17

1988–1990

‘Everything is written in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and death.’

Yehuda Amichai1

STRETCHING THE ROPE

On a wintry day in January 1989 Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s famously taciturn prime minister, flew by helicopter from Jerusalem to an army camp overlooking Nablus, capital of the Palestinian intifada and the largest town on the West Bank. On a muddy hillside he met IDF paratroopers on reserve duty, who spoke bitterly of having to do the dirty work of crushing the uprising. ‘In order to enforce order in the casbah we must be brutally violent against people who are innocent of any crime,’ one soldier said. ‘I violate army regulations every day – and this weakens me and strengthens them … Everything we do bolsters the intifada.’ Shamir, huddled in a blue parka against the biting cold, drummed his fingers on the table in front of him as he listened impassively to the catalogue of frustration. ‘We hate these PLO terrorists,’ he shouted angrily afterwards, ‘because they force us to kill Arab children.’ General Amram Mitzna, the West Bank military commander, looked embarrassed behind his beard.²

The new year had not seen any let-up in the pace of events. The UNLU called for a day of escalation to mark the anniversary of Fatah’s first military operation against Israel in 1965. And thirteen Palestinian militants had been expelled across the Lebanese border – an indication of Israel’s determination to continue wielding the iron fist despite diplomatic gains by the PLO and demoralization at home. Petrol bombs were thrown and curfews imposed. Around that same time, several attempted raids across the Lebanese border occurred that were the work of Syrian-backed groups opposed to Yasser Arafat’s strategy. They sought to undermine his nascent relationship with the US and demonstrate that they, at least, had not abandoned the armed struggle. And it was not only Israeli soldiers who were angry with Shamir. A few days earlier the Likud leader had been heckled and called a traitor while visiting settlers at Har Bracha, also near Nablus, where he promised retribution after a Jewish taxi driver had been shot dead. Their demand was for Israel to act decisively to crush the intifada – and to improve security for settlers. But the new fear, in the heartland of Samaria, was that even the steely Likud leader would buckle under mounting international pressure to negotiate with the PLO.

Shamir, prodded by the Americans, did put forward a proposal for holding elections in the West Bank – to choose Palestinians with whom Israel could negotiate some form of autonomy – but he ruled out any talks with the PLO or the dismantling of settlements. Arafat rejected any elections as unacceptable as long as the occupation continued. These responses fitted a familiar pattern: ‘The Israelis’, recorded the US diplomat Dennis Ross, ‘would try to minimize the scope of any idea, assuming correctly that we would inevitably build on the idea, even transform it, as we tried to sell it to the Arabs or the Palestinians, who constantly tried to maximize whatever we offered.’3 Israelis on the left and centre wanted to see a more significant response to the shift on the other side. Furious controversy erupted over the leak – blamed on the Labour party – of an IDF intelligence assessment warning that Israel could not ignore the changes that had taken place in the PLO and predicting that the US would continue to press for practical Israeli steps towards direct negotiations. Shamir denied the story, and was accused of lying, which did not inspire confidence.⁴ ‘Israel,’ joked another government minister, ‘is like a man who has jumped from the 30th floor of a building, and, passing the 5th floor window, says “so far so good”. But will the parachute open before it is too late?’

Shamir’s offer to hold elections was conditional on an end to violence. Israel, meanwhile, looked for new ways to deal with the intifada. In May it imposed an indefinite ban on Gazans working inside the green line in response to the killing of collaborators and the abduction and killing of a hitchhiking soldier, with a second soldier missing and presumed killed in similar circumstances. In the event, the ban lasted just a few days but this drastic step was meant to put pressure on Palestinian workers whose pay in normal times was the largest single source of income in Gaza.5 The ban also seemed likely to shut down a vital safety valve and worsen an already deteriorating economic situation. ‘Now there will be more intifada, not less,’ insisted a ragged-looking Palestinian labourer from Khan Yunis, sent packing by police from a Tel Aviv building site. ‘If you stretch the rope too far it’ll simply break. What do they think? That we won’t help each other? No-one has died of hunger yet during our intifada. The Israelis say they’ll manage without us, but I don’t believe it.’ The move led immediately to requests for non-Arab workers to replace the absent Gazans.⁶ At the same time Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, was arrested, along with his close colleague, Abdelaziz al-Rantisi, and 250 supporters, on the grounds that the group was responsible for the fate of the two missing soldiers. It was testimony to the growing threat posed by the Islamist organization. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were formally outlawed shortly afterwards.

The intifada, international diplomacy and Israel’s volatile domestic politics were all dangerously intertwined all that summer. Shamir faced more right-wing wrath in June after another settler was killed near Nablus. The prime minister was jostled and abused, cries of ‘Traitor’ and ‘Death to the Arabs’ ringing out at the funeral of the victim. Ariel Sharon expressed his personal grief – and pursued his own political ambitions – by reciting the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, continuing his campaign against the Palestinian election plan. Shamir warned of the risk of civil war if divisions deepened. ‘It is not a question of civil war or anarchy,’ Sharon retorted. ‘We are fully in control and able to deal with the root of the problem. We must not just say “we will destroy”. We must destroy.’⁷ Days later Shamir yielded to the hawks and ended any lingering ambiguity by declaring that he would not accept US conditions for negotiation and that settlement would continue – qualifying his elections plan almost to the point of extinction. The PLO blamed Israel for undermining efforts to achieve peace. A cartoon portrayed a tiny Shamir, triumphantly raising his manacled and padlocked hands as a giant Sharon strides away with the key. Less than twenty-four hours later, a young Gazan from the Nusseirat refugee camp, reportedly shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ (‘God is greater/greatest’), grabbed the wheel of a bus on the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem highway and forced it off the road into a gorge, killing fourteen passengers. The perpetrator, who survived, told investigators he was avenging beatings of relatives by Israeli soldiers. This chillingly novel form of attack was the worst single incident of terrorism inside Israel since the 1978 Coastal Road massacre.8 In its wake, several Arabs were forced off buses and beaten in West Jerusalem. Activists of the far-right, racist Kach movement, led by the Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League in the US, attacked a group of left-wing Israeli women holding a vigil against the suppression of the intifada. Sharon, meanwhile, called openly for Arafat to be ‘eliminated’, while Dan Shomron, the IDF chief of staff, was publicly criticized, along with General Mitzna, for his handling of the intifada. It was around this time that Shomron was reported to be reading A Savage War of Peace, the British historian Alistair Horne’s magisterial account of the Algerian war of independence, and to have distributed copies to his senior officers. The parallel that interested thoughtful Israelis was that although the French army was militarily far superior to the FLN, that advantage had not translated into victory over the anticolonial rebels.

BREAKING THE BARRIER OF FEAR

Palestinian defiance masked hard times. In the occupied territories popular songs and poetry praised sacrifices and solidarity, hailing the sense that now that the ‘barrier of fear’ had been crossed there was no going back. ‘Stone and Onion and a Bucket of Water’ and other tracks on the album Children of Palestine, by the Jerusalem composer Mustafa al-Kurd, blared out from cassettes everywhere, evoking the mass demonstrations that had grabbed the attention of the world and galvanized the Palestinians in the first year of the intifada.9 But the human and material costs were rising steadily. Economic pressure mounted in June when Israel adjusted its closure policy, requiring anyone crossing the green line to be issued with a new magnetic ID card. They were not given to released prisoners or administrative detainees. Many cards were confiscated by militants, forcing Palestinians to boycott Israel regardless of the financial hardship it meant. In Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, the Israelis confiscated property in lieu of unpaid taxes – attracting sympathetic American media coverage of the Palestinians because of inevitable comparisons with the Boston Tea Party.¹⁰

Another growing problem was the beating and killing of collaborators. It highlighted the gap between the intellectuals and ideologues who represented and spoke for PLO factions and the young militants who maintained security, using resonant, comic-book hero names like the Black Panthers, or Red Eagles: the ‘Striking Forces’ of the intifada. Others were known simply as al-mulathamin, ‘the masked ones’. Sabah Kanaan, murdered with knives, axes and iron bars in the old casbah in Nablus, was accused of prostitution and collaborating with the enemy. The Shin Bet recruited agents among drug dealers and prostitutes who could be coerced or induced to cooperate. Palestinians often encountered this. Israelis got a rare glimpse of the sleazy side of the occupation when a Gazan pimp who had worked for the security service murdered seven people in the slums of Tel Aviv.¹¹

Killings of collaborators were often extraordinarily bold, perhaps because the perpetrators knew that Palestinian witnesses would be unlikely to testify. In one case a young man with a silenced pistol sauntered casually up to the police station in the centre of Nablus and shot down a Palestinian who had worked openly with the army and the Shin Bet – and carried an Uzi submachine gun and a walkie-talkie to prove it. Later that day the same weapon was used to kill an injured collaborator lying helpless in a hospital bed. In Ramallah a young man named Subhi Abu Ghosh was gunned down by Israelis disguised as Arabs – probably from the IDF undercover ‘mistaravim’ unit codenamed Duvdevan (Cherry) – who arrived at a cafe in cars with West Bank licence plates in the company of a known collaborator whose role was to identify the wanted man they were looking for. In Yaabed, collaborators patrolled openly with their Israeli-issued guns.12 They were seen as fair game. ‘The political echelon has no control over what the Striking Forces do,’ said an East Jerusalem activist. ‘And it is clear to us that the repeated waves of arrests [by the Israelis] created vacuums in the local leadership, and this allows younger people to take the initiative in doing something they see as heroic or nationalist.’¹³ In September 1989, amid growing alarm, senior Palestinian political figures intervened when four people in a small West Bank village were about to be killed for collaboration; they were spared and allowed instead to promise to mend their ways and sever contact with the Israelis. Faisal Husseini, who was seen as Arafat’s personal representative, made similar efforts to stop these killings. But the phenomenon was an inevitable by-product of this low-intensity war. ‘We can do our job investigating collaborators because we have learned ourselves in Israeli jails how interrogations are conducted,’ one young militant explained. A Black Panther member said: ‘With all my respect to Faisal Husseini, I would like to remind him that the collaborators do not inform on him, but on us … Husseini does not live with us here, and can therefore not decide who is a collaborator. We are the ones who know.’¹⁴ By the second anniversary of the intifada, in December 1989, an estimated 150 Palestinians had been killed as suspected collaborators. Israeli spokesmen often said that only a small number were genuine informers. Fifty thousand Palestinians had also been through the prison system. By 1989 about 13,000 were imprisoned – 1,800 of them in administrative detention without trial.¹⁵

In the absence of any changes on the ground or concrete political gains apart from the faltering PLO dialogue with the Americans, the uprising had itself become routine. International media coverage had been extremely important in drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians but its intensity lessened over time, not least because of the higher and more novel drama of the revolutions that were transforming the landscape of Eastern Europe throughout 1989. But the media could mislead as well as inform. The TV cameras captured repeated clashes, but rarely filmed the Palestinians who continued to work inside Israel, or the Israelis, especially in the Tel Aviv area, who were carrying on with their lives undisturbed by or oblivious to the sporadic unrest across the green line. ‘The situation in the territories was shunted – or repressed – to a marginal place in terms of public interest’, noted B’Tselem, the newly founded Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. ‘The types of stories that led … the news in the electronic media or made headlines in the written press in the past, are today noted laconically or relegated to inside pages of the newspaper.’16 There was an economic cost to be sure, but for the Israelis this was mitigated by the import of foreign workers and a fall in unemployment among Jews who replaced absent Palestinians. In June 1989 about 90 per cent of Palestinians from Gaza were still working, though the figure was only 56 per cent from the West Bank.¹⁷ Life went on despite the tensions. In Jerusalem, Jewish taxi drivers took to spreading keffiyehs on their dashboards when driving in the eastern side of town, while Arabs in West Jerusalem displayed stickers supporting Beitar, the local soccer team notorious for its racist chants. It was hard to be precise about the political impact inside Israel, though something had clearly changed. ‘The achievement of the uprising’, commented the Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea towards the end of a momentous year, ‘is that the vast majority of Israelis who were happy with the status quo are now much more unhappy with it.’¹⁸

PEACE NOW?

Changes in the Israeli peace camp proved the point. Peace Now had been born as a mass movement after the Sadat initiative in 1977 and had grown in importance during the Lebanon war in 1982. On the eve of the intifada, however, it had been languishing in limbo for some time. It supported the Labour party’s hazy commitment to ‘territorial compromise’ but remained cautious about dealing with the PLO: the hazards of advocating that were underlined when the veteran Israeli peacenik Abie Nathan (who had famously flown a plane named Shalom to Egypt to try to see Nasser in 1966) was gaoled for meeting Arafat. It was not until the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in Algiers in November 1988 that Peace Now came out and called unreservedly for Israeli negotiations with the PLO.¹⁹ Individual Jewish peace activists had forged close ties with Faisal Husseini and other Fatah supporters in Jerusalem. Now contacts went beyond the small but vocal anti-Zionist left to include Peace Now, with both sides expressing a commitment to oppose violence and end the occupation. Husseini and other Fatah members regularly took part in public meetings with Israelis.20 Peace Now was itself challenged by smaller, more radical groups, such as Dai laKibbush (Enough Occupation) and Yesh Gvul (There is a Border), demanding an end to occupation and offering support to soldiers, usually reservists, who refused to serve in the territories – even though numbers remained small. At least forty new protest groups were created in the first few months of the intifada. Women in Black began weekly vigils in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, drawing comparisons with the Argentinian mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and attracting abuse from drivers and passers-by. Other Jewish doves offered practical help, with a group of architects and engineers forming a committee to rebuild houses demolished by the army in the West Bank village of Beita after the killing of a Jewish settler girl who was out on an organized hike – the traditional Zionist way of laying claim to the land. Pickets outside prisons and detention camps became routine.²¹ A Council for Peace and Security, dominated by thirty retired IDF generals and other senior officers and security officials, was formed to make the argument that occupying the West Bank was no longer a military necessity.

Tolerance of dissent, however, still had its limits. On the second anniversary of the intifada in December 1989, the state-run Israel Broadcasting Authority banned two popular Hebrew songs that protested about the treatment of Palestinians and Israeli indifference to the situation. And when B’Tselem expressed concern about the deaths of 120 Palestinian children, Yitzhak Rabin replied acerbically that the organization should have written to their parents instead.²² But the Jewish death toll was barely a score – fewer than in any month of traffic accidents and fewer than a twentieth of the Arab lives lost. For most Israeli Jews, the war in their own backyard was still ‘like a war on a distant continent’.²³ And politically, there had still been little significant movement by the Israeli government. Underscoring the point, on the last day of 1989, Shamir plunged the unity coalition into crisis when he sacked the ex-Likudnik Ezer Weizman, now the Labour minister for science, for holding unauthorized contacts with the PLO. Weizman had advised the Palestinians, through Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli-Arab intermediary, to accept Israel’s West Bank elections proposal. On the same day tensions rose after an unusually heavy-handed police crackdown on an orderly Peace Now rally in Jerusalem. ‘For once Palestinian and Israeli demonstrators experienced without discrimination the same violent repression by the police, who were totally baffled by what was going on,’ recalled one participant.24 Mustafa Barghouti, an independent leftist, later remembered that rally as a high point for the common hopes of Palestinians and dovish Israelis for a two-state solution to their conflict.²⁵

Yet for Palestinians, Sari Nusseibeh concluded, the intifada had created a paradoxical situation:

Although it made Israel fully cognizant of the cost and burden of the occupation, and although it forced the international community into a more active role in the political process through which Palestinians hoped to achieve freedom and independence in their own state alongside Israel … the overall political result was a purgatorial reality, in which the Palestinians could neither reach that sought-after independence nor fully integrate themselves into Israel. In other words, they were neither free from Israel nor equals within it.²⁶

Shamir’s interpretation was even starker. It suggested that compromise with the Palestinians was simply not possible. The intifada, in his unbending view,

was not a demonstration; not a spontaneous venting of frustration; not civil disobedience. It was a form of warfare against Israel and against the Arabs who want to live in peace with us. Ultimately, it was continuation of the war against Israel’s existence, its immediate purpose to push us back to the 1967 lines and to establish another [sic] Palestinian state in the areas we leave … [It] changed nothing in our basic situation. It served instead to underscore the existential nature of the conflict.²⁷