Israel Arrests 14 in Bid to End Arab Strike

In their most determined effort yet to break a four-month-old Palestinian commercial strike here, Israeli security forces Monday arrested 14 East Jerusalem Arab shopkeepers and charged them with defying an army order setting their business hours.

More than 100 police, soldiers and plainclothes security men descended on a row of shops along the Street of the Prophets minutes after merchants opened them at 2 p.m. in accordance with instructions from the underground leadership of the Palestinian uprising that has rocked the country since early December.

Police ordered would-be shoppers and spectators away, detained some merchants and ordered the rest to lock their businesses back up.

By keeping their stores shuttered for all but three hours daily, the merchants have provided a highly visible reminder in the capital of the continuing Palestinian unrest, which the army now says has cost 165 Arab lives in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem is on the itinerary of most of the more than 100,000 tourists who visit Israel in an average month.

The authorities want the merchants to remain open all day to return a look of normalcy to the city. And Monday’s message was that if the merchants refuse to go along, the security forces will make sure they cannot open at all.

“The logic is that the intifada (uprising) doesn’t determine what happens,” according to a senior police official quoted in Monday’s editions of the Jerusalem Post. “We do.”

Although the army has been using force for weeks to try to impose its will on shopkeepers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the authorities have been reluctant to follow suit in Jerusalem. However, with the uprising showing no signs of an end, top government officials have apparently decided to escalate their efforts to quell it--in all its forms.

Over the weekend, the head of the army’s Central Command, Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, used his authority under emergency regulations inherited from British rule here to order 25 shops, strategically located opposite the popular Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s walled Old City, to maintain regular hours. Israeli officials claim that many merchants have quietly pleaded with the city authorities to force them to open. They are suffering financially from the strike but are reluctant to defy the underground Palestinian leadership for fear of attacks on themselves or their properties, the officials say.

One East Jerusalem money changer’s store was firebombed earlier this year when he opened in defiance of the strike schedule. However, merchants on the Street of the Prophets said Monday they would rather follow the underground leadership than Israeli officials.

“As Palestinian people, we believe in our leaders,” said Jamil Lekhnuz, who runs a wholesale grocery store with his father. “The world must understand that the Palestinians want a solution to the Palestinian problem, and that means a Palestinian state.”

Lekhnuz was one of those taken away in a police bus after mounted patrolmen had cleared the street of shoppers and spectators. Later, according to Israel Radio, troops used water cannon to disperse onlookers.

In related developments, Israel Radio said military authorities have issued restraining orders on “dozens” of Gaza Strip residents, forbidding them to leave the area and requiring that they report twice a day to their local police stations. The residents are accused of having participated in anti-Israeli demonstrations.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin disclosed over the weekend that 1,700 Palestinians have been jailed without trial under administrative detention orders. That is nearly double the number previously acknowledged and comprises about one-third of the total of about 5,000 prisoners held in connection with the uprising.