The Palestinian Revolt: the Israeli Response

...If, then, as seems highly probable, the unrest in the territories becomes chronic, the impact on Israeli politics will surely be fundamental...

...Even before the present Arab uprising there were clear indications that the Likud was losing support to the radical right, to Tehiyah, Tsomet (the new party of Rafael Eitan), and Kach (Kahane's party...

...The general strike called by the Israeli-Arab leadership in January —""PPeeaaccee Day," it was termed—for the most part passed off as planned, quietly...

...It was a wet, cold Jerusalem night, and the mood of the few hundred people crowded inside the hall (normally used for weddings) was tense, somber...

...and the policy of breaking arms and legs again produced bitter dissension and unprecedented condemnation, both domestic and foreign...

...Ariel Sharon of autonomy "in the Jewish sense of the term," meaning limited self-rule without Israeli citizenship...

...In sum, then, for all the flurry of international diplomatic action that the revolt has produced, the interim result may well turn out to be some form of partial, unilateral action agreed upon by both Likud and Labor...

...Insisting throughout that the status quo is the best of all available options, the Likud gained the most electorally from the fact that the territories have 154 • DISSENT The Palestinian Revolt served throughout as a captive market for Israeli products and have supplied so abundant a flow of cheap labor, cheap land, and cheap housing...

...Eds...

...But there seems to be no doubt that despite the highly spontaneous and even anarchic nature of the revolt, the decision to refrain from the use of firearms (and there is no lack of such weapons in Palestinian hands) has been quite deliberate...

...Although the road to Armageddon thus runs very straight, the way forward to the evacuation of the territories, even though it, too, has political logic, remains heavily befogged...

...The cells run by those organizations in the Occupied Territories have been highly vulnerable to Israeli security forces...

...but the policy of expulsions, in probable contradiction to international law, was frustrated by energetic American diplomatic pressure...

...and truncheons were to be employed instead of guns...

...Even in normal times, Israel has a large foreign press corps in residence...

...Will Peres and Rabin...

...The Palestinians can hardly turn back now...

...And the prime minister at the time, whom Peres then systematically undercut, was none other than Yitzhak Rabin, whose "iron-fist" policies now win unadulterated praise from the Gush...

...And the terror campaigns waged by various Palestinian organizations have proved to be not just ineffective but actually counterproductive...

...Since the uprising, the numbers have fallen sharply and there has been much talk of an all-out stoppage...

...Over a generation, such a system inevitably attracts mediocrity and encourages arrogance, contempt for the subject population, gross insensitivity...

...but better the crisis now than later...

...It is a safe guess that if the Likud remains in a coalition with Labor it will sooner or later have to modify some of its positions—although enormous pressure by the United States would be required to force it to accept in explicit terms the principle of "land for peace...

...All this is grist for the mill of Ariel Sharon, who has reestablished himself, since his fall in 1983, as a key contender for the leadership of the Likud, seeking to outflank Yitzhak Shamir from the right...

...Whether the current Arab uprising will result in yet another dramatic political change, it is still too early to say...

...Driving through the streets of Jerusalem these days, one sees many cars with large signs in their windows that read "TV...

...that it did not hesitate to evacuate the Sinai for a treaty with Egypt...

...And, despite everything, the Palestinian death toll kept rising (up to eighty by the beginning of March...

...His recent outburst against a Jerusalem Post reporter says much about this man who conveys, and thrives on, menace: "Do you know when you'll understand the damage you're doing...

...smoldering volcanoes are liable to erupt...

...Now, to try to cut down on the fatality rate, a new strategy of massed baton charges had just been introduced by the army...

...The only other way in which a breakthrough toward a settlement is conceivable would be an about-face by the Likud leadership...

...With the Palestinians in revolt, such systematic evasion ceases to be tenable...

...their policy of ruthless attacks on civilian targets at home and abroad has evoked associations with the Holocaust, redoubled intransigence in Israel, and made them subjects of contempt throughout the civilized world...

...Still more disturbing, there are clear signs that it may not be possible to quarantine the over six hundred thousand Arabs living within pre-1967 Israel from the epidemic of unrest in the territories...

...administration will be willing to undertake that experiment, only time will tell...

...The truth of this bitter evaluation was driven home by Ran Cohen, commander of a reserve armored regiment and a Knesset member for the Civil Rights party, who described anguished phone calls from soldiers stationed in the Gaza Strip...

...As a result, the camps, far from returning to calm, became organized centers of insurrection, and, in response, the army decided to reimpose its authority even if some shooting would necessarily be involved...

...Over the last twenty years, this complex mix has normally served to perpetuate the status quo or, more exactly, the policies of "creeping annexation...

...Is this not Chelm...

...Now that the Palestinian revolt can no longer be lightly dismissed as "disturbances," it is more and more often described in everyday conversation as a "war" —and the logic is unmistakable: "When in war, do as war does...

...Paradox, and hence paradoxical potentialities, characterize the entire system...

...All that was needed was for the Arabs to demonstrate, to strike, to boycott, to protest on a massive scale...

...In order to keep the potentially enormous resistance to a minimum, the Israeli administration since 1967 has employed all the classical techniques of imperial control: divide and rule, stick and carrot, manipulation in every shape and form...

...The failure to predict the uprising and the clumsy response it evoked are painfully reminiscent of the European colonial regimes during the twilight of empire...

...And time and again they found themselves having to eat their words, often within a matter of days...

...The supreme irony, of course, is the fact that a few dozen stone-throwing youths who sparked the uprising on December 9 have produced a challenge to Israeli rule over the West Bank and Gaza far more profound than anything achieved over the last twenty years by * A proposal by the late Yigal Allon, a Labor party leader, according to which Israel would cede significant portions of the West Bank while retaining a military line, with settlements, along the Jordan River and certain other areas of the West Bank...

...and now many more hundreds of special correspondents poured in...

...If pressed, individual leaders, much irritated, come up with contradictory formulae: Moshe Arens talks of giving full citizenship to the Palestinians in the territories...

...Over the last few years, Mubarak Awad, the founder of the Palestine Center for the Study of NonViolence, situated in East Jerusalem, has been insisting that sooner or later the Palestinians were bound to change their tactics and start a resistance movement designed to exploit glaringly obvious chinks in the Israeli armor...

...The necessity to guard the Jewish settlers on the West Bank and in Gaza and the incipient unrest of the Arabs inside Israel have brought home as nothing else could that a "Greater Israel" is no guarantee whatever of a quiet life...

...Public demand for clearcut answers is bound to grow...

...after all, armies are built to be instruments of mass destruction, and it really is preferable to beat people up than to shoot them dead...

...Ben-Gurion would not have hesitated to risk possible civil war under such circumstances...

...and once the revolt began it was not diagnosed as such for many weeks...

...It was a government of this kind (although with a rather less extreme membership than would be the case today) that gave Sharon the green light to launch the Lebanese war...

...150 • DISSENT The Palestinian Revolt the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Arab states, and the Soviet Union combined...

...What is causing widespread distress is not primarily the moral issue...

...Polarization will erode the middle ground hitherto occupied by the Likud...

...A leading Israeli columnist, A. Schweizer, writing in the newspaper Ha'aretz on February 1, chose to describe what had happened in Gaza in early December as comparable (albeit in miniature) to the spontaneous riots of hungry women and workers in Petrograd that set in motion the 1917 revolution...

...Twenty years after, the restoration of the pre-1948 borders is bringing with it pictures increasingly reminiscent of the British Mandatory period...

...The primary cause of worry is a spreading sense of insecurity...

...Interwoven into the one multicolored fabric are strands drawn from very different traditions—the highly engage and ideological politics of the pioneer and underground movements in Eastern Europe...

...As the revolt had mounted from late in December, close to thirty Arabs had been shot dead in clashes with the troops and hundreds of others had received bullet wounds...

...the Tammany-type politics of the party machines built up to regiment the massive immigration of forty and fifty years ago...

...A new set of tactics then followed: There were to be mass arrests of those "inciting" the "disturbances...

...But an orthodoxy that rests on such a motley of varied interests cannot provide much of a bulwark against sudden heresy at the top—so long, of course, as the party leadership remains more or less united...

...To avoid the surrender of land, a sheer nightmare from its official point of view, the Likud (like Labor) might well opt for the lesser evil and move a long way toward Palestinian home rule in the territories...

...In the hall, the atmosphere of dismay was deepening into depression when, toward the end of a long evening, Meir Pail stood up to speak...

...today, I believe, it would like to, but will it dare...

...Teddy Kollek, the proverbially optimistic mayor of Jerusalem, on one occasion let slip the remark that "coexistence is at an end...

...By all accounts, the Palestinians are well aware that they have won the first rounds in this new phase of the struggle and have even forced the Reagan administration to move the Arab-Israeli conflict to a place near the top of its diplomatic agenda...

...Beyond this is the fact that the Palestinians themselves have been reluctant to maintain a full-scale general strike...

...Hitherto, the Arabs have fought with weapons so convenient to Israel that it is almost as though they were of her choosing...

...Long-term processes of this kind tend to remain mere abstractions for the man-in-thestreet until they impinge directly on his day-to-day existence...

...Talk of "transfer" —the euphemism for expulsion—has become common not only in the Tehiyah party, for example, but also in the once-moderate National Religious party and in right-wing Likud circles...

...Twenty years ago, shortly after the Six Day War, Yehoshua Arieli, a leading Israeli historian, had argued in an influential SPRING • 1988 • 151 The Palestinian Revolt series of articles that a "civil uprising" in the territories would be only a question of time...

...With elections scheduled before the end of this year, Rabin no doubt felt that a dramatic show of "force, might, and beatings" would not only put a quick stop to the riots but also prevent an erosion of—or even enhance — Labor's electoral support...

...English-speaking Palestinians, whose cars carry the blue number-plate of the territories (as against the yellow Israeli plates), not only ferry visiting journalists back and forth in safety from the refugee camps and other rebel centers but also arrange contacts with local leaders...

...In defense of yet another dramatic reversal, the Likud would argue that it has long accepted Security Council resolution 242 (which links peace to withdrawal...

...All the indications are that when Jewish youth become disillusioned with the Likud, they move preponderantly not to Labor but even further to the right...

...A recent academic survey reported that 30 percent of young Jewish men here regard the "transfer" of the Arabs out of the territories as the "most desirable" solution...

...the ringleaders were to be expelled from the country...

...The angle of vision becomes ever narrower until all that the security forces are capable of seeing are terrorists and ringleaders...

...As a parliamentary democracy, heavily dependent on the United States (so Awad has repeated constantly), Israel could not permit herself the use of unlimited force to put down passive resistance...

...Ofra and Kedumin, jewels in the crown of the Gush, owe their existence to Peres—the man whom its members now regard as enemy number one...

...A group of two hundred Israeli academics (including Jacob Talmon and Gershom Scholem) published a statement a few months after the 1967 war declaring that the annexation of the Occupied Territories was bound to undermine both the democratic and the Jewish nature of the state...

...or British Embassy, with a little suitcase, waiting to be evacuated...

...Prophecies of this kind tend to be self-fulfilling...

...The events of recent years—the Lebanese war, the Jewish terrorist underground, the massive coverup and subsequent wholesale presidential pardons in the Shin Beth (General Security Services) scandal, and the rise of the radical right (with Meir Kahane the mere tip of the iceberg)—tend to confirm the first half of this prognosis...

...Yitzhak Rabin himself (quoted in Ha'aretz of February 5) admitted that this was a policy of "collective perspicacity" on the part of the Palestinians...

...At every stage over a period of months, they have been able to outlast the army, forcing it into repeated changes of tactics...

...It is as though, after twenty years of intimate contact with a parliamentary democracy, the young Palestinians have somehow grasped the fact that there are enormous gains to be made by seizing the role of the underdog and not letting go...

...The judges in that case had ruled that soldiers were duty-bound to disobey "patently illegal" orders...

...By now, though, it is SPRING • 1988 • 153 The Palestinian Revolt beginning to dawn on people that a return to the status quo ante is highly improbable...

...Both the major parties, the Likud and Labor, drew in 1967 on ideological articles of faith predating World War II to develop rigid strategies toward the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—in the one case, "Greater Israel" and, in the other, the Allon Plan.* During the long periods of inertia that characterized most of the post-1967 era, the pragmatists, the opportunists, and the populistled rank and file have all combined to reinforce the supremacy of party doctrine...

...He is now holding on desperately to the Camp David agreements, which he opposed so vehemently when they were signed nine years ago...

...A narrow Labor-led government could initiate unilateral steps to establish some form of home rule in the West Bank and Gaza...

...But the average Israeli living within the old borders now thinks many times before picking a route that crosses the territories...

...This project, it was reported, had been thought out by Arab graduates of Israeli universities now working abroad for the PLO...

...Despite themselves, the people crowded into the wedding hall found themselves laughing...

...In the early weeks of the uprising, the overall Israeli policy was to keep the roads open while avoiding major confrontations within the refugee camps...

...q 156 • DISSENT...

...It would, of course, be comforting if this scenario could simply be dismissed as an apocalyptic nightmare...

...The fact is that political life in this country presents unusual juxtapositions of extreme idealism and pure opportunism, fanaticism and cynicism...

...The Likud is formally committed to three basic propositions: a Jewish state, a democratic state, and permanent Israeli sovereignty over the territories...

...And, as it turned out, many tens of thousands of people—up to eighty thousand, according to some estimates—came to the march and the rally on Saturday night...

...and the populist and demagogic politics of recent election campaigns...

...But it cannot...

...However unpredictable Sharon's long-term political behavior, he is at this moment the natural rallying point for all those forces that, consciously or not, assume that SPRING • 1988 155 The Palestinian Revolt another war is inevitable and that in it lies the solution to Israel's "demographic problem...

...now it is the Jewish state (equipped with draconian emergency ordinances of the Mandatory government) that finds itself saddled with that task...

...What this means is that Israel may well find itself after the next election led by a coalition of the Likud, the religious bloc (which has become increasingly "hawkish"), and the radical right...

...Given the fundamental division between the annexationist Likud and the anti-annexationist Labor parties, the only policy that could command general ministerial support was to avoid all mention of political issues and put down the "disturbances" by strictly military means...

...Reports of large-scale cancellations by tour groups originate more in rumor than from official sources...

...This trend has been accelerated by the terrible resentment, felt among an increasing number of Israeli Jews, against the Palestinian Arabs...

...The Peace Now leaders could leave in the knowledge that many of those present had volunteered to help in organizing the mass demonstration that was to be held a few days later in Tel Aviv...

...There would thus appear to be only two different ways in which a peace process could now be set in motion...

...An anti-Palestinian backlash could well carry them to the victory that escaped them by a mere hair's breadth in 1984...

...Almost certainly not...

...Whether the license for these actions was implicit or explicit—or simply a mixture of winks and turning a blind eye—the upper echelons of the army and, above all, the minister of defense were clearly responsible for what was being done...

...but in reality it has not taken place...

...On the one hand, the uprising has to a significant extent, and de facto, restored the "green line," or pre-1967 borders...

...If there were an end in sight, all these developments could be shrugged off as a passing inconvenience...

...Once the uprising began, a flexible response was rendered improbable not only because of 152 • DISSENT The Palestinian Revolt the constant flow of faulty intelligence reports, but also because the so-called National Unity Government is totally divided when it comes to the long-term future of the territories...

...When you stand on the roof of the U.S...

...the managerial politics of the new Israeli-born elites...

...The furious hatred such measures inspire must surely redouble Arab determination to persevere and to broaden their basis of support until it encompasses, in one way or the other, the entire population of the territories...

...but the Yishuv (Jewish community) could then rely on the British to suppress the uprising...

...A recent poll revealed that if an election had been held in January, it would have given the radical right sixteen Knesset seats and the Likud thirty-three...

...True, the perhaps sixty thousand Jewish settlers who live in new towns and villages on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip maintain a show of normality, although it is not easy...

...it has also softened the blow to the Israeli economy...

...The only true surprise, of course, is that a great explosion did not occur much earlier...

...In these new conditions it is the right-wing Likud that finds itself most exposed...

...Directly after 1967 Labor was strong enough to have pushed through such a deal but did not want to do so...

...Hence, the extraordinary reversals of Begin and Peres resulted in amazingly little intraparty strife and few defections...

...Of course, the West Bank and Gaza are minuscule areas, but by Israeli standards, their population of some one and a half million, all under military rule, is very large...

...A public opinion poll held in December 1987 showed that the radical right has the support of 12 percent of the population, as against 26 percent for the Likud...

...Pail's short speech relieved a tension that had become almost intolerable...

...However astonishing it may seem, not one Israeli, either soldier or civilian, was killed during the early months of the uprising (although a number were seriously wounded...

...Throwing stones—not to talk of petrol bombs—is hardly nonviolence...

...Even East Jerusalem, the Arab sector of the city officially annexed to Israel by Menachem Begin, has for the first time become the scene of major riots (although so far unaccompanied by loss of life...

...The decision of the European Parliament in February to defer ratification of a major trade agreement with Israel has, for example, been passed over almost without comment...

...The Arab rebellion has made extraordinarily effective use of the media...

...This is hardly the long awaited "dawn," that much beloved metaphor of the early Zionist writers...

...The easy assumption that "time is on our side," which has been used to justify political immobility and has served as the cover for a de facto annexation, is already beginning to sound anachronistic...

...As ever, Sharon still delights in baiting the press, which here, as in many democratic countries, is the object of much popular resentment, even hatred...

...The television cameras, the press corps, and public opinion in Israel and abroad would prevent the kind of massacre used by Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, to put down Moslem fundamentalists in Hama in 1982 or by the Red Army in Budapest in 1956...

...Doubtless, we will witness periods of relative quiet, if only because sheer exhaustion must take its toll, but in all probability they will be mere lulls in the storm...

...Israeli politics for the last twenty years had become the politics of the shtetl —not just of any shtetl but specifically of Chelm, the legendary Jewish town of fools...

...Whether this or any other U.S...

...The cumbersome National Unity Government is hard put to cope with an opponent deliberately seeking to appropriate Israel's most powerful national myths...

...Every new measure, it was confidently predicted by the army command and the minister of defense, would finally do the trick, restore "law and order...

...The polls consistently show the joint strength of these parties as close to 50 percent...

...But neither is it the "Black Hole at the End of the Tunnel," a title chosen recently for a piece in Davar...

...Newspapers carry accounts of the Arab Revolt of 1936-38 (or of "the events" as the revolt is usually called in Hebrew...

...But events have taken on a new kaleidoscopic character...

...but the victory of the Palestinians in the media war, guaranteed by the public display of the "iron fist," is simply a fact...

...In "normal" times, at least one hundred thousand workers from the Occupied Territories come every day to work inside Israel...

...This is partly because there is a concerted effort on the part of the powers-that-be not to discuss publicly the extent of the economic damage...

...And in wartime the attempt to bring about a mass flight or expulsion of the Palestinian Arab population would be seen as both natural and technically feasible by many government leaders...

...These letters, familiar even to the children of the West Bank and Gaza, grant the correspondents immunity from the flying stones and safe passage past the hastily improvised barricades of rocks and burning tires or barrels of tar...

...He was not going to concentrate on the truncheons...

...a settlement would have been infinitely easier then...

...Without it, Israeli politics can hardly be understood at all...

...Shimon Peres, who today talks passionately of the desperate need for Arab-Israeli peace, gave crucial support not so long ago, when minister of defense in the mid-1970s, to the ultranationalist Gush Emunim organization as it forced the hand of a reluctant Labor-led government into permitting Jewish settlement in the heartlands of the West Bank...

...The emphasis shifted once again, now toward collective punishment in the form of allencompassing curfews, which at times meant incarcerating hundreds of thousands of people in their homes for many days...

...And he was by no means alone...

...while their bombastic rhetoric served to pacify the great mass of Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza, lulled into inertia by expectations of liberation from without...

...This self-limitation has made it materially possible for the Palestinians to sustain the uprising for many months...

...Even more ironic is the near-panic that greeted the news in February that the PLO was about to send a ship loaded with Palestinian exiles to demand the "right of return" to Israel...

...Peace with Jordan, with the PLO, or with both would require the return of nearly all the Occupied Territories and a compromise over Jerusalem...

...but what we have been witnessing since December 1987 is a remarkable display of strength derived from the mass mobilization of weakness...

...All in all, it is to be regretted that the "disturbances" did not come fifteen or twenty years ago...

...In the meantime, though, Yitzhak Shamir will not yield territory unless he can carry his two major rivals in the Likud, David Levy and Ariel Sharon, with him...

...New municipal elections could be held as in 1976 and 1972...

...As the last of these items is manifestly incompatible with the other two, the Likud shuns any public discussion of long-term issues...

...Some people take comfort in the fact that the revolt finally died down after almost two years...

...And now, some twenty years later, it was Rabin himself who was responsible for policies that were "brutalizing" the army...

...even those settlers who used to travel unarmed now tend to carry guns...

...Such a government might prefer to avoid war, but it would bring war nearer if only because the extreme right is convinced that the entire Arab world is bent on Israel's destruction, that any concession is a Munich, that it is all or nothing, "them or us...

...For oldtimers especially, the sense of deja vu is unavoidable...

...In the public relations battle, Israel has clearly gone down to a humiliating defeat...

...Yizhar Smilansky, a much respected Israeli writer, entitled one of his columns in the Labor newspaper Davar "How Dare They Be Surprised...

...Mordechai Bar-On recalled how, as the army's chief education officer in the 1960s, he had been encouraged by the then chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, to issue a leaflet to the troops explaining the significance of the landmark Kfar Kassem trial...

...The policy of beatings, it seemed, was being interpreted by many of the troops as permitting almost indiscriminate— and patently illegal—violence...

...Nor is the economic question making a decisive impact on the popular psyche...

...There is no question that the uprising has induced a sense of deep shock in the Israeli public at large...

...and Michael Dekel, of "transfer...

...It is true that the Palestinian uprising has not followed the path advocated by Awad, who takes Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as his models...

...This change of tone has, at times, been remarkable (and not without unconscious humor, given his insistence that Arab violence must not be allowed to pay...

...Since the uprising, Shamir has begun to talk of autonomy and elections on the West Bank and in Gaza...

...As the shootings, beatings, general curfews, and mass arrests become institutionalized, they are bound to act as a boomerang...

...And the choice will increasingly narrow down to either the idea of expulsion, driving the Palestinians out, on the one hand or evacuation, leaving the territories, on the other...

...Hardly less ironic than this humiliation of our children (eighteen-year-old conscripts) with their rifles by their children (many no more than twelve or thirteen) with their stones has been the fact that at every turn the uprising has caught the Israeli authorities hopelessly off balance...

...and this was the man who then proceeded to engineer the total withdrawal from Sinai not only of the army but of every last settler—after which Begin retired, incarcerated in a quiet Jerusalem apartment from which he emerges only once a year...

...Our renowned intelligence services had failed utterly to anticipate any significant rise in unrest in 1987...

...The fact (so the demographers tell us) that there are more Arab than Jewish children under the age of five now living within the present borders certainly confirms the second...

...And a glimpse into the crisis in the citrus industry is vouchsafed only when the newspapers report that the general secretary of the Histadrut, Israel Kesar, and many of his colleagues are spending three days picking oranges...

...The PLO has repeatedly warned its followers on no account to start shooting...

...But there were cases of rioting, and the major road running from the coast to the Jezreel Valley via Wadi Ara was actually blocked for a few hours by hundreds of Arab villagers...

...and the unexpected is, for the moment, the norm...

...Certainly the idea of fqrcing the Israelis into playing the part of the British, thus leaving the role of the Jews in the Exodus story for the Palestinians, suggests a good working knowledge of Zionist history...

...No doubt, many Likud members would like nothing better than that the United States release them from what has become a selfmade trap, coerce them into accepting compromises that they are unable to make alone...

...And to expect a united front from this trio is somewhat farfetched...

...A poll published late in January reported that only 7 percent of Israeli Jews regarded the handling of the riots as "too harsh," as against 40 percent who considered them "too lenient," and 46 percent who felt them to be "about right...

...Hundreds, thousands, were arrested...

...A sense of the ironic is not merely a valuable psychological defense mechanism at a time of unusually severe social stress...

...Disorientation and anxiety are probably more widespread than during the Lebanese war, which for many months at least was seen by most Israelis as a success story...

...The speakers of the evening were all high-ranking reserve officers who one after the other condemned both the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, for having consistently, over a period of years, sabotaged every diplomatic peace initiative and also the defense minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for his determination to break the resistance in ways both fast and furious or (in his own words) by "force, might, and beatings...

...In the full-scale wars since 1967 the technological and organizational superiority of Israel's armed forces more than made up for her inferiority in men and materiel...

...and that it is the party of peace, Labor of war...

...The crisis has also spawned a new type of professional guide...

...The simmering popular resentment is taken for granted, a permanent fact of life, and so of no operational significance...

...All this amounted to weakness masquerading as strength...

...How much connection is there between what our leaders say, what they mean, and what they do...

...Menachem Begin, Pail reminded us, had sworn that when his time came to retire he would make his home in one of the Israeli settlements in Sinai...

...The basic issue was not the army but the SPRING • 1988 • 149 The Palestinian Revolt politicians...

...But the subsequent daily count of dead and wounded produced an intolerable uproar throughout the western world and actually stoked the fires of Arab resistance...

...Pail, a battle-hardened veteran, a military historian by profession (and, like Bar-On, a onetime Knesset member) is a bearlike figure of a man, but with something of teddy-bear whimsicality about him, and he chose to leaven the heavy seriousness of the evening with some sharply ironic comments...

...But how would a government based on 51 percent of the Israeli electorate and headed by Rabin and Peres be able to advance the peace process...

...True, the Labor party, together with its satellites, (Mapam, the Civil Rights party, and a new Center party), may just win the next election...

...And it is happening now...

...The orgy of eating one's cake and having it that has characterized official policy toward the West Bank and Gaza for the last twenty years cannot go on indefinitely...

...By attacking the Israeli soldiers head on— not with guns but with stones, not at one place but simultaneously at dozens of different spots, not in small groups but in large crowds—the Arabs have been able to neutralize the strength of the occupying power...

...The story is now familiar enough but still merits retelling...

...Such calculations are cause for speculation (elections may not come until November...

...The idea that an attempt to wipe away the "green line" and reestablish the borders of British Mandatory Palestine might prove a disaster for the Zionist cause is not new...

...They found themselves warmly welcomed by the Palestinians throughout the territories and offered every possible facility...

...and these in turn could lead to the emergence of a de facto political leadership in the territories...

...And, conversely, it is as though after twenty years of running a regime of occupation, the Israeli establishment is incapable of acting any part but that of a lumbering Goliath...

...Since the PLO, and not Jordanian supporters, is expected to win such elections, such moves would in all likelihood constitute a first step toward a Palestinian state in some indefinite future...

...Among the hundreds of Arabs hospitalized with broken arms and legs were many who had been beaten up after arrest and some who had simply been minding their own business until caught in the widening net of military brutality...

...Nothing like it has occurred since the establishment of the state forty years ago...