Keeping Lid on Unrest : West Bank: Tense Duty for Israelis

Before most of his countrymen had even gone to work, Lt. Col. Moshe Givati, the Israeli military commander in charge of the southern part of the West Bank, knew he faced potential trouble in the two biggest towns under his control.

He had been awakened in the middle of the night with reports that students from Bethlehem University planned a memorial rally for two Palestinian youths shot to death by Israeli troops a few days earlier at another West Bank university. And now students were congregating menacingly outside the Islamic University here in Hebron, the headquarters city for his command.

Givati, a twice-wounded career officer who has held this job for 10 months, has earned a reputation of dealing firmly with such situations. He is admittedly more used to issuing ultimatums to demonstrators than to negotiating with them. He said he personally wounded a rock-throwing Palestinian youth in the legs during a clash earlier this year.

Order to Ease Up

But after the West Bank violence of recent days, which has left four Arab youths dead and at least 20 wounded, the order this day was to ease up. In particular, the army was not to open fire except under the most extreme circumstances.

As dusk gathered many hours later, Givati had managed to keep order without resorting to force. His counterpart in the occupied Gaza Strip had not been as successful, and another Palestinian, a 16-year-old girl, had been shot in the wrist.

It was one of the better days in what Givati described as his “complicated and very frustrating” service on the West Bank. Trained to fight enemy Arab armies, he said he feels torn by a policing job in which there is no black and white, but only shades of gray.

‘Actions Were Very Clear’

“When I had to fight against the Syrians, all my actions were very clear--knowing what I am doing is to survive, to help Israel survive, and to keep my soldiers alive,” he said. “I was maybe tense, maybe tired, maybe in lousy conditions, but I was clear in my mind about what I was doing.

“Here I find myself thinking more: What am I doing here? What I am doing: Is it right? This job causes you to think more about who you are, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it.

“On the one hand, you want to do your best to keep the situation quiet,” he said. “On the other, it means you’re fighting children.”

The U.N. Security Council on Monday condemned “the opening of fire by the Israeli army resulting in the deaths and wounding of defenseless students,” and the United States, which abstained in the U.N. vote, delivered a verbal protest to the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Wednesday.

While expressing “all due regret” over the killings, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin defended his army. It acted in accordance with procedures allowing troops to fire at the feet of demonstrators when other methods to disperse them have failed and directly at them in life-threatening situations, he said.

(Israeli investigators now say one of the four dead Palestinians, a 12-year-old boy, may have been shot by Jewish settlers rather than soldiers. On Friday, Rabin ordered an inquiry into the shooting, the Associated Press reported. )

Frictions and Violence

A day spent with Givati this week provided a glimpse, from the Israeli’s soldier viewpoint, of the day-to-day friction that can erupt at any time into the kind of bloody clashes that have characterized the past week.

Givati is military commander over what the Israelis know by its biblical name as Judea-- an area extending from the southern outskirts of Jerusalem nearly to Beersheba, and stretching westward from the Dead Sea to the “green line” which, before the 1967 Six-Day War, divided Israel from a West Bank ruled by Jordan.

About 11,000 of Israel’s most militant Jewish settlers live in the area amid 400,000 Arabs. Hebron is the only West Bank center where Jews live in the middle of a Palestinian city, creating a uniquely tense situation, which Givati said makes him feel “that I am sitting on a barrel of gun powder.”

His job is to keep the roads open, to protect the Jewish settlers, and to keep the settlers from undertaking vigilante actions against the Arabs. Day-to-day problems are the responsibility of the civil administration and the local, mostly Arab police.

Reinforcements Deployed

Givati normally has several hundred troops at his command, including members of the paramilitary police border guards. The army sent in reinforcements because of the latest violence.

Some of his soldiers oppose Israel’s policies in the West Bank--particularly Jewish settlement in the heart of Hebron. But Givati said he tells them he doesn’t care about their political views; policy is the government’s concern, theirs is security.

He follows his own advice, sidestepping questions about his politics. “I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for Jews to live in the heart of Hebron,” he said. However, he added, “If forever we have to guard these settlers in the heart of Hebron with soldiers, I’d say it’s a grim future.”

He is clearly popular with the Hebron settlers, although he said that if ordered, he would not hesitate to move them off the West Bank, back into pre-1967 Israel.

Students the Problem

His immediate problem on this day was not the settlers, but Palestinian students. Rising at 5 a.m. at his home near Tel Aviv, Givati arranged by car radio on his way to work to meet his commander in Bethlehem at 7 a.m. to review plans for containing any demonstration at the university there.

From there he stopped at Dahaisha, with 6,000 residents the largest and most troublesome of five Palestinian refugee camps in his area. It is located beside the heavily traveled main road leading from Jerusalem south through the West Bank. The day before, a rock-throwing Dahaisha youth had been wounded in the hand when troops opened fire to disperse them, and Givati’s superior had come to investigate.

Back on the road, Givati received the first radio reports of potential trouble at Islamic University and stopped to check the situation. Five days earlier, troops had arrested 41 students there.

Now, at mid-morning, he was in his office, his intercom buzzing frequently with reports from his junior officers in the field. The Bethlehem students could demonstrate outside the campus, he ordered, so long as they were led by the university rector and the march stayed under control. But it wasn’t to start until he had time to get there.

Discreet Deployment

By 10:40 a.m., he was back on the road, but on the way back to Bethlehem he wanted to check out Islamic University again. His soldiers were deployed discreetly around the campus, close enough and visible enough so that the students knew they were there, but sufficiently unobtrusive so as not to antagonize.

At a curve in the main road about a half mile away, his military intelligence officer had set up an outpost atop a store advertising “Damascus Sweets.” Givati peered through binoculars at the students massed in the campus courtyard.

“It’s quiet, but looking at them I feel something is going on,” he mused. “It’s only a gut feeling, but they’re too crowded together. They’re looking around nervously. They see us, but maybe they’re still trying to evaluate if it’s possible to demonstrate.”

Keep a sharp eye on things, he ordered his men, then he climbed back into his Peugeot for the 20-minute drive to Bethlehem.

Up Through Ranks

He talked briefly about his earlier career: a young soldier in the Six-Day War; wounded by terrorists on the Golan Heights in 1969; then up through the ranks; tours as a military attache in Thailand and Turkey; the war in Lebanon; then a helicopter crash two years ago while on a training mission in the Jordan Valley. He had recovered and then been given this assignment.

He got less than halfway to Bethlehem before his earlier instinct proved right.

The car radio barked. Givati swerved to the shoulder of the two-lane road and listened for a few seconds, then made a U-turn. “OK, it’s started,” he said. The Islamic University students back in Hebron were throwing rocks at passing cars.

By the time he got back, many students were leaving the campus. “You see?” he said. “Some are going home. They don’t want to be involved.”

Using his car radio, he issued orders. “Close off traffic from all directions coming toward the university. . . . Whoever wants to leave (the campus), let them leave. . . . Don’t go near the fences. . . . Make sure they don’t go demonstrate in the center of town.”

Troops Poised for Action

Several dozen troops were poised for action, many with tear gas canisters already affixed to their weapons. Givati stopped two students to ask in poor Arabic what was going on. They had decided to boycott classes in protest, the students said.

In less than 20 minutes, the tension had passed. “Fold up the roadblocks,” Givati ordered. “But be alert to what’s going on inside the city.”

“In another five minutes, you’ll see everything is ticking like a Swiss watch,” one of his junior officers promised over the radio.

And Givati turned back on the road to Bethlehem.

“This situation is very bad for the army,” he said. “Instead of training and preparing the army for the next war--which I hope will not come--we have to deal with . . . this situation.”

Service Called Corrupting

The Israeli left contends that West Bank service corrupts young soldiers. Joel Greenberg, a Jerusalem Post correspondent just returned from doing reserve duty in Hebron, described in an article last weekend the “small everyday incidents,” the “little indignities” visited upon the Arabs by Jewish troops grown callous from the occupation.

He wrote about soldiers damaging Arab property and harassing Arab passers-by.

The article angered Givati, although he conceded that “many soldiers who are serving in this area, rubbing (shoulders) with the population, are influenced to hate Arabs or to become more right-wing.”

He said he gets frequent complaints from Arab residents, and that all are investigated. Two months ago, he said, a sergeant was court-martialed for having roughed up an Arab barber in the Hebron market.

Unrest in Manger Square

By the time Givati reached Bethlehem, the student demonstration was already over. A few stones had been thrown in Manger Square, but now everything was quiet. The owner of a cafe on the square greeted Givati like an old friend. He had seen the stone throwing, he said, and he advised: “Mr. Givati, be tough with them!”

As he spoke, one handcuffed youth was being led to a nearby police van. The young man objected to having his photograph taken.

“He threw rocks and now he’s embarrassed to have his picture taken?” Givati shouted. “Tell him it will be in every newspaper in America!”

Over orange juice and Turkish coffee, Givati said that in his opinion, the Palestinians had become “more self-confident” since he first served in the occupied territories as a young soldier. “You can feel it in the air,” he said. “You can feel it in the street. . . . My private opinion is that the situation will only get tougher.”

Reputation for Firmness

He said he established a reputation for firmness early, during a demonstration at the Hebron Polytechnical College soon after he got this assignment. He said he was ordered to clear the building.

“I handled them very tough that day,” he recalled. When students failed to respond to an ultimatum to evacuate, “we broke in and arrested about 90 students. Five of them were sent to the hospital” from tear gas or baton blows. “And I think they got the lesson.”

Givati said the biggest mistake a West Bank commander can make is to open fire on demonstrators too quickly. However, he stated, “even I shot a boy two months ago in Dahaisha camp.”

The youth was one of a group that began throwing rocks as a car carrying Israeli President Chaim Herzog approached, and Givati was afraid the official car would be hit. “You can imagine the shame if something like this would happen to me,” Givati said. “They would crucify me.”

He said he shot at the legs of the rock throwers and afterward tended the wounded youth.

Concerns Over Vigilantes

Givati said that if the army fails to control Palestinian violence on the West Bank, “there is always the fear that the Jewish settlers will rise up and we’ll have to deal with both sides simultaneously.”

However, he conceded, there is a difference in the way the troops handle Palestinian violence and settler violence. “Of course, there is a difference--because I’m in a Jewish army,” he said. “I’m a Jewish officer. I will never shoot in the leg of a Jewish settler. I will arrest him. I might even beat him if it’s necessary to control him. But if I will shoot a Jew--do you understand the meaning? It means I shoot my brother.”

After stopping for a quick lunch of cold fish at a border police cafeteria outside Bethlehem, where Givati was accosted by a deputy commander complaining about shortages of everything from food to toilet paper, it was back to Hebron for a tour of troop positions around four enclaves of Jewish settlement.

Insults, Identity Checks

At the old Arab market, one merchant, wearing a traditional kaffiyeh headdress, interceded with Givati on behalf of a man who had been stopped for a security check. The man had reportedly insulted the soldiers, who then ordered him to stand near a guard post.

Givati checked the man’s identification and then sent him on his way. “It’s a game of opening an eye here, closing a eye there,” the commander said.

“Now that man owes him (the merchant) a favor, and he (the merchant) owes me a favor,” Givati said.

The market is particularly sensitive because four Jewish settlers have been stabbed there in the 10 months Givati has been in charge. He thinks all the attacks were by the same man, although he admitted he has no firm leads to his identity.

‘What Can I Do?’

On the way back to his headquarters on Hebron’s highest hill, a radio call reported more stone throwing at Dahaisha. “What can I do?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “To control a whole camp with (a limited number of) soldiers is ‘Mission Impossible’. “

As the late afternoon winter sky turned darker, things were nevertheless quiet enough that Givati was talking about returning home for the evening to see his wife and three daughters instead of sleeping in Hebron as he said he does four or five nights a week.

The next day, he would greet a new group of reservists, telling them: “It doesn’t bother me what your political ideas are. Right now you are soldiers.”