News Analysis: After a Year of Arab Unrest, Israel Can’t Shake off Intifada

On Tuesday evening, Dec. 8, 1987, an Israeli truck driver, driving down a narrow road between Ashkelon and Gaza, plowed into two vans carrying Arab laborers home to the Gaza Strip from their jobs in Israel.

Four of them were killed. At their funeral the next day, tempers flared. Speakers claimed the truck driver diliberately rammed the vans. They said he was avenging the fatal stabbing in Gaza earlier that week of an Israeli salesman, Shlomo Sakal.

Angry youths staged demonstrations against Israel. By the weekend, rioting spread throughout the Gaza Strip and into the even more populous West Bank.

The riots have not ended yet. They were given a name: “intifada,” an Arabic term that means “shaking off” — the way an animal shakes off dirt or parasites.

The purpose of the intifada is to shake off the Israeli administration of the territories.

A year after the unrest began, Israeli policymakers remain divided over how best to deal with it. They agree, however, on one thing: It is not over and the end is not in sight.

It may have weakened. It may have changed direction. It is wounded, but still alive; hurting, but still inflicting a heavy burden on Israel.

The Palestinians have paid a heavy price. The Israelis have tried to crush the intifada with an iron fist, with soldiers of the Israel Defense Force using live ammunition and at times brutal force to disperse demonstrators.

CASUALTIES 20 TIMES HIGHER

To date, at least 301 Palestinians have been killed, according to IDF body counts, and at least 3,640 have been wounded.

At present, there are some 5,500 Palestinians in jail, 1,500 of them under administrative detention, which means they are held without charges and without trial.

The Israeli authorities have deported 32 Palestinians, and another 27 are in jail fighting deportation orders by legal means.

Their prospects are not good. Israel’s judicial system has yet to overrule a deportation order.

The IDF has demolished 140 houses belonging to Arabs allegedly involved in terrorist acts, and it has sealed off the homes of 47 others.

As with the administrative detentions, the deportations, demolitions and sealing off of houses are done without direction from the civilian courts. The military alone decides.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has asserted repeatedly that the IDF would use all possible measures to crush the uprising “as long as they are within the realm of the law.”

But the price of the intifada cannot be calculated only in terms of dead, wounded and imprisoned.

The economy of the territories, which flourished during the first 20 years of the Israeli administration, is now in ruins. The frequent strikes, Israeli economic sanctions, the dry-up of investments, have caused a precipitous drop in living standards.

Palestinian society also has undergone a socio-political revolution. A new generation of local youthful militants has taken control.

The generation that grew up under Israeli administration pushed the Palestine Liberation Organization aside and took over the local leadership.

Young activists led the population into confrontation with the Israelis.

The IDF does more than control the highways and main streets of the large towns. Almost daily it conducts pre-emptive raids against remote villages. They are the cause of the most recent Palestinian casualties. They have driven nationalist activity underground.

STRIKES AND FIREBOMBINGS

But if mass rioting is over, other expressions of unrest persist.

Hardly a week passes without a general strike. An Israeli car traveling anywhere between Hebron, in the South, and Nablus, in the North, has a good chance of being stoned — at least once.

Recently, local activists have resorted to firebombs. Two days before the Knesset elections, they attacked an Egged bus, burning to death a mother and her three small children.

The 70,000 Jewish settlers living in the territories now must think twice before leaving their homes. They accuse the security forces of impotence.

The IDF also pays a price. Soldiers who should be training for “the next war” devote more time policing the territories. That has had a bad effect on army morale.

So have frequent stories in the press about military brutality toward the local population.

Despite strict orders against the unwarranted use of excessive force, commanding officers find it difficult to control all deviant behavior.

Israel also pays an economic price. Gad Yaacobi, the minister of economic coordination, estimated recently that the intifada would cost Israel almost $1 billion.

There is general agreement between Labor and Likud that whatever the political solution, the intifada must be curbed.

While Premier Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud leader, has given Laborite Rabin his full confidence, crities like Ariel Sharon and other right-wingers, strengthened by the recent elections, have proposed even tougher measures, including the death penalty for terrorists.

WEST BANK ANNEXATION

The far right demands annexation of the West Bank, while Labor still clings to the idea of an international peace conference and territorial compromise.

Meanwhile, increasing frustration with the intifada has produced a discernible shift to the right among the Israeli public.

There had been great hope in the territories that the PLO’s proclamation of an independent Palestinian state, and its limited steps toward recognizing Israel and renouncing terrorism, would produce some tangible diplomatic rewards for a year of merchant strikes and demonstrations.

But the Palestinians today have little to cheer about. A year after the intifada, they are confined to their homes, under curfew and subject to punitive measures.

It now appears that positions are hardening on both sides. A year after the intifada began, a political solution seems more remote than ever.