Palestinian Issue Re-Evaluated : Angry or Appalled, Israelis Can’t Ignore Arab Unrest

At a meeting of senior editors and staff members for one leading Israeli newspaper last weekend, a bitter argument was under way over coverage of army efforts to end the unrest that has rocked the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip for nearly six weeks.

“Wait a minute!” interjected one staffer as he glanced around the room at his colleagues. “Next year, it could be any of our sons out there facing (Palestinian) women and kids throwing stones.”

There was a momentary hush. When the discussion continued, it was in a very different tone, said a participant. “All the politics went by the wayside,” he said.

Israeli Jews have reacted to the continuing unrest with a mixture of anger, fear and frustration that often does nothing but harden their pre-existing attitudes toward the Palestinians and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict.

But as the exchange at that editorial meeting suggests, there are signs that the clashes and the killings are shocking others out of their old, stereotyped views and into a deeper re-evaluation of the conflict.

It is still unclear how widespread this phenomenon may be, and even less certain what it might portend. Discussions with two dozen Israelis suggest that for each person now more amenable to some compromise with the Palestinians, there is another more convinced that Israel must hang even more tightly onto what it has got.

Some parts of the country--notably, the Tel Aviv area--seem remarkably untouched by the unrest that is almost the only topic of conversation in Jerusalem and other centers where there is also a large Palestinian population nearby.

Still, there is no question that the rioting has thrust the Palestinian problem into the national consciousness in a way that it has not been present for many years, and that it is having a very personal effect on many Israelis.

For years, noted Zeev Chafets, an author and government spokesman under former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, security in the territories was mostly the concern of a few hundred army reservists and border police. Because of the unrest, however, the area has been flooded with regular army troops from the most elite units.

Brought Home

These soldiers are “the cream of the crop,” Chafets said. “They come home on a Friday night (the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath). One’s father is a judge, another is an editor, another runs a hospital.” Their sons talk about what they see in the territories, and it brings the conflict into the best Israeli homes in a very personal way, he said.

He added: “Now you hear these people saying: ‘I don’t want my son to have to do this. I don’t want my son to be a policeman.’ It’s certain to have an impact on decision-making, but how quickly I don’t know.”

Watching the main evening news program on television the other night, a young woman student was taken aback by film of a violent clash between stone-throwing demonstrators and soldiers, firing tear gas, rubber bullets--and sometimes live ammunition. “Hey, it’s a war!” she remarked. “It’s a real war!”

Many Israeli Jews who had long since come to ignore the so-called “green line,” which divides pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank, now think twice about driving in the territories or even in mostly Arab East Jerusalem.

‘Fed Up,’ Arabist Says

“I’m fed up,” said Moshe Maoz, a Hebrew University Arabist and author of a book on the Palestinian leadership of the West Bank. “I don’t want to go there to the territories any more. It’s your job,” he said to his interviewer, an American journalist, “not my job.”

And a Jerusalem journalist said she awoke in a cold sweat one recent night from a nightmare in which she found herself trapped in the Gaza Strip.

Sometimes, Israeli frustration with the situation emerges in the form of resentment at outside critics.

“People don’t realize how much we care about the situation that is taking place here,” objected a government worker. “It’s very easy to come and say the situation is rotten. I know the situation is rotten, and I know that there is a problem. That’s why I care so much and why I feel so bad about it.

‘It’s Our Future’

“It’s very simple for people to preach to us all the time,” added the government worker, a father of two. “ ‘Do this. Do that. Take your people away.’ But it’s our future, not the future of people who sit on their cozy sofas all over the world. If we’ll do something that will damage us today, what will we tell our children 10 or 15 years from now? I’m not trying to sound schmaltzy. It’s a problem.”

“There’s a sense that the world refuses to understand, when they talk about the ‘innocent Palestinians,’ that children and old people are being trained to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails, which become lethal weapons,” said Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, a religious leader in Efrat, a West Bank settlement considered relatively moderate politically.

“The feeling is that we are being blamed for acts of terror that are being incited against us by people who vow our destruction,” Riskin added, referring to radical Palestinian groups. Nevertheless, he said, he still believes “we have got to find a way of making peace at any cost.”

More Severe Measures

A poll published in late December by the independent Dahaf agency found that 69% of more than 600 Israelis surveyed supported more severe measures to suppress the unrest. Only 7% favored more lenient measures. The agency is repeating its survey now to see if three more weeks of unrest have caused any change in attitudes.

In a separate poll, conducted by the Gallup organization for Newsweek magazine here on Jan. 13 and 14, nearly one quarter of respondents said they are more ready to turn over parts of the occupied territories as a result of the unrest. About 16% said they are less willing, while 56% said their position has not changed.

“I’m a rightist because of them!” complained Machluf Revivo, 58, a Jerusalem taxi driver, about the Arabs. Becoming so agitated by the subject that he almost caused an accident, Revivo added: “It’s eating me up! In Algeria, where I came from, I was a socialist.” But in the upcoming Israeli elections, he said, he intends to vote for right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocates the removal by force, if necessary, of all Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories.

Not Safe Anymore

Herzl Eliahu, 30, another taxi driver, complained that “an Arab isn’t afraid to walk around in Zion Square (in Jewish West Jerusalem) while a Jew can’t walk around safely in the Old City” section of mostly Arab East Jerusalem.

“Before the riots it was OK,” said Eliahu. “They were quiet. But now they start to make noise.” The only sensible thing to do, he said, is “throw them out.”

A 22-year-old soldier, who refused to give his name, said he had just returned from duty in the West Bank where he helped “disperse demonstrations, make arrests in the middle of the night and stuff like that.” He called the situation “impossible. There is no ‘benign occupation.’ Before (joining the) the army, I didn’t understand that, but now I do.”

The youth said that even though he feels strongly that Jews have a right to the occupied territories, “I would be willing to give it up for real peace.” However, he added, he sees little chance of that and does not want to see “40 years (of Israeli statehood) go down the drain.” The “Arab mentality,” he added, is such that “they’re going to look at you like a sucker if you try to be nice to them.”

Won’t Take Any Nonsense

Rabbi Riskin, from Efrat, said radical Jewish settlers on the West Bank maintain that one reason the area around Hebron has been relatively quiet during the unrest is that the Arabs there “know that the Jews (in the area) will not take any nonsense.” Jewish settlers around Hebron are among the most militant in the region.

To Adina Chinitz, a young actress from Tel Aviv, the whole situation is mostly “academic. . . . What’s strange about it is the lack of any connection between what’s happening in the territories and my daily reality.”

Still, even the most blase resident of Tel Aviv cannot escape the subject completely, it seems. Chinitz said she was reading a newspaper while visiting her chiropractor the other day and found herself “counting the number of people that had been killed.”

Other Israelis are at least as frustrated with their leaders and their fellow Jews as they are with the Palestinians. And they make comparisons that the Israeli authorities find unflattering at best.

Never So Depressed

“I’ve been here for a long, long time, but I haven’t ever been so depressed,” said a social worker who emigrated from South Africa. She is astonished at the “total surprise” her fellow Israelis express about the continuing disturbances. “The surprise is that it didn’t happen a long time ago,” she said.

“It’s oversimplified to say it’s like South Africa,” the woman added. “But my feelings are just like my feelings in South Africa.”

“Remember the ‘Prague Spring?’ ” Hadas Enoshi, 25, a student, asked rhetorically about the ill-fated, 1968 effort at reform in Czechoslovakia. “Remember when the Russians entered Prague with tanks and the Czechs threw stones at them? My instinct tells me that if now, we are the ones with the tanks, how can it be that we’re right? It’s as if throughout history the ones who were right were the ones with the stones.”

Politicians Are ‘Idiots’

Michelle Segal, 39, a Tel Aviv artist, said recent events have had little impact on her opinion, which is that the country’s politicians are “idiots” who are “leading us to disaster.” Segal added that she didn’t “know if we should give back the territories or not.” However, she said, “it scares me to think what will happen if we don’t do anything.”

And a middle-aged professional man, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed that the Israeli government should not wait for movement from the other side. “There are all kinds of initiatives Israel can take,” the man commented. “And even if the other side turns them down, then at least the government would have a clear conscience concerning itself and the people.”