The Intifada: From Stones to Knives

By Frank Collins

The increasingly draconian methods of the Israeli army are not only failing to quell the intifada but, on the contrary, are provoking the intifada into forms of primitive violence previously abandoned.

The inability of the army to restore order and security for Israelis in the occupied territories, and especially in East Jerusalem, has infuriated the Israeli public. Ordinary Israelis are now lashing out at Palestinians and the Israeli political left in a new frenzy of hatred. The anti-Palestinian disorders at the funeral of Rabbi Meir Kahane revealed the increasingly violent aspect of present-day Israel racism and set a new low in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The intifada, relatively quiescent since the installation of the new Likud government this summer, has been reactivated by Palestinian frustration at diplomatic reverses abroad and the intensification of the cruelties of the occupation.

Great Hopes

Palestinians, their Western sympathizers, and the Israeli peace camp have set great hopes on the intifada as a catalyst for a peace process that would lead to the establishment of a new Palestinian state. To this end, the PLO had made fundamental concessions. It finally accepted the UN Security Council's land-for-peace resolutions 242 and 338, and abandoned armed struggle.

The particular peace process that was launched by the US, however, was regarded by most Palestinians as nothing more than an American ploy to give the Israelis time to crush the intifada. The fact that the US promoted a peace plan based upon the blatantly insincere Shamir elections proposal, which Shamir himself then rejected, was seen by Palestinians in the occupied territories as proof of American bad faith. The breakdown of the US-PLO dialogue, therefore, did not add much to the existing Palestinian disillusionment.

The last straw in the breaking of Palestinian trust in the United States was the American veto, after the killing of 15 Palestinians and the wounding of another 1,000 on one day in May, of a UN Security Council resolution to station United Nations observers in the occupied territories to monitor violations of Palestinian human rights. The United States had given some initial indications that it would vote for it.

Far more than was realized in the United States, the Palestinians had expected that a UN observer team could protect them against Israeli human rights abuses. The expressions of disappointment that I heard from Palestinians after the US veto were the most bitter of any that I had heard in the seven years I have been going to the Middle East. As all hope of a diplomatic settlement based on American good offices vanished, restraints on intifada violence in the interest of influencing US public opinion now seemed pointless.

From Guerrilla Tactics to Open Struggle

Until very recently, the violence accompanying the intifada's demonstrations, strikes and civil disobedience had been largely confined to the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails at armed Israelis.

The PLO outside leadership's banning of firearms at the outset of the intifada represented a sharp reversal of the advocacy of armed struggle that had been maintained by the PLO since its founding. This represented a transformation from reliance on guerrilla tactics by individuals and small clandestine groups to an open struggle of the whole Palestinian community, aside from the small residue of collaborators and informers.

As pointed out by Ian S. Lustick in an important article in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1990, this change of PLO policy from armed struggle to restraint in the use of force, meant that the conflict had matured from a "solipsistic" use of violence, intended mainly to raise the self esteem of the Palestinian people, to an "objective, very clearly and explicitly [designed] to intimidate, scare, 'persuade,' Israelis into ending the occupation by raising the felt costs of continuing it."

The communique of the Palestinians' Unified National Command (UNC) following the Oct. 8 Al Aqsa massacre by the Israeli border guards contained this chilling passage, "Every soldier or settler in Palestine is considered to be a target to be liquidated. " The subsequent spate of stabbings of Israeli Jews represents a partial turning back by the intifada from open mass community action to clandestine individual actions. The stabbings fit Lustick's definition of "other directed" objectives, as opposed to "solipsistic " self-inspiration purposes. The stabbings do not, however, depart from the PLO ban on the use of firearms in the intifada.

UNC's "liquidation" communique did not result from any Palestinian consensus, however. The majority PLO faction in Nablus has issued a bulletin condemning killings of Palestinians by Israelis, of Israelis by Palestinians and of Palestinians by Palestinians. Highly respected Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini's account of his personal experiences during the Hararn Al-Sharif massacre, published in the December 1990 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, spoke strongly against hatred of the Israelis. And Imad Abu Sanina, a Palestinian stabbed by Jewish terrorists in a Jerusalem butcher shop, refused to press charges saying, "Let Jews and Arabs live in peace."

The stabbings have electrified the Israeli public more than all of the intifada violence.

An escalation of killings by Palestinians, however, does not depend on majority assent. For individual or clandestine group action, only the concurrence of a tiny minority is required. The present disillusionment of most Palestinians with the prospects of help from either the Israeli left or from the US *government assures that killings of Israelis by Palestinians will continue to escalate.

The stabbings have electrified the Israeli public more than all of the intifada violence. After three Israelis were stabbed to death in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem in November, the Israeli government banned Palestinians in the occupied territories from entering Israel. "The separation is intended to minimize the exposure of Israelis to the knifings and firearms attacks ordered by the intifada leadership and to give the army and the police breathing space to deal with this new phase of Arab terrorism," Israeli authorities explained.

The ban was approved by virtually the entire Israeli public, ranging from Rehavam Ze'evi of the right-wing Moleret party, which favors expulsion of all Palestinians, to Yossi Sarid of the liberal Civil Rights Movement. Many Israelis thought that the ban on Arabs from the occupied territories would be permanent, and were disappointed when it was lifted in a few days. The new plan is to increase greatly the number of Palestinians individually barred from entering Israel as "security cases."

In fact, total closure could not be sustained for more than a short period, Low-paid Palestinian labor is essential to the Israeli economy, particularly in the construction industry, which is building new apartments for Soviet Jewish immigrants.

Ironically, Israel continued to depend on Palestinian labor, despite a large pool of unemployed native Israelis and the new Soviet Jewish immigrants. Neither the Israelis nor the Russians will accept the low wages, long hours and deplorable working conditions prevailing for Palestinians.

The interdependence of the Israelis and the Palestinians underlines the grave dangers to both parties should the intifada, and Israeli efforts to suppress it, escalate beyond present levels of violence. Indeed, occupation authorities opposed any prolonged closure of the borders, fearing the desperation of impoverished Palestinians shut out from working in Israel would "aggravate the security situation. " A complete separation of the two peoples, as advocated even by some of the leaders of Israel's "Peace Now" movement, is presently unworkable in view of the presence of close to 100,000 Jewish "settlers" in the occupied territories.

The future course of the escalated intifada therefore depends largely on Israeli actions in response to external pressures emanating from the US, the United Nations and the international crisis enveloping the Mideast.

Dr. Frank Collins is an American journalist who divides his time between Washington, DC and Jerusalem.