Israel Warns of Toughened Punishment in Effort to Suppress West Bank Violence

The Israeli government has instituted a tougher policy toward disturbances on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River in the wake of two fatal attacks on Jews there within the last two weeks.

The measures include harsh prison sentences for Arabs convicted of attacks on Israeli vehicles, immediate collective punishment in areas where there are stone-throwing or other incidents and increased army patrols in the region.

In an interview published Friday, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin warned that if the West Bank unrest gets any worse, the authorities will use “all forms of punishment permitted by the (Israeli) law . . including expulsion, administrative arrest and destruction and sealing of homes.”

Israel has invoked all these forms of punishment against Arabs in the past. But both Rabin and Prime Minister Shimon Peres had proclaimed a generally more conciliatory line toward the Arabs after Israel’s national unity government took office last September. West Bank Jewish settlers and others representing Israel’s potent political right wing have criticized both men as too soft.

Despite the two recent killings, Rabin and others insist that there has been no general deterioration of the security situation on the West Bank. Army figures indicate that the number of disturbances during each of the last three months is well below the same period a year ago.

Political Motives Seen

The crackdown is thus seen here as motivated at least as much by political as by security concerns.

When David Pinhas, 44, died Jan. 31, six days after he was burned by a Molotov cocktail hurled into his car near Qalqilya, the settlers called for Rabin’s resignation. Then, four days later, an unknown assailant ran up to Cpl. Aharon Avidar, a reserve soldier who was on guard duty in Ramallah, and killed him with a single pistol shot to the chest.

“The choice is to surrender to their goal, which is to destroy the state of Israel, or to mete out severe punishment, such as long terms in our jails or (expulsion) over the border,” Knesset member Geula Cohen of the rightist Tehiya Party said of Arab troublemakers earlier this week.

In addition to protecting their political right flank at home, Peres and Rabin are clearly concerned that Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon will be misread by other Arab states as a dangerous sign of weakness.

The pullout comes amid a sharp increase in attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanon by Shia Muslim guerrillas. And, as a senior military source said: “The Arab media is the focus of massive propaganda aimed at the West Bank, urging them to take lessons from south Lebanon.”

33 Serious Attacks

According to army figures, there were 33 serious attacks on Israelis in the West Bank last month, including 23 incidents involving Molotov cocktails and three involving firearms.

A hint of the tougher official line came on the day Pinhas died of his burns. A military court in Ramallah sentenced two Arab youths, ages 14 and 17, to eight and seven years’ imprisonment, respectively, for throwing Molotov cocktails at a bus occupied by Jewish passengers last October. There were no injuries and no damage in the incident.

“I asked for stiff punishments because lighter sentences have proved ineffective in stopping the stone-throwing on the roads,” the prosecutor, Maj. Yair Rabinovich, said. “It is unthinkable that the roads of Judea and Samaria (the biblical names for the West Bank) should be unsafe for travel.”

Even though three years of each youth’s sentence was suspended, the punishment was the most severe for an offense of that type in at least a decade, according to Israeli sources.

Three days later, in the largest such action on the West Bank in months, Israeli security forces raided the Dahaisha Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, arresting 20 people. The raid followed a series of attacks with stones and Molotov cocktails on Israeli vehicles passing near the camp.

Palestinian Nationalism

Dahaisha has long been a hotbed of Palestinian nationalist feeling and the focus of settler demands for tougher action against stone-throwers. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, the gun-carrying leader of the settlers, has camped outside Dahaisha daily for more than three months in a one-man protest against the stone-throwers. He has an army guard.

Asked at a press conference by the Committee for Defense of Dahaisha earlier this week if residents would be willing to pledge an end to the stone-throwing, Hassan abu Jawad, a resident and committee member, replied: “What do you expect? Do you expect people to greet the occupation with roses?”

The southern portion of Dahaisha was under curfew for most of Friday as the result of another stoning incident the day before. And in Ramallah, several stores in the area where Cpl. Avidar was shot on Monday remained padlocked by military order. Security sources said the reason was that store owners were known to have seen the killer but were refusing to cooperate with the army’s investigation.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, two stores in Nablus and nine in Hebron were similarly closed earlier this week after stone-throwing incidents in those towns.

Security sources said the actions against shop owners and the latest curfew on Dahaisha were also part of a new policy to impose immediate collective punishment for every West Bank disturbance.

Assassinated Mayor

In another sign of growing pressure, two West Bank mayors said Friday that they have been warned by Israeli military officers not to attend a gathering scheduled for today in Nazareth to mark the end of the traditional 40-day Muslim mourning period for Fahd Kawasmeh, former mayor of Hebron, who was assassinated in Amman.

Residents have protested the West Bank crackdown as a violation of U.N. regulations and conventions under which the area has supposedly been ruled since Israel captured it from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.

“We wonder who governs the West Bank,” editorialized the East Jerusalem Arabic-language newspaper Al Quds earlier this week. “Is it the settlers? Or is it the prime minister or his defense minister? Or is it them all? Or is it according to what the political atmosphere at the present moment allows?’

Leftist Israeli Jews protest what they call the double standard used on the West Bank for Jewish settlers and Palestinian Arabs.

Settlers who blockaded West Bank roads for two hours earlier this week in protest over Arab attacks, for example, have gone unpunished.

“The settlers preach that the law should be upheld meticulously, but only vis-a-vis the Arabs,” Haaretz columnist Yehuda Litani wrote.

And Felicia Langer, a leftist Jewish lawyer who represents West Bank Arabs, charged that it is racist for the authorities to impose collective punishment on Arabs for stone-throwing from the refugee camps unless the same is done to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, from which automobiles traveling on the Sabbath are often stoned.