Losing the West Bank War
Morrison, Micah
.................................................................................................................. Micah Morrison LOSING THE WEST BANK WAR As war embroils Gaza and the West Bank,...
...Twenty years of relatively benign occupation bred an intimacy of ruler and ruled now revealed in the contempt with which Palestinian kids with rocks face Israeli kids with rifles...
...According to a widely circulated story, what actually happened was that the letter was engineered by Tom Dine, the executive director of AIPAC, to pressure Shamir...
...Labor and Likud leaders, army brass, the Jewish settlers in the territories, the average citizen-all have been forced to look again, to re-evaluate, to think about what may come next and what can be done...
...I feel very strange," Amitay said, "as an American, living comfortably in the suburbs, giving advice to my Israeli friends who send their sons to the army, who are the victims of terrorist attacks, as to what decisions they should make in terms of territory...
...On December 21, some of Israel's 700,000 Arab citizens mounted protests to express solidarity with Palestinians in the territories, a move that sent shock waves through the Israeli public...
...Yet the moment should not be allowed, to pass...
...The right-tending Likud half views the international conference as a trap and favors the Camp David route of direct negotiations with Jordan...
...On other fronts, things have fallen apart and Jerusalem will soon have to begin picking up the pieces...
...Today, more than ever before, the top of the pyramid must be sensitive to the power and desires of the base, otherwise they will begin to totter...
...The Likud is widely believed to be ideologically bent on retaining the territories as part of the Biblical Greater Israel...
...The central committee hailed "the brave position of all forms of international media, which made a great effort to portray a true picture of the Zionist entity's fascist and Nazi practices and to acquaint world public opinion with the real situation without any lies or tricks...
...The mood has shifted somewhat to the right, as Israeli resolve stiffens to support soldiers in the field...
...The Likud is headed for a win in an angry race...
...The outcome of that battle will shape the next stage of IsraeliPalestinian relations...
...International criticism of Israel's handling of the uprising grew louder, and many American Jews prominent in public affairs and the media joined the condemnations...
...Day by day the Palestinian death toll mounted...
...Most of their strength is thought to be in Gaza, more traditional than many parts of the West Bank and more closely tied to Egypt and its centers of Islamic learning...
...Noteworthy also in the broadcasts are the sharp increase in the use of Koranic verses and the apparent elimination of the PLO's long-established practice of referring to a "democratic, secular state" in Palestine-two indications of Arafat's growing problem with the fundamentalists...
...But when the going gets bad, American Jews are far from the killing fields...
...Syria presents major problems with both chemical capabilities and missiles...
...At this point, the rifles cannot afford to lose...
...Many of Israel's friends in the U.S., Jews and non-Jews, viewed the new policy as brutally unfair...
...The danger of this tactic, for Arafat, is that he may be unseated by a more radical Syrian-led coalition, or by a new internal Palestinian leadership emerging from the uprising, or by some combination of the two...
...The initial Israeli response was to shrug it off...
...all the drunken pens who are hindering the uprising of our sons...
...Pamphlets appeared on the streets, signed by "The United National Command of the Uprising...
...the complete power of the Israeli authorities over their lives...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 moil caught hold in the West Bank...
...Sensitive to the slow, daily climb of deaths and stung by world rebukes, Israel's blunt-speaking defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, announced that a new policy of "force and beatings" would replace the use of live ammunition in responding to clashes with the protesters...
...an internal Palestinian leadership could emerge and establish a relationship with the PLO acceptable to Israel and Jordan...
...The biggest shift, and potentially the most significant, -concerns the Palestinians in the territories...
...I don't think it's my province to do so...
...support for Jerusalem...
...In an unending stream of columns, Lewis, loudly declaring that he was "devoted" to Israel and its "best friend," repeatedly called for pressure on the Shamir government and put the best possible face on Arafat and his bloody henchmen...
...As Americans grew more and more disturbed by the nightly reports, a number of liberal and left-wing Jewish intellectuals and organizations began to hammer Prime Minister Yitzhak benign Uncle Yasser...
...Beyond electoral politics, Israeli planners are looking at a strategic map in accelerating evolution...
...Recent polls of the Likud show that 75 percent of the party favor a turn to Labor over entering into a coalition with rightist extremists such as Meir Kahane...
...Menachem Begin's brash policies, Jewish settlement in the territories, the war in Lebanon, the Pollard spy affair: all tarnished the image American Jews hold of Israel, a country the majority of them have never set foot in...
...Resolution 242 with ambiguous and evasive remarks, as Lewis glumly noted in his March 13 column...
...While the violence continues and international criticism of Israel persists, Arafat may be content to continue his classic course of just holding the PLO together...
...In theory, the new policy made sense: better to send a kid to the hospital with a broken hand than send him to the grave...
...So while the ancient feud between Arab and Jew continues, and a solution continues to prove elusive, the U.S.-Israeli alliance has been shaken as never before...
...There was the extraordinary sight of an Arab summit meeting relegating the Palestinian issue to the bottom of its list of priorities...
...True friends," Lewis intoned in February, should not "remain silent...
...Micah Morrison LOSING THE WEST BANK WAR As war embroils Gaza and the West Bank, Israelis rally to a grim consensus on national security and PLO intentions...
...An element of Fatah, "Force 17," took credit...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 19 with waving the American flag-who would be as stupid as not to wish to have the best of both worlds...
...In short, will a strong leadership emerge from the uprising...
...Two days later, four Gaza residents were killed in a truck accident...
...Rumors spread that it was a deliberate Israeli reprisal for the death of the salesman...
...The left-leaning Labor half of the government, led by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, presses for some sort of international conference as a prelude to direct negotiations with Jordan and non-PLO Palestinians...
...The Palestinians are once again spotlit on the world stage, but Arafat is in an uneasy alliance with the fundamentalists, who distrust his secularism, and the far left radicals who view him as a capitulationist...
...Above the lieutenants are the new leaders, the as yet unidentified Palestinians calling the shots from inside the territories and coordinating with the external factions...
...Below the leadership is a wider body of political activists and former prisoners...
...partition resolution, the founding of Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah (the dominant group in the PLO), and Sadat's visit to Jerusalem all stirred Palestinian feelings, as did an Israeli decision to deport one of the leaders of the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad in Gaza...
...The Islamic Jihad group is thought by many analysts to have been especially active in fomenting the uprising...
...The youth of the territories are tired of his promises, yet still look to him as a symbol of Palestinian aspirations...
...It has lost influence with the always-weak moderate and pro-Jordan Palestinians in the territories and with Arab governments inclined to take a less belligerent approach to the Jews...
...In a lengthy statement by the Fatah central committee attacking "U.S...
...In a narrow military sense, the territories will be "contained...
...media, in turn, gave wide play to dissent in the Jewish camp...
...the anti-Arafat groups divorced from the PLO...
...International criticism grew to a storm...
...Gilat and others describe the current power structure as a kind of pyramid...
...Many of the Israelis who in the past spoke in favor of mutual simultaneous recognition between the PLO and Jerusalem appear to have been shocked into silence by the sheer vehemence of the Palestinians...
...The Palestinians in the territories will have had time to absorb their victory and experience Israeli intentions not to give ground in the face of violence...
...Iran and Iraq are trading chemical attacks...
...Jihad, as the name implies, calls for immediate "holy war" against Israel...
...Out not only from the West Bank and Gaza, but out of Jerusalem, out of Haifa, out of Tel Aviv, out of "Palestine...
...Palestinians have never been unified, but divisions increased in the eighties, with several PLO factions in outright rebellion against Arafat and others keeping their distance from him...
...Human conscience will never allow the new Nazism and fascism to spread their hegemony...
...At the same time, it is clear to all Israelis that the cost of the occupation has risen dramatically...
...The uprising will continue, the Chairman said, "one phase after another and through distinguished qualitative leaps until the hateful Zionist occupation is ended...
...Hauser repeatedly slammed Prime Minister Shamir, saying he was "always in the wrong" and that "the central issue [blocking negotiations] remains the ideological commitment of the Likud bloc" to claiming all the land...
...A view of PLO attitudes toward the now-useful media (and toward Israel) emerges from Baghdad radio during the week of Lewis's chat with the M eanwhile, back in the jungle of American Jewish affairs, support for Israel was coming apart at the seams...
...circles talk of the aid weapon and widening contacts with the PLO has gained ground...
...Nothing unusual...
...But Israelis do not have to listen to Radio PLO to gauge Palestinian attitudes...
...The uprising has brought pluses and minuses for him...
...The Palestinians in the territories are not "the enemy" in the unambiguous way Arab soldiers across the borders of the small nation are the enemy...
...The U.S...
...And silent he did not remain...
...They grew up under Israeli rule and have little or no real memory-and thus little or no real fear-of the awesome military force that rolled back the combined might of the Arab world in 1967...
...Most of the speculation centers around a twelve- or fifteenmember group representing the prominent powers: Arafat's Fatah...
...there is no well-defined order of battle for Jerusalem's troops in this fight, no clear concept of battlefield victory...
...Solutions exist...
...The "National Command" may turn out to be either a fiction, with power much more decentralized, in town and regional groupings...
...But Western observers, especially the television media, often overstate the divisions and the power of the marginal wackos in Israeli society, neglecting the remarkable degree of cohesiveness on matters of national security...
...Arafat's radio stations, not to mention those of more radical PLO elements, make no mention of living in peace with Israel...
...The erosion of its qualitative military superiority has accelerated...
...and the religious...
...Military analysts will be calculating that additional tens of thousands of troops will be needed to clamp a lid on the territories if full-scale war breaks out...
...The troubles of recent months have produced shifts in the strengths and weaknesses of the players, while leaving the basic situation unchanged...
...The old methods of quelling disturbances were not working...
...As for Jordan, its influence in the territories has been blown out the door, and it will be a while before King Hussein starts look ing for a way back in...
...a war in Lebanon that divided Jews...
...He even left the confines of his Boston garret to fly to Tunis and meet with Arafat...
...When Secretary of State George Shultz came through the region with his carefully blended plan of an international conference, Camp David-style autonomy talks, and negotiations on the final status of the territories, Arafat refused to allow Palestinians to meet with him and blasted the plan over Baghdad's Voice of the PLO radio as "a new form of slavery on our people...
...By the end of 1988 there will be new governments in Washington and Jerusalem...
...Within weeks, if not days, underground networks were activated, and detailed instructions on everything from shop closings to the use of firearms began to flow from radio stations beyond Israel's borders...
...One particular pen, that of Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, led the Jewish charge against Jerusalem...
...It is from this group," writes Tzvi Gilat in the Tel Aviv daily Hadashot, "that the shadow people emerge, those who make things happen, who pull the strings, who motivate forces, who direct the street, who pass the riots from one camp to another...
...Beyond the reach of the media, and possibly beyond the reach of the Shin Bet, a battle for the hearts and minds of the shabab is being waged...
...George Habash's Popular Front, further to the left of Arafat...
...The airwaves are full of the worst sort of hateful invective and ceaselessly urge residents of the territories to "valiant revolution," "genuine holy war," and "the higher objective of seeing Palestine liberated and of seeing Jerusalem, the capital of our free and independent state, liberated...
...The argument over Israeli policy raised many questions and left a lot of bad feelings, yet one thing is clear: it provided a political opening for criticism of Israel, and Congress, seeing that support was not solid, moved into the opening with a letter criticizing Prime Minister Shamir and suggesting he was an obstacle to peace...
...It has lost the sympathy of some in Congress and the general public...
...Egypt's separate peace with Jerusalem-to Palestinians, a bitter betrayal...
...They had captured the moral high ground...
...Jewish divisions were playing into the hands of the PLO...
...Dines office called the story "totally untrue...
...These positions have been shaken by the uprising, although no widespread change in attitudes is yet apparent...
...senators, supposedly was in response to a Shamir statement that "this expression 'territory for peace' is not accepted by me...
...A Palestinian intellectual writes of enclaves of "scattered sovereignty...
...There's only one candidate for the job, and whether it's the Republicans or the Democrats in the White House next January, Henry Kissinger should be immediately drafted...
...Israeli leaders are watching all these developments, of course, and are preparing for the upcoming election...
...The rioting began...
...The next war against Israel, most observers believe, will be led by the Syrians...
...The media had blanketed the area and were sending out dramatic footage of well-armed Israeli soldiers beating unarmed Palestinians...
...the Communists...
...The kids on the street are sending the message loud and clear: Jews out...
...Bad news for American alliances abroad, worse news for Jerusalem...
...Syria's drive for strategic parity with Israel is well under way...
...Political unrest has a peculiar chemistry, and students of this episode will cite a confluence of events in November and early Decem ber as contributing to the explosion...
...A major question from the intifadah: Who are the leaders...
...journalists in the area report that pamphlets seized in January were full of viciously antiSemitic statements deriding the Jews as "apes" and calling the elimination of Israel "a Koranic inevitability...
...At the top are the spokesmen," writes Gilat, "the famous personalities, those who are exposed to the media...
...But despair-or worse, apathy-is not in order...
...Left or right, the next government of Israel will not rush into a deal on the West Bank...
...Ehud Ya'ari, Mideast correspondent for Israel TV, recently warned in a Washington Post article that Cairo, while "trying to be helpful" in the peace process, is also staging military maneuvers in the Sinai Peninsula that allow it to prepare "for the possibility of a future war with Israel...
...In early December, an Israeli salesman was murdered...
...Will they deal with Israel or seek to destroy it...
...The troubling television images had something to do with it, of course, but the fact is that Jewish America has been parting company with Israel for quite some time...
...The letter, signed by thirty U.S...
...No amount of patient explica tion by Israel's supporters of Palestin 17 ian rejectionism and terrorism, of the deep historical roots of the problem, of Arab hostility and geo-strategic realities seemed capable of overwhelming the powerful impact of nightly clips showing Israelis clubbing Palestinians and firing at groups of cocky stonethrowers called, simply, "the guys'in Arabic, the shabab...
...The losses have made prospects for peace more remote, at least in the short term...
...Shamir, calling for, among other things, implementation of the Peresinspired international conference, territorial compromise, and recognition of the PLO...
...Dine is close to Labor's Shimon Peres...
...Others speak of a constitutionally backed tripartite condominium with trapjaw demilitarized zones...
...Two weeks later, however, Lewis was putting ambiguities aside and saying that Arafat "reiterated recently that he accepts Resolution 242, with its call for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory to `secure and recognized' borders...
...News of a bold terrorist attack by hang-glider on a military base in northern Israel swept through the crowded refugee camps of Gaza, raising passions and pride: the latest in a series of demonstrations that the Israeli army was not invincible...
...The Syrian-led "rejectionists" within and outside the PLO will attempt to prevent him from joining any negotiating process, although he himself has shown little real interest in negotiating, unless one is referring to negotiating the demise of the Jewish state...
...For Israel, advance notice may have been served of a new and lonely stage in its struggle for security...
...At the base of the pyramid are "the people...
...Through its credibility, the Western press has ended the myth of Zionist control of the world's media...
...But such a group sounds like a fractious and unwieldy beast, and thus an easy target for the Shin Bet...
...The Egyptians, aided by George Shultz, have stopped mentioning Camp David-the one plan that worked...
...The reference to "phases" was not lost on Palestinians or Israelis: it refers to the PLO strategy of a phased victory, the first phase being the takeover of the West Bank and Gaza, the next phase being the rest of Israel...
...and the rise of the fundamentalist impulse in both Jewish and Islamic contexts...
...The Syrians appear to have benefited most from the uprising...
...Israel still sees the problem as one of having nobody to deal with: publicopinion polls continue to show overwhelming rejection of the PLO-quite a sensible position, since the PLO is still calling for and working toward the destruction of the state...
...Although there is much speculation about the make-up of the command, scant evidence has surfaced...
...When the going is good," wrote Israeli professor Shlomo Avineri during the Pollard spy affair in an article that ignited an earlier Jewish American freakout, "when being Jewish and supporting Israel go together 'These from a March 9 broadcast from Baghdad...
...And it is losing, bit by bit, the fragile skein of diplomatic agreements draped with great effort around Arab-Israeli relations...
...Israel has lost the moral high ground in its battle for survival...
...Hauser bridled, calling that notion "very much a false [sic] canard" and adding that "if all Jews the world over are united by the concept that we are one and that Israel is vital to us, we not only have a right to speak out in objection to the course Mr...
...Traditional days of November protest, marking the Balfour Declaration, the U.N...
...The generation of the shabab apparently have eclipsed their elders, and may eclipse the PLO...
...In practice, however, the policy was a disaster...
...Political unrest has peculiar chemistry, and students of the intifadah will cite a confluence of events in November and early December as contributing to the explosion...
...Peace does not rest with a single man, as Anwar Sadat often said...
...successful Arab attacks against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon...
...In a time of heightened tension, Ya'ari suggests, the Egyptians could move from cold peace to cold war, drawing away additional Israeli troops...
...The Fatah broadcast also praised "the democratic Jewish forces" that "have caused a Jewish uprising against the Zionist entity's rulers...
...Those concerned with the fate of the region should recognize that everyone has moved a few steps closer to the brink of a major war...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 scheduled for November, will be the first solid indication of Israeli attitudes toward the uprising and future courses of action...
...Amitay replied that the central issue was that the majority of Arab nations refused to recognize Israel and remained committed to wiping it off the map...
...Indeed, the fundamentalist factions are the new wild cards in the array of anti-Israel forces...
...One man had a suggestion...
...As the shabab came of age they saw the expansion of Jewish settlement in the territories...
...pressure-a cut-off of all American aid-could not force Jerusalem to accept a hostile PLO state in the heart of the country, and it would be a monumental miscalculation to place too much weight on the "aid weapon...
...O n several important fronts, Israel has lost the West Bank War...
...The PLO has been playing catch-up, with some success, since the shabab and fundamentalist activists sparked the uprising...
...In the territories, some support for Fatah broke away, drifting to Marxist terror factions on the left and Islamic fundamentalists on the right...
...And while massive arrests and limited expulsions have taken a toll on the uprising, Israel's internal security service, the Shin Bet, apparently has had little success in capturing the leaders of the turmoil-if indeed there are any key commanders...
...One example of the divisive Jewish debate in the U.S...
...that part of the war Israel will not lose...
...Above them are the activists and former pris oners-the street lieutenants...
...Ways can be found to defuse the situation and allow Israelis and Palestinians to live with security and justice...
...The most famous personality of them all is Chairman Arafat...
...Shamir has taken, we have a duty...
...Once again the PLO chief refused to give clear-cut recognition of Israel's right to exist, hemming all reference to U.N...
...What degree of control comes from inside the territories and how centralized is it...
...In a chilling analysis, Pinhas Inbari, a commentator for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper al-Hamishmar, writes that cooperation in the territories between pro-Arafat shabab, supporters of radical factions to the left of Arafat, and supporters of the radical-right Islamic Jihad "is exactly the format of the Syria-Libya-Iran coalition...
...According to most reports from the region, these organizations played key roles in laying the foundation for the intifadah...
...The reality of the shabab has been the endless talk of Israel's Jewish and democratic culture, the exposure to and denial of those democratic rights, and the endless talk of Arab leaders, including the PLO, about how any day now they were going to "liberate Palestine...
...It has lost the undivided support of the American Jewish community...
...imperialism" and the Shultz plan, it took a moment to offer the sort of praise that should give pause to journalists...
...Apparently, the idea that action would have to come from "inside" was all the time gaining strength with the younger generation...
...Enormous obstacles remain, of course, and that's why the search must be sustained and serious, with the realization that Israel is fully able to hold out for decades if its security is not assured...
...True or not, the senatorial letter, and the wide suspicion that AIPAC sided against the elected leader of Israel, indicate a weakening of U.S...
...I srael's losses are not irrecoverable...
...others were caught in a bind of absolute loyalty to the army and adamant opposition to retaining the disputed territories...
...I srael's divisions over the territories continue to be imperfectly reflected by its "national unity" coalition government...
...From Gaza, the tur Micah Morrison is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and, editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...An earlier JewishArab war, in the distant world of British-ruled Palestine, sputtered murderously from 1936 to 1939...
...T he shabab are the new generation of Palestinians...
...Rita Hauser, founder of the International Center for Peace in the Middle East, debated Morris Amitay, the former director of the powerful Israel lobby, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), on "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour...
...The losses, and the continuing battles, are absorbing the attention of Israel's many friends and many enemies, as well they should: a new phase has begun...
...The Hauser/Amitay exchange indicates the problem for American Jews in the debate over Israeli security: Do American Jews, who claim a special affinity with Israel because of shared religious and cultural values, have the right to press Jerusalem into actions which may result in war and the death of Israelis...
...A highlevel, creative approach is needed for 1989...
...National elections, In the cold logic of rifle and rock, of ruler and ruled, the fighting can go on for many more months, even years...
...In the cold logic of rifle and rock, of ruler and ruled, the fighting can go on for many more months, even years...
...They saw themselves as professional fighters thrust into the unwelcome role of policemen...
...The PLO was slow to pick up on the useful role played by the media...
...He then offered a remark which upset Hauser and pointed directly at the problem with American Jewry's argument over Israel...
...The forces in the maelstrom of Mideast politics are shifting, but Israel will face the same old dilemma: resolving the necessity of providing a secure existence for the state with the desire to move forward in the search for peace...
...Further afield in the Arab world, each country is calculating how the uprising -that means the Palestinians-can best be put to use, and at the same time keeping an anxious eye on the vast carnage of the Iran-Iraq War...
...some found themselves incapable of striking a woman or a child...
...In a recent article for the New York Times Magazine, writer Ze'ev Chafets relates the story of a leftwing Israeli activist who went to a demonstration of Israeli Arabs in Jaffa and was shocked to hear them chanting in baladna, yahud kalabna"this is our country, and the Jews are our dogs...
...came on the day after Lewis's report of his Tunis meeting appeared, the day when, not coincidentally, Prime Minister Shamir arrived in Washington to discuss the crisis...
...A new report from the Brookings Institution, for example, mentions "confederal arrangements that would reflect distinctive national identities...
...Jerusalem, for its part, should recognize that in U.S...
...Damascus-tied PLO factions are broadcasting from southern Syria and are said to be picking up support in the territories...
...This emerging coalition, Inbari notes, "aims to entrench Iran and Syria firmly in the territories...
...Arafat has faced (and eliminated) potential challenges from the territories before, but never one with the power of the shabab...
...The rifles win...
...Although it is not solely the work of the younger generation, the Palestinians are showing increasing political sophistication...
...he intifadah, the "uprising," as it is known in Arabic, began in early December, in Gaza...
...The Saudis are buying new missiles...
...The fighting is a different kind of conflict for the citizen-soldiers of Israel, one to which they are particularly ill-suited...
...The continuing troubles, combined with an absence of credible Palestinian statements about living in peace with the Jewish state, is swinging the electorate to the right...
...One of the largest of the groups was the alShabiba youth outfit, ostensibly created for the purposes of charitable works...
...Even the most severe U.S...
...But that would soon change...
...the expulsion of the PLO from Beirut and years of violent feuding in that organization...
...Washington's power, however, is limited...
...American opinion-makers thrashed this into a frenzy of accusations that Israel was backing away from Resolution 242...
...Vigorous organizing efforts had brought them into a variety of groups quietly linked to various PLO, Communist, and Islamic factions...
...It would pass in a few days, a few weeks, next month...
...In Palestinian eyes, the uprising was __,,7---,an astounding success...
...In private, Israeli soldiers were expressing deep resentment at the new policy...
...He'll kill me for suggesting it," Richard Nixon told the Washington Times recently...
...What degree of control comes from PLO headquarters in Tunis, from Damascus, from the mosques of Tehran and Cairo...
...But Kissinger has the genius, the track record, the Mideast knowhow, and the grudging respect of all concerned parties...
...In Israel's system, the Likud will probably not win an outright majority of sixty-one parliament seats, and will be in the position of needing to build a governing coalition by turning to parties on its right or back toward Labor for another "national unity" situation...
...As late as January, Baghdad radio was following its usual practice and calling for "silencing...
...or a front, established to draw attention away from a much smaller leadership unit...
...The world was watching them and condemning Israel...
...El The Fatah central committee hailed "the brave position of all forms of international media, which made a great effort to portray a true picture of the Zionist entity's fascist and Nazi practices . . . " 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988...
...A door might be swinging open...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
