West Bank: The Cruelest Conflict

Two peoples, Jewish and Palestinian, struggle for an ancient homeland

Much of it looks today as it must have looked in the time of Jesus.

Gnarled, green olive trees cling to the arid slopes while vineyards thrive in the valleys watered by the Jordan River. Donkeys and bony oxen pull ploughs to cultivate laboriously terraced hillsides where farmers for generations have carefully cleared away rocks from the sere soil. Yet television antennas sprout incongruously from the roofs of houses in Arab villages, while women in colorfully embroidered dresses still gather to wash and gossip at the central well. In Jewish settlements that dot the sun-drenched landscape, youths in jeans and yarmulkes dance the hora after school is let out. Their parents leave guns at the door when they gather at the community center--surrounded, as often as not, by barbed wire and sandbags--for Sabbath prayer.

To its 692,000 Palestinian inhabitants, this 2,300-sq.-mi. land of rolling hills and valleys that lies between the Jordan and the coastal plain is the West Bank, the heartland of what they hope will eventually be an independent Palestinian state. The Palestinian yearning for a national homeland after centuries of rule by the Turks, the British and the Jordanians is every bit as intense as that of Zionist settlers before the creation of Israel. In a sense, it is a "twice Promised Land," once by Yahweh to the Jews in biblical times, again by the United Nations to the Arabs when it partitioned Palestine in 1947. To the area's 5,000 Jewish settlers, and to thousands of other Israelis, the land is Judea and Samaria, a part of the Eretz Yisrael into which Abraham led God's chosen people. Disputes about the future of the West Bank, which was occupied by Israel eleven years ago this month during the Six-Day War, cloud the prospects for a Middle East peace settlement. More than that, those arguments focus on the cruelest of conflicts: two families fighting over the same home.

The Israelis argue that security requires them to supervise the West Bank militarily, while history grants them the right to settle there. They contend that if an independent Palestinian state were created in the West Bank (and in the Gaza Strip along the Mediterranean), it would quickly be taken over by the Palestine Liberation Organization and used as a launching pad for terrorist attacks on Israel. For that reason, last December Premier Menachem Begin put forward a 26-point proposal for the occupied territories that would give limited self-rule to the Arabs on domestic matters. Israeli authorities, however, would still be responsible for "security and public order," meaning continued occupation.

Although U.N. Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, Begin came to power last year on a platform proclaiming that Israel's right to the West Bank was "eternal." Many of Begin's countrymen are even more adamant in arguing the Bible-based claim to the area. Last week Gush Emunim (Group of the Faithful), a religious nationalist movement led by Hanan Porat that has sponsored many of the West Bank pioneers, demanded that the government confiscate Arab land to provide for new Jewish settlements.

The Begin plan has been rejected by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and other Arabs. It is overwhelmingly denounced by the West Bank Palestinians on the ground that it would merely continue an occupation they find hateful and humiliating. Home rule, they argue, in no way satisfies their need for a national identity. They dismiss the security argument as fraudulent. Soldier for soldier, weapon for weapon, Israel is the most powerful state in the Middle East despite its small size; the West Bank, which almost certainly would be demilitarized in a peace settlement giving it autonomy, has no airport, no arms factories and no means to build them. Pointing to the millions of Palestinian exiles living in Lebanon, Jordan and other Arab states, they ask: Why should Jewish emigrants from Russia and the U.S. have the right to settle on land that Arabs have lived on for at least 1,000 years, while refugees born in Haifa and Jaffa cannot go home again?

Israel argues, with some justice, that its occupation of the West Bank has been as benign as such a military operation can be, and that, in any case, it is considerably more enlightened than the rule of Jordan, which governed the area between 1950 and 1967. Israelis point out that West Bankers choose their own mayors. The West Bank's standard of living has improved dramatically, and more than 40,000 Palestinians work in Israel.

As might be expected, there are differing opinions between Israelis and West Bankers on what the occupation has meant economically to the region. Foreign economists conclude that both sides benefit, though Israel comes out ahead. The West Bank buys 91% of its imports from Israel, while it sells only 65% of its exports in return. Nearly half of the West Bank's 90,000 workers hold jobs in Israel, but they are often in areas that Israelis shun such as garbage collection, day labor and construction. Moreover, they receive, on the average, 81% of the wages Israelis get for the same work.

To the Palestinians, the Jordanian occupation, undesirable as it was, was somewhat more palatable because they at least shared a common culture. The West Bank Arabs may be well dressed and fed, but they despise their Israeli occupiers, despise themselves for being so impotent, despise the world for looking on uncaringly. They believe they are being robbed of their culture, shorn of their rights, exploited and humiliated.

Their anger is fueled daily by the presence of 2,200 Israeli occupation troops. Every Palestinian has some horror story to tell about Jewish oppression: a relative deported without legal proceedings, a family home destroyed, beatings and arrests, degradations and insults, racism and arrogance. In a report on human rights in Israel, the U.S. State Department this year noted that in the West Bank "military authorities may enter private homes and institutions in pursuit of security objectives as they see fit. This has occurred frequently, sometimes resulting in damage to property and injury to inhabitants." The report went on to cite restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, travel and political activity in the West Bank.

Despite Israel's insistence that West Bankers' rights are respected, the fact is that they may be stopped and searched at any time, arrested and held without charge, convicted of so-called security violations, sometimes without representation by a lawyer, and denied work permits for their chosen profession. Many official communications, including tax statements and phone bills, are in Hebrew, a language that few Palestinians know. West Bankers pay in taxes just about what it costs Israel to maintain the occupation, aside from the expenses of its troops. Yet they complain that they are not allowed even to dig irrigation wells for much-needed water for agriculture.

A particularly humiliating form of harassment is the ubiquitous "checkpoint" --which is anywhere an Israeli soldier decides to make it. West Bank Palestinians, whose license plates are blue in contrast to the Israeli yellow, may be stopped three or four times driving to and from work each day. Says one West Bank intellectual: "It is a common sight in Nablus or Ramallah to see two or three Israeli soldiers rush into a coffeehouse and shout: 'All out to the pavement.' Customers are then asked at gunpoint to face the wall while they are body-searched and their identity cards checked. If you happen not to have your I.D., you are sure to be in for rough manhandling by the soldiers."

Fear of arrest is real and constant.

The State Department estimates that as of last year there were 1,500 Palestinians being held on security charges. West Bankers claim that since the occupation began, at least 100,000 Palestinians have been in jail at one time or another, a figure that foreign observers consider realistic. Earlier this year, Ramallah Journalist Raymonde Taweel, 36, wife of a banker and mother of five, was taken from her home after midnight and held for six weeks in "administrative detention." No charges were ever lodged against her, but during lengthy interrogations she was repeatedly asked why foreign journalists came to talk to her. "Who are you?" screamed one Israeli guard at her. "You are an animal!" Then, Mrs. Taweel claims, he spat in her face and struck her in the nose. "You feel so humiliated," she recalls. "I felt that if only I would not cry, I would show them. But I couldn't help it. It was so horrible."

Arab students are frequently arrested for such vaguely defined crimes as "indiscreet talk." Brother Joseph Loewenstein, president of Bethlehem University and a member of the Roman Catholic Christian Brothers order, kept a log last year of undergraduates who were called in for interrogation. Out of a student body of 400, 104 were questioned. Sometimes, he says, a Jeep-load of soldiers will stop near the school and demand to see every student's identification. "It upsets the students terribly," says Brother Joseph. "The occupation has taken away all of their self-assurance. It has caused not so much a physical fear as a dread of the humiliation and degrading attitude of most of the authorities."

The most flagrant recent example of harassment occurred at Beit Jala (pop. 8,200) two months ago, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:* some 50 Israeli troops surrounded a school, ordered the students to close the windows, and then lobbed canisters of CS antiriot gas into the classrooms. Some students leaped 18 ft. to the rocky ground below. Ten were hospitalized with fractures. Military authorities at first denied the incident, but Israeli Defense Minister Ezer Weizman pressed his own investigation and found it to be true. He removed Brigadier General David Hagoel, 49, as military governor of the West Bank.

Israel has repeatedly denied that maltreatment or torture is part of its official policy. But members of the diplomatic corps as well as of volunteer groups have witnessed numerous incidents of demonstrators being beaten during arrests. "I know torture happens," says Hugh Harcort, 48, an American professor of cultural studies at Bir Zeit University. "I don't know how you prove it, but if I see one of my students picked up by the Israelis and I see that he is injured when he is released, what am I supposed to think?" Amnesty International has asked Israel for an investigation of alleged-ill treatment of certain Palestinian and Israeli-Arab prisoners.

Palestinians complain bitterly about cultural oppression as well. As a people, they have always prized literature and the arts and kept high standards of literacy and education. In private, students angrily equate Zionism with Nazism. They note that books referring to Palestinian culture or nationalism are censored, and that residents of the occupied territories are hindered from receiving publications from Arab countries. Literary censorship, however, is quixotically enforced, and examples of a powerful new Palestinian literature--plays, novels but most notably verse, circulate freely in the West Bank. Inevitably, the themes of the writings reflect a yearning for freedom by artists living under an alien oppression.

Nothing infuriates the West Bankers more than the Jewish settlements. The early ones were established by Israel's Labor government after the Six-Day War along the Jordan Valley--a first-line of defense composed of quasi-military outposts. Since then, Israel has invested $2 billion in settling all the occupied territories (which include the Sinai, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip). The 51 communities throughout the West Bank have alone received $1 billion.

Since Begin came to power, the government has legitimized formerly illegal settlements started by Israelis who simply went out to the West Bank. There are even more ambitious plans for the future. Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon is promoting a plan to settle 2 million Jews in the occupied territories. Defense Minister Weizman has drawn up a plan of his own; it calls for the construction of six large urban centers on the West Bank. If carried out, says a longtime observer in Jerusalem, "this plan would be the last straw. In five or ten years, it would gobble up so many land resources that the West Bank would become an integral part of Israel." Arab states and the U.S. agree that the settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its population to conquered territory.

Israeli officials frequently speak of the settlers as living in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. In fact, these pioneers have relatively little contact with Arab villages near by. Palestinian farmers do come to some settlements to barter fruits and vegetables, but closer contacts are shunned by both sides. When one Arab approached residents at Karnei Shomron, near the 1967 border, and asked if he could send his child to the community's day care center, they said no, on the ground that it would set a dangerous precedent.

The Jewish communities are Israeli fortresses in the midst of Arab hostility. The stark reality is told in the barbed wire strung around Kiryat Arba, the largest settlement (pop. 1,700), and in the armed soldier who stands at the gate of Karnei Shomron. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, 42, of Kiryat Arba, a spokesman for the settlers, admits that he always carries a gun. "The Arabs don't want us here," he explains. "They'd kill us all if they could."' Relatively few settlers say they would stay on the West Bank without the Israeli army's protection.

Why, then, do they come? Israel Schindler, 27, secretary of Karnei Shomron, points to a nearby hillock and notes that from it Jordanian artillery gunners used to fire on Israelis living in Tel Aviv twelve miles away. By settling this region, he insists, Israelis are preventing the enemy guns from returning to that hillock. Giora Reuveny, 30, is a member of Tomer, a budding Jewish settlement in the sunny Jordan Valley; proudly surveying his six acres of corn, tomatoes and eggplants, he admits to the appeal of the good life at Tomer. Ruth Berchlingue, 46, a French-born Jew, came to Kiryat Arba for religious reasons, and cites Genesis 23:9 as proof that Abraham bought the land she is living on.

Many thoughtful Israelis, hawks and doves alike, are alarmed by the long-term impact of the continued occupation, on Israel as much as on the West Bank. Says Emmanual Sivan, a professor of Islamic history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University: "For the generation of Israelis in their 20s, the occupation has been the natural order of things; this is certainly bad. They have learned that the Arabs are at the lower end of the ladder, which creates a vision of each other that is not conducive to coexistence. I'm not worried about whether or not we can hold on to the territories. But the price we pay worries me. Here we are, a democratic society, holding another society hostage." Uri Avneri, editor of the Tel Aviv weekly magazine Ha 'olam Hazeh, is even more outspoken. "The occupation is an unmitigated disaster for Israel. The fact that the Palestinians remain without their dignity poses a greater danger to Israeli security than any long-range benefit Israel could have from the military side of things."

Other Israelis acknowledge the injustice of the occupation but are troubled by the alternatives. "The occupation goes against the basic attitudes of Zionism," says Biblical Expert Shemaryahu Talmon of Hebrew University. "It's clear that we have not been able to turn the situation of ourselves as occupiers into one of cooperation. The obvious solution is to say, let's get out of it. But you can't return to a situation [before 1967] where Israel was twelve miles wide at its waist."

In a way, Israel's occupation of the West Bank is an accident--the result of a miscalculation by Jordan's King Hussein. At the start of the Six-Day War, Premier Levi Eshkol urged him not to intervene; when he did so, Israel dislodged his forces from the Old City of Jerusalem and pushed them back across the Jordan River. But what began as a temporary occupation of the West Bank has now evolved into a semipermanent "liberation," as Begin calls it. Does this mean that the Jewish state--a nation born of discrimination and a longing for freedom --has become blind and insensitive to sufferings of others? Have the Israelis lost something of their humanity in a quest for security forced upon them by Arab hostility and four bloody wars?

Even some Israelis would admit that there is no easy answer to those hard questions. Moreover, many sympathetic foreign observers of Israel are concerned about a kind of national neurosis that goes beyond what is frequently called its Holocaust complex. Reports TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff: "Israelis have a world view so charged with the desolation of the past and the anguish of living memory that all sense of trust has been eradicated. Many Jews today are tormented by the past, troubled by the present, fearful of survival in the future. Asked about the occupation, they respond that it is benign, that the Palestinians never had it so good, that anyway Israel would not be an occupier if the Arabs had not compelled it to fight. In the end, they ignore the problem. They turn their eyes from Palestinian troubles and finally talk about something else. A history of four wars, of almost daily terrorism, of hatred and struggle, has become so overpowering that the sound of the word occupation seems pale by comparison."

Zionism gave birth to the state of Israel; it also, inadvertently, helped inspire a sense of nationalism in the Palestinians--a people, Poet Mahmoud Darweesh once wrote, who have "no homeland, no flag and no address." Wrenching as the decision may be, logic suggests that sooner or later Israel will have to give the Palestinians that homeland, that address. Great risks are involved, but there are even greater risks in the alternatives. Gradually expelling the Arabs from the West Bank would be morally unthinkable, and would condemn Israel to a permanent state of hostility with its neighbors. Annexing the West Bank and Gaza, with their 1.1 million Arabs, would turn the Jewish state that Israelis want into the first stage of the binational country that P.L.O. Leader Yasser Arafat seeks. Keeping the Palestinians under occupation, no matter how benign, will only churn up the will to struggle that is expressed in this popular West Bank ballad:

You may take the last strip of our

land

Feed my youth to prison cells

You may plunder my heritage

You may spread a web of terror

On the roofs of my village,

But

I shall not compromise

And to the last pulse in my veins

I shall resist.

*Only five days before the scheduled withdrawal of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, 150 Israeli commandos, using boats and helicopters, last week hit a Palestinian camp at Aaqbiye, six miles south of Sidon. The Israelis claimed that the attack was aimed at a terrorist training camp; sources in Lebanon suspected that the raid was retaliation for the recent bombing of a bus in Jerusalem, in which six people were killed. Death toll in the attack: five Palestinian soldiers, at least six Lebanese civilians, and two Israelis.

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