Israel Days of Rage in the Territories

By Michael S. Serrill

From inside the walled courtyard of Shifa Hospital, the 200 young men hurled stones at the advancing Israeli troops. On the roads leading to the hospital, other rioters set truck tires on fire, smearing the brilliant blue sky over Gaza with stinking black smoke. Nearby, a loudspeaker on the minaret of a mosque blared encouragement: "Oh, you young people, go at them! Don't back off!" As an Israeli helicopter dropped tear-gas canisters into the courtyard, the soldiers finally stormed the gates, chasing the demonstrators through the hospital's corridors and beating some of them bloody. Two Palestinians were shot to death in the melee.

These are days of rage in Israel's occupied territories. In the past two weeks, widespread unrest has not only turned the Gaza Strip into a war zone but also spawned strikes and violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Faced with the worst riots in the territories since seizing them in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel responded with an iron fist. Pitched battles between rock- throwing demonstrators and gun-toting soldiers left at least 17 Palestinians dead and more than a hundred wounded. Since the violence started on Dec. 8, hundreds have been arrested and detained. Denounced by the U.S. and other allies as excessive, the military crackdown has prompted soul searching at home as well as bitterness against outside criticism. Editorialized the daily newspaper Ma'ariv: "Israeli society is not meant to withstand bloodshed of this kind as the price of our presence in the territories."

The violence began two weeks ago in Gaza, the squalid swath of poverty along the Mediterranean that is home to 600,000 Palestinian Arabs. Rumors spread that an Israeli truck had deliberately rammed two cars carrying Arab workers, killing four of them, in retaliation for the murder of an Israeli merchant. By the next morning much of Gaza was covered with smoke from burning tire barricades. Thousands marched through the dirt streets carrying photocopied pictures of local youths who had died in the unrest. In the following days, troops attempting to disperse the demonstrators were greeted with showers of stones, iron bars and fire bombs. Soldiers were attacked by gangs of children, some as young as six, who disappeared into the labyrinthine alleyways of the refugee camps. Some troops answered the volleys of rocks with bullets in a show of force that was generally as ineffective as it was lethal. Shopkeepers joined in a strike that shuttered nearly all the stores in Gaza and some in the West Bank. Gazans who work in Israel stayed home.

In the Gaza refugee camp of Jabalia, Israeli soldiers, in an apparent effort to avoid being stoned, blindfolded two teenagers and tied them to the hoods of their jeeps. On Wednesday night Israelis were horrified by television footage of a man in civilian clothes firing an Uzi submachine gun into a crowd of rock-throwing Palestinians. He was later identified as an agent of Shin Bet, Israel's internal-security service. The agent will reportedly be disciplined, but officials appeared less upset by the act itself than by the fact that it was captured on film. At week's end the trouble spread to East Jerusalem, where mobs of Palestinian youths rioted through the streets. Israeli police were careful this time not to retaliate with excessive force.

As if there were not trouble enough, Israel's controversial Minister of Industry and Trade Ariel Sharon chose last week to move into a new home: an apartment in the Muslim quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Sharon, who still owns a farm in the Negev, decided to live in the Muslim quarter to make it safer for Jews who would be encouraged to follow him. Arabs responded with new protests and a strike by shopkeepers in East Jerusalem. When Sharon threw a Hanukkah party for 300 guests, hundreds of police had to be called out to provide security, and Israeli officials fretted that providing permanent security for Sharon in the Muslim quarter would require a third of the security agents assigned to Israeli officials.

In Washington, State Department Spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley denounced Israel's "harsh security measures," while Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy urged Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was visiting the U.S. capital, to use restraint. "We are sorry we have to use force," Rabin said later. "But whenever there is a violent demonstration using Molotov cocktail bottles, throwing stones, setting fires, attacking car passengers, the police and the military will use whatever is needed to prevent it."

Beyond the immediate problem of keeping order, no one in Israel's divided leadership seems to envision any long-term solution for the occupied territories. Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud bloc leader who succeeded Labor's Shimon Peres as Prime Minister last year, is much less willing than his predecessor to negotiate a settlement. With no prospect of political talks, the people of Gaza and the West Bank are falling under the sway of Islamic fundamentalism. In Gaza last week the mosques helped fan the unrest among embittered young men no longer afraid of becoming martyrs.

In the long run, Israel seems to have little choice but to make peace with its Arab subjects or face being overwhelmed by them. There are 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, plus 740,000 in Israel itself. Their high birth rate means they will outnumber Israel's 3.5 million Jews by the end of the century. "There will be no peace until the Israelis leave our land," said Shahla al Aklik, a Palestinian woman whose son was killed in the West Bank last week. "Even if we lose all our sons, the struggle will continue." That resolve has survived two decades of Israeli occupation, and neither bullets nor tear gas seems likely to destroy it.

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/Gaza