Year-Old Intifada ‘a Way of Life’ : Israelis and Palestinians Dig In for a Long Struggle

In a small sitting room decorated with a velveteen tapestry of the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim holy place, young Palestinian men showed each other their scars.

Abu Suhai, 22, showed a half-dollar-size smudge on his shoulder, the remnant of a bullet wound he got in March. Izzedin, only 18, sheepishly pointed out a dime-size welt on his thigh, a September injury.

As if to assure everyone that his injury was as severe as anyone else’s, he blurted out, “The bullet is still inside.” His comrades laughed.

In other countries, in other times, the youths might have been comparing football injuries, so commonplace are their tales of danger and pain. In the year since the Arab uprising against Israeli rule began on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a cat-and-mouse struggle with the troops has become almost routine for many Palestinians.

The intifada, as the uprising is called in Arabic, has its wide swings, its tragedies, failures and victories, but it has also become, day by day, stamped on the fabric of everyday existence. Observers and participants in the continuing battle say that, whatever the final outcome, the Palestinians will never be the same again.

“The intifada has become a way of life. I don’t think I can imagine what we would be without it,” declared Said Kanaan, a businessman and prominent Palestinian spokesman in Nablus.

“The intifada is a state of mind,” commented Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, the Israeli military commander of the West Bank. “The mood, the feeling, is that the Arabs have gained something. They are able to control their future. They took their lives into their own hands. It is impossible to take this from them--impossible.”

Each side in the conflict appears willing to dig in for the long haul. Arab leaders are talking about rebuilding the area’s shattered economy and creating institutions such as trade and professional unions to cement a new feeling of nationhood. The sentiment was encouraged by the declaration of an independent Palestinian state issued in Algiers last month by the legislative arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Israeli officials speak less of crushing the rebellion and more of managing it by asserting Israeli control in every community in the occupied territories so that Arab nationalist feelings are not transformed into de facto self-rule.

Battle for Political Control

“The fight is now for political control,” said Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli expert on West Bank and Gaza affairs. “The cost is not unbearably high to either side. That’s why it can go on for a long time.”

Predictions of a protracted struggle are subject to wild-card variables, Benvenisti admits. On the one hand, many Arab hard-liners are chafing under the gradualist approach of the main leadership of the uprising, while in Israel, extremist politicians clamor for tougher measures against not just the stone-throwers and demonstrators but also the leaders behind the scenes.

“This thing is always subject to lunacy,” Benvenisti said with a sigh.

The Palestinian rebellion began in the Gaza Strip a year ago Dec. 9. The first demonstration was sparked, apparently, by rumors that a traffic crash the previous day, involving a truck driven by an Israeli, had been an act of retaliation for the fatal stabbing of an Israeli plastics merchant. Four Gazans were killed and seven injured when the truck struck their two vans.

300 Palestinian Dead

Military officials said another source of tension was a deportation order against a local Muslim fundamentalist leader.

Since then, about 300 Palestinians have died and thousands have been wounded in the intifada. More than 6,000 Arabs are in jail at any one time, many without recourse to a trial. In a recent study, Benvenisti estimated the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be 1.7 million.

Through it all, the daily lives of Arabs have been bent into shapes unimaginable a year ago, when youths in the Gaza Strip first picked up stones to hurl at Israeli traffic.

Nablus, with a population of 90,000, is the largest city on the West Bank and was one of the first to take up the intifada with vigor. It is a feisty city with a long history of rebellion and hard times. When it still carried its ancient name of Shekhem, one ancient ruler leveled it and sowed the ground with salt so that it could not be cultivated. The Roman invader Vespasian also tore Shekhem down and rebuilt it, naming the town Neapolis, or New City. Arabs do not pronounce the letter P, so the name eventually evolved into Nablus.

Crusaders took the town long enough to build some churches. Napoleon put an ammunition dump on a hill near the city center. Nablusians blew up the depot with regularity.

2,000 Hurt

Nature itself was sometimes unkind to Nablus; in 1927, an earthquake destroyed much of the city.

Characteristically, within two days after the intifada began in Gaza, boys in Nablus took up stones to attack Israeli soldiers. On the first day of the uprising here, three youths were shot to death; since then, almost 2,000 Nablusians have been wounded, according to hospital records.

“Nablus considers itself the capital of resistance,” said Mitzna, the Israeli commander. “It’s a tough nut to crack.”

The streets of Nablus present clear signs of dual authority. On almost every corner, an apparently idle youth keeps watch for troop movements and whistles warnings to cohorts posted at the next intersection.

“Fii jaish?” asked a boy entering the Casbah carrying a small plastic bag of oranges. “Are the soldiers in there?”

Studies in Secret

His question was repeated up the line of vegetable stalls until it reached a vendor with a view of the next cross street.

Pausing amid his usual calls of “Tomatoes,” “Pepper” and “Garlic,” the vendor replied, “No soldiers,” and the boy calmly weaved through the market on his way home.

For the better part of a year, students met in secret classrooms to try to keep up with their studies. Israel kept the schools shut from February to May and closed them again in July, making the holding of even impromptu classes illegal, subject to jail and fines. Authorities of the Israeli Civil Administration reopened the schools last week, three months later than usual, and warned that they would be closed again if students joined protests.

In their ample spare time, youths renamed streets after dead rebels and handed out leaflets with the latest protest schedules.

Badge of Honor

Women, who in traditional Arab society are cloistered in the home, sometimes take part in public protests. Jail is a badge of honor.

“I would give anything to marry someone who has made such a sacrifice,” said Bassam, a young bachelor and street organizer.

Fierce-eyed militants collect taxes from store owners, prorated to reflect their reduced business, and deliver bread to families hard-pressed by the series of strikes and business closures.

The hard-core rebels, many toughened by years spent in Israeli jails, often live a fugitive life in the maze of alleys in the city’s crumbling Casbah. One, named Walid, recounted how soldiers have come to his parents’ home, surrounding it “Chicago-style” waiting to catch him--and, he thinks, shoot him. He never visits.

“I am not suicidal,” he joked dryly.

During the conversation, in a hidden ruin of a Turkish bath, someone knocked at the door. Walid leaped from the chair and headed for a side exit. It was a friend. “This is how I live,” he said, calming down.

A City-State

The rebels also give chase. Members of self-styled “hit teams” deliver handwritten warnings to Arabs accused of spying for the Israelis. In mosques, firebrand mullahs shout Koranic threats at those who compromise themselves and sell property to the “invader.”

“Blessed are those who keep the integrity of the land,” preached one cleric on a recent Friday.

During one week this fall, two suspected collaborators were killed in Nablus; one body was hanged from a meat hook in a butcher’s shop, the other dumped into a pile of garbage.

“We are like in ancient days, a city-state. We take care of our own business,” said Iran, the owner of a closed-down shoe factory.

Iran said he stopped doing business because he no longer wants to buy raw materials from Israeli suppliers. He makes do with money sent from a son who works in Kuwait, although that, too, has become a problem.

Israeli authorities suspect that money from abroad is destined for rebellious groups and keep an eye on the recipients. At one bank, a publicly displayed sign advises: “Security legislation requires that any person receiving monies from abroad, in any amount, must sign a declaration if those monies belong to or are intended for any other person.”

Money Filters In

Israel prohibits large sums of money from entering the occupied areas; transactions are limited to $1,200 no more than once every two months. Still, relief money filters in, although rebel sources say that it is not enough for the hordes of unemployed who have given up jobs in Israel.

During the school closing, Iran tried to teach his two school-age sons at home but found them inattentive. “They would rather roam the streets and look for adventure,” he said.

One of his boys, age 18, was jailed for six weeks in Ketziot, an Israeli detention center in the Negev Desert. “I am afraid, of course,” Iran admitted. “But this is their battle. It is their future at stake. My life is behind me.”

The Israeli army has undergone changes since the uprising began. Its training, once heavily focused on tanks, artillery and air power, now includes lessons in warding off rocks and rioters.

Israel is trying to take the fight to the Palestinians. Instead of waiting for protests to break out, Israeli soldiers go into towns and villages to confront stone-throwers. “We are taking the initiative,” said Mitzna. “Even if it’s with only one or two jeeps, we prefer to go in rather than leave it alone.”

‘We Mean Business’

The introduction of so-called plastic bullets, which are actually made of plastic and metal, has given the army new latitude in fighting off protesters. The bullets are considered lethal within 70 yards of a target, and the army uses them with greater frequency than it uses lead bullets; troops no longer have to wait until protesters get aggressive before firing.

“The message is: We mean business. Plastic bullets make the rioters disperse right away. We want to keep the lid on, even if the pressure builds once in a while,” said Mitzna, whose long beard gives him the look of a biblical sage in combat fatigues.

“The protesters used to open their shirts and taunt us--dare us to shoot. Well, now they run away,” he boasted.

The unpredictable nature of the intifada makes some Israeli soldiers uneasy, in spite of their armed advantage. On a recent tour of the West Bank, soldiers escorting a reporter entered the olive-growing village of Balaa to show that it was at peace.

“I know this village like the back of my hand,” boasted Chaim, an army reservist who promptly took a wrong turn into a blind alley. He began to perspire and ordered a jeep-load of soldiers to point their rifles at rooftops to frighten any potential stone-throwers.

“You can never be too sure,” he cautioned.

When the intifada --the word literally means tremor in Arabic--began, unrest was nothing new to the West Bank and Gaza territories, which Israel occupied after the Six-Day War of 1967. However, the persistent unrest and turbulence since last December marks a new level of Arab resistance, observers say.

Civil War

Researcher Benvenisti describes it as “a civil war, a Jewish-Arab civil war.” He believes that for the moment, the Arabs are too weak to throw off Israeli rule by themselves. “They can only sustain low-level strife, and it is not enough to be a threat to the Israeli regime.”

He predicted that the Arabs will try to wean themselves away from Israel in everything from education to postal services in order to try to gain freedom. The process, he estimated, could take a decade or more.

Arab observers consider that time is on the Palestinians’ side. Part of their confidence is owed to a sort of historical mystique.

“British, Turks, Christians, Hebrews, all kinds of colonizers have come and gone. The Arab is here to stay,” said Munir Fasheh, a sociologist at Birzeit University in Ramallah.

“I am not saying that the intifada will succeed in the short run. But it has made fundamental changes in the mind. It freed the imagination from the idea the Israeli is here forever,” he added.

Forever or not, for now the daily rhythm of the intifada is as regular as the call to prayer at a mosque.