Turmoil in the Occupied Lands

By William E. Smith

As Begin survives a Knesset vote, tension rises in the West Bank

Suddenly, savagely, street violence and rioting erupted last week throughout the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arab youths threw stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with rifle fire and tear gas. Roadways were blocked by burning tires and other rubble. City streets emptied, except for the occasional patrol of red-bereted Israeli paratroopers. As the turmoil spread, seven Arabs and one Israeli soldier were killed, dozens of Arabs and soldiers were injured, and hundreds were arrested. The demonstrations were the fiercest since the Israelis occupied the area 15 years ago during the Six-Day War, and the stakes were high.

As skirmishes flared in Ramallah, Nablus and Gaza, Israelis were preparing for the final withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula on April 25, an event that some of them opposed and many dreaded. In a week of drama, the controversial withdrawal, in turn, provoked an Israeli parliamentary crisis, very nearly forcing Prime Minister Menachem Begin to resign and call for new elections. The vote marked the beginning of a parliamentary struggle that was likely to last throughout most of the year.

The demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza raised the specter of another war. In neighboring Arab countries, governments speculated that the Israelis, if not preparing for outright annexation, were intentionally trying to drive out the Palestinian Arabs, who constitute more than 96% of the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Three Arab states--Jordan, Lebanon and Syria--called one-hour national strikes as gestures of sympathy for the Palestinians. At the United Nations, the Security Council began debate on a motion to condemn Israel for its actions on the West Bank.

Last week's parliamentary crisis began when the Begin government alienated a few right-wing extremists in the Knesset by sticking to its plan to withdraw from the Sinai. Thus, when Begin faced his 25th no-confidence motion since 1977 and his fifth since his re-election last June, he was opposed not only by the Labor Party and two small minority groups, but by a handful of his usual supporters. Chief among these was Rabbi Haim Druckman, 49, a Deputy Minister who belongs to the six-member National Religious Party. The bronze-bearded Druckman, the father of ten, holds the view of many religious Jews that the northern Sinai, extending to El Arish in the southwest, is part of the biblical Eretz Yisrael and should not be abandoned.

Druckman thus joined forces last week with the firebrand Geula Cohen and her two colleagues in the tiny, radical rightist Tehiya Party. In 1980 Cohen wrote legislation calling for de facto annexation of Arab-dominated East Jerusalem. Late last year she tabled a motion to annex the occupied Golan Heights. She would also like to annex the West Bank, but her main mission at the moment is to block the Sinai withdrawal. Says she: "The people of Israel are nervous. This national trauma will stay in our hearts and minds forever."

At last week's Knesset session, attention was focused on Begin, who leaned heavily on a cane as he took his seat at the government's table, and on Rabbi Druckman, who sat two rows behind the Prime Minister. Begin took occasional notes as Opposition Leader Shimon Peres perfunctorily charged the government with incompetence in its handling of the West Bank. Demanded Peres: "What are our ambitions? To add 1.3 million Arabs, against their will, to Israel, and make Israel a binational state on a one-way street to conflict?"

In his defense, Begin lashed out at the "hypocrisy" of the U.N. Security Council, which he said was so ready to condemn Israel but ignored the recent fierce crackdown on dissidents in Syria. "We don't want to spill the blood of any Arab," Begin insisted. "We want to live in peace and mutual honor with the Arabs of the land of Israel."

When the Prime Minister had at last finished, the chamber fell silent with expectation. Asked Speaker Menachem Savidor: "Who is in favor?" And when Druckman quickly raised his hand, along with 57 other members of the Knesset, the 58-58 tie vote was inevitable. His bad leg propped on a hassock under the bench, Begin could not look behind him to see how Druckman had voted. His Deputy Prime Minister, Simcha Ehrlich, broke the news to him. Begin then turned in his seat, grimacing, to stare at Druckman for a moment. When Savidor announced the vote, Begin rose to his feet without using his cane. "Mr. Speaker," he said, "I must call a Cabinet meeting now, and therefore I ask for a recess."

Begin had previously said that he would quit in the event of a tie vote. For one thing, a resignation might strengthen his hand. If no one could form a government, Begin could call new elections, and some polls put his Likud coalition ahead of Labor, 41% to 38%.

But there was a risk: Labor's Peres just might be able to get a majority in the 120-seat Knesset by wooing some tiny parties in the Likud coalition that were souring on Begin for one reason or another. This possibility caused Begin to put the question of resignation to his Cabinet, and the Cabinet voted 12 to 6 he should remain in office. Begin followed the Cabinet's counsel. Sniffed the anti-Begin newspaper Ha'aretz: "On this occasion the Prime Minister outdid himself in swallowing his own words." But most Israelis believe that Begin will soon attempt to muster a majority for new elections, to be held some time later in the year.

If the past week is any indication, the interim period will prove to be a contentious one. The current troubles in the West Bank and Gaza were caused by an aggressive Israeli campaign to curb the political influence of the territories' 23 mayors and, through them, the power of the P.L.O. The immediate issue was seemingly trivial. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had announced last November that the occupation government would henceforth be led by an Israeli civilian, Menachem Milson, a professor of Arabic literature at Hebrew University. Several of the more militant Arab mayors, fearing that an Israeli annexation of the West Bank was already under way under the guise of civil administration, refused to deal with Milson. Two weeks ago, the Israeli authorities responded by firing Mayor Ibrahim Tawil of El-Bireh and replacing him with an Israeli lieutenant colonel. The issue, says Sharon, is, "Who will control Judea and Samaria, the P.L.O. or Israel?"

As strikes and protests spread last week, the Israelis fired two more mayors who back the P.L.O.: Bassam Shaka'a of Nablus and Karim Khalaf of Ramallah. The Israelis accused them of "repeated attempts to disrupt public order." Both men had themselves been victims of West Bank violence. They were maimed two years ago in terrorist bombings. The Palestinians blamed Israeli authorities, but no one has yet been arrested in connection with either incident.

The Arabs reacted to the firing of the mayors by staging strikes and throwing stones. They burned tires in the streets in an effort to halt the flow of traffic. In Hebron they stoned a busload of Egyptian tourists, a group of women from the Alexandria Red Crescent Society. In Gaza, two well-armed Arabs mounted a grenade attack on an Israeli patrol, killing a sergeant and wounding three other soldiers as well as a carload of Arabs.

The Israelis responded in kind. In Nablus, to punish a group of striking shopkeepers, Israeli soldiers welded shut the doors of seven stores, ordering that the businesses remain closed for 60 days. Conversely, in an effort to break a strike, soldiers elsewhere used metal cutters to open stores by force, only to discover that the shops would be shut down again as soon as the army patrol moved on. Faced by rock-throwing mobs, Israeli soldiers fired in the air but, in several instances, aimed directly at the rioting youths.

In the center of Ramallah, only ten miles north of Jerusalem, the streets were almost deserted. Whole rows of stores were closed tight, their metal shutters locked down on the sidewalk. Those shops that were open, generally selling bread or perishable foodstuffs, seemed poised in indecision. Their shutters were only halfway up, and their owners peered out anxiously into the streets. The pavement was smeared black by burning tires or dappled by thrown rocks. The only people who seemed at home in the city were the young, stern-faced Israeli paratroopers, who lounged at traffic islands or patrolled the neighborhoods.

Perhaps the most ominous aspect of last week's fighting was the role of the Israeli settler "militias," or vigilante groups, which occasionally attacked and intimidated the Arab population. Out of the estimated 24,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, an estimated 5,000 males carry small arms. In addition, every settlement has some artillery pieces and heavy arms for defending itself against a general attack.

When they leave their homes, settlers are supposed to carry weapons day and night, and some are quite willing to use them. Two weeks ago, when Arab youths put up a makeshift roadblock along the route to the Jewish settlement of Shiloh, two carloads of settlers crashed through the obstruction, firing rifles and submachine guns as they proceeded. Not until five days later was the body of a 17-year-old Arab youth discovered on a hillside near by. Police subsequently arrested and charged the secretary of the settlement, Nathan Nathanson, 38, with the shooting. Last week, at another roadblock, an Israeli security officer shot and killed an 18-year-old student. On at least one occasion, settlers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of Arab youths while nearby Israeli soldiers did nothing to stop them. In a private meeting last week, Major General Ori Orr warned a group of settlers that their actions were "provocative" rather than "acts of self-defense." After that, the settlers did appear to be distancing themselves from the current troubles. Yisrael Harel, the general secretary of a settlers' organization, declared: "Our message to the Palestinian population is clear and simple: Don't touch us and we won't touch you."

At a news conference Friday morning, Menachem Milson said once again that his country's struggle was not against the Palestinians but the P.L.O., and that a "crucial struggle" was under way over "the very possibility of coexistence between Jews and Palestinian Arabs." Until now, Israel has maintained that the 1976 West Bank elections, in which several pro-P.L.O. mayoral candidates, including Shaka'a and Khalaf, scored victories, were "free elections in the fullest sense." Last week, however, Milson hastily rewrote the official history, declaring that the 1976 elections had been undemocratic and influenced by P.L.O. intimidation.

The notion that Israel's aim in the West Bank was "coexistence" was challenged by a number of Arab leaders. Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan said angrily, "This really is the final phase of Israel's efforts to liquidate the Palestinian people," and Jordan's Foreign Minister Marwan el Kassem declared: "The sight of Israeli civilian settlers firing guns into a crowd of unarmed Arab demonstrators can only remind us of the tactics used to drive Palestinians from their homes in 1948."

In Damascus, Khaled Fahoum, chairman of the Palestine National Council, a sort of parliament-in-exile, concluded: "Begin is getting out of Sinai, under U.S. pressure, so he must somehow compensate. But he cannot formally annex the land. If he does that, he must make 1.3 million Arabs citizens of Israel. And that he is not prepared to do, especially when you compare our birth rate to theirs." Other Arabs argued that, if sufficient numbers of Palestinians could be expelled from the West Bank or intimidated into leaving, the birth rate would be irrelevant. After all, the Arab population of the West Bank has not grown since 1967. The reason: constant emigration.

Although angered by Israeli actions, the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made an effort to restrain its public criticism of them. Egypt feared that intensifying the controversy over the West Bank might give the Israelis an excuse for not handing over the last third of the Sinai on April 25. Egypt also does not want to give Israel any reason to back out of the continuing Camp David talks on autonomy for the Palestinians. For similar reasons, the Reagan Administration was keeping silent. The tension on the West Bank, said one U.S. diplomat, was something that Washington "just has to live with and pray it doesn't get worse."

Arab leaders are worried that it will. Some are openly predicting that Israel's next step, aimed in part at deflecting world attention from the West Bank, will be the long-expected Israeli attack on P.L.O. strongholds in southern Lebanon.

--By William E. Smith. Reported by David Aikman/Jerusalem and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, William Stewart

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