The Israeli Occupation Three Years After the Intifada

By Israel Shahak

The effects of the first three years of the Palestinian intifada, are illustrated by recalling the situation that existed prior to the intifada's outbreak on Dec. 8, 1987. For all of its unspeakable injustice and discrimination, the Israeli occupation was operating smoothly, fully covering its very low cost by taxation and other forms of draining the inhabitants of the territories of their money.

The number of Israeli soldiers stationed in the territories for the purpose of "enforcing order" did not normally exceed between 7,000 and 8,000, while in periods of occasional "turbulence, " it increased to a maximum of 20,000. In addition to the soldiers, a few hundred border guards, usually stationed in the Gaza Strip, could move quickly anywhere tension occurred.

The main pillar of Israeli rule in the territories, however, was then the local police, commanded from the top by Israelis-Jews and also some Palestinians. Locally recruited Palestinians, however, were the mainstay of the occupation regime, and the primary source of information to Israeli secret services. Recruitment of local Palestinians to the police was not difficult, although, in true apartheid fashion, their salaries were much lower than those of the Israelis.

Israeli Jews could safely travel everywhere, even to the most remote villages or to refugee camps, where they often behaved with extraordinary arrogance. Today all this sounds like fairy tales from another era.

Obstacles to Self-Emancipation

This "idyllic" situation was not due to any discretion by the Israeli army or occupation authorities. Rather, it was due to the lack of organization for a struggle for freedom on the part of the occupied Palestinians. The PLO bureaucracy and the Palestinian intelligentsia inside Palestine pretended that a Palestinian resistance existed when it did not. Nor did they mention aspects of Palestinian society which facilitated the Israeli rule, such as the Israeli ability to recruit a Palestinian police force. This Palestinian bureaucratic taboo against mentioning anything which would belie the slogans has always acted as an obstacle to national self-emancipation.

Without this taboo, in fact, the intifada could have achieved even more than it has. No reader of PLO publications prior to the intifada could have surmised that many Palestinians faithfully served Israel as policemen. Likewise, no reader of these publications could know that the Palestinian guerrillas were relatively easily defeated, largely owing to the skills of Palestinian bedouin scouts serving the Israeli army.

Needless to say, the situation by December of 1990 was very different.

In fact, before the intifada, the daily oppression, humiliations, land confiscations and arbitrariness of the Israeli regime were steadily increasing. This increase, duly recorded by the Hebrew press, was the chief reason for the outbreak of the intifada.

Readers of Israel's Hebrew-language press are aware of how outrageously the Israeli armed forces were behaving before the intifada. On June 19, 1987, Eyal Ehrlich reported in an article in Haaretz headlined, "An occupier against his will," the testimony of a young Israeli soldier assigned to serve in the border guards. Whenever a Palestinian is accosted to show his I.D., the soldier wrote, its checking is always accompanied by "a slap, a punch. a kick."

"The border guards usually enjoy beating the Arabs," the account continues. "They derive pleasure from it...

"Sometimes I feel like a Nazi when I watch my friends in action. I try hard to stay away from one of my commanders ... He always behaves very badly toward the locals: with violence, beatings, and the like...

"The soldiers spit in the faces of the Arabs, or they kick them in the testicles. And there is always that slap in the face. "

An article in Hadashot of July 7, 1987 by Menahem Shizaf was headlined, "Border guards order the Arabs to masturbate and to lick the floor." It described the treatment meted out to Palestinian workers from the occupied territories who were found spending the night in shacks in Israel rather than returning to their homes.

Those horrors of Israeli rule in the territories before the intifada were made possible by factors within Palestinian society, which can be described as official and unofficial collaboration. Official collaborators were the mukhtars, and many mayors of towns and villages, operating as executors of the Israeli administration's orders. A parallel network of unofficial collaborators, most of them armed, played an even more important role, in return for which they were allowed to tyrannize their localities.

A single Shabak (secret police) operative could, before the intifada, dominate a big Palestinian village merely by using such collaborators effectively.

A very good description of this situation is contained in Yellow Wind by David Grossman, first published in Hebrew as a series of articles early in 1987, and now available in English (from the AET Book Club). He described a "fatherly looking" military governor lecturing a group of "his mukhtars" as if they were small children, and a Palestinian collaborator, swaggering in the middle of Nablus with a huge revolver on his hip, who terrified everyone with whom he came in contact.

Israeli Rule Rests on Force

Needless to say, the situation by December of 1990 was very different. Israeli rule rests entirely on "naked" force, exercised by the Israeli soldiers and border guards themselves. The local police, whose size dwindled radically when intifada militants forced its locally recruited members to resign, now comprises mainly Israelis, both Jews and Arabs. It no longer plays any major role either in criminal or in political cases. This is primarily because of the unreliability of the police, but also because of the new policy of Defense Minister Moshe Arens, designed to enforce order in at least some selected spots in the territories.

The number of soldiers deployed in the territories is enormous. Even in quiet times, it amounts to some 150,000 soldiers, in addition to the border guards and other functionaries. During the frequent moments of tension, such as Palestinian National Days or in the aftermath of the Oct. 8 massacre on Haram. Al-Sharif, this figure is even higher. I derived this figure from semi-official but unpublished Israeli sources, and I am convinced it is accurate.

Since so many soldiers are deployed in policing the territories, training programs are suspended or neglected, with disastrous effects on the army's efficiency.

The intifada can be said to have triumphed insofar as it has hurt the combat efficiency of the Israeli forces, with the exception of the air force, and thereby indirectly has altered the whole balance of power in the Mideast.

Moreover, the achievements of this huge force in policing the territories are problematic. Events in the territories on the third anniversary of the intifada, commemorated on Dec. 9, 1990, as reported by the Hebrew press and Palestinian informants, demonstrate this. Yizhar Be'er, writing in Haaretz Dec. 10, reported: "The IDF soldiers patrolled all the main roads, were in control of all the big cities and surveyed the terrain from their lookouts on the roofs and watchtowers. At the same time, in all the less easily accessible spots, throngs of youngsters, dressed in home-made uniforms, were marching to the sound of trumpets and drums and proudly waving the Palestinian flag.

Most West Bank villages can be considered "liberated zones."

Such marches were held not only "in about 400 villages" of the West Bank, but also in some smaller towns, like Bir Zeit. Some Jews, journalists or others, attended these marches by invitation. They later reported that in huge areas only a rare army patrol in jeeps could be seen. The army had orders not to enter many such places, and on this and many other days, they became virtual "liberated zones."

So what exactly were the soldiers doing? The manpower deployed on that day, although unknown in size, can certainly be presumed to be much larger than the "usual " 150,000. The point is that their deployment was mostly static. From the strictly military point of view, this is the most wasteful mode of deployment. It means that the refugee camps in the territories are by now watched from outside, from fortified lookout points built on nearby hills, or from specially constructed platforms, from which the main entrances to the camps are watched day and night. Some refugee camps have been surrounded by high walls. Inside the big cities, there is a dense network of fortified lookouts located on the roofs of the houses. Along the main roads used by the settlers or other Israeli drivers, care is being taken that no stretch of such roads remains unobserved, at least in daytime.

Other areas, including most West Bank villages, can be considered "liberated zones, " as they frequently are called in the Hebrew press, where Israeli authorities appear only rarely, and within the framework of military operations. Refugee camps, middle-sized towns, and suburban neighborhoods located at a distance from the main roads form a category in between. They are ceaselessly observed from lookouts, and army patrols venture there from once to several times a day. But, apart from that, the Israelis do not really rule there. New reservists assigned to the Gaza Strip are handed a detailed map indicating places safe for driving and walking; "grey areas" which can be observed from the lookouts or which are frequently patrolled; and all the rest, where the entry of armed soldiers or Israeli civilians is expressly forbidden, except on specific orders. The latter amount to the larger part of the inhabited areas in the Gaza Strip. Economic activities of the kinds strictly prohibited by the Palestinian popular committees, such as buying Israeli produce, continue, but only under the direct protection of soldiers. One article vividly describes how Palestinian peddlers hawk Israeli bananas while standing under the walls of the lookout posts, but nowhere else. The situation in the West Bank is essentially similar.

Computer Checks/"Initiated Actions"

What about the rest of the territories? Rule can be exercised in only two ways: computer checks and the infrequent army raids referred to as "initiated actions."

Palestinians who need to travel the main roads, or who work in Israel, are being stopped at the countless roadblocks and other places for a check of their I.D. cards. Often, such checks are made by radio communication with the central computer of the Israeli administration, which stores all the personal data. Failure to pay any taxes or fines by residents of a "liberated zone" is recorded there. When stopped at a roadblock, anyone delinquent in such payments is detained. If he owns something like a car which can be confiscated on the spot, it will be. Then, he and/or his family must proceed to an Israeli administration office, where they are forced to accept its demands in order to obtain a personal release or restoration of property.

The second way of keeping the "liberated zones" under some Israeli control, the "initiated actions," involves the entrance into a village, town, or refugee camp by a sizable force. They detain all the males more than 14 years old for one to three days, and search all the houses. All the IDs are then checked by the computer, with the aim of arresting and confiscating the property of anyone delinquent in tax payments.

Those who take precautions not to be arrested by the Israeli authorities, however, can stay out of their reach for years, living unmolested as honored activists. They avoid the main roads in daytime, and are helped by a good early warning system in some areas, which enables them to escape in time.

A whole category of "wanted" persons, who with the help of such simple precautions avoid capture for long periods of time, has emerged. Sometimes an elite Israeli unit will raid a locality for the sole purpose of capturing or killing a "wanted" militant. But, most significantly, to do so the raiders usually disguise themselves in Arab dress, in contrast to the situation before the intifada. Then, even in the most remote villages or the refugee camps, Palestinians used to be arrested in their own houses by small Israeli units guided by the collaborators, or else Palestinians were summoned by the mukhtar to his house, where the secret police were waiting to apprehend them. In the towns, the job was done by the local police.

At present, most collaborators live either inside Israel or in special towns or well fortified strongholds, avoiding the localities of their earlier residence. In larger cities they are stigmatized and socially isolated. The mukhtars, even if they have stayed, refuse to cooperate with Israel. The Israeli army has to make all arrests by itself, without proxies. If it fails, the wanted persons remain free.

The soldiers operating under such conditions find themselves susceptible to new kinds of stress, unknown to the older protest movements of enlisted men. The newer forms of protest can be either overt and organized or covert and passive.

Typical manifestations of the former were two recent public protests of officers and NCOs from different reserve units against the prolongation of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. Both were so different from earlier protests that they attracted the attention of journalists, who described them in great detail in two articles, in the Dec.7 issue of Yediot Ahronot and the Maariv. One of the two groups wrote a letter to Prime Minister Shamir demanding unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Signatories included two majors, five captains, four lieutenants and one sergeant-major, all from a "special paratrooper unit. "

Such petitions, however, can easily be offset by far more numerous calls for more bloodshed, especially by soldiers serving in less prestigious formations. The majority of Israelis, particularly the young, at present support tougher policies than those actually being applied. The present Israeli policies, which cause enormous suffering to the Palestinians, may still wear down the Palestinians, defeating the intifada through the sheer excess of suffering inflicted. Much depends on the outcome of the Gulf crisis and other faraway developments. Therefore, even after three years, it is impossible to predict the final outcome of the intifada.

Dr. Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and retired professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League of Human and Civil Rights. His monthly translations From the Hebrew Press are available to Washington Report readers for $25 a year.