Looks at six books on the intifada
Goldstein, Eric
FROM STONES TO STATEHOOD: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING, by Phyllis Bennis, photographs by Neal Cassidy. Olive Branch Press, 1989. 135 pp. $16.95. INTIFADA: PALESTINE AT THE CROSSROADS, edited by...
...the ministers simply dodge the subject...
...With regard to the merchant class, Tamari notes that mass action is threatened by the decline of the tax revolt and friction among manufacturers, shopkeepers, and street peddlers, who found themselves bearing unequal burdens of the strikes and boycotts...
...Intifada or no, Israel's Likud-led government is willing and ready to maintain the occupation into the foreseeable future...
...Simon and Schuster, 1990...
...They were written before intra-Arab assassinations began to outnumber killings by Israeli troops, and before Soviet Jews began to pour into Israel at the rate of more than ten thousand per month...
...INTIFADA: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING - ISRAEL'S THIRD FRONT, by Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, edited and translated by Ina Friedman...
...However, Peretz's well-organized chapters on the origins of the intifada, its effects on Palestinian and Israeli life, and its international repercussions make it a useful reference...
...Even more unsettling is the question of what would happen to Palestinians in the territories if Israel went to war...
...McDowall convincingly lays out the long history of state discrimination against Israeli Arabs in the delivery of services and their radicalization during the intifada...
...South End Press, 423 pp...
...It built on grass-roots political institutions that had been developing for a decade or more, and was directed by a local leadership that coordinated with the PLO outside while remaining attuned to the mood of the population inside...
...What then did the intifada accomplish...
...In the Arab revolt of 1936-39, Tamari writes, merchants' participation involved a substantial degree of coercion, while the strike during the intifada was "basically a voluntarist act...
...Unless sincere negotiations get under way," Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari predict, "both sides will suffer considerably for the foreseeable future and the ultimate outcome of the intifada will be much to Israel's detriment...
...This gap is filled by some of the better essays in the two highly uneven collections under review...
...347 pp...
...Israel's peace movement is reeling before the task of trying to explain why Israelis should talk with Palestinians who are demonstrating for Saddam Hussein...
...Eventually, one hopes—provided the Gulf crisis is resolved without a regionwide conflagration—the world's attention will turn again to the Palestinian question...
...They also mislead by starting the book with a harrowing description of the massive riots that overwhelmed soldiers in Gaza during the first days of the intifada, without making it clear that most of the confrontations in ensuing months—in which most fatal shootings by soldiers took place— involved far fewer participants and far less danger to the soldiers...
...All these books were completed before the intifada began to taper off and fade from the news...
...And before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, deflecting attention from the plight of the Palestinians everywhere except in his own rhetoric...
...David McDowall's Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond does not focus on the intifada, although he contends that its eruption only adds urgency to his main argument: that Israel's gravest danger comes from the disaffected Arab population inside the Green Line...
...Most Palestinians did their bit not by hurling rocks but by participating in strikes, tax boycotts, marches, political meetings, and exercises in self-sufficiency...
...Palestinian rights will be suppressed, Israel's moral fabric will fray, and both sides will suffer casualties...
...In the volume edited by Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, particularly effective is Beshara Doumani's portrait of an unremarkable West Bank family on the eve of the intifada...
...Like McDowall, all of the authors under review 136 • DISSENT Books would prefer a solution sooner than later and worry that continuing violence and polarization on both sides may harm the peace prospects...
...INTIFADA: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING AGAINST ISRAELI OCCUPATION, edited by Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin...
...The intifada has raised the day-to-day cost to Israel of the occupation, but not beyond its means...
...Also, the authors should have reminded readers that Shin Bet's familiarity with its adversaries is derived partly from nasty methods of extracting information...
...Another point that comes across in these volumes is that although stone throwing is more telegenic, it is less significant than the nonviolent components of the intifada...
...For all his alarmism, McDowell fails to persuade that the problem of Israel's Arab population is a time bomb for Israeli democracy rather than a wound with which it can continue to live...
...The authors describe with feeling the dilemmas faced by an army trying to quell a revolt by unarmed civilians, while laying bare the failure of one method after another and the abuses committed along the way...
...Do Schiff and Ya'ari relate what Palestinian leaders discussed on the basis of Shin Bet (the Israeli secret service) or Palestinian sources...
...Although their accounts seem largely credible, the omniscient voice of Schiff and Ya'ari is irritating in WINTER • 1991 • 135 Books the absence of footnotes...
...The book by Schiff and Ya'ari provides the only insightful portrait of Israeli thinking during the intifada...
...322 pp...
...Any deliberation in long-range policy is repeatedly postponed...
...I trust their metaphors mix less noisily in the original Hebrew...
...What happened to the political promise that the intifada seemed to contain two years ago, when Yasser Arafat uttered the formula required to open direct contacts with the United States and attempted to cash in on the rebellion...
...The cycle of rebellion and repression is driving Israelis further to the right and Palestinians toward Islamic extremism...
...Israelis who favor the mass expulsion of Palestinians might swell to a majority if hostilities broke out between Israel and, say, Iraq or Syria, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) encountered resistance in the territories...
...The hundreds of violent incidents," write Schiff and Ya'ari, "had become a smoke screen for the effort to build a `shadow administration' as the stamp of a state-in-themaking...
...but rather, that Arabs' fear of a harsh response, their political fragmentation and stake in the status quo, and perhaps some concessions from the state, will keep a lid on their resentment...
...It is depressing to ponder a continuation of the status quo...
...It is not that the Jewish state will resolve Arab grievances to their satisfaction...
...Pressure from the United States, an increasingly consequential European Community, a helpful Soviet Union, and a more pragmatic United Nations could revive the search for a dialogue...
...352 pp...
...At the same time, the intifada has given many Israelis a grudging respect for the Palestinians of the territories and a recognition that the PLO is their authentic representative...
...Their portrait, while more sympathetic toward Israeli policy-making than any of the other works, shows no less exasperation...
...Every day that passes corrodes Israel's economy, moral character, and relations with its own Arab citizens...
...38.50 hardcover, $14.95 paperback...
...PALESTINE AND ISRAEL: THE UPRISING AND BEYOND, by David McDowall...
...INTIFADA: PALESTINE AT THE CROSSROADS, edited by Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock...
...The experience of empowerment during the intifada has transformed the self-image of the Palestinians and has enhanced their stature in any future dealings with Israel or other states...
...in any event, attributions are sorely needed...
...Presumably, this bit of conversation is courtesy of the Shin Bet...
...In the absence of political progress, the intifada will continue to simmer, with increasingly bitter eruptions...
...If Palestinians trade in their stones for knives or warm weapons, Israel will quickly ratchet up its repression to keep attacks on Jews at politically tolerable levels...
...55.00 INTIFADA: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING, by Don Peretz...
...Prime Minister Shamir's 134 • DISSENT Books constituency is a strong one, combining those who are ideologically committed to retaining the West Bank and those who embrace the status quo on security grounds...
...Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising, by Don Peretz, a political scientist at SUNY-Binghamton, is a workman-like overview of the intifada that is limited by its heavy reliance on English-language press sources, particularly the Jerusalem Post...
...While the other authors rely solely on published sources and survey research, these two well-connected Israeli journalists provide inside accounts of Knesset and cabinet meetings and army strategizing...
...McDowall, a former employee of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, argues that "giving adequate satisfaction to the Palestinians of the occupied territories is now urgent if the uprising (or successive uprisings) does not begin to turn the thoughts of Israel's own Palestinian population from civil rights to secession from the Jewish State...
...One achievement is that Palestinians have empowered themselves, albeit within harsh limits...
...Their recent demonstrations in support of Saddam Hussein would not have shocked McDowall, as they did Israeli Jews...
...While Schiff and Ya'ari describe Palestinian thinking at the top, they devote less attention to the grassroots organizations and daily life in Palestinian towns and refugee camps...
...Less nuanced profiles of Palestinians during the intifada fill Phyllis Benniss's and Neal Cassidy's photo essay, From Stones to Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising...
...Who told them, for example, that activist Mohammed Labadi said to his driver at a December 1987 meeting, "We're going to put out handbills to inflame the people to revolt, and you're going to be in charge of printing them...
...In the volume edited by Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock, Salim Tamari, a sociologist at Bir Zeit University, argues convincingly that traditionally conservative merchants and shopkeepers played a key role in consolidating the uprising by resisting efforts by the IDF to force them to remain open during commercial strikes...
...Preeminent is the decline in the mass character of the resistance and the risk of a reversion to pre-1987 conditions, when activism was the province of a hard-core minority...
...The motives for participating, he writes, were "a combination of increasing tax pressures and a shift in the perception of the military government, which now saw the urban middle classes as part of a hostile subject population rather than as part of a 'pragmatic majority that wants to live quietly.' " Tamari's article faces up to some of the failures of the intifada...
...The revolt sustained itself through the stamina and sacrifices of all sectors of Palestinian society, which closed ranks in a way that did not occur during earlier uprisings...
...22.95 Arecurrent theme in three of the books under review is that the Palestinian intifada has made a peace settlement a goal of utmost urgency...
...In one indication of renewed confidence, Jewish settlement in the West Bank has surged again after an earlier dropoff, as Soviet immigrants push up housing prices inside Israel...
...Many are concerned by the rightward drift in Israeli public opinion, a trend that has probably been reinforced by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait...
...Still, Schiff and Ya'ari's book is the most readable, a thriller about two adversaries trying to outwit one another, each battle-hardened in its own way...
...None of the authors sees Israeli society deriving parallel benefits from the intifada...
...22.95...
...Westview Press, 1990...
...15.00...
...In the 1970s and 1980s Abu Farid and two of his three sons worked hard and fared better than they could have under the Jordanian occupation...
...University of California Press, 1989...
...Although the authors let Palestinians speak for themselves, the voices sound canned: unity is never less than total, and all acts of repression only reinforce the struggle...
...246 pp...
...It is a gross overstatement to claim that "the military courts simply did not allow soldiers to get away with excesses...
...Although the book's descriptions of abuses are disturbing enough, the authors fall short of capturing the full extent of army misconduct...
...In the final analysis, the intifada has exposed in all its grimness the snarled state of the country's political system, which has grown brittle in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has a way of crippling itself the moment the issue comes up...
...Abu Farid, jailed on political charges by the Jordanians some thirty years ago, has grown cynical both about the PLO and the Arab world...
...But in a postscript written one year later, the author, a historian and contributing editor of Middle East Report, describes how the family's relative comforts have been disrupted by the intifada: Abu Farid and one son have quit their jobs in Israel, two sons have been arrested, and all are aroused and angry...
...Whenever this system appears to be making some progress, its wheels immediately jam...
...q WINTER • 1991 • 137...
...Praeger, 1990...
...Although some public opinion polls show an Israeli public increasingly willing to talk to the PLO, "the consensus," Schiff and Ya'ari write, "was a kind of dug-in-heels attitude that the status quo must be maintained—and certainly that it must not be altered as a result of anything done by the Palestinians...
...Schiff and Ya'ari bring to life the wrangles between, on the one hand, Israeli politicians, who ignored the possibility of a revolt in the territories and then demanded its instant suppression when it broke out, and, on the other, the IDF General Staff, which comes across as an oasis of relative sanity and moderation...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
