Israel Outlaws Arab Youth Group, Closes Union

Israeli authorities tightened their “iron fist” policy on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on Saturday, outlawing a popular Palestinian youth movement, closing down a nationalist building workers’ union and arresting scores of activists in an effort to quell continuing unrest.

The army also posted leaflets in Arabic in at least two West Bank towns calling on the residents to “return to normal life” and warning that the price for past uprisings, in 1936 and 1948, “has been paid by generations of Palestinians up to this very day.”

The latest sanctions are part of a new economic and political crackdown that the authorities apparently hope will succeed where military countermeasures have failed against nearly 15 weeks of anti-Israeli protests.

High Casualty Toll

The violence has left at least 97 Palestinians dead and nearly 800 wounded, mostly by army gunfire. The army said today that the latest victim was shot by troops on Saturday in the West Bank town of Janin after he and a companion had attacked a patrol with firebombs.

United Nations sources say that thousands of other Palestinians have required medical treatment for injuries sustained by beatings, rubber bullets and other means. No Israelis have died as a direct result of the unrest, although army figures covering the period through March 15 show that 120 Israeli civilians and 191 soldiers have suffered unrest-related injuries. A military spokesman said that he could not say how many were seriously hurt but that the majority sustained cuts and bruises from rocks or flying glass when vehicles in which they were riding were stoned.

A senior security official confirmed Saturday that the occupation authorities had banned Youth Committees for Social Action, more popularly known here as the Shabibeh movement, from the Arabic word for youth.

Group Called Hostile

The ban defines Shabibeh as a hostile organization, and membership in the movement becomes punishable by up to 10 years in prison under a 1945 law carried over from British rule in what was then Palestine. The official said that some of as many as 100 people reported arrested in an army sweep that began Friday are Shabibeh activists.

“We came to the conclusion that this organization has passed the red line and we cannot afford to let it operate freely any more,” the official said.

Shabibeh committees are alleged to be active in inciting and organizing anti-Israeli demonstrations and to be behind a campaign in Palestinian villages and refugee camps against Arab informers and other “collaborators.” They are seen as following the political line of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The official said he could not say how many Shabibeh groups exist, although Israeli sources have said previously that there are about 200 such committees on the West Bank alone. Palestinian sources put the total in the occupied territories at twice that number. A local committee might have several hundred dues-paying members and enjoy the allegiance of many more youths.

“There are committees in almost every village, every university, every city,” a member in the West Bank town of Nablus told a Times reporter in January. “Just in Nablus we have seven or eight.”

Members described the semi-secret movement as a peculiarly Middle Eastern cross between the Boy Scouts and a New York street gang, joined by a potent bond of Palestinian nationalism.

It is by far the largest of several Palestinian youth movements that emerged in the occupied territories during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It gained strength in the local leadership vacuum created during that same period by Israel’s crackdown against the since-outlawed National Guidance Committee of nationalist mayors and other, older Palestinian personalities.

The basis of Shabibeh is ostensibly community service, and Israeli security sources confirm that committees typically organize activities ranging from cleaning streets to distributing sweets to the relatives of Palestinian prisoners on Muslim holidays.

But using that base, the security sources say, Shabibeh leaders also mobilize Palestinian youths for violent anti-government protests.

In another action Saturday, the army ordered the building workers’ union in Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank, closed for two years. The union is said to be a hotbed of Palestinian nationalist activity.