No sign of end to West Bank uprising

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 50

No sign of end to West Bank uprising

By G. G. Laßelle NZPA-AP Gaza Strip The crowd of Muslim schoolgirls ambling home in their white scarves suddenly stops. As two trucks of Israeli soldiers in riot helmets rumble by on the muddy street, the girlish grins become stoical, blank expressions.

A father of five stands nearby. He is asked about the future in this refugee camp where anger erupted last December 8 into what has become the year-long Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. “The blood will keep flowing,” he replies. In Jabaliya, where more than 50,000 Palestinians are crowded into tin shacks and crude houses, hardly a day goes by without a teenager being wounded by Israeli soldiers opening fire on stone-throwing youths. It is much the same in the towns and villages of the occupied West Bank. The revolt has spread to the Arab sector of Jerusalem and, in small ways, to Arabs who live inside Israel and are citizens of the Jewish State. More than 300 Palestinians have been killed, and thousands have been wounded. On the Israeli side, one soldier has been shot dead, another died of stab wounds, and the deaths of nine civilians have been tied to the uprising by the police or the army. For many Palestinians, the revolt is a source of both pride and dismay. The passivity of 21 years of Israeli occupation has ended. But thousands of families have had a cousin killed or wounded, a son jailed.

Israelis see the revolt with fear or hatred. Jewish settlers are stoned as they travel to their homes in the occupied Arab lands and some respond with gunfire. Israelis in Jerusalem are afraid to go to the Arab sector that the Government has annexed as part of Israel’s capital. Parliamentary elections on November 1 showed Israelis deeply divided on how to deal with the Palestinians. Parties that gained seats advocated every solution from returning occupied land for peace to expelling all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Dedi Zucker, a member of parliament from the Left-wing Citizens Rights Movement, sees an odd unity in this and a change from old views. Citing the opposite extremes, he notes, “In both cases, people don’t believe Israelis and Palestinians can live together in the current situation.” Israeli officials have dozens of times seen a hint of quiet as evidence of a waning in the “intefadeh,” the Arabic word for “uprising” used now even by Israelis to describe the revolt.

But Ephraim Sneh, the former head of the West Bank military government, wrote in the Israeli newspaper “Haaretz” that despite the toll taken on Palestinian society, “it would be a mistake to assume it is incapable of sustaining the intefadeh.”

For most Palestinians, it is not a question of whether to continue the uprising, but how. Daoud Kuttab, a leading Palestinian journalist, sees the revolt at a crossroads.

It is pulled one way by those weary of trouble and almost weekly general strikes, and the other by those still angry and determined who believe only stepping up the violence will drive Israel out of the occupied lands. Kuttab says the problem is to keep the intefadeh in the world’s eye without making Israel angry enough to crush it by any means. “There is very little room between escalating the intefadeh and at the same time going into military or armed resistance,” he says. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza see the great achievements of the intefadeh as building their own pride and drawing attention to their plight, not only in the West but among their own leaders in the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The Palestinians believe that television footage of young Arab stonethrowers shot or beaten by Israeli soldiers has made people in other countries aware that there is a Palestinian people, 1.5 million of them living in occupied land.

As for the P.L.0., for years it declared in overblown Arab rhetoric that Israel would be driven into the sea. Last month it issued a Palestinian declaration of independence based on a United Nations resolution that calls for creating Jewish and Arab states side by side. Dr Hatem Abu Ghazali, a community leader in the West Bank city of Nablus, sees this as a major accomplishment for Palestinians who live with the reality of Israeli occupation, not with dreams of

the past.

“We have shown international public opinion that we are looking for peace, not only the people but the leadership of the P.L.0.,” he says. But Abu Ghazali says anger and frustration can only grow from the response by Israel and the United States. The Israeli Government immediately labeled the P.L.O. move “double talk” intended to mask the Palestinians’ true intention of destroying Israel in stages. Both the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, and his more moderate rival, the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, declared the Palestinians could never have what they most want, an independent state.

In Washington, the United States Secretary of State, George Shultz, turned down a visa for the P.L.O. leader, Yasser Arafat, to go to New York and address the United Nations.

Four days later, two firebombs were hurled into the compound of the United States Consulate in Arab east Jerusalem. They burned out harmlessly, leaving only black marks on the consulate wall.

Abu Ghazali says the American and Israeli response to the PLO’s implicit recognition of Israel have provided "a hearty ideological meal” to those who want violence.

But Kuttab, the journalist, says the intefadeh need not boil into worse confrontation. He says the future of the uprising will be decided by debate among Palestinians and throughout the world.