Israeli Officials Wary : Palestinian Uprising May Change Shape but Endure

JERUSALEM —  Israeli politicians are reassuring a worried and divided country that a government counterattack has broken the back of a popular uprising, the intifada, by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Not everybody is convinced that they are right.

“There are signs that the intifada is dying,” hard-line Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said last week.

“We have dialogue with all sectors of the population without exception, and in all of our conversations we hear, ‘Gentlemen, let us return to normal life,’ ” said Shmuel Goren, Israel’s chief administrator for the turbulent territories.

Counterpoint to the official optimism is a quiet concern among some Israeli security officials in the territories that the unrest may change its shape but will endure.

The Palestinians themselves, grieving, tired, but convinced they have won a historic victory through a popular uprising that began without warning six months ago this week, say unabashedly that they have just begun to fight.

“Under a thin layer of calm, embers are glowing,” warned Yitzhak Rabin, who is Israel’s defense minister and one of Shamir’s main political foes.

Rabin has met repeatedly with moderate Palestinian leaders to promise substantive talks once the unrest ends. Many of the territories’ most dynamic leaders, though, are in no condition to do any talking. By one careful estimate, at least 90% of them are among about 4,000 Palestinians currently in Israeli detention camps. Half of the prisoners are being held on the orders of local military commanders without judicial review.

“Once they get out, the whole thing could start all over again,” cautioned one well-placed Israeli analyst. “The intifada is the only card the Palestinians have to play. They cannot let it die.”

Palestinians, buoyed by a new-found sense of community, talk of asserting economic independence and replacing violence with massive civil disobedience. In Arab villages and Palestinian refugee camps, self-appointed grass-roots committees to administer community life have sprung up for the first time.

Among some Israeli specialists, though, there is concern that a new stage of the revolt might include export of violence from the territories to Israel itself in low-level, spontaneous terrorism of the knife and Molotov cocktail variety. An Arab stabbed a Jewish theology student in the back as he walked through the Old City of Jerusalem one day recently.

As a consequence of the intifada, the Green Line, which separated Israel and Jordan before the 1967 war, is a physical fact of life again. Everybody knows where it is, even though it is invisible, and Israelis no longer casually cross it.

“Once again, Jerusalem is a divided city. You can see the hatred in their eyes, and I guess they see the same in ours,” said an Israeli woman accustomed to Saturday shopping forays into an Arab East Jerusalem that now seems more menacing than exotic.

Arson, a favorite tactic during a 1936 Arab revolt in then-British-ruled Palestine, is on the rise again. In recent weeks, thousands of acres of forest and farmland have burned amid increased vandalism in the Israeli countryside.

Israelis more convinced by numbers and intuition are heartened by a perceptible waning of violence in the West Bank and Gaza. There are still daily clashes, but the crowds of demonstrators are smaller and more factional, sometimes almost pro forma. General strikes, like one that continued Saturday, are still frequent, but both sides are coming to recognize that they hurt Arabs worse than Jews.

Violent clashes between troops and demonstrators in the West Bank dropped to 1,150 in May from a March peak of 1,940, by government count. In March, 47 demonstrators died in the territories conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War 21 years ago this week. Last month, amid increasingly sporadic unrest, fewer than two dozen demonstrators died.

At great expense to its international image, Israel is pursuing a vigorous program to stifle the intifada.

In the dusty streets of Arab villages and refugee camps, a blue-ribbon army has traded its assault rifles for tear-gas launchers and its tanks for homemade contraptions that spew gravel back at stone-throwing demonstrators. Helicopter pilots trained on rocket-firing gunships now practice dropping gas and nets on young rioters. Commandos and paratroopers rigorously groomed to confront terrorist infiltrators and foreign armies instead wield unaccustomed clubs and newfangled anti-rock shields.

Said Meron Benvinisti, Israeli head of a research center here: “We’re back to biblical times; the shepherds’ war. Stones and clubs are replacing missiles and tanks.”

Said a fortyish Israeli reservist: “For years I have been a tank commander. This year I was a riot policeman. OK, if that’s what’s needed. But my crew and I are not as good with the tank as we used to be.”

Lacking both technique and equipment when the intifada began, the armed forces have learned on the job. Soldiers now get at least two days of training in crowd control, including reservists whose period of active duty has been extended this year for up to 65 days. A new manual spells out to regulars and reservists alike the rules of engagement as explicitly as it forbids excessive use of force.

To its dismay, Israel has heard repeated allegations of brutality by its soldiers, reflecting what one analyst calls “a change from Israel’s historic self-image as David to suddenly being cast as a brutal Goliath.”

In tactical terms, Israelis and Palestinians have adapted quickly to sustained and large-scale civil strife new to both of them.

“We are better organized. We have more means and equipment now, and we know better how to use them,” said Maj. Ofra Preuss, an army spokeswoman.

Know Just How Far to Go

So, too, have young Palestinian demonstrators learned unspoken street rules, say Arab observers. They know how far a patrol can be provoked, and they know how to harass soldiers without forcing them into tight spots where they might panic. They know the range of various weapons, and how the sound of a rubber bullet is different from that of a real bullet.

Onions have passed into Palestinian folklore as an effective means of neutralizing tear gas among protesters who now sometimes advance behind garbage can lids and keep handy a bucket of water in which to douse gas grenades.

In six months, about 190 Palestinians have been killed, an appalling number, but far fewer, senior military commanders quickly note, than died in one May week of fighting between rival militias in Beirut.

Israel is effectively supplementing the military repression with curfews, deportations and administrative and economic harassment. Phones and telexes often don’t work in the territories. It is impossible to get even a birth certificate without proof that taxes have been paid. New identity cards are required. Citing reduced income, territories’ administrators are cutting back social services. It is becoming as hard to import foreign exchange into the territories as it always has been to smuggle in weapons.

About 10,000 Arrested

In all, about 10,000 of the 1.5 million Palestinians in the territories have been arrested since the revolt began. Still being held, along with intifada leaders and teen-age rock throwers, are the territories’ intellectual elite.

Clearly, the Palestinians are hurting. Just as clearly, they are enormously proud at what their intifada has achieved.

Far from the noise and the passions, the prestigious independent International Institute for Strategic Studies in London concluded last week that six months of revolt had “done more to boost Palestinian morale and generate worldwide sympathy for the Palestinians than all the preceding 40 years of Arab armed struggle against Israel.”

Israeli tactical and strategic response to the revolt is manifest. So is its strength and its willingness to use it. What remains to be seen is whether, in the face of all of that, the Palestinians are able to generate a second-phase intifada in which they can translate their psychological gains into political advantage.

Thus far, the intifada has had no serious political message beyond a quixotic call for an independent state. A practical message is belatedly emerging, however, in calls for free municipal elections and negotiations leading to some sort of staged and broadly accepted autonomy.

After six tumultuous months, not many people on either side seem convinced that the Israeli government’s hope of a return to business as usual is possible, or even desirable. Israel itself is torn between those who believe the intifada must be crushed and those who wince at the internal cost to Israel of violently suppressing a civilian population on occupied lands.

Two-thirds of Israelis now tell pollsters they would be willing to talk with Palestinians about a political settlement for the territories convulsed by the intifada.