The committee's establishment was decided upon at a meeting at Haifa's Christian House on Wednesday. According to a press statement issued after the meeting, it will be formally launched at a national conference of Arab Christians, mostly laymen, that is slated to take place in Haifa on April 9.

However, public figures from other communities - Muslim, Druze and even Jewish - have also been invited to the conference. "We have no intention of disconnecting from the Arab sector in general, or from the state in particular, so it's important that participation be broad and sweeping," explained a member of the conference's organizing committee.

The idea of the action committee arose because many Christian Arabs feel their traditional religious leadership has failed to put issues of concern to their community on the public agenda, while the Arab political parties and the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, which are supposed to represent the Arab sector as a whole, are ineffective in representing specific Christian concerns. But the real spur to action was what happened in Maghar a few weeks ago, when the town's Druze residents went on an anti-Christian rampage.

"It turns out that the state and the government view the Christians as the Arab sector's good children, who lack the strength to fight for their rights, partly because they are a minority within a minority," said one Christian who was involved in the decision to establish the committee. Most Israeli Arabs are Muslims.

Nevertheless, there were also fears that an action committee would provoke charges from Arab political parties and religious leaders that the Christians were dividing the Arab sector, and thereby serving the establishment's interests.

Michel Nahla, who runs Christian House, said the Maghar riots were the catalyst that overcame these fears. "Suddenly Christians in Maghar and other mixed towns began to feel that their security was being abandoned, and there was no one to provide a solution. They had no address other than the religious and spiritual leadership, and these events proved that its power is fairly limited," he said.

"Nevertheless, it is important to stress that the Christians have no intention of starting a process of Lebanonization in the Arab sector, in which each community acts alone and worries only about itself," Nahla added, noting that this is why representatives of other communities were invited to the conference.

One of the first projects being proposed for the action committee's consideration is a campaign to get the government to establish a commission of inquiry on the Maghar riots, compensate the town's Christian residents for the massive property damage they suffered, indict the perpetrators, and punish policemen who, in the community's view, were negligent in their handling of the riots. Another proposal is to establish regular intercommunal dialogues, especially with the Druze community.

As predicted, however, the decision to establish the committee has drawn some angry responses from other parts of the Arab sector. Shawki Khatib, who heads the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, declined to comment. But MK Issam Makhoul (Hadash), himself a Christian, charged that the action committee would create far more problems than it solved. "This is a separatist idea that sends us many years backward, and it means falling into the trap of factionalism," he said.

Makhoul, like the only other Christian Arab MK, Azmi Bishara, sees himself as representing the entire Arab sector, not only the Christians. He believes the Christian community's problems must be solved through existing institutions, and in the context of solving the problems of the Arab sector as a whole.