Meanwhile, on the West Bank...

While the attention of the U.S. Administration remains focused on the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon, Israelis keep driving one nail after another into the coffin of the year-old "Reagan Plan" for the West Bank—almost as though they are trying to make sure there is no way for it ever to rise up from its grave.

The various nails have been taking the form of land acquisitions, building of Jewish settlements, removal of elected Arab officials, encouragement of vigilantism, and intimidation and psychological warfare against the Arab inhabitants, and it is becoming clear that the withdrawal of Israeli troops and the turnover of the West Bank to Arab sovereignty—as called for by the Reagan Plan—would hardly be possible without a miracle.

The Reagan Plan actually died in its early infancy, in the view of most Middle East watchers, after Israel rejected it out of hand, the Palestinians viewed it with suspicion, and King Hussein finally decided not to enter negotiations on the plan because he was convinced the U.S. had no intention of backing up its words with deeds.

Only the U.S., despite everything, considers the plan still alive, but what has been happening in the West Bank during the many weeks since the Administration last seemed to be paying attention should be making it sit up and think.

A lot of what is happening can be found in microcosm in the ancient city of Hebron, where confrontations went on all summer between Israeli settlers and Palestinian Arabs who have been trying to resist armed harassment and a steady encroachment of their lands by the settlers. The confrontations came to a climax in July, when a Jewish seminary student standing at a bus stop with his submachine gun was stabbed to death by Arabs. Israeli settlers immediately retaliated by burning down the Arab central market, and several days later masked gunmen opened fire on the campus of Hebron's Islamic College, killing a student and two professors.

Behind these incidents lies a pattern of behavior by the government and the settlers which has frightening implications for the Palestinians.

Firstly, Palestinians see how far the Jewish settlers are ready to go, no matter how difficult or provocative their goal.

Hebron has a population of 70,000 Arab Moslems who are regarded as the most pious and fundamentalist in the West Bank. On the other hand, the Jewish population there totals fewer than 100, with another 5,000 living nearby in a Jewish settlement, Kiryat Arba, which overlooks the city. The Jews in this area, in counterpoint to the Moslems, are generally regarded as the most extremely nationalist of all Israelis. That, in fact, is why they are there: they are trying to be the thin edge of the wedge that will open up the West Bank's most fanatically Moslem city and turn it into a Jewish one. This is an openly-stated goal, which they regard as stemming from divine right. Once of the 100 Jews living in the Moslem city of 70,000 told a Western reporter: "The Arabs have to realize that this is a Jewish city." Intimidation, and a creeping annexation of one building after another—which recently has included one used as an Arab school—are their major weapons. Squads of vigilantes, headquartered in Kiryat Arba, venture forth with their machine guns and roam through Hebron and its environs to question suspected stone-throwers, smash the windows of Arab-owned cars, cut down the vineyards of Arab farmers and uproot electricity pylons belonging to the Arab municipality.

Secondly, the recent history of Hebron shows Palestinians that the extremist settlers generally get what they want in the end—even when the government initially condemns their objectives.

The Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba was first established by illegal squatters, whom the government denounced. Later, though, the government caved in to their persistence and made the settlement official. The city of Hebron, at the time, still had no Jews living in it. Thus began the next stage, in 1980, when a group of Jewish women and their children came down from Kiryat Arba and squatted in a stone building at the edge of what more than 50 years ago had been the small Jewish quarter of Hebron, now in the heart of the city. Once again, the government first condemned their presence as illegal, and then gave them official sanction. Eventually, the government announced a plan to reconstruct and settle the former Jewish quarter in its entirety, but was held up from doing so by a stay-order from Israel's supreme court. After the incidents in July, however, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister David Levy announced, despite the court order, that the government's "decision" to settle the area "will go ahead in its entirety." Science Minister Yuval Neeman dropped his own contribution into the settlers' hat by announcing that the government would establish a science center for them in Hebron, and Interior Minister Yosef Burg promised them that there would be a rabbinical court in Kiryat Arba by the time of the Jewish holy days in the fall—thus adding a new ingredient to the area's already seething cauldron.

Thirdly, the ugly double standard that is used to keep the Palestinians down was used with frightening effect during the recent incidents.

When the seminary student was killed, a curfew was imposed on Hebron, and its mayor and elected city council were both dismissed, on the grounds that they had created an "atmosphere of incitement" in the city. When the Jewish settlers from Kiryat Arba went on their rampage and burned down the Arab market, Israeli soldiers who were supposed to be guarding the area just stood and watched. Nor was any curfew imposed on Kiryat Arba, or any of its officials dismissed. Several days later, when gunmen killed Arabs at the Islamic College, the curfew was re-imposed on Hebron. This led the deposed Arab mayor to note, sardonically: "If the victim is Israeli, a curfew is imposed on the Arabs. If the victim is Arab, a curfew is also imposed on the Arabs." He could also have mentioned that while Israeli soldiers stood by and did nothing when settlers protested by wrecking a market, soldiers broke up an Arab protest demonstration by firing into the crowd and killing a teenage Arab girl.

In other areas of the West Bank as well as in Hebron, the aggressive behavior of settlers is being encouraged not only by the government's permission for them all to carry weapons—and even its tacit willingness to allow them to make "arrests" of Arabs suspected of wrongdoing—but by its worsening record in investigating and punishing crimes against Arabs.

Getting Away With Murder

In June, an assistant attorney-general, Judith Karp, resigned as head of a justice ministry committee which had completed a report a year earlier on police ineffectiveness in prosecuting Israeli vigilantes, to protest the fact that no action had been taken on its findings. The Attorney General has rejected requests, even from the Israeli parliament, to disclose the content of the report. Sources close to the Karp Committee told The Jerusalem Post that among the incidents that regularly go uninvestigated are "homicides, assaults, thefts, vandalism and conspiracy."

Some of the crimes against Arabs that remain unsolved have had major political significance—such as the crippling of two Arab mayors by a car bomb in 1980. Many others stem from the summary justice which is handed out by settlers to teenagers who protest the occupation by throwing stones: such as the shooting through the head of a 14-year-old girl after Arab youths threw stones at Israeli vehicles, and the abduction and killing of an 18-year-old youth who was forced into a settler's car after a stone-throwing demonstration.

Perhaps the most frightening development for Palestinians in the months since the demise of the Reagan plan has been the amount of talk about the idea of expelling the Arabs from the West Bank. The Arabs have grown used to hearing such suggestions from the likes of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the leader of the Kiryat Arba settlers, and from Rabbi Meir Kahane, the fanatical head of Israel's Kach party—although his recent article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times calling for "the removal of the Arabs in the land of Israel to their own Arab lands" gave his views a respectability which many found chilling. But there has also been talk of expulsion by Israelis holding official positions.

One of them is Meir Cohen, the deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, who not long ago was briefly in the running to become President of Israel. Last spring, Mr. Cohen told a parliamentary committee in public session that Israel had made a "calamitous mistake" when it did not drive out 200,000 to 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank during the 1967 war. "Things would have been simpler today: no Palestine problem, no stones, no demonstration," he said. He then astonished his parliamentary colleagues—who like most Israelis adhere at least in public to the line that nearly a million Arabs fled from the Israeli armies voluntarily during the fighting that accompanied the establishment of Israel—with the words: "I learned exactly how it should be done, from the...commanders of my unit in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1948 war." At the same time as this kind of talk goes on, official Israeli organizations have been actively promoting the idea that "Jordan is Palestine"—a campaign which a Palestinian intellectual has described as an attempt "to cloak expulsion in the guise of justice and historical legitimacy."

Occupation Takes Its Toll

How are the Arabs in the West Bank taking it all? They are certainly not giving up. Some indication of this became evident from a recent poll on the West Bank in which 92 percent of the respondents said they were solidly behind Yassir Arafat. On the other hand, the unending intimidation and humiliation, and the fear that their chances of being free from Israeli occupation during their lifetimes may be fading away, have certainly taken their toll.

It is probable that the frustrations of occupation were at least a contributing cause—if not the only one—of the mysterious illness which swept the West Bank last spring and put more than 900 Arabs, including nearly 700 adolescent school-girls, into hospitals. The symptoms included headache, dizziness, blurred vision, abdominal pain and fainting, and the victims were convinced they had been poisoned. Teams of doctors from the World Health Organization and from the U.S. Public Health Service who investigated the epidemic failed to find any physical cause. Both teams concluded that psychological factors were involved. The U.S. team called it an "acute illness" which was "induced by anxiety," and added that the team had "observed no evidence of malingering or of deliberate fabrication of symptoms."

One Arab official, who was convinced that a deliberate physical poisoning of Arabs had taken place, did not feel any better after reading that psychological pressures could have been the cause. "To us," he said, "this is also a poison. A poison of the mind, which is worse than the poison of the body."