Fighting History

...Moral and democratic scruples aside, many Israelis (and especially the military) increasingly call into question the strategic value of territories filled with hostile and restive people...

...To most Israelis the Palestinians, if they exist at all, are useful laborers or potential spear-carriers for Arafat, Syria's Hafez al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and the rest...

...336pp...

...Somewhere into its third month," the authors tell us, "the intifada adopted a long-range strategy that subordinated all its moves and considerations to the single goal of divorcing the territories from Israel's administration...

...Livingstone and Halevy present an unbroken litany of shootouts, hijackings, extortions, assassinations, and similarly noble forms of political struggle, accompanied by a numbing capacity for infighting...

...Yet, if anything,thespasmodic, agonized and ineffectual responses of the IDF (a far cry from the U.S.' matter-offact willingness to dispatch several hundred Panamanian civilians in order to eliminate the hardly compelling threat of Manuel Noriega, not to mention the merciless repressions regularly enacted throughout the Middle East) recall an observation made several years ago by one of Israel's prominent intellectuals, Shlomo Avineri...

...There is clearly no reason to think the PLO has decided to accept Israel's permanent presence in the Middle East...

...Nonetheless, it lays bare the tragic antithesis at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...

...Inside the PLO reads like the spate of books issued a few years ago luridly depicting ruthless terrorist thugs out to destroy Western civilization...

...But their work is marred by sloppy writing and minor errors (for example, the Institute for Palestine Studies is referred to as the Center for Palestine Studies...

...Before long they began to shift their energies from raw confrontation as such to community-building—the crucial task for the Palestinians, as it was for the Zionists in the first decades of this century...

...nor, understandably, does the incident appear in Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari's firstrate account of the revolt...

...But the West expects little from the latter, and so is rarely disappointed with their mendacities...

...As Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy demonstrate in Inside the PLO, the organization is largely as unpalatable a group of thugs as one might hope to never to meet...

...Were that the case, the Israeli body politic would not be split down the middle...

...Writing earlier this year in Shaun Filistinya, a PLO periodical published in Arabic on Cyprus, Nafe declared that armed struggle and negotiation are complementary options aimed at the single goal of eradicating Israel...

...For many years the gilded carriage he would ride in on his frequent visits to the Holy Land was the centerpiece of Mishkenot, prominently displayed as if it were the relic of a real-life fairy tale...

...On the other hand, it cannot be overstressed that as far as much of the Israeli public is concerned, things really could be worse...

...until now, the PLO has seemed genuinely unable to grasp how badly terrorism hurt its cause...

...In the process, though, again unlike the ANC, it lost touch with the people actually living under occupation, who finally felt they literally had to take matters into their own hands...

...It is left to Israel to think its way out of its current predicament and revitalize its mission as the bearer of Jewish history...

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Writer, political consultant Visiting dignitaries, academics and other guests of the State of Israel are often put up in Mishkenot Sha'ananim, a charming cluster of 19th-century houses affording a sublime view of Mount Zion and the Hinnom Valley, best known as Gehenna, the Hades of Jewish folklore...

...He ought to be informed of the reality...

...To the militants who sent it up in flames, the gilded carriage no doubt stood for the colonial imperiousness that planted a state of interlopers and intellectuals in their midst, the ultimate indignity inflicted by the West's centuries-old attempt to smother the Arab world...

...But even that is something of an improvement...

...These suggestions were routinely dismissed out of fear that, as General Moshe Levi (Israel's first Sephardic Chief of Staff) put it, the IDF would degenerate into a "professional occupation force...

...It may fairly be said that Yasir Arafat's fundamental thrust since the intifada burst forth has been to play catch-up to the rapidly evolving events on the ground that have given the lie to his decades of publicityseeking, violence and failure...

...Yet when Arafat finally made his declaration (albeit in lapidary prose only a diplomat could understand) it was with Shultz' encouragement...

...21.95...

...Indeed, the Israelis are not Nazis, notwithstanding the occasional imbecilities to that effect in the media, but they are occupiers...

...Certainly the Israeli Army, besides continually protesting to the political echelons that a military solution to the Palestinian problem is neither achievable nor desirable, has exhibited a classic Rabbinic circumspection and pragmatism in the application of force against the uprising...

...Paradoxically," the authors note, "in an age benumbed by mass killing, the suffering of lone individuals takes on greater force...

...Rather than repress the reality of their situation," the authors write, "Israelis and Palestinians must begin to accept it as a condition that precludes an absolute victory for either cause...

...This, to be sure, did not lead to anything reminiscent of sitting-in at a Woolworth's counter...

...Unlike the ANC in the case of the black South Africans, the PLO managed to foster an ersatz statehood for the Palestinians despite the absence of all the normal indicia of sovereignty...

...Some of their more interesting revelations are that Ali Hassan Salameli, the dashing mastermind of the Munich Olympic massacre, was on the CIA payroll for several years...

...The problem is not so much Jews and Arabs fighting one another, said the Lebanese Shiite professor, as it is Jews fighting Nazis and Arabs wrestling with Crusaders...

...This was of little strategic significance, and went largely unreported in the Western press...

...It is instructive in this regard to compare the PLO with the national liberation movement now in the ascendant on the world stage, the African National Congress (ANC...

...The houses were built through the benefaction of Sir Moses Montefiore, the great Victorian philanthropist and court Jew...

...It was founded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as a way of wresting influence from Syria...

...Hassan Nafe, a well-known Palestinian intellectual, has explained how such tactics can be reconciled with the PLO's diplomatic strategy...

...It would involve an Israeli administrative withdrawal from most of the territories, followed by a tripartite powersharing confederation linking Israel, a demilitarized Palestinian entity and Jordan...

...The Palestinians are not central to any Israeli self-understanding (they don't play the role, say, that blacks did in the white consciousness of America's preintegration South...

...that a number of governments and corporations have regularly paid protection money into to the PLO's substantial coffers...

...When in February of that year George Shultz traveled to Israel and sought to meet with local Palestinian leaders, Arafat threatened a violent end for any Palestinian who would damage the cause by accepting the invitation to dialogue the American Secretary of State offered...

...But hostile and uncompromising as the actions were, they marked a turn toward a future-oriented approach —bound to be painful for both sides...

...Most important, it lacks sufficient context relating the PLO to Palestinian nationalism and Arab politics...

...they come into view only as the inhabitants of a sliver of territory lying between Israel and the Arab armies rightly considered the critical threat to its survival...

...The Palestine Liberation Organization owes its existence to the fratricidal rivalry among the Arab states...

...And when government officials accept responsibility for these acts they unwittingly open themselves to greater criticisms than would be leveled at officials who could plausibly blame disagreeable policies on overenthusiastic subordinates...

...While the lesson has not been fully learned, and the fact that the PLO has not forsaken its longstanding intention of eradicating Israel must constantly be borne in mind, perhaps Israel can nurture the PLO's diplomatic strategy...

...Responding to a proposal that Israel equip itself with attack dogs for use in the territories, he said: "We're not the Nazis...

...The Israelis, Schiff and Ya'ari report, were scandalously surprised by the intifada...

...To the Jews, by contrast, Sir Moses' carriage simultaneously conveyed the Zionist themes of philanthropy, well-placed activism and attachment to the Jewish past (Sir Moses himself adhered to Orthodoxy), plus a touch of romance...

...Perhaps the truest comment about the Middle East conflict has come from Fouad Ajami...

...It is the fundamentalists of the Gush Emunim settler movement, virtually alone, who have displayed a religiously-driven intoxication with power unseen in Judaism since the Bar Kochba revolt of the second century...

...Over the more than two decades of the West Bank and Gaza occupation, they tell us, it was sometimes suggested that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) be trained in riot control and equipped with shields, tear gas and other paraphernalia for dealing with civil insurrection...

...In addition to Israel, the fury was directed against an unresponsive local power structure and the entire Arab world, which had just concluded a summit in Amman that scarcely mentioned the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza...

...Ostensibly objective observers were caught unawares, too...

...The crucial and often-overlooked issue is Israel's encirclement by self-professed foes of its very existence...

...For the collective inability to envision themselves as an occupying force resulted in their total unpreparedness, psychological as well as military, for the revolt...

...Nor do the Palestinians figure in the messianic theologies of Gush Emunim's adherents, who at least treat them as objects of condescending toleration...

...Their conclusion, like the rest of the book, is fueled by a rare mix of moral concern and strategic lucidity that has been characteristic of the best of Israel's political and military thinking...

...The unhealable wound that has prompted such thinking was pithily pointed to by the current Chief of Staff, Dan Shomron...

...This no doubt is why the Israelis at first thought the intifada was merely one more theatrical exercise...

...Shortly after the uprising that has become known as the intifada began in earnest, a group of Palestinians torched Sir Moses' carriage...

...Most surprised of all were the members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) "leadership...

...Belfast is bad, the thinking goes, but it sure beats Auschwitz...

...In the light of these sorts of intramural statements, articles by PLO operatives in Foreign Policy and other Western outlets obviously are useful not for what they say about the PLO itself, but for what it has concluded Western audiences would like to hear...

...Although the PLO has had little success in armed combat, it has scored impressive triumphs in the realm of political theater...

...As for Arafat's celebrated renunciation of terrorism on December 14, 1988, Livingstone and Halevy show it to have been of a piece with the calculation and self-aggrandizement that have marked his career...

...The intifada began," they write, "not as a national uprising to throw off the yoke of foreign domination but as a rebellion of the poor, an awesome outburst by the forsaken and forgotten at the bottom of the social heap...

...The white heat of violent regional isolation has seared away all concerns other than survival...

...Out of the turmoil emerged the Unified National Command, a group of skillful indigenous leaders in many respects as troublesome to the PLO as to Israel...

...Schiff and Ya'ari masterfully reconstruct the evolution of that development...

...Israel has violated this stricture in the years of occupation, with much help from its intransigent enemies...

...One of the present situation's crueler ironies is that their horror at even the thought of being occupiers prevented the Israelis from seeing how, in the Palestinians' eyes, that is in fact what they are and all they are...

...Since the intifada started in December 1987, public attention has focused on the countermeasures of the Israeli Army...

...The authors have performed a valuable service in gathering so much useful information between a single set of covers...

...And, of course, his refusal to condemn the foiled guerrilla landing on Tel Aviv beaches at the end of May has forced the suspension of the U.S.-PLO talks...

...Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secret Funds and the War Against Israel and the United States By Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy Morrow...

...Yitzchak Rabin, the hard-headed Defense Minister who would subsequently institute some of the IDF's more controversial policies, went off to the United States to sell Israel Bonds shortly after the initial riots and stayed for three weeks...

...Economic stagnation (helped along by Israel's heedlessness), resentment at political marginalization, and the spiritual energies released by radical Islam combined in an explosion of personal rage unrestrained by tactical considerations...

...As the intifada was getting under way, the Brookings Institution issued a hopelessly well-intentioned report advocating an international peace conference...

...envoy Robert H. Pelletreau Jr.'s interlocutors in the discussions with the PLO in Tunis is none other than Abdel Latif Abu Hijlah, who in 1973 murdered the United States Ambassador to the Sudan...

...Had Jews known the sheer violence the Zionist enterprise would entail, he said, it might never have gotten off the ground...

...Their book is absolutely essential reading for anyone who would try to understand Israel's recent past and likely future...

...In the end, the organic conditions for peace scarcely exist in the region...

...Soon it became the vehicle for keeping alive the Palestinian struggle, the sole issue binding the Arab countries, and for holding at bay the Marxists, fundamentalists and other Palestinian elements threatening their stability...

...To the Palestinians the Israelis are everywhere, forcing themselves on a subjected people with scores of deliberate humiliations...

...Just between Arafat's December '88 repudiation of terrorism and this past February, various PLO factions—including his own Fatah—launched some 16 cross-border attacks against Israel...

...In their closing chapter, Schiff and Ya'arioutlinetheir plan for asettlement...

...and that one of U.S...

...If there is a lesson to be learned from the intifada, it is that the first duty of morality is to think clearly...

...Negotiation is the preferred strategy of the moment, hecontinued, given Israel's relative military strength vis-àvis the Arab world and the collapse of the Eastern bloc, but there is no question that Israel is "an illegal state standing against history, whose lot will surely be to disappear...

...Israel's lapses of judgment, however, should not obscure the utter stupidity and malevolence that have characterized the widely accepted "legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people...

...Nafe insists that Israel continues to harbor the ambition to establish a Greater Israel, and sees itself as closer than ever to doing so...

...In their fearlessly clear-headed reportage, Schiff and Ya'ari, two of Israel's most distinguished and well-placed journalists, soberly elucidate the latest painful consequence of this mutual enmeshment in violent historical memory...