Next Step : Arab Revolt: From Rocks to Revenge : * The <i> intifada </i> is dormant as a popular uprising against Israeli rule. But the wave of retribution intensifies.

The blinds were drawn and any shuffling noise in the street brought on tensed muscles and furtive glances from the pair of young Palestinians. Their attack of nerves was understandable. Only hours before, one of their group was shot down by plainclothes soldiers in a refugee camp.

“Every Black Panther knows that he will be dead soon,” said Maher, a fidgeting young man in a tight black sweater. “We would rather die with a gun in our hand than like sheep.”

Maher and scores of activists like him are symbols of a dark evolution in the more than four-year-old Arab uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The character of the anti-Israeli activity has changed so much from the original intifada, or “shaking off” of Israeli rule, as to be almost unrecognizable.

Armed groups like the Black Panthers now take it upon themselves to interrogate and liquidate suspected collaborators as well as to attack Israeli soldiers and settlers. These bands have replaced wider organizations in towns and villages as the motor force of the intifada. Guns and ambushes have eclipsed stones and street marches as the emblems of the uprising.

“The truth is,” wrote Danny Rubenstein, an Israeli reporter who has covered the revolt since its beginnings, “that the intifada as a broad, populist civilian uprising no longer exists and shows no signs of being resurrected.”

Unlike the original “popular committees” that organized strikes and protests, the clandestine teams like the Black Panthers express virtually no political convictions. They exist merely to kill--and be killed. “Talk is fine for people in Jerusalem, but here, we act,” said Maher.

For their part, the Israelis have expanded their use of plainclothes Israeli hit squads who stalk groups like the Black Panthers and shoot members on sight. The army says it fires in self-defense, but an incident near the West Bank town of Tulkarm last month throws doubt on the claim.

A Black Panther suspect was shot and killed while playing soccer. He had tried to hide behind a referee, but soldiers fired on him when the umpire fled, witnesses said. West Bank army commander Danny Yatom told Israeli reporters Sunday that the fugitive “slipped” so that bullets meant for his legs hit a “vital organ.”

Israeli torture of detainees, once officially considered an anomaly, is now routine. Settlers have been given a freer hand in vigilante activities. A year after shooting a Palestinian boy who was peacefully at home, an Israeli from the West Bank settlement of Tekoa has yet to be charged.

Israeli authorities attribute the sharpened crackdown to the increasing danger posed by armed Palestinians--danger to Israelis and Arabs alike. “This is not the same intifada it used to be,” said an Israeli intelligence official.

The combined willingness of Palestinians and Israelis to let gunfire do their talking has inspired Cassandra-like warnings about the spiral of violence.

Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari cautioned in Jerusalem Report magazine that “what is urgently needed--even as security forces use an iron hand against wielders of knives and firearms--is action to change the atmosphere of despair and purposelessness that has taken root among young Palestinians.”

Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini, who is the head of the Palestinian delegation to Middle East peace talks, predicted that if those negotiations fail, “the law of the jungle will prevail.”

But if anything, the peace talks seem so far to have added fuel to the fire. Several Palestinian groups have vowed to derail the talks, calling them a surrender. Street fights between Palestinian factional bands and at least one fatal knifing have been reported.

Israeli settlers have declared their intent to campaign against even minimal Palestinian self-rule and have launched a drive to increase rather than reduce the army presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian attacks on soldiers have made troops more eager to fire first and ask questions later.

Janin, population 40,000, is a focus of the new battle. The city lies in the heart of a wide, fertile plain at the West Bank’s northwest corner, at the apex of what Palestinians call the “iron triangle” of towns that have long rebelled against alien rule. (The other cities at the triangle’s corners are Nablus and Tulkarm, both also home to Black Panther groups.)

This is a city where the sights, sounds and smells of the intifada, now missing from many towns, are still in evidence: black smoke from burning tires, gun shots and tear gas.

Grafted onto the town of Janin is the United Nations Refugee Camp, home to 10,000 residents, descendants of Palestinians driven from Israel proper by the 1948 Middle East War. Like almost all refugee camps, its side streets are dusty and its chockablock homes are bare concrete block. It is here where the local Black Panther chapter operates.

Earlier this spring, plainclothes police rode into the dusty camp in unmarked vans and trucks. Palestinian scarves around their necks and knit caps on their heads, they looked not much different from the thousands of day workers who travel to and from this agricultural town to work in Israel. But in their knapsacks were Uzi submachine guns and pistols. Their target: Khaled Fahmawi, a Black Panther.

The Israelis said he drew a pistol. Palestinians said the victim was shot with his hands raised in surrender. Maher and his companion seize on such incidents to justify their own call to arms.

“The stone carried the message of the intifada, but the cost was too great,” said Maher, 23. “The Israelis would suffer a smashed windshield and a Palestinian would get killed. So why just throw stones? Weapons are the only answer.”

The Black Panthers, and another group named the Red Eagles, first surfaced in Nablus, long the volcanic core of the intifada. The bands were made up of wanted activists who were singled out as leaders of street protests or in some cases were suspected of killing informers.

The members were “bingos,” Israeli slang for fugitives whose identification numbers were kept on lists by army commanders. When the ID of a captive matches a number on the list, soldiers shout “bingo!” Other fugitives have been killed, sometimes fingered in the streets by informers in the company of agents of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.

Fugitives belonging to Fatah, the main faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, banded together to form the Black Panthers. The Red Eagles belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist PLO offshoot.

A strange euphoria infected the early groups in Nablus. They took to open displays of power and held the city in their thrall. They executed suspected informers; they held spectacular parades, wearing sinister masks and brandishing guns.

Their braggadocio belied a desperation: They were constantly on the run, hiding in caves and gorges by night, begging for food among passersby and always a step away from a run-in with the growing number of undercover hit squads operated by the Israelis.

In December, 1989, armed Israeli agents dressed as Arabs picked off four Black Panthers in a Nablus barber shop. A similar ambush in a nearby refugee camp spelled the end of a Red Eagle cell.

The Panthers seem, at best, indifferent about the peace talks under way. They speak neither of sinking them nor of pushing them forward; their violence is virtually without a message. “There is an Arab saying. ‘If you don’t shine now, when will you shine?’ We are not waiting for talks to solve our problems,” said Maher.

In Janin, Black Panther bands claimed responsibility for the killing of an Israeli soldier last September, an Arab-Israeli hunter in January and an oil company security guard in February. There has been armed violence elsewhere as well--settlers shot at in Ramallah, soldiers ambushed near Hebron and Tulkarm.

The cresting wave contrasts sharply with the relative quiet in many other places, where stores are open into the afternoon and evening and general strikes have been reduced to one or two a month.

Economic difficulties in the territories have set off a scramble for jobs. Activists who once spent days plotting intifada strategy now build immigrant housing inside Israel, as well as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The hardships have been brought on largely by the Gulf War. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, in response to the PLO backing for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, largely cut off funds to the organization. Tens of thousands of working Palestinians were expelled by the Kuwaitis, cutting off a source of money for their kin in the West Bank and Gaza.

Many Palestinians also yearn for some semblance of normality. Conversation often turns wistfully to life “before the intifada “ when family and community celebrations were raucous and domestic cares lighter. For the first time in almost four years, weddings have gone public.

The reduction in massive participation in the intifada fulfills a goal by the Israeli authorities, who have worked to alienate the general population from the revolt.

On the one hand, Israeli authorities have reduced restrictions on travel in the West Bank and Gaza and have lifted several roadblocks. They have announced programs to increase the numbers of building permits in the territories and reduce bureaucratic steps necessary to obtain them. The army also has cut down on patrols in out-of-the-way towns and villages, reducing the number of potential targets for stone throwers.

On the other hand, even peaceful Palestinian marches have been fired on, and, over time, rules for opening fire have been relaxed so that now soldiers and police can shoot at anyone running away from them on the grounds that flight is tantamount to confession. They may also fire at someone they believe is going to throw a rock.

While there were earlier rumors of such activity, the special Israeli undercover units first surfaced in September, 1989, when groups code-named Samson and Cherry were involved in roadside ambushes. Once, in Bethlehem, they disguised themselves as tourists and fatally shot a stone-thrower in the city streets.

Thirty-one Palestinians have been shot by undercover units this year, human rights groups say. The army admits to 13--a rate of about one a week.

At Nablus military headquarters, officials expressed cautious satisfaction over the results. A sign lists the missions of local army units--among them to “prevent street disturbances.”

“It used to say reduce street disturbances,” noted a local commander. “But we have largely succeeded in keep mass activity at bay.”

The Israelis have been frustrated in getting information about the Black Panthers and other groups by the shrinking pool of informers over the last four years, due to the threats and killings . But torture and beatings have become a common means for the Israelis to extract information. “The authorities want the information and want it fast. The easiest way is to beat it out of someone,” said Stanley Cohen, a Hebrew University criminologist.

In a recent conversation with a reporter, a released prisoner in Nablus recounted 20 days of beatings under interrogation in a Janin jail. His captors were trying to get information about Revolutionary Security, a successor group to the Black Panthers in Nablus. The prisoner, A., is a Fatah activist and organizer of stone throwers in the turbulent Old City of Nablus. He was arrested twice in the Arab uprising, which began in December, 1987, and before that a dozen other times,

This time, he was jailed in Nablus for two days, then transferred--blindfolded and bound--to Janin. The trip usually takes 40 minutes, but A. claimed it took three hours. “They beat me with sticks all along the way,” he said. “They cursed and kicked. When I got there, the prison refused to accept me until I had seen a doctor. I was bleeding from the mouth.”

He said that during the next 18 days he was held alone in a cramped cell and interrogated repeatedly, his head covered with a canvas sack. Frequently, he said, his hands were draped over the back of a chair and tethered to his feet. He was beaten on the chest and claimed to have suffered three cracked ribs. After the interrogation, he remained in jail for six months until freed after paying a $500 fine.

Military authorities say that they don’t torture, but rather follow ground rules that, under law, permit them to use “moderate physical pressure.”

The dual policies of trying to encourage Palestinians to resume normal affairs and to hit hard at perpetrators of violence has left a gaping hole. Israeli settlers, targets of shooting and unhappy with the political implications of allowing many Palestinian towns to be free of visible army authority, have revolted. Groups were formed to travel into remote areas where, if they were stoned, they would fire on the Palestinians or call in the army.

Black Panther and other armed groups have let it be known that settlers are favored targets and over a four-month period this year and last, five settlers were killed on the highways.

Even before the killings, the government had made clear a lenient attitude toward Israeli settler vigilantism. Shootings by settlers were winked at; detentions were only provoked if the settlers got in the way of the army.

A notable case involves Salam Musleh, 15, who was fatally shot when a settler fired into the window of the teen’s house. Police quickly identified Boaz Moscowitz as the gunman. He said stones had been thrown at him and he was firing after his car was halted at a makeshift barricade put up by Palestinians.

Since the incident, the Musleh family’s lawyer has made several requests for prosecutors to bring charges; the Justice Ministry has done nothing. “The price of Arab blood in the territories is getting cheaper and cheaper,” said Avraham Gal, a lawyer for the Palestinian family.

Moscowitz hung up on reporters trying to reach him. His lawyer says they have heard nothing about the case for months.

Fellow residents of Tekoa, a settlement south of Bethlehem, sympathize with Moscowitz and blame the incident on the lack of police security on the roads.

“Mr. Moscowitz was justified in his action,” said Amiel Ungar. “I would prefer to visit him in jail than in the morgue.”

Deadly Trend During much of the Arab uprising, more Arabs have been killed by other Arabs than by Israeli troops, according to B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group. Government figures are lower but show same pattern.

Palestinians killed by army:

Palestinians killed by Palestinians:

* Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians: 42

* Palestinians killed by collaborators: 14

* Israelis (soldiers 24 and civilians 56) killed by Palestinians: 80

SOURCE: B’tselem