MIDEAST Q & A : Palestinian Unrest: Tough Problems That Defy Solution

Secretary of State George P. Shultz is scheduled to arrive back in the Middle East today for another round of talks aimed at launching Middle East peace negotiations. His chances of success are seen as slim by many analysts, who have watched uncounted peace plans strangled in the Gordian knot of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Shultz has said that he was motivated to make another attempt by the unprecedented Palestinian uprising that has rocked the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip continuously since Dec. 9, and that he will keep his initiative alive as long as there is any hope of making progress.

Coinciding with his trip, The Times has attempted to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about the latest unrest and the background to the conflict.

Q: Why did the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip start at this time? A: “The area was ripe for explosion against the background of growing frustration from the general situation, and any spark could ignite it,” according to an official assessment prepared as guidance for the Israeli army spokesman’s office.

Analysts in Israel generally point to three events last year as priming the fuse and one as lighting it.

An Arab summit meeting in Amman, Jordan, last November officially relegated the Palestinian issue to the sidelines while it concerned itself mostly with the Iran-Iraq War. This is seen as having helped to convince local Palestinians that if they wanted something done about their situation, they could no longer rely solely on their Arab brethren and the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership abroad. They would have to act themselves.

President Reagan’s summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Washington last December was viewed in Israel as having pushed the Middle East issue off the main international agenda as well, choking off another source of Palestinian hope.

Meanwhile, a cross-border attack from Lebanon in which a lone Arab on a hang-glider killed six Israeli soldiers at an army base near Kiryat Shemona on Nov. 26 became almost instantly the stuff of heroic legend to Arabs, contributing to a sense of Palestinian potency and undermining the deterrent power of the Israeli army’s still-awesome image.

The match was struck Dec. 8, when an Israeli truck collided with a van full of Gazan workers, killing four of them. Rumors quickly spread that the incident was deliberate, an act of retaliation for the stabbing of an Israeli a few days before in Gaza City. There were demonstrations the next day, leading to a clash with the army in which one Palestinian was shot to death and 16 wounded.

There has been an average of more than one unrest-related fatality daily ever since.

Q: Who is behind the current disturbances?

A: There is no serious disagreement within Israel that the disturbances began spontaneously. The army assessment states: “For the first time since 1948, the Palestinian residents of Judea and Samaria (the Biblical names preferred by the government for the West Bank), and Gaza are leading the struggle.”

Not only did the Palestine Liberation Organization not initiate the disturbances, according to that assessment, “the PLO was taken by surprise in the first days.”

Since then, the PLO and other Palestinian nationalist organizations have taken a progressively larger role in the uprising.

“Once the disturbances took hold and began to spread, (the PLO) decided to jump on the bandwagon and worked to exploit and intensify the disturbances by distributing proclamations, providing funds and sending newspapers to the refugee camps with the aim of inflaming the situation as much as possible,” the army document states. “Today, the PLO is working together with local elements.”

Palestinians describe the PLO role in less pejorative terms but agree with the essence of the official assessment. They stress, however--and Israeli security officials privately confirm--that although PLO leaders outside the area are supporting the unrest, it is a wide assortment of mostly young, local activists ranging from Islamic fundamentalists to PLO supporters to Communists who are actually leading it.

Q: What makes the current violence different from past periods of unrest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

A: Anti-Israeli demonstrations and violence have occurred periodically in the territories since soon after the army occupied them in June, 1967.

Most have been short-lived and linked to a specific event, such as a general strike Aug. 23, 1969, after an arson attack by a crazed Australian Christian against the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, or demonstrations on May 15, 1976, linked to the 28th anniversary of Israeli statehood, in which two Palestinians were killed.

There have also been more extended periods of intermittent unrest. On the West Bank, those include a rash of strikes and demonstrations from the autumn of 1968 into early 1969 that coincided with a period of intense PLO cross-border raids from Jordan; a wave of demonstrations from late 1975 throughout most of 1976 connected with early Jewish settlement activity on the West Bank and Israeli-sponsored elections to Arab municipal councils; and from late 1979 until mid-1980 in the aftermath of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which came from the Camp David accords, and during the heyday of the so-called Committee for National Guidance, composed of nationalist Palestinian mayors and other community leaders.

In the Gaza Strip, the army waged an 18-month campaign during 1971 and early 1972 to crush a well-armed Palestinian underground that brought life in the area to the verge of anarchy, punctuated with nerve-jangling shoot-outs in the narrow alleys of its teeming refugee camps.

However, according to the official army assessment, the current uprising constitutes a new form of unrest, “in which a large segment of the population seems to be involved” and especially youths “who were born after 1967.”

The unrest is “unprecedented” in its “intensity, extent, and duration of the disturbances,” the army assessment continues. It affects “many places that had always been quiet” and involves “commercial strikes that might have lasted a day in the past (but) have been going on now for weeks.”

Also, the army notes, with few exceptions and in contrast to past incidents, local residents have not resorted to the use of firearms.

Q: Does that mean that the issue involved here is only Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

A: Not at all. Although Palestinians deeply resent many of what they see as the day-to-day humiliations and restrictions of military rule, this is not a conflict over civil rights. It is deeply rooted in differing Jewish and Arab claims to the same land and the right to live on it as a sovereign nation.

Q: Exactly what is Palestine?

A: The term “Palestie” is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who settled along the southern Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the occupied Gaza Strip in the 12th Century BC. The name was later applied by the Romans to the biblical region of Judea, now usually referred to by non-Israelis as the southern portion of the West Bank. Palestine was also the term used by the League of Nations after World War I, when it gave the British government a mandate to rule over territory that includes what is today Israel, Jordan and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Q: What was the aim of the mandate system in general, and the Palestine Mandate in particular?

A: The basic purpose of the mandate system was to assist local communities that had been part of the dismantled Turkish Empire to achieve independence. Turkey, which had ruled the area for the previous 400 years, fought on the losing side of World War I as an ally of Germany.

The League of Nations awarded Britain the mandates for the former Turkish provinces of Palestine and Iraq, and it gave France the mandate over the province of Syria. Iraq became independent in 1932, Syria in 1936, and Lebanon, which was split off from Syria, in 1941.

The British Mandate in Palestine specifically charged that it should prepare “such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.”

Q: What did the British do?

A: The British divided their mandate in 1922, awarding two-thirds of the land that lay east of the Jordan River to Emir Abdullah, the grandfather of Jordan’s current king, Hussein, as a reward for Arab support against the Turks in World War I. Jordan was proclaimed an independent kingdom in 1946.

Attempts to effect a peaceful agreement between Jewish and Arab residents of Western Palestine failed, and in 1947, Britain turned to the United Nations, the successor to the old League of Nations, for a solution. The result was the U.N. Partition Plan passed on Nov. 29 of that year, which set aside about 60% of the land for a Jewish state and the rest for an Arab state.

Jewish leaders reluctantly accepted the compromise, but Palestinian Arabs, who were themselves a large majority and who were backed by other, already independent, Arab states in the region, did not. They demanded a single Palestinian state with an Arab majority.

Fighting quickly broke out, the British withdrew, and, on May 15, 1948, Israel declared independence.

The new Jewish state was immediately attacked by neighboring Arab armies, beginning what remains the costliest of six Arab-Israeli wars in the last 40 years. In the end, Israel wound up in control of significantly more land than set aside in the U.N. Partition Plan. Jordan captured the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem, annexing them soon thereafter. Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip, which it governed under a military administration for the next 19 years.

Q: Who are the Palestinians?

A: “Palestine” ceased to exist as a legal entity after 1948, and the former “Palestinian Jews” became Israelis. The term “Palestinian” continues to be used, however, usually to describe those Arabs born in, or descended from, residents of Western Palestine.

There is considerable argument over exact figures, but between 600,000 and 1 million Palestinian Arabs either fled or were forced out of areas that became part of Israel in 1948. Another 160,000 remained behind and became Israeli citizens.

Today, there are about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs living as Israeli citizens inside the pre-1967 borders of the state. They are usually referred to as Israeli Arabs. Another 3.3 million to 3.8 million Palestinians are scattered throughout the world, but most live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip (1.4 million) and Jordan (about 1.2 million).

Q: Why is Palestine sometimes called the “twice-promised land”?

A: Religious Jews consider Palestine the “Promised Land” of the Bible--the home that God promised Abraham. But the origin of the term “twice-promised land” is political, not religious, and much more recent.

During World War I, Sir Henry MacMahon, British high commissioner in Egypt, pledged in correspondence with Hussein ibn Ali, the ruler of Mecca, that in return for Arab support against Turkey, Britain would see to it that the Arabs enjoyed postwar independence. Hussein ibn Ali was the father of Emir Abdullah and great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein.

On Nov. 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, in a letter to the early Zionist and philanthropist Lord Lionel W. Rothschild, conveyed on behalf of the government a promise to “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” and to do its best “to facilitate the achievement of this object.”

Neither “promise” was specific as to boundaries, although it is clear that at least some British officials, including Col. T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), considered the award of lands east of the Jordan to Abdullah as the fulfillment of the MacMahon pledge.

On the other hand, the so-called Balfour Declaration stipulated that it be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries.”

Q: What is Zionism and what are its origins?

A: The term “Zionism” was first used near the end of the 19th Century to define the nationalist movement that emerged in Europe with the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

The movement was inspired in part by anti-Semitism in both Eastern and Western Europe, and it focused on Palestine because it was there that the Jewish people first emerged about 3,800 years before, during the time of the Biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The term “Zionism” is taken from Mt. Zion, which is one of the hills on which Jerusalem is built.

Q: What are the origins of Palestinian nationalism?

A: Palestinian nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one much shaped by Zionism. Although Arabs constituted the great majority of residents in the area for hundreds of years until the second half of this century, there was no important national movement among them until large-scale Jewish immigration into the area began in the early years of the century.

As Jewish immigration increased, aided financially by Zionists abroad, the area developed rapidly. That, in turn, attracted new Arab immigrants who, under the British Mandate, increasingly thought of themselves as uniquely Palestinian. Exacerbated by differences in religion and custom, the competing nationalisms put the two peoples on a collision course.

What is often seen as the first round in the modern national conflict occurred with violent anti-Jewish disturbances in 1920. There were other serious outbreaks of violence in 1929 and 1936.

After the 1936 uprising, the British appointed a royal commission headed by Lord Peel to analyze the situation. It concluded that the Jewish and Arab positions were too far apart to be reconciled, that the mandate was unworkable, and that the only answer was to partition Western Palestine. The Jewish Agency, then operating as an unofficial Jewish government, accepted the Peel proposals as a basis for further discussion, but Palestinian Arab leaders rejected them totally, a preview of what was to happen a decade later with the U.N. Partition Plan.

After the disappearance of Palestine as a geographic entity in 1948, the displaced Arab residents looked mostly to the wider Arab world around them for retribution. The approach was consistent with the rising “pan-Arabism” of the time, epitomized by the late Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Q: Who represents the Palestinian people today?

A: The Palestinians have no elected representatives, and the question of who should serve as their voice is one of the central issues of the conflict.

In general, however, support for the Palestine Liberation Organization appears genuine and widespread, if only as a symbol of national identity and the desire to form a state of their own on all or at least some part of historic Palestine.

The PLO is a relative latecomer to the conflict, however, being formed only in 1964, under the auspices of the Arab League. In 1974, at an Arab summit meeting in Rabat, Morocco, it was declared the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

Q: What do the Palestinians in the territories want?

A: Because open political activity in the territories is outlawed by Israel and residents are also frequently intimidated by militant, underground Palestinian groups, it is impossible to know for sure what most people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip want.

Short of the ultimate goal of Palestinian “self-determination,” the only expression of specific West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinian objectives came in a Jan. 14, 1988, East Jerusalem news conference at which local leaders listed a number of short-term demands “as a means to prepare the atmosphere” for an international Middle East peace conference. They included:

-- Release of all prisoners arrested during the uprising;

-- Permission for all Palestinians forcibly exiled by Israel to return, and acceptance of “several hundreds of applications” by Palestinians who want to rejoin families living under Israeli rule;

-- Withdrawal of Israeli troops from all population centers on the West Bank and Gaza Strip;

-- The opening of a formal inquiry into the behavior of soldiers and Jewish settlers in the territories and “due punitive measures against all those convicted of having unduly caused death or bodily harm to unarmed civilians”;

-- An end to Jewish settlement activity in the territories and the release of lands, “especially in the Gaza Strip,” already confiscated;

-- Cancellation of all direct Israeli taxes imposed on Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the occupied territories;

-- An end to all restrictions on political gatherings and preparations for free municipal elections supervised by “a neutral authority”;

-- Reimbursement, with interest, of all money deducted from the wages of residents who work in Israel proper;

-- An end to all restrictions on building permits, industrial and agricultural development projects, and water rights;

-- Either an end to restrictions against transfer of West Bank and Gaza goods to Israel proper, or comparable restrictions on Israeli goods transferred to the territories;

-- And an end to restrictions prohibiting residents of the territories from membership in the Palestine National Council, sometimes described as the Palestinian Parliament-in-exile.

Q: What is Israel’s position?

A: That, also, is difficult to say for sure, because there are significant differences among various political factions in Israel. National elections scheduled for Nov. 1 are expected to focus primarily on this question and, for that reason, are considered among the most fateful in the country’s history.

In the short term, however, there is widespread agreement within Israel that the unrest must be quelled and some semblance of normality restored to the occupied territories before any constructive political moves are possible.

Beyond that, the government remains committed in principle to the Camp David agreements’ provision granting Palestinians in the territories autonomy in the running of at least some of their own affairs. Israel and Egypt began to negotiate the exact terms of such autonomy under terms of their 1979 peace treaty, but the talks came to naught in large part because of the opposition to the concept by other Arab states and the Palestinian nationalist organizations.

Israeli political parties representing a vast majority of citizens oppose creation of a Palestinian state anywhere west of the Jordan River, seeing it as a threat to Israeli security. A Palestinian “right to self-determination” is seen as merely a euphemism for a Palestinian state.

One major Israeli political party, the Labor Alignment led by Alternate Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, is committed in principle to exchanging some West Bank and Gaza Strip land in return for peace, with the idea that such ceded territory would become part of a political confederation with Jordan.

The other major party, the Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, opposes giving up sovereignty over any land in the occupied territories, which it considers an inseparable part of the “Land of Israel.” It talks about Palestinians continuing to live under an Israeli flag, but running their own domestic affairs and enjoying voting and other political rights in Jordan.

Both political blocs insist that whatever happens, the Jordan River must remain Israel’s “security border,” and that any Palestinian entity on the West Bank or Gaza be demilitarized. And they are committed for the life of their current coalition agreement as partners in Israel’s “national unity” government not to annex the West Bank and Gaza.

Q: Why is Israel so opposed to dealing with the PLO?

A: To an apparently substantial majority of Israelis, the PLO represents an irredeemably terrorist organization committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, and therefore beyond the pale as a negotiating partner.

The so-called Palestinian National Covenant, which is, in effect, the PLO’s constitution, never calls specifically for the liquidation of Israel, and some contend that a declaration by the 8th Palestine National Council, in 1971, effectively tempers some of the harsh language in the covenant by calling for a democratic Palestinian state in which Jews and Arabs would live together.

However, even the 1971 resolution was not adopted as a formal amendment to the covenant, whose language implicitly rejects Israel’s right to exist. Articles 1 and 2, for example, call Palestine within its pre-1948 borders an “indivisible part of the Arab homeland.” Article 15 says the liberation of Palestine “aims at the elimination of Zionism” there. And Article 19 deems the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel the following year “entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time.”

The PLO has consistently refused to renounce the covenant.

On a purely pragmatic level, Israeli leaders also contend that even if they were ready to talk to the PLO, the organization and the Palestinian people themselves are so fractious that they, alone, are incapable of providing the kind of minimum security guarantees that Israel or any other state must have if it is to live a normal national life. Only the neighboring Arab governments can provide such guarantees.

Q: What are some of the proposed solutions of the conflict?

A: At one end of the “solution” spectrum is the replacement of Israel with a secular, binational state in which Arabs would be a majority--the end, in other words, of Zionism.

At the other is the physical “transfer” of Palestinian Arabs to surrounding Arab countries, leaving all of so-called “greater Israel” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean with an unassailable Jewish majority.

In between are various proposals for either territorial or “functional” compromise:

-- Creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip politically independent from either Jordan or Israel. Israel and the United States, among others, oppose this approach as threatening the security of both Israel and Jordan. Proponents argue that with demilitarization and appropriate safeguards, such as U.N. guarantees, security concerns could be dealt with.

-- The return of the most heavily populated Arab areas of the West Bank and the ceding of Gaza to Jordan in return for a peace treaty with Israel. This option is opposed by the Israeli political right, which objects for religious, historical and military reasons to the surrender of any part of “greater Israel.” Israel’s political left argues that this is the only acceptable way to ensure that future generations of Israeli Jews will not be a minority forced to rule over an unwilling Arab majority.

-- Retention of all of the West Bank and Gaza while extending limited self-rule to their Palestinian inhabitants. This approach, favored by the Israeli right, is unacceptable to most Palestinians as consigning them forever to Israeli domination.

-- Creation of some sort of Israeli-Jordanian “condominium” rule over the territories, possibly leading in the future to a three-way confederation joining Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians.

There are, of course, myriad variations and combinations of those proposals, including suggestions of how to deal with perhaps the most difficult question, the status of Jerusalem, which is a holy city to Jews, Muslims and Christians alike.

Q: What about the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

A: Jewish settlement began in territory captured from Jordan within months of the end of the 1967 war, and it has continued ever since, with more or less enthusiasm, depending on the government in power.

In the first decade after the war, Israeli Labor governments established relatively few settlements, and those were mostly in lightly populated areas with maximum military value as defensive positions. Settlements in the Jordan Valley, for example, were seen as an early warning system in case of attack from the east.

Others had long seen 1967 as the natural continuation of the 1948 war, completing the national patrimony of the Jewish people. And with a more sympathetic Likud government in power after 1977, such Israelis rapidly expanded settlements in hopes of creating a situation in which it would be politically impossible for any future Israeli government to ever trade away captured land for peace.

Today, there are 118 Jewish settlements on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a total population of about 70,000. Because they live on the front line of the conflict, the settlers are frequently the target of Palestinian attacks--usually rocks or firebombs, which have killed several and injured hundreds. Militants among the settlers, in turn, have frequently launched vigilante raids against Arab villages in which they have damaged homes and property.

The settlers are issued arms for self-defense, and they have been responsible for shooting to death a number of Palestinians over the years. They tend to vote in significantly larger proportions than other Israelis for parties on the right of the political spectrum.

Q: What is the role of religion in the dispute?

A: Religious differences have always been in the background of the conflict, going back to the contest between Muslim and Jew over the legacy of Abraham, who is considered the patriarch of both.

Religious fundamentalists on both sides ultimately base their claims to the land on their respective Scriptures--the Bible for the Jews, the Koran for the Muslims. And a fundamentalist religious revival among both peoples is one of the factors that has recently exacerbated the conflict.

To religious Jews, the West Bank, particularly, is the heart of biblical Israel, and territory that must never be relinquished. Fundamentalism is a driving force in the Jewish settlement movement.

And to a growing number of Palestinian fundamentalists, the battle for this land--all of it, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean--is part of a holy war to restore the glory of Islam throughout the region.

Q: Is there any significant difference in the patterns of the current unrest between the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

A: According to army figures, the Gaza Strip is one of the most crowded areas on the globe, with about 600,000 Palestinian Arab residents packed into a total area of 131 square miles, nearly half of which is off limits to them because it is set aside for Jewish settlement or as a restricted border area.

It is geographically isolated and highly dependent economically on Israel. Historically, it has relied on agriculture, primarily citrus, and fishing for its livelihood, but the combination of a mushrooming population and Israeli restrictions have made those sectors progressively less central to the economy. Most local industry consists of small workshops, reliant on Israeli buyers.

The West Bank has about 850,000 Palestinian Arab residents in an area of nearly 2,300 square miles. It has some industry and considerable agriculture, and is linked via “open” bridges to Jordan. It, too, faces many economic restrictions, imposed both by Israel and Jordan, but it is considerably more self-sufficient than Gaza.

About one-third of Gaza’s Arab population lives in eight refugee camps, and many of those refugees travel daily to work in Israel past the areas, now in Israel proper, where they or their families originated. Combined with a strong trend of Islamic fundamentalism in Gaza, which sees the conflict with Israel in religious as well as national terms, this leads to some of the most militant attitudes being identified with Gaza.

Residents of the refugee camps, which are recognized on all sides as squalid, have dominated the unrest there.

By contrast, only about 10% of West Bankers still live in refugee camps, and they have played a proportionately reduced role in local unrest. According to the army, it is residents of the cities and, particularly in recent weeks, of the villages, who have been in the forefront of West Bank disturbances.

Islamic fundamentalism, although an increasingly important phenomenon on the West Bank, is not nearly as widespread as in Gaza. The traditional Palestinian nationalist groups--Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Communists--are, by the same token, more important. Also, West Bankers are physically closer to the mostly Jerusalem-based foreign press and have considerably more contact with the media than their brethren in Gaza.

Q: Does Israel do anything to improve the conditions of the refugees?

A Government policy is to help resettle Palestinian refugees out of the camps, within budgetary constraints; 11,000 Gaza families have so far been relocated. There have also been sharp improvements in health standards, particularly in the Gaza camps, since they have come under Israeli control, although those standards are still far below what is prevalent in Israel proper.

The PLO and other Palestinian nationalist groups, along with militant Arab states, oppose the resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza camps. To accept relocation would be to implicitly forfeit any claim on their former homes, these groups argue.

Many refugees apparently agree. There have even been votes taken in some camps where the majority opted overwhelmingly to stay where they are. Also, some camp residents are unwilling to leave because it would mean forfeiting certain aid they now receive from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.

Q: What is the difference between the situation of Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories?

A: Theoretically, at least, Israeli Arabs have, since being removed from military rule in 1966, enjoyed all the same privileges of citizenship as Israeli Jews. In fact, as with minorities in many lands, they are sometimes unable to realize the equality to which the country’s basic laws entitle them.

One clear difference is Israel’s Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who immigrates. Arabs have no such right, although thousands of Palestinians were in fact readmitted after 1948, and any non-Jewish resident can apply for naturalized citizenship.

Another problem for Israeli Arabs is that they are exempted from army service, which is mandatory for Israeli Jews. A side effect of their exemption is that the many jobs in civilian Israeli industry for which army service is a prerequisite are closed to them.

Palestinian Arabs in the occupied territories are governed under about 1,200 military regulations, several of which are carried over from emergency laws passed during the British Mandate. Their political freedom is severely restricted, and their legal protections are minimal compared to those for Jews and Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. They can be held without warrant for up to 18 days, for example, while the limit for Israeli citizens is 48 hours. They are subject to administrative detention for up to six months without trial on the order of an area military commander.

Q: What is the full picture on casualties from the unrest?

A: As the death toll from the unrest has climbed there have been increasing discrepancies in the figures reported by different organizations. The Palestine Press Service, a pro-nationalist East Jerusalem news organization closed last week by military order, includes 26 people in its count who are said to have been asphyxiated by tear gas. But the Israeli army says such lists artificially inflate the death toll. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which aids in the administration and maintenance of 27 West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinian refugee camps that have been the focus of much of the unrest, includes in its count nine Arabs that it says were beaten to death by troops. The army excludes those cases, saying that alleged beating deaths are still under investigation.

The Times has, since Dec. 9, kept its own records of fatalities and now lists 127 Arab victims of the unrest. It does not include any alleged tear-gas victims, but does include two “collaborators” killed by fellow Palestinians and a boy shot to death by one of them. Others on the list have been confirmed by at least two sources.

Last month, a soldier slain by a lone assailant as he stood guard outside a government building in Bethlehem became the first Israeli killed in the occupied territories since the current troubles began.

Three Israeli civilians, two women and a man, died in a terrorist bus hijacking in southern Israel on March 7. The three gunmen, who were killed by a police anti-terrorist unit, said they acted in solidarity with the Palestinian uprising. But all are believed to have been outsiders who infiltrated from Egypt. The three are also excluded from any list of Palestinian casualties.

In addition to the dead, an army count lists 986 Palestinians as having been wounded, most by army or settler gunfire, from Dec. 9 through last Wednesday. No organization is known to have kept an accurate count of demonstrators injured by other means, although the United Nations says that the number of Palestinians treated in hospitals, mostly as a result of beatings, is “in the thousands.”

Meanwhile, according to army figures, 137 Israeli civilians and 232 Israeli soldiers have suffered unrest-related injuries. The army says 40 soldiers have been seriously hurt since the disturbances began. Six remain in the hospital, including one in a coma and one paralyzed from the waist down. Seriously injured civilians include a man shot in the legs, another badly burned by a firebomb, and a boy and a man who suffered concussions from being hit with rocks.

Most of the injured Israelis suffered cuts or bruises when hit by rocks or by flying glass when the vehicles in which they were riding were stoned.

Q: Are there other means the army could have used to deal with the situation without such high casualties?

A: The most frequently heard suggestion is that the army could stay out of Palestinian villages, refugee camps and towns, avoiding unnecessary confrontations while concentrating on securing the roads. Others say the problem is that the army lacks the proper, non-lethal riot control equipment, and sufficient, specially trained, riot-control troops.

An army spokesman counters that the military has poured more men into the territories, and that soldiers have increasingly been given special riot-control training. Also, it has tried a number of non-lethal means. But with about 5,500 incidents in the last four months, spread over about 450 villages and towns on the West Bank alone, the scope of the disturbances is too great. And as a result, the situation still arises frequently where a relative handful of troops find themselves facing a crowd using increasingly violent tactics against them. The result is more shooting.

As for staying out of the Arab areas, the spokesman notes that many of the Palestinian towns and villages straddle or border main roads that must be kept open. Also, the army is obliged to protect those Arab residents of the territories who are pro-Israel, a group under increasing threat from Palestinian militants who consider them “collaborators.” Both those tasks necessitate entering Arab areas.

In addition, the army is concerned that if it is seen as ceding control over any area, it will only encourage the spread of the violence.

Q: What is the influence of the media on the demonstrations?

A: The vast majority of the Palestinian demonstrations start and end without any media presence. And it is significant that despite the presence of so many television and still cameras in the areas, not one of the incidents in which a Palestinian was shot to death during a demonstration is known to have been recorded on film.

It is true that once under way, the presence of the media and particularly of cameras has intensified or sometimes prolonged a demonstration.

“Local residents behave much more violently in the presence of reporters,” according to an official army information booklet issued in connection with the disturbances.

Until last week, the army generally allowed open coverage of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, although once trouble starts, it was always customary for local commanders to close the area to non-resident civilians, including the media. Reporters are also banned from areas that have been declared under army curfew.

Israeli civil libertarians, in arguing against proposals to extend last week’s media ban--particularly for television--argue that the presence of reporters acts as an inhibition on troops who might otherwise violate standing orders against the use of unnecessary force against protesters.

Q: What is the interest of the United States in the situation?

A: The Middle East is one of the most important areas in the world to the United States. Economically, Middle East oil is vital to America’s West European allies. Although the United States’ reliance on oil from the region is less today than in the mid-1970s, it is still an important source and one that is likely to become more important toward the end of the century.

The region is also one focus of the superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and a test of whether that rivalry can be transformed into mutually beneficial cooperation in an era of glasnost.

America has friendly bilateral ties with a number of countries in the region, and a particular affinity with Israel, with which it shares a basic, democratic political philosophy as well as many strategic interests.

It is the Reagan Administration’s stated view that the status quo regarding Israel and the Palestinians in the territories is increasingly untenable. Among the dangers it sees in the future, if no solution is found, is that religious fundamentalism will gain strength throughout the region, rendering it increasingly unstable and threatening to American interests.