West Bank Body Counts Rising Even as World Prospects Improve

The Middle East holds more hope and more menace than it has for years. Important positive signs add touches of light. Yet bitter defense of the status quo, everyday violence and implacable suspicion make the outlook dark. A visitor this spring senses a witching hour in which events could move either way.

The engine of change remains the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. After 16 months, the conflict is, if anything, more intense. On the Palestinian side, about 450 dead, many more injured, thousands in field prisons no better than concentration camps and curfews. Immobilizing villages has not broken resistance. The stone-throwing continues and all the heavy-handed measures of Israel’s so-called civil administration (military personnel from top to bottom) only seem to compound the problem.

The school system is shut down on the West Bank and children wander around with nothing to do except taunt the Israeli military patrols with stones and slingshots. (A 9-year-old can send a one-inch stone 100 yards and can really hurt someone at 60 feet.)

The men and women of the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency, offering educational and health support to more than 800,000 refugees in the occupied territories, try to sustain local institutions. Yet Israeli authorities assert that schools are hotbeds of nationalism and violent opposition. They have also refused to allow children in the first three grades, just learning to read and write, to be taught at home by their parents under the guidance of visiting teachers. The Palestinians, hungry for learning, see this as a deliberate policy to condemn their children to illiteracy and they respond with incandescent hate.

Economic pressure, harassment and humiliation are all-pervasive. A father wanting a birth certificate for a child must first apply at seven administrative offices for such things as a good conduct clearance. Exit fees for those permitted to travel abroad have gone up. The limit on money that may be brought into the capital-starved territories has gone down. Emergency regulations amount to martial law. A new ordinance restricts freedom of movement, requiring people to carry special identity cards.

Since 1967, Israel has managed the economy of the occupied territories in the traditional mercantilist manner of a colonial power. In addition, it has seized much of the land and, more important, the water resources for its settlements. The West Bank and Gaza have been a captive market for Israeli consumer goods, a source of cheap labor and no competition.

Until the intifada, occupation was a profitable enterprise for Israel. Now, Palestinians aim for a separate economy as a matter of liberation. The uprising has a Boston Tea Party aspect, along with the building of economic infrastructure and social self-help institutions. There is already a rather remarkable political cohesion. A revolving leadership withstands the Israeli security services’ efforts to suppress it. And it appears to work by a popular consensus that the clumsy authorities are unable to co-opt.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s proposal for “democratic elections” is dismissed, even by Israelis in the peace camp, as a transparent play for time. Mohammed Milhem, one of the mayors elected in the last free election of 1976 and then expelled by Israeli occupation forces in 1980, calls Shamir’s suggestion a trick to identify and then expel Palestinian leaders. “A man will not be bitten twice by the same snake,” he says. But he would consider a referendum, internationally supervised, on whether the people want the Palestine Liberation Organization to represent them.

The intifada is a phenomenon. After erupting spontaneously, it has developed a program to justify the depth of the struggle--a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel, arrived at through political settlement. The intifada has imposed this program on laggard leaders outside, specifically the PLO and Arab regimes that have spent decades ineffectually juggling the hot potato of Palestinian nationalism.

Astonishingly, official Israel appears unaffected. The tired leaders of Labor and the jingoists of Likud have found no better common ground than Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s declared policy of “force, might and beatings.” The casuality rate is as high as ever and one of the worst incidents occurred less than two weeks ago. Elias Freij, the Christian mayor of Bethlehem called it an unprovoked massacre--at least five dead and dozens injured in one village. Chief among the perpetrators were Druze border police, known for brutality toward Palestinians and now employed in larger numbers at places previously patrolled by the Israeli army.

Particularly ominous was an incident earlier in April when a man in Israeli army uniform turned a submachine gun on a group of Palestinians near the Jaffa Gate of old Jerusalem, killing one and wounding two. Telephone callers claimed responsibility in the name of the Sicarii. Sicarii, alluding to a dagger, was the name used by Zealot guerrillas who fought the Roman occupation in the time of Christ. In recent months, the modern Sicarii has been linked to acts of vandalism, fire bombing and vicious intimidation against men and women in the Israeli peace movement or deemed to be pro-Arab. Now observers think Sicarii may be setting out to kill Palestinians in a sort of counter- intifada.

Israelis as well as Arabs think the binary tragedy, occupation- intifada, can continue for years despite the human and material costs.

Yet the big political picture has improved in one essential aspect. Middle East battles are no longer amplified or exploited in the tensions and polarization of the Cold War.

The United States and the Soviet Union urge compromise, a peace with Israel’s security and Palestinian political rights in stable balance. As Washington has made contact with the PLO, Moscow has reached out to Israel (also to Egypt and Saudi Arabia). The Kremlin is telling Syria that there can be no military solution and no further deliveries of offensive weapons to pursue one. Syria’s recent attack on a Soviet ship in the Mediterranean may be a kick in the shin for this, but Damascus has nowhere else to turn.

At the same time, the tone if not the substance of the U.S.-Israeli relationship has changed. Impatience with the Likud government’s inflexibility shows. Shamir’s security argument, that once trumped all criticism, is less credible now. The threat has shrunk. Egypt has long since made peace with Israel; Jordan seeks it.

Prospects for peaceful adjustment to new realities are not hopeless; but given the explosive alternative, the sooner the better.