Middle East In the Eye Of a Revolt

By Michael S. Serrill

The day was Friday, the time shortly after noon. Prayer services had just ended at the al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, one of the holiest sites for both Islam and Judaism. As several hundred young men streamed out of the mosque, the shouts began. "There is no God but Allah!" "Allah is great!" The banned red-black-and-green Palestinian flag was raised, and Israeli and American banners burned. A thousand Israeli police, stationed there in case trouble broke out, began firing tear gas to disperse the crowd. But they were driven back by a shower of rocks and broken concrete.

For the next two hours police chased the agile, cursing demonstrators around the 30-acre Temple Mount and through the narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem's Old City. Protesters, tourists and the police themselves choked on the cloud of tear gas that enshrouded the golden Dome of the Rock, the ciborium that stands on the site from which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven on a white horse. At one point, after a police officer was beaten, his comrades chased a group of demonstrators into al-Aqsa mosque itself, normally off limits to any military personnel. The fearsome scene seemed to encapsulate all the hatred of the Arab-Israeli conflict: Muslim and Jew literally battling for control of the most revered territory in the Holy Land.

Something tragic is happening in Israel and its occupied territories. For five weeks mayhem and bloodshed have engulfed the land, particularly the Gaza Strip and the towns of the West Bank, as the Palestinians who have lived in a wary truce with their Israeli rulers for two decades have let the world know that enough is enough. Each day last week brought another killing or two, raising the death toll since early December to at least 36. The Israelis seemed bewildered by the chaos, uncertain what to do next as they came to realize that they were fighting not just a few troublemakers but an entire population, whose ire was being fanned by militant Islamic fundamentalism. "We are dealing with a new phenomenon that we are only beginning to recognize," said a senior official. Added Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: "It is one national will against another national will."

As the streets of the Gaza Strip seethed and a general strike paralyzed commerce throughout the territories, the Israeli government sent in more troops, arrested more Palestinians, and cracked down on the violence harder than ever. "We must get a political solution by political means and not as a result of terror," said Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who is in charge of the occupied territories. "Arab terror will be confronted by the power of the Israel Defense Forces."

Though Rabin for the first time acknowledged the spontaneous nature of the uprising, he and other officials still hoped to quell the rioting by acting against what officials insist are the "ringleaders" of the violence. Four such men were loaded aboard an Israeli helicopter last week and flown to a mountain road near the town of Hasbeya, in southern Lebanon. There they were handed $50 each and told not to return to their homes. To help the exiles on their way, the soldiers flagged down two Mercedes taxis and paid the drivers to take them away.

The four were among nine ordered expelled two weeks ago. At first they appealed the deportation orders, but they dropped their cases after their lawyers were not permitted to see evidence against them. The quartet was whisked out of the country within 24 hours, with no notification to their families, and was last reported to be in Syrian hands in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The other five, including three fundamentalist leaders, are continuing to appeal.

The United Nations Security Council reacted to the deportations by passing yet another resolution denouncing Israel's tactics. The U.S., which supported a resolution two weeks ago urging Israel not to go through with the expulsions, abstained from the 14-0 vote. U.N. officials were also indignant at the sour reception Under Secretary-General Marrack Goulding received last week in Jerusalem. Goulding, a Briton assigned by the U.N. to investigate conditions in refugee camps, was snubbed by most Israeli officials, then denied access to two camps he tried to visit. When he finally made his way into the Gaza camp at Rafah, demonstrators threw stones at his army escort, and he was accused by Israeli military authorities of provoking a riot.

Even Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was - caught off guard by the fury of the people he calls his own. Arafat tried to get back into the game last week by renewing his call for an international peace conference. Speaking from his office in Baghdad, Arafat declared that he would be willing to accept all U.N. resolutions, including Resolution 242, which recognizes Israel's right to exist, in exchange for P.L.O. participation in the peace conference.

But there was little thought of peace in the boiling Gaza Strip, where more than 600,000 Arabs live in an area 30 miles long and five miles wide. Every day last week fires from burning barricades flamed into the night, enveloping the squalid refugee camps in black smoke. The thunk-thunk of helicopters sounded overhead as soldiers tipped tear-gas canisters onto rioters below. The twisting alleyways echoed with the rattle of gunfire, the crackle of smashing fire bombs and the thud of stones.

Gaza's main shopping street, Omar al-Muktar, was streaked with soot from burned tires, soaked with water from broken mains, and strewn with stones, chunks of concrete, pieces of metal and smoldering rubber. Barricades stood everywhere, built of tree branches, junked cars, overturned garbage dumpsters and rusting oil barrels. As fast as Israeli troops forced passing pedestrians to dismantle them, they were rebuilt by the roving shabab -- the young men who are the main force behind the uprising.

Finally, the military resorted to its most drastic measures yet. Entrances to the eight camps where most of the residents live were closed and the people were confined to their houses. The curfew was lifted once a day to allow the purchase of food. "We have to beat them in their pockets," said a military official. "They will not be able to carry on for long without the money they earn working either here in Gaza or in Israel." Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir suggested that if the Gazans continued to riot, they might never be allowed to return to their jobs in Israel.

Despite the repression, morale in Gaza remains high. In one crowded home in the huge Jabalia camp, Zainab, a widow of 50, and her five children said they were determined to keep up the protest despite the Israeli crackdown. Her son Jawad, 17, has already served several jail terms for his anti-Israeli activities, and is willing to risk more. "Let it be known to the Israelis that we are strong," Jawad told a visitor. "We are capable of confronting them on all fields. We are not going to run away as the Egyptian army did in 1967." Asked what his goals were, Jawad replied, "Very simple. I want to turn the Palestinian problem into a severe headache in every Israeli head."

In the West Bank there was less turmoil but no less resolve to defy Israeli authority. At the central square in Am'ari, a refugee camp on the road between Jerusalem and Ramallah, the shabab gathered, young men ranging in age from 15 to 30. The camp, which houses 5,000 people, is a concrete maze with open sewers running down each alleyway. "No matter what time the army comes, we come out and start confronting them," said Osama Nijim, 23. It has become a way of life, the only way of life in recent weeks, when work has been scarce because of strikes, and soldiers are everywhere.

At Osama's house several twists and turns away from the square, his mother, father and sisters crowded into the living room, and tea was served. The room was a chilly concrete square furnished with plush red sofas and a cabinet full of china figurines. Osama unwound a red-and-white-checked kaffiyeh from his head as he began talking. He was fresh out of jail, having served 14 days for throwing a tear-gas canister back at Israeli soldiers. "The army is the provocation," he said. "The fact that they come into our camp is enough so that the shabab react by throwing stones." Osama admitted to being a provocateur. "Since he was a kid, he has belonged to the profession of stone thrower," said his friend Tarek Ali, 18, with some reverence.

The sound of a helicopter overhead drowned out conversation and seemed to please Osama. "They prove that we Palestinians are capable of confronting them, that we are strong enough so they have to bring in helicopters against our stone throwers." Though he said he had been harassed most of his life by the Israelis, he insisted he did not hate them. "But we are committed to achieve a homeland for the Palestinians with our own flag, just like you live in America with your own flag."

Suddenly a tear-gas canister struck the window, and peppery fumes wafted in. The women wrapped scarves around their faces, the men their kaffiyehs. Soon came the sound of rubber bullets ricocheting off the walls outside, then the shuffle of feet running for cover. "I have no future," said Tarek Ali matter of factly. "How can I, as long as I am not liberated from this occupation?"

Osama told of the folk remedies used to ward off Israel's punitive measures: onions for the eyes, lemons for the stomach to counter the effect of tear gas. There is no remedy for the rubber bullets, which burn the skin and sometimes break bones. The day before, Osama noted, soldiers threw rocks at the shabab from their helicopters. When it gets too rough, he said, "we run away for a while, then get together again to wait for the next time."

The war of nerves in Am'ari, Jabalia and the other camps and towns of the West Bank and Gaza has been going on since 1967, when Israel seized control of the territories after winning the Six-Day War. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Israeli troops waged a ferocious struggle with the P.L.O., whose Kalashnikov-toting fighters killed scores of soldiers and civilians in the occupied territories. The Israelis eventually wiped out the P.L.O. threat in the West Bank and Gaza, helped in large part by King Hussein's successful 1970 campaign to drive the P.L.O. forces out of Jordan.

Since the mid-1970s the Israeli military, which runs the territories with a combination of soldiers and civilian administrators, has kept rebellion in check with a relentlessly efficient system of control and surveillance. It is a tribute to Israeli security, or to the self-restraint of the Palestinians, that not a single gun has turned up in Palestinian hands during the current unrest. But Jerusalem's peace of mind over the years has come only at the expense of basic civil liberties.

Palestinians in the occupied territories are almost completely disenfranchised. All mayors are now Israeli appointed. Israel tried twice, in 1972 and 1976, to sponsor municipal elections in the West Bank and establish a measure of self-rule. But the Palestinians undermined the process by electing candidates who openly declared their allegiance to the banned P.L.O.. In 1976 the P.L.O. won a smashing victory, electing its representatives as mayors of all the major towns and villages. The Israeli response was to declare some of the contests invalid and to deport some of the winners. There has been no balloting since then.

Today most political activity in the territories is banned, and membership in political organizations is severely restricted. This has helped spawn underground nationalist and religious movements that favor radical solutions. Paralleling the clampdown on political thought is a policy of strict, often arbitrary censorship of all newspapers, magazines and books that circulate in the territories. Last week Israel launched its latest crackdown on the Palestinian press. It detained six journalists, held two for interrogation and ordered one jailed for up to six months.

Israeli soldiers and border police can enter Arab homes without a warrant. Palestinians are routinely stopped and required to show identification papers. Arabs can be detained for up to six months without trial. Their houses can be sealed or demolished on suspicion that a member of the family is engaged in "terrorist" activity. They can be arrested for dozens of offenses that do not exist in Israel, including flying the Palestinian flag, reading "subversive" literature or holding a press conference without permission.

Restrictions on civil liberties grate hard against the Palestinians' self- esteem. But life under Israeli rule has had its compensations. Israel has made major improvements in living standards within the territories -- particularly in Gaza, which in 1967 was one of the most underdeveloped swatches of land in the world. Today half of Gaza's residents have running water, compared with 14% two decades ago. Nearly 80% own refrigerators and television sets, up from 3%. In the West Bank more than four-fifths of the homes have electricity, in contrast to one-quarter 20 years ago. Per capita income rose in the West Bank from $300 in 1968 to $1,400 today, and in Gaza from $100 to about $1,000. Though the territories' health-care system is still inferior to that of Israel, an Israeli-sponsored overhaul has helped raise life expectancy from 48 to 62 years.

About 50,000 Gazans and 50,000 West Bank Arabs travel daily to jobs in Israel, where wages are higher but still no more than half what Israeli workers earn. Arabs from the territories dominate the unskilled-labor market, especially in the construction industry. Arabs collect Israel's garbage and clean its streets, wait on tables in its finest restaurants and keep its factories and mills running. For Israel, holding on to the territories makes sense economically. Jerusalem contributed $240 million in aid and investment to Gaza and the West Bank in 1987 and took back $393 million in taxes.

The territories' economic dependence on Israel has only increased political resentment, especially in Gaza, where almost 70% of the inhabitants have been living in refugee camps for 40 years. Some of the youngsters in these camps work in Israel for subsistence wages; others are unemployed or underemployed. The more prosperous West Bank is more economically independent. For example, it carries on a thriving agricultural trade with Jordan, of which West Bank residents remain citizens. Only 15% of the 800,000 West Bank denizens are refugees, and even fewer live in refugee camps.

While violence between the occupied and the occupiers stayed at a relatively low level in recent years, hardly a week went by in which an Israeli or Palestinian was not killed or injured in communal clashes. According to the West Bank Data Project, which studies economic and political trends in the territories, the number of demonstrations averaged about 500 a year between 1977 and 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon. Since then, the number of protests has ranged from 3,000 a year to 4,400. In terms of Arab unhappiness, says Meron Benvenisti, an outspoken Israeli liberal who runs the project, "I don't see a change from a year ago. We just forget."

One might have expected an explosion of youthful anger by glancing at the occupied territories' demographic development. Out of a population of 1.4 million, more than half are 20 years old or under and have lived their entire lives under occupation. The potential rock throwers -- those between 15 and 25 -- number 300,000. Poor, idle, infected with frustration, this embittered generation has little faith that its elders, including those who run the Arab states and the P.L.O., still have the will to remove the yoke of Israeli occupation.

Like a swelling number of other young people in the Middle East, the Palestinians have instead begun to turn to Islamic fundamentalism for their ideological sustenance. The fundamentalists are especially strong in Gaza, where the teeming refugee camps have become a fertile breeding ground for the message of the Islamic sheiks. Islam is also gaining strength in the camps and universities of the West Bank. Says Efraim Sneh, an Israeli brigadier general who recently resigned as head of the West Bank Civil Administration: "Islam is moving into the void, and it's much more difficult to combat that kind of terrorism."

Ironically, the Israelis, far from cracking down on fundamentalist activity, had until recently raised no objection to it, hoping it would turn the youth of the territories away from the P.L.O. In Gaza the military allowed the fundamentalists to establish kindergartens, youth clubs, sports organizations and, in 1978, an Islamic college. They also permitted the building of mosques, whose number in Gaza rose from 70 in 1967 to nearly 180 today. They even allowed the Islamic sheiks to bring in money from abroad, mostly from Saudi Arabia, to support their activities.

After allowing the seeds to be sown, Israel is now reaping the harvest of fundamentalist hatred. Islamic teachers have been some of the main cheerleaders of the rioting, blaring their call to resistance from loudspeakers attached to mosques in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They substitute Islamic slogans for the old P.L.O. themes, chanting "Allah helps those who help themselves" or "Palestine is our Holy Land." Their call to the barricades is made more effective by Islam's reverence for martyrdom. For now, the voice of Islam speaks from a small base, with the various local groups like Jihadi Islami and Mujama Islami claiming at most a few thousand members. But they have served as an emotional framework for the aimless ire of the rebels.

The P.L.O., in contrast, has been trying to catch up with the angry young Palestinians. Arafat publicly claimed credit for organizing the protests last week, but his advisers acknowledge that the eruptions were not orchestrated. "The P.L.O. cannot order people into the streets," says a Cairo-based Palestinian businessman with close ties to Arafat. "People have to be motivated by internal factors. It has to be spontaneous."

Arafat is trying to climb back into control. He is uniquely positioned to do so, since the P.L.O. is still the only organization in the territories with the money and clout to respond to the Palestinians' needs. The P.L.O. has sent dozens of radio and telephone messages to its friends inside the territories urging them to join in the unrest. P.L.O. officials say they have provided food, medical equipment and money to the inhabitants of the Gaza refugee camps, though camp residents deny it. "The P.L.O. is the only institution these people can go to when they're in trouble or when they need help," says Nabil Sha'ath, a member of the P.L.O. central council. Still, the veteran P.L.O. leadership has found itself for the most part looking on from the sidelines.

Israeli military authorities have found to their dismay that they cannot stop the rioting of the shabab by cutting off its head. The youth movement is so fluid that the arrest of some 2,000 "leaders" of the uprising seems to have had little effect. There are now some 6,500 soldiers in the occupied territories, five times the number on the ground when the unrest broke out in early December. "We can go on like this for a long time," says army Chief of Staff Dan Shomron. "But I know very well that the influence on the forces is a negative one. My main lesson for the future is that such things can and will erupt quickly, so we must be ready to react swiftly."

Israeli political leaders are beginning to learn a different lesson, best expressed by Minister of Economics Gad Yaacobi, a Labor Party member: "The true sources of the recent events are the pent-up fury and hatred of 20 years of occupation, the swelling frustration over diplomatic stagnation, and the sense of impotence and hopelessness stemming from this." Added Ezer Weizman, a former Defense Minister and Likud bloc member who recently defected to Labor: "If we do not advance now toward a political solution the situation will only deteriorate rapidly."

Members of Israel's national-unity government, a coalition of the center- left Labor Party and right-wing Likud bloc, have begun moderating their positions, partly in anticipation that the Palestinian unrest will be a major issue in national elections scheduled for November. Even Prime Minister Shamir said last week he "would not object to the idea" of negotiating with non- P.L.O.. Palestinian leaders. But he also continues to insist with more fervor than ever that Israel will never give up the West Bank, and never consider altering the settlement policy that has allowed 65,000 Jews to set up homes in the West Bank and 2,700 more to do so in Gaza. Foreign Minister Peres, who switched jobs with Shamir in October 1986, has once again begun talking up his proposal for an international conference, and says he intends to reactivate the peace process "soon." Yet few believe, even in the face of the worst Palestinian violence in 20 years, that Israel's politically paralyzed government can generate the will to find a diplomatic solution.

As for the Palestinians, they have drawn world attention to their plight by making martyrs of their sons and burning tires in the streets. Their spasm of violence has no practical objective and is accompanied by no political program. "It's all been lost on them," says Benvenisti. "All they've got is a new myth of the children of the stones."

The real tragedy of all this fury is that neither side is any closer to settling the violent struggle for the same cherished rocks and hills. Israelis and Palestinians, except for the extremists among them, know that only a political compromise can end the agony. But neither side possesses the courage to begin. And so the Palestinians seem destined to continue futilely flinging stones, while the Israelis remain committed to fighting back with bullets. And time keeps slipping away.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Johanna McGeary/Jerusalem