MIDDLE EAST : Palestinians Drop Strikes as a Weapon

Sometimes they raced from store to store, sometimes they sauntered, but the message the Palestinian youths brought was the same: “Strike!”

Almost in unison, Arab merchants would shutter their shops, workers would turn and head home and schools would empty.

At the Dec. 9, 1987, start of the intifada, the Palestinians’ rebellion against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the strike was one of their most powerful weapons.

“With a general strike, we would throw the Israeli economy into chaos--factories could not work, construction halted and vegetables, fruit and flowers were not harvested,” recalled Samir Abdallah Saleh, a Prague-trained economist, who teaches at the Palestinians’ An Najah National University in the West Bank city of Nablus.

But this week, in a move marking an important shift in its struggle, the Palestinian leadership announced that, except for one strike on the ninth of each month commemorating the start of the intifada, there will be no more general strikes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“Commercial strikes served their purpose during a certain period,” said Faisal Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace talks. “That has come to an end now.”

Fatah, the mainstream political movement within the Palestine Liberation Organization, then canceled the next strike day, which had been called by a rival group, and said that only the Palestinian leadership now could decide on such strikes.

The effect was to return direction of the Palestinian struggle to top political echelons, taking it off the street, where strikes used to be organized at almost a moment’s notice and sometimes at variance with the leadership’s goals and strategy.

“We are afraid this call for limiting strikes is meant to deny the forces opposed to the peace process the right to express their rejection of these negotiations with Israel,” Tayseer Khaled, a member of the PLO executive committee from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said in Damascus.

When the strikes began, more than 160,000 Palestinians went to work in Israel each day, and large segments of industry, agriculture and manufacturing depended on them.

“The strike gave us control--first of our own Palestinian streets, but also of the overall situation,” said Riad Malki, an engineering professor at Birzeit University and a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “The strike was the Palestinian people saying ‘no’ to the Israeli occupation. . . .”

Rival groups vied to organize the biggest strikes, the young men who carried the word through the community became the intifada’s cadres and, after years of feuding, the Palestinians finally achieved a measure of political solidarity.

Over the long course of the intifada, however, Israel reduced sharply the number of Palestinians it employed and shifted more production toward exports to Europe and learned to cope in other ways.

“We are at the point now where we are striking only against ourselves,” Abdallah, a member of the Palestinian delegation to the Arab-Israeli peace talks, said.

Abdallah, a leading member of the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party, called this month for an end to the “strike days” and an effort to strengthen the Palestinian economy.

To the amazement of Palestinians, his highly controversial call--in effect, a challenge to the political groups that organize the strikes as a demonstration of their power--won PLO support.