Caught Between Militants, Military : Israel’s ID Policy Poses Dilemma for Gaza Arabs

Construction worker Mahmoud Abu Aziz was in a bind.

Israeli authorities had issued him a new identification card. Only by showing it at the main exit from the teeming occupied zone where he makes his home could he pass into Israel and collect back wages from his Israeli employer.

But strong-arm activists of the Palestinian uprising had warned him and thousands of others in the impoverished Gaza Strip not to cooperate with the new Israeli program and to turn in their cards to local neighborhood committee members as a show of solidarity.

‘My Family Wages’

“We are caught in the middle,” said Abu Aziz, 31, sighing as he decided what to do on a humid Friday morning. “The intifada leaders don’t like the cards, but these are my family wages. Maybe just today, I can use the card, no?”

Abu Aziz’s choice, and the dilemma for thousands of workers like him, is the focal point in the latest quiet struggle of the intifada, as the uprising is called in Arabic.

Israel sees the cards as a means to weed out potential troublemakers crossing into Israel, as well as a way to assert its authority in the Gaza Strip, a hotbed of anti-Israeli militancy. The uprising leadership considers the cards an effort to split Gaza’s population into “good” Arabs and “bad” and to weaken the resolve of Palestinians to fight Israeli occupation.

The Israelis appear to have the upper hand. For the estimated 60,000 Gazans who work at mainly menial tasks inside Israel, there is no quick substitute. The question is whether uprising leaders will put their authority on the line to force the issue.

Already Friday, the first day of the policy, Israeli officials were declaring victory.

“As you can see, despite the threats, people still come,” said Col. Sami Mutsafi, Gaza’s military governor. Estimates of crossings Friday ranged as high as 6,000. Many Muslims avoid work on Friday, the chief Muslim prayer day. Sunday, the first day of the work week in Israel, is expected to reveal the strength of resistance to the cards.

Brig. Gen. Zvi Poleg, the top military commander in Gaza, was optimistic. “There is a law that cannot be broken: When people are hungry, they will go to work,” he said.

Less than a mile away, Palestinian activists were busy prodding workers to stay away, while at the same time hinting that at some point the decision to use the new cards would be left up to the workers themselves.

“Our workers are faithful. We believe they will do the right thing,” predicted Zacaharia Agha, a physician and Palestine Liberation Organization sympathizer.

Worker Abu Aziz was looking for a middle way. “I will ask the popular committee if I can go. I’m sure if I explain myself, they will understand,” he said in a wavering voice. Such committees are directing the 18-month-old uprising.

Although the use of firearms, arrests without trial and housing demolition continue to be the main tools used by Israel to cope with the intifada, many bureaucratic methods are employed as well. Tax raids, car seizures, arbitrary traffic inspections and denial of permits to build and travel also affect daily life for Palestinians.

Now, with the new plastic cards, Israel is undertaking to tighten control over the labor population.

“This is a visa, a permission to visit Israel,” Poleg said. “We call it a magnetic card.”

Poleg and other officials paint a graphic picture of the eventual purposes of the card. Information registered on the magnetic tape can be fed into a computer to call up an array of information about the cardholder: a criminal record, if any, his political affiliations, activities of his relatives, whether he has failed to answer military summonses or paid taxes. The cards are meant to be issued to all men between 16 and 60 years old. Women will not be required to get them.

Asserting Control

“The intifada leaders want to break connections with Israel and create anarchy,” Gen. Poleg explained. “These cards say in so many words, ‘We are the government.’ ”

The impetus for distributing the cards, which include a picture of the bearer, originated with violent attacks made by Arabs on Israeli citizens inside Israel, such as one in July in which a militant Muslim steered a public bus off the main Jerusalem-to-Tel Aviv highway, killing 16 passengers.

No one expects the new cards to fully deter the attacks. The bus assailant, for example, had no criminal record or special history of anti-Israeli activity. Still, there is a psychological message for the distraught Israeli population.

“This can help Israelis feel more secure,” Poleg said.

Despite opposition expressed in leaflets and graffiti, many Gazans have voluntarily picked up the new cards, spurred by rumors that they will cost more as time goes by. Cardholders are charged the equivalent of $10 for the document.

Soldiers have also rounded up residents and bused them to the station where the cards are issued. Old cards have been confiscated, and their bearers told to get the new ones.

Members of anti-Israeli “hit teams” have tried to collect the cards in an effort to establish their own form of control.

“The Israelis want to divide us, to say some Palestinians are different from others. We say we all get the cards or none of us do,” said Rami, a hit team member who claims his group collected 500 cards in a single night.

Besides being concerned that the cards will divide Palestinians, activists view the possible police use of the magnetized documents with alarm. “If the computer says you are not ‘clean,’ you will not be able to buy a car, get a house, work--anything,” conjectured Agha, the pro-PLO physician.

Israeli military officials confirm that bureaucratic harassment of Palestinians is a tactic aimed at destroying the sense of solidarity between the general population and hard-core activists of the intifada.

Israel is trying to isolate the two psychologically by convincing workaday citizens that the only way to return to normal life is to end the uprising.