Intifada’s ‘Shock Troops’ Masked : Israel: Palestinians cling to it as a show of power and defiance; authorities see it as a sinister symbol.

In the end, the dispute over the circumstances of the killing of Nidal Habash, a 21-year-old Palestinian business student, centered not on whether he was throwing stones or gasoline bombs or anything else, or whether he was a terrorist. It all came down to whether he wore a mask.

Palestinian witnesses say that the slender youth had pulled off his red mask and surrendered, hands up, to an Israeli soldier who had shot him in the legs and then, while the youth lay prone, shot him three times in the stomach from close range.

Israeli army officials say the youth was masked, and thus fair game for pursuing troops. They deny he had surrendered and consider the case closed, despite calls by a British diplomat and an Israeli human rights group for an investigation.

That a mask should be the main focus of debate is indicative of the increasingly unpredictable course of the Arab uprising against Israeli rule and Israel’s response to it. Perspective is the latest casualty: A man is killed and everyone wonders if he was masked or not.

Israeli military officials have seized on the mask as a sinister symbol of the violent underside of the intifada , as the Arabs call the uprising. They have given soldiers permission to open fire on anyone in the West Bank and Gaza Strip wearing a mask, be it a hood or a wraparound scarf. The soldiers are supposed to aim at the legs.

“They (the masked Palestinians) are the hard core facing the security forces in their war against the uprising,” Amnon Strashnow, the army’s advocate general, recently told Israeli reporters. “They oil the wheels of the uprising.”

Strashnow said the new firing orders had been approved by the Justice Ministry.

The intifada is entering its 23rd month. Almost 600 Palestinians have died, most of them from Israeli rifle fire but occasionally from beatings. Another 125 Palestinians have been killed by nationalist militants as suspected collaborators with the Israeli authorities. Diplomacy designed to bring together Israeli and Palestinian negotiators is at a standstill.

Rebel Palestinians cling to the mask as a show of power and defiance despite the evident danger in wearing it. If anything, the danger seems to add glamour, especially among the young.

“People know they can depend on us. They know we are willing to face death,” said a young activist who gave the false name of Arafat. Among the general population, such youths are known simply as munafthamiin-- “masked ones.”

Nablus, a city that is considered by both sides to be the white-hot core of the uprising, was where the elaborate use of masks was pioneered. It was here that the traditional Arab scarf known as the kaffiyeh gave way to a variety of hoods--first garbage bags with holes poked in them, later knitted hoods decorated with nationalistic designs.

Youths parade in neighborhood “armies,” sometimes with homemade sabers, clubs and maces. Color codes often identify the wearer with rebel factions: black and white for Fatah, the main faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization headed by Yasser Arafat; red and white for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a doctrinaire Marxist PLO group, and black with a green stripe for Hamas, an Islamic movement opposed to Israeli rule in any part of historic Palestine.

Red, white, green and black Palestinian flags are converted into ready-to-wear masks; the munafthamiin also stitch the colors into the checked pattern of the kaffiyeh or around the eye holes of hoods.

In a pinch, offbeat disguises will do. Halloween-style gorilla masks are a favorite in some villages.

In practical terms, the rebel youth embrace the mask as protection for themselves against the preying eyes of informers or the Israeli cameras that photograph demonstrators from rooftop outposts in cities and towns.

They also feel the need to spare relatives and associates who are not directly involved from the consequences of their acts--interrogation, harassment, sometimes even the demolition of a family home by the authorities.

“The boys have to defend themselves even against people they know. Why should they expose even their relatives to questioning by Israeli interrogators by letting their deeds be viewed publicly? It is better for no one to see,” said an activist in Nablus.

There is a story circulating in the West Bank and Gaza that illuminates the double life of activists and their use of masks. A group of masked youths confronted a man over his possession of an Israeli-issued identification card. The youths were collecting and destroying the cards in order to discourage Palestinians from cooperating in any way with the authorities.

The man denied he had been issued a card.

“Give it over,” the youths insisted, but the man persisted in his denials.

Finally, one of the boys pulled off his mask and said, “Papa, give them the card.”

The psychological power that a mask confers may be the most compelling reason for the Palestinians to ignore the danger of using it.

“They feel like someone else. It is like Clark Kent changing into Superman. The powerless become powerful,” explained a college professor in Nablus. “It is no longer just little Ahmed, the baker’s son, who is out in the streets. It is Ahmed the masked one, part of a group and a movement.”

The masks also have historical significance for the Palestinians. During revolts against British rule of Palestine in the 1920s, dashing horsemen wearing kaffiyehs around their faces became the romantic symbol of resistance.

“The Palestinians believe they link themselves with this past by wearing masks,” commented Daoud Kutab, a nationalist journalist.

The authorization from the Israeli government to shoot at anyone masked is only the latest policy adjustment designed to force an end to the intifada while keeping the repression palatable to Israeli society. During the past year, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin has issued a series of rulings liberalizing the conditions under which soldiers may open fire, with ammunition that has ranged from live lead-tipped rounds to plastic bullets--really a blend of plastic and metal effective up to 80 yards--to rubber-covered metal balls.

There has been little public outcry over the order on mask wearers, which was handed down earlier this month. Some observers contend that Israelis, sedated by the endless rhythm of the intifada , no longer pay attention to the daily violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Others contend that the masks themselves, by distancing the person behind the disguise from outsiders, make it easier for Israelis to accept the increasing bloodshed.

“The masks erase the personality of the Palestinians and emphasize the presence of them as a group,” remarked Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University. “The masks are the uniform of the intifada , and it always easier to shoot at uniforms than at people whose clothing suggests individuality.”

Ezrahi pointed out that in the collective memory of recent Israeli history, masks are a particularly powerful symbol of the harm that some Palestinian groups have done to innocent Israelis.

“Every time I hear about the masks, my mind flashes to the photo of the terrorist standing on the balcony of the dormitory at the Munich Olympics during the killing of Israeli athletes,” Ezrahi noted, referring to 1972.

The war on masks comes against a backdrop of generally tougher measures taken by the Israeli army against any forms of resistance to Israel’s occupation.

Israeli jails now hold 13,000 Palestinians, including thousands who are detained for periods of up to a year without trial. Towns and villages are placed under curfew for days and even weeks at a time. Property is confiscated and phone lines and even water supplies cut in punishment for protests or stone throwing or for not paying taxes.

Of all the cities and towns in the West Bank, Nablus is the one closest to a state of full-scale insurgency, albeit one still without weapons to face the M-16 rifles of the Israelis stationed in and around the city.

For months, many of the demonstrations and stone throwing took place mainly in the Old City, a rambling quarter of crumbling arches and labyrinthine alleys. But as the army cracked down hard on the neighborhood--soldiers once blew up two houses belonging to the families of rebels who dropped a brick on the head of a soldier and killed him--the action moved to the other end of the steep valley city.

According to an independent count, 20 residents, mostly teen-agers and mostly masked, have been killed in Nablus during the past two months. Israeli human rights groups estimate that more than 100 Nablusis have died in the uprising, meaning more than one in six of the Palestinian fatalities has occurred in this city of 120,000.

It was in the well-to-do Nablus neighborhood of Rafidia, on Oct. 9, following a parade of masked youths, that a soldier shot down Habash in a vacant lot after the army had scattered the youths and pursued stragglers. The marchers were identified as belonging to the Popular Front. Army spokesmen said they were inciting residents to riot.

“I was shocked,” recalled Asma Masri, who watched the shooting from the balcony of an apartment building that overlooks the field. “He had his hands up and a soldier fired from about 50 yards. The boy fell and the soldier approached slowly until he was about 10 yards away. Then he fired three more times.”

Israeli officials justify the tougher measures by pointing to the increasing incidents of violence by Arabs against Arabs. The attacks on collaborators, they insist, are meant to keep Palestinians from freely accepting the government’s proposals for election and local self-rule.

“If one of these youths is walking in the streets, I don’t have to wait until I find two alleged collaborators murdered in that area the next day,” said Strashnow, the army’s advocate general.

Nablus, along with the Gaza Strip, has become known as a grim center of such reprisals, against both suspected collaborators and Arabs accused of crimes against morality such as drug trafficking and prostitution.

Last spring, the underground leadership of the uprising gave the green light for assassinations on the grounds that it was necessary to protect rebel organizers in the face of mass roundups and the increasing threat of assassination by soldiers and plainclothes agents.

The killings quickly got out of hand. Over the summer, about 80 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians; until then the total of such assassinations had only reached 20. Some of the reprisal squads even turned to crime and intimidation. In response, two masked groups were formed to control them. But the intifada leaders soon lost control of these vigilante groups and some weeks, they killed more Arabs than the Israelis did.

In any event, a debate broke out last week over whether soldiers should be given leeway to shoot at masked Palestinians who live in mainly Arab East Jerusalem, which was fully annexed to Israel in 1967. Police Chief Haim Bar-Lev opposed any such order because, he said, full Israeli law applies in the city and there is no statute that would permit such liberal firing orders.

“We have not reached the conclusion that a law should be initiated that makes it possible to open fire on a man with a mask in sovereign Israeli territory,” the police chief said, referring to the Palestinians as simply “people with masks.”

Rightists who are pressing the army to do more to crush the uprising argued that there is no reason to exclude Jerusalem Arabs from the deadly consequences of wearing a mask in occupied areas.

“Everything possible must be done in order to make clear to the masked men and those behind them that Israel will not reconcile itself to these and similar phenomena in East Jerusalem as in other places under its control,” the rightist religious newspaper Hatzofeh declared. “We must stop this forgiving approach, see the phenomenon of masked men in all its severity and not treat them as ‘men with masks.’ ”

For all kinds of men with masks, the coming winter could be the most dangerous season of all. Arabs commonly wrap their faces with kaffiyehs as a protection against the chill wet winds of the Holy Land.