A Durable Peace (28 page)

Two things greatly assisted in driving home these ideas to the West: the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada, and the ongoing
controversy over the Jewish settlements in the territories. In recent years these issues have served as lightning rods in
the campaign against Israel, focusing all the anti-Israeli energy in the international scene and directing it to reverse the
great injustices that Israel has allegedly committed against the Palestinian Arabs.

The intifada came as a godsend to a PLO that had been losing ground in the Arab world and internationally ever since 1982,
when the Israeli army had entered Lebanon, destroying the PLO bases that had been built up there for over a decade, and depriving
the PLO of the staging area it needed to launch attacks against Israel. An indication of how low the PLO’s fortunes had sunk
came in 1987, when an Israeli bus was bombed by PLO terrorists in Jerusalem, prompting (again, for the first time in anyone’s
memory) Palestinian Arab leaders in the territories to condemn this act of terror and those responsible for it. Such a brazen
act of repudiation against their own “sole legitimate representative” was what the PLO had most feared for years, and with
good reason.

Meanwhile, although it was far from paradise, life in the territories had been steadily improving for years. The West Bank
that Israel had found in 1967 had been only lightly touched by the twentieth century. There was scarcely any industry, medical
treatment was primitive, and higher education did not exist. The vast
majority of the residents lived in homes without electricity or running water, and most of the women were illiterate.

Soon after the Six Day War, Israel adopted a liberal policy aimed at radically improving the lives of the Arabs. Universal
education was instituted, universities were opened, hospitals were built, and modern roads were cut into the hills. By 1985,
the number of telephone subscribers had grown by 400 percent, ownership of automobiles had risen by 500 percent, and the annual
rate of construction in Judea and Samaria had risen by 1,000 percent. By 1986, 91 percent of Arab homes in Judea and Samaria
had electricity (as opposed to 23 percent under Jordan), 74 percent of homes had refrigerators (as opposed to 5 percent),
and 83 percent of homes were equipped with stoves (as opposed to 5 percent). By 1987, these Palestinian Arabs had become the
most educated segment in the Arab world, infant mortality had dropped drastically, and the economy had grown by an amazing
40 percent.
⁴⁹
The improvement in Gaza was even more dramatic. Ironically, the Palestinian Arabs were also enjoying rights denied to other
Arabs in the Middle East, with a press consisting of newspapers representing various factions (some openly sympathetic to
the PLO), and the right to appeal all government decisions directly to the democratic Israeli court system. Furthermore, Israel
kept the Allenby Bridge to Jordan open, affording every Palestinian Arab the right to visit other Arab countries and see whether
living conditions were better elsewhere. Most of them decided they were better off in the West Bank.

This is not to say that the Arabs in the territories had suddenly become Zionists or acquiesced in Israeli control. That is
never the case with a population living under military government, especially if that government must contend with the constant
threat of terrorism. Palestinian Arabs have thus had to go through such trying experiences as roadblocks, identity checks,
curfews, closings of workplaces and schools, and searches of their homes. And there has been no option for speedily bringing
this state of affairs to an end. During the twenty years after the Six Day War the territories’ political future was kept
in limbo, first by the unwillingness of Israeli
governments immediately after 1967 to annex or bargain away the territories, and then after the Camp David Accords of 1978,
when the Arab side refused to follow through on the agreed-upon negotiations for determining the future of the territories.
As a result, the Palestinian Arabs inhabiting these territories lived for over two decades under military administration,
without knowing what the future disposition of the territories would be. Such uncertainty produces inevitable political tensions
that a final political settlement would otherwise reduce. For example, the Arabs of the Galilee lived uneasily under an Israeli
military administration during the 1950s and became full-fledged citizens of Israel once that administration was removed.
The decades that have passed since then may not have been idyllic, but the fact that Israel’s Arab citizens can take part
in Israeli society, and that they have a mechanism for political expression (including representation in the Knesset), has
produced a relatively quiet coexistence for Israel’s Arab and Jewish citizens that has defied the earlier prognostications
of many.

But no such definitive political settlement or mechanism for political expression was to be found in the territories. Virtually
the entire Arab world rejected the Camp David Accords, refusing to rescind its totalist and immediate demand for a Palestinian
state in the territories, thereby making it impossible to make progress along the path of negotiations with Israel. Thus,
by 1987, two decades after the Six Day War, a new generation of Arabs had grown up in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that was at
once uncertain about the future of these areas and continuously subjected to virulent PLO agitation that filled the political
void. Inevitably, this generation adopted ever more extreme and implacable positions.

But here too the PLO could not deliver on its own incitements, and increasingly the rage of the younger Palestinian Arabs
was directed not only against Israel but against the leadership of the PLO itself, which was seen as living the good life
in villas along the Côte d’Azur or on the languorous beaches of Tunisia, on the other side of the Mediterranean. Like their
troubled counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world who are seduced by the facile promises of religious
fanaticism, more and more of these youngsters were turning to the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas movement as a vehicle to vent
their rage. Fundamentalism spreads most rapidly in poverty-stricken areas and is therefore at least in part a by-product of
the Arab world’s investment in weapons as a substitute for refugee rehabilitation.

This was the background for the outbreak of the “intifada,” which unleashed these frustrations into widespread violence. The
intifada began on December 8, 1987, when an Israeli truck accidentally ran down four Palestinian Arabs in Jebalya, near Gaza.
Within hours the rumor spread that this was a deliberate act of murder, touching off weeks of mass rioting. Sensing a chance
to regain its standing, the PLO joined in fanning the flames. On the day after the accident,
Al-Fajr,
a pro-PLO newspaper in Jerusalem, described it as “maliciously perpetrated.”
⁵⁰
In Baghdad, Arafat used the frenzy of the rioting as an excuse to promise that Israel was about to be annihilated:

O heroic sons of the Gaza Strip, O proud sons of the [West] Bank, O heroic sons of the Galilee, O steadfast sons of the Negev:
the fires of revolution against the Zionist invaders will not fade out… until our land—all our land—has been liberated from
these usurping invaders.
⁵¹

Arafat sometimes has let his guard down. Here he was summoning Arabs to rise up and liberate “all our land,” in which he specifically
includes not only the West Bank but the Galilee and the Negev—that is, Israel in its pre-1967 boundaries. And when Bethlehem’s
moderate Christian mayor Elias Freij suggested a temporary halt to the violence, Arafat responded: “Whoever thinks of stopping
the intifada before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.”
⁵²

Within a few weeks this violence was being organized and funded by the PLO, gathering Arab youths into “intifada committees”
that really believed what Arafat told them: that victory was at
hand. They attacked Israeli civilian traffic with rocks and gasoline grenades and enforced repeated strikes by setting up
roadblocks to prevent Arabs from going to work, firebombing Arab stores, and threatening Arab merchants who tried to keep
their shops open. Raiding the schools during class time and forcing the children into the street, the activists made their
riots look more popular and simultaneously increased the tragic toll of children among the intifada’s casualties. Afraid of
being outdone, the fundamentalist Hamas movement organized rival committees, and for the next four years the two networks
of violence competed in trying to push the Palestinian population to bloodshed.

In all this the Israeli army did precisely what is required of it by the Fourth Geneva Convention: It tried to defend the
Arab and Jewish civilian populations by patrolling the highways, dismantling the roadblocks, and arresting the instigators
of the violence.
^*
The intifada “committees” responded by attacking the soldiers with axes, bricks, and gasoline grenades—gaining glory for
themselves and media coverage for the PLO. The PLO sent out an order not
to use guns, lest they spoil the underdog image of the uprising and provoke the army to take serious action.

The West may have imagined that the young Arab hotheads in Nablus wished for nothing more than the liberation of their backyard,
but the “committees” saw it otherwise. Their goals were just as Arafat and the Hamas had dictated them: to drive the Jews
from every inch of Israel. They published widely circulated Arabic-language communiqués explaining this goal to those they
expected to follow them. A leaflet circulated by Arafat’s Fatah faction, dated January 21, 1991, said that Jews were “descendants
of monkeys and pigs,” the inference being to treat them accordingly. The Hamas, in a typical counterleaflet, declared, “There
will be no negotiations with the enemy. There will be no concession on even one centimeter of the land of Palestine. The way
to liberation is through jihad.” As for their Jewish neighbors in Judea and Samaria, the leaders of the intifada called upon
their followers to “burn the ground out from under their feet.”
⁵³

On rare occasions, the Western press actually bothered to send a translator along and interview some of the intifada leaders
about what they wanted. When Bob Simon of CBS News tried this novel approach, he received a straightforward answer from the
leader of a group of seven masked intifada activists he interviewed: “I want all of Palestine, all of it entirely…. Palestine
is indivisible. Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, Galilee, Nazareth—all of these are parts of Palestine.”
⁵⁴
None of these “parts of Palestine” is on the West Bank. These are pre-1967 areas of Israel, the regions of densest Jewish
population, which the intifada’s leaders believed would eventually fall into their hands.

But after a few months, all but the most extreme grew tired of pursuing this chimera, and the intifada began to lose its glitter.
The interminable strike destroyed the booming economy that had been painstakingly built up since 1967, ruining businesses
and impoverishing many. Law enforcement was transferred into the hands of competing gangs of local toughs funded and directed
by
competing PLO factions,
^*
who used their power to abuse anyone they considered to be “collaborators“: the well-to-do, the educated, political rivals,
and so on. Indeed, the great majority of intifada violence ended up turning inward: against rival factions and anyone else
considered undesirable. In 1990, the third year of the intifada, the total number of people killed in this grisly inter-Arab
strife in the territories was one hundred, as compared to a total of fifty killed in confrontations with the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF), a ratio of two to one.
⁵⁵
The bodies of scores of Arabs were discovered covered with burns, swollen from beatings, disemboweled, dismembered, decapitated.
Wives of “collaborators” were raped, and their children molested and beaten as warnings. The intifada was literally devouring
its children.

Little publicized has been the virulently anti-Christian dimension of the intifada. In Christian towns such as Bethlehem,
a campaign of violence, firebombings, and blackmail has been directed against Christians, with the intention of forcing them
to sell their holdings to Moslems and leave the Holy Land. In an article in the Catholic journal
Terra Santa,
Father Georges Abou-Khazen wrote that Arab states have been pouring money into the effort to “Islamicize” the country, and
that he feared the complete eradication of the Christian presence in the Holy Land. According to Father Abou-Khazen, Christians
have been too terrified to speak out, fearing for their lives.
⁵⁶

Not that any of these horrors reached most of the programs of the international television networks covering the intifada.
As in the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, no one seemed to care when Palestinian Arabs were being harmed
unless Israel was doing the harming. Ignoring the Arab reign of terror in the Palestinian streets, the media created for themselves
nightly
installments of a popular romance-drama: heroic underdog in search of self-determination taking on a terrifying Israel tyrant.
This drama was not too difficult to create since democratic peoples do not like violence, and they do not like soldiers. They
are especially revolted by the sight of a soldier beating a nonsoldier or glaring at a child. Since viewers were being told
that this was an “army of occupation”—that is, it had no right to be there in the first place—the media managed to transform
even the most necessary aspects of maintaining law and order into unforgivable crimes.

Utterly lost from the images on the screen was the organized nature of the rioting, the internecine violence, and the terrorized
lives of the innocent Arabs (and Jews) who were ground under the intifada’s heel. Similarly lost were the restrictive firing
orders that stayed the hand of every Israeli soldier, and the swift trials of the 208 Israelis who in any way disobeyed these
orders
⁵⁸
—as against the tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers and reservists who followed the regulations with impeccable restraint.