volunteer and serve in special units. No specific numbers are available, but the few other Arabs who volunteer for the army are almost all rejected.

Several right-wing politicians have suggested that Arabs not be allowed to vote because they do not perform military service. Arab politicians are more ambivalent, especially so because the army is used to suppress the Palestinian revolt against Israeli rule.

Beneath the surface give-and-take over the rights and responsibilities of Arab citizens, there are other contradictions. A few years ago, a survey of Israelis showed that while 60% wanted to burden Arabs with the same national obligations as Jews, fewer than half supported equal rights for them.

Many Arabs have come to believe that they will always be pushed to the back of the line, be it for jobs or, as in the case of En Hod, common services.

“We all work in Israel,” said Abu Elhijeh, the village leader’s son. “We travel around and see what is going on. We want to live like other people, like the rest of the Israelis.”

En Hod was a Crusader outpost that was settled by Arabs in the distant past. In 1948, when Britain abandoned its hold on Palestine and Israelis and Arabs went to war, the families of En Hod conducted raids on the nearby highway to Haifa. Armed Israelis took over the village, and most of the residents took refuge abroad or with families elsewhere in Israel.

But one clan stayed on, on nearby land used for grazing, and formed the nucleus of the new En Hod.

These people raised goats and grew olives and were generally ignored by the government. Then, in the 1970s, the state put up a fence to keep the village from expanding. Trees were planted for a new national park, and the shade of these trees killed the olive trees. Goats were forbidden on grounds that they damaged the environment.

But the Arabs persisted, and they found a loophole in the building restrictions: The fence meant to hem them in obstructed only the march of the village up the mountain. The ravine was left unfenced, and the residents began to build down, often at impossible angles.

“It took three years to lay the foundation of a house because we had to scrape away at the mountainside,” Abu Elhijeh said.

In 1986, the village began to lobby for municipal status for its 130 residents. This seemed to awaken the government to the existence of Arab En Hod, and it was to the village’s disadvantage. Instead of helping out, officials sent word that three new houses would be demolished.

A sit-in and a sympathetic campaign on television and in newspapers saved the houses. But the publicity awakened other Arab communities with similar problems.

It turned out that restrictions on the growth of Arab communities had led to a spate of illegal building nationwide. About 40 communities banded together with En Hod to solve a problem common to them all, the lack of services. The campaign was backed by the New Israel Fund, a North American and Israeli group that supports community work and promotes democracy in Israel.

The Arabs complained that smaller Israeli villages get full services. Also, remote Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are provided with roads, water and electricity.

The government says it is studying the requests for recognition, but it points out that many of the Arab settlements are scattered and that jurisdictional problems abound. Six thousand Arab houses were built illegally, officials estimate.

“In the end, there will be no choice; the settlements will be recognized and included in some municipality,” said Ilan Cohen, an official in the Arab Affairs Ministry. He did not venture to guess when that might be.

The common effort of En Hod and the other Arab communities has had a chilling effect on the Jews of old En Hod. After years of paying lip service to the Arabs’ complaints, they have grown hostile now that the Arabs are flexing their political muscle.

“They are being exploited by leftists and don’t know how to stop it,” said Mara Ben-Dov, a painter, sculptor and 16-year resident of En Hod.

Like others, Ben-Dov fears that recognition of the Arab village will somehow mushroom into mass urbanization and clutter the landscape with chicken coops and auto repair shops. As it is, En Hod is in dispute with a neighboring Jewish kibbutz over the farmers’ plans to build a food processing plant.

“I don’t feel bad at living in a home that used to be Arab,” Ben-Dov said. “All Israel was once Arab, so it’s impossible to think like that. These things happen in war. Look, my parents were refugees, my mother from Austria, my father from Yugoslavia. My grandparents were killed by the Nazis. We never got anything from it all.”

It was a Saturday, and old En Hod was filling up with day trippers pouring out of buses. At the Bonanza Restaurant, which used to be the village mosque, the pianist, a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union, was playing “Strangers in the Night.”

The call of the muezzin from less than two miles away, in the other En Hod, could be heard, summoning the faithful to mid-day prayers at the mosque the villagers have built to replace the old one.