13

The Fault Line

The first thing one notices after walking across the Lebanon border into Israel is how straight everything looks. In contrast to the chaotic farm fields of Lebanon, the Israeli banana groves are planted in perfectly parallel rows, and the kibbutz family houses are built in symmetrical patterns that smoothly and gently carry the eye along. The roads are straight and the white lines down the middle all seem freshly painted. Indeed, the whole vista exudes a sense of planning and order. Even Israel’s coastline looks straighter than Lebanon’s.

For a while after I arrived there, Israel’s straight lines fooled me. It took my eyes several months to penetrate the forest of right angles and to discover the jagged and volcanic fault line that lurked just beneath the surface of Israeli society. Whereas Lebanon was built on many different fault lines, separating the seventeen different Christian and Muslim sects that make up the country, Israel and the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are built over just one, which separates Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. In Lebanon, the government was constantly being shaken by tremors which exploded along its sectarian fault lines. Eventually, a tremor came along in 1975 that was powerful enough to open them all at once and send the whole country crashing into an abyss.

In Israel, the government was much stronger and more cohesive. For twenty years, from June 1967 to December 1987, the Israeli government was able to absorb all the shock waves and tremors that built up along the fault line dividing Palestinians and Jews—so much so that many Israelis, and even some Palestinians, forgot that it was even there. But living in Beirut had made me very sensitive to geological disturbances; like any earthquake survivor, I never stopped feeling them.

Whenever I told Israelis that their country reminded me of Lebanon much more than they might have thought, they bristled with indignation. “What are you talking about,” a prominent Hadassah Hospital neurologist sputtered at me when I made such a comparison at a Jerusalem dinner party. “Civil war in Jerusalem? Gaza is like Beirut? You have spent too much time in Lebanon.”

Indeed I had.

On Friday, November 6, 1987, the Jerusalem Post ran the following item about the Palestinian owner of the Dallas restaurant in East Jerusalem, one of the city’s more popular purveyors of Arabic food:

“If Mohammed Hussein has his way, observant Jews may soon be able to grab a bite in [Arab] East Jerusalem. Last month Hussein applied to the local religious council to receive a kashrut certificate for his restaurant Dallas … in the heart of the city’s main Arab shopping district. According to Hussein, there is a great demand for a kosher restaurant in East Jerusalem. ‘Jews come here all the time and ask if we have a certificate,’ he said. Hussein believes that the restaurant—a stone’s throw from Salah e-Din Street, the courts, and the Justice Ministry—will attract a kashrut-observing clientele. A religious Muslim, Hussein understands the burden of dietary restrictions: ‘I look at this as a chance to help people observe their religion.’”

Mohammed Hussein’s plans to make his Arabic restaurant kosher were not the mad antics of an isolated Palestinian quisling trying to curry favor with his occupiers. To the contrary, they were emblematic of the extent to which Israelis and Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were inexorably melding together into a single binational society during the twenty years that followed the 1967 war.

From their side, the Israelis integrated the West Bank and Gaza Strip into their own systems of municipal government, zoning, town planning, road signs, and transportation. When you drove from pre-1967 Israel into the West Bank, there was no WELCOME TO THE WEST BANK sign to tell you where you were, and there was no change in the road or physical scenery. The two regions blended together in a way that was seamless, which explains why Israelis who grew up after 1967 often don’t have a clue where the border runs and would be hard-pressed to draw the outlines of the West Bank on a map. By the late 1980s some 70,000 Israelis had moved into towns and settlements in the West Bank (not including East Jerusalem). Most of them were not gun-toting religious zealots in search of the Messiah but Israeli yuppies in search of a house with a yard and armed with nothing more dangerous than briefcases stuffed with the commuting schedules to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Indeed, roughly 85 percent of the Jewish settlers living in the occupied territories today reside in ten urban centers within a 30-minute commute of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Maybe that was why few Israelis seemed to take notice when a Hebrew version of Monopoly was issued in which players could buy houses and hotels in the West Bank towns of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Nablus as easily as in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

Shopping for bargains in Arab villages and markets on Saturday became a weekly routine for many Israelis. In fact, I knew a very senior Israeli military intelligence officer who told me that every Sunday, after giving a top-secret briefing to the Israeli Cabinet on the week’s intelligence developments, he would drive directly from the Prime Minister’s office to his favorite Arabic restaurant in the West Bank town of Bethlehem to sate his appetite for grilled lamb and Arabic salads.

But while all the world seemed to be focusing on how Israel was sinking roots into the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, few paid attention to how much the Palestinians living in these areas were sinking their own roots—voluntarily and unconsciously—into Israeli society. No one observed this process of Palestinian integration with more insight and honesty than Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, who teaches at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit University. The son of a prominent Palestinian politician, Anwar Nusseibeh, Sari, now in his late thirties, was born and raised in Jerusalem in the days before 1967, when it was under Jordanian control, and he watched every step of the way as his Palestinian compatriots slowly became “Israelified.”

“It all began with an Egged bus,” said Sari, referring to the Israeli national bus cooperative. “After the 1967 war, Palestinians would not get near an Egged bus. It looked like a terrifying monster from outer space, transporting aliens from one foreign place to another. Some people said we should never ride the Israeli buses because it would be recognizing the Israeli occupation. But slowly, Palestinians started using the Egged buses; they figured out where they were going and where they were coming from. The Israeli system is the Egged bus, and we have learned to use it.”

The Palestinians felt they had no choice: either they learned to ride the Egged buses and did business with the Israelis on Israeli terms or they resisted and didn’t eat. Israel controlled all the means for importing raw materials and exporting finished products and would not allow them to develop their own industrial infrastructure that might compete with the Israeli economy or serve as the basis for an independent state. The Israelis did, however, encourage Palestinians to work as laborers in Israel, to trade with the Israeli economy, and to export their surplus agriculture to Jordan. In this way, Israel hoped that the Palestinians would prosper as individuals but remain impoverished as a community. The Palestinians chose to play the game by Israel’s rules, while all the time denouncing the Israeli occupation. It was their version of moral double bookkeeping and it enabled them to survive, and in some cases thrive, without feeling they had abandoned their claims to independence.

Observed Nusseibeh: “If you look at our workers and trade over the past twenty years, you’d have to say that the salient feature was how we integrated and assimilated into Israel. We were, in a word, coopted, and our whole economic well-being and existence became parasitic on our being coopted. Whatever form of Palestinian activity you saw, it required some kind of assent from the Israeli authorities and we, ourselves, went out and got it. Although as individuals we talked about Palestinian independence and uniqueness, as a community we behaved just the opposite.”

Indeed, by the late 1980s roughly 120,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would wake up each morning and drink their Israeli-made Tnuva milk and Israeli Elite coffee, slip on their Israeli-made jeans, tuck their Israeli-issued identity cards in their back pockets, hop into a pickup truck belonging to an Israeli contractor, factory owner, or shopkeeper, and spend their day working in an Israeli town and speaking Hebrew. Later on, these same Palestinian workers would pay their income taxes to the Israeli government, maybe bribe an Israeli official for a building permit, read their Israeli-censored Arabic newspaper, and then drive to the airport with their Israeli-issued licenses to fly abroad on their Israeli-issued travel documents. While the parents were abroad, their children would use Israeli Tambour paint to spray anti-Israeli graffiti on the walls outside their homes. After sunset, some Palestinians, bought and paid for by the Israeli Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, would inform on their neighbors. The next morning they would rise again at dawn to build with their own backs every Israeli settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In some cases, Palestinians even worked on settlements that were built on their own confiscated land.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem and in Jericho, Palestinian merchants would sell yarmulkes, menorahs, “I Love Israel” T-shirts and other Jewish items—most of them made by Palestinian labor—right alongside kaffiyehs and Korans and other traditional Arabic souvenirs. A Palestinian-owned pasta factory in the village of Beit Sahur, a tahini factory in Nablus, and an RC Cola factory in Ramallah were among the dozens of Palestinian food manufacturers which arranged to receive kosher certification from rabbis hired from adjacent Jewish settlements; it was their only way of gaining access to the lucrative Israeli market. By 1987, some 800 West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who had worked officially in Israel for more than ten years, and then turned sixty-five, were receiving old-age pensions from the Jewish state they did not recognize.

I was once visiting Rabbi Jonathan Blass and his wife, Shifra, two Jewish settlers who live with their children in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Neve Tzuf, about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. In the course of interviewing them about life on their settlement, they mentioned with pride the fact that their fourteen-year-old son, Shlomo, had gone into business with the son of the muezzin of the neighboring Palestinian Arab village of Deir Nizam. (The muezzin is the Muslim cleric who traditionally calls other Muslims to prayer five times daily from atop the mosque’s minaret.)

And what did they do together?

“They make yarmulkes,” said Mrs. Blass. “Well, not exactly. The muezzin’s son has a group of women working for him in the village and they knit the yarmulkes. Shlomo, our son, gets them the orders and sells them. Many of the yarmulkes worn by Gush Emunim settlers were sewn by the women of Deir Nizam. They just exported a shipment of five hundred to a group of observant Jews in South Africa. The muezzin’s son gets the patterns to sew on them from a book that we gave him that was put out by B’nai Akiva [the religious Zionist youth movement]. He knows the colors and the styles that the different groups of Jews like to wear. He makes a beautiful one with the skyline of Jerusalem sewn on it. He does Hebrew letters, too—whatever you want.”

The Palestinians did such a brisk commerce under the evervigilant eye of the Israeli tax collectors that Israel started to make a profit from occupying them. A study done by the West Bank Data Base Project, an independent research organization focused on the occupied territories and headed by former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti, concluded that “the occupied territories never constituted a fiscal burden on the Israeli treasury. On the contrary, the Palestinian population contributed large sums to the Israeli public consumption.” According to Benvenisti’s study, the Israeli government raised tax revenues from West Bankers and Gazans through two means. One was by local income, property, and value-added taxes collected in the occupied territories. These funds were used to support the Israeli military administration and its capital expenditures on roads, hospitals, and municipal infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza. The other was through value-added taxes on goods purchased by Palestinians while in Israel, as well as excise taxes, import duties, and payroll deductions. Any West Banker or Gazan who worked officially in Israel had about 20 percent of his salary withheld to cover National Insurance payments. But since most of the insurance benefits were applicable only to Israelis, the Palestinian contributions were transferred directly to the state treasury. Some of these funds went to make up the deficit between the cost of the Israeli occupation and the amount of taxes collected locally from Palestinians. What was left over—roughly $500 million during the first twenty years of the occupation, according to Benvenisti—was used by Israel for its own development.

At the same time, the Palestinians—as a community—were so well behaved under the Israeli occupation that between 1967 and 1987 Israel had to deploy only about 1,200 soldiers a day, along with a few hundred Israeli Druse Border Police and a few hundred Shin Bet agents, to control all 1.7 million Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel maintained its occupation so cheaply and efficiently by using a network of contact points to which they got the Palestinians to voluntarily submit, hence little brute force or manpower was required to keep them in line.

“For 95 percent of these contact points to be effective in controlling the Palestinians they required our consent and cooperation,” said Nusseibeh. “For example, you were sent an order telling you to come to the military governor’s office in Beth El, and you knew that they were going to arrest you, yet you came anyway, on your own, instead of just ignoring the order and forcing the Israelis to send a whole army unit to your village to get you. You were told you needed a building permit to add a wing to your house. Instead of just building the wing and ignoring the Israelis, most people went down and waited in line for a permit, without anyone holding a gun to their heads. The same was true with press censorship. Even the most radical Palestinian papers went to the Israeli censor every day. We were once sent an order to close Bir Zeit University. We read about it in the newspaper, and instead of everyone turning out at the university and challenging the Israelis to throw them out, we all just sat home. The symbol of the Palestinian acquiescence to the Israeli occupation was our willingness to hold [Israeli-issued] identity cards. The Israeli ID was the cornerstone of the occupation. It told the Israelis where you were from and who your family was and where they could find you. The Israelis set things up so that we could not travel, drive, trade, import, or go to a hospital without presenting our ID card, and we cooperated. I would say that only 5 percent of the Israeli occupation involved brute force—Israeli troops physically forcing Palestinians to comply with some order or regulation. Ninety-five percent of the time we did it ourselves.”

While the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza constantly complained about the symptoms of the Israeli occupation—the land confiscations, the arbitrary arrests, the house demolitions, and the curfews—as a community they did very little to undermine the system of occupation. There would be an occasional strike or demonstration by lawyers or students—those highly politicized elements of the society—and an occasional casualty from a confrontation with Israeli troops, but rarely anything sustained or widespread. Mass civil disobedience that would have shaken the system of occupation was constantly discussed in the PLO literature that was distributed throughout the occupied territories in the 1970s and ’80s, but it was virtually never implemented. When in 1980 the military government issued Order 854, which would have put all the university curricula and teaching under the authority of the Israeli army, the Palestinian universities and students banded together and rejected it; eventually the Israelis backed down. That was real communal resistance, but it was the exception, not the rule.

Why didn’t the Palestinians get themselves organized, resist more as a community, and disengage from the Israeli system? To begin with, they had no stable independent economic base to fall back on and they were not willing to endure the economic and personal hardships that mass civil disobedience on the scale required to really bring pressure on Israel would have entailed. Second, Israel used its military power and its Shin Bet domestic intelligence service to disrupt any Palestinian attempts at mass organization and to arrest any Palestinian who remotely behaved like a local leader; Israel would tolerate Palestinian spokesmen, but any spokesman who got more than three people to follow him was eventually arrested, expelled, or harassed into submission. Third, with the PLO guerrilla leadership in Beirut, and later Tunis, claiming to have responsibility for confronting Israel and making all political decisions, it became very convenient for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to accommodate themselves to the Israeli system, even profit from it, while declaring that liberation was the PLO’s responsibility. Whenever I would ask West Bankers when their liberation would start to become their own responsibility, they never really had a convincing answer.

Fourth, as in Lebanon, Palestinian society was riven with ethnic, clan, sectarian, and regional divisions, which always made concerted popular action difficult to organize. Palestinian Christians suspected Palestinian Muslims, Muslim fundamentalists suspected Communists, pro-Jordanians suspected pro-PLOniks, Hebronites suspected Jerusalemites, the members of one extended family in a village refused to cooperate with those of another. These rivalries also explain why the Shin Bet never had any problem recruiting what they called “Shtinkers”—Palestinian informers who kept them abreast of who was saying what to whom in every village and refugee camp in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Finally, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had so convinced themselves that the Israeli occupation was being carried out by brute force—and not by their consent and cooperation—that they did not believe they had within themselves the power to challenge the Israeli system. Clinton Bailey, the Tel Aviv University Bedouin expert, once told me of a conversation he had had with a Palestinian merchant he knew in the Old City of Jerusalem that vividly underscored this self-imposed Palestinian impotence.

“I had gone to the Old City to buy a present, and I went to a shop on David Street,” said Bailey. “It is owned by a Palestinian merchant in his thirties, a very gregarious and charismatic fellow who was always dressed in modern jeans and always flirted with the girls who went by. So he invited me to have tea with him, and as we sat down I asked him what was happening in his life. He said, ‘Well, I am a Hajji now.’” (A Hajji is the honorific title bestowed on any Muslim who goes on the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is known in Arabic as the Hajj.)

“So I asked him, ‘When did you go?’ and he said, ‘Just this last summer [1987].’ So I said, ‘You must have been there when the big clash took place between the Saudis and the Iranian pilgrims.’”

(In August 1987, Saudi troops shot and killed some 400 Iranian pilgrims after the Iranians, according to the Saudis, began to riot while making the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Iranians, however, said the Saudi attack was unprovoked.)

The Palestinian shopkeeper answered, “Yes, I was there. I saw the whole thing. My hostel was right on the corner in Mecca where the clash happened.”

Bailey then asked him who was telling the truth about what happened, the Saudis or the Iranians. The shopkeeper, according to Bailey, answered with a real air of contempt: “The Iranians, of course. Don’t talk to me about the Arabs. The Arabs are shit. We would sell our own mothers. The Saudis ambushed the Iranians without warning. They shot and killed a lot of people, and many others were wounded. But I tell you, none of the Iranians cried. I went down to the street to help people and I wanted to help this Iranian woman who was wounded and to move her out of the sun. She said, ‘No no, take your hands off me. It is haram [forbidden] for a man to touch a woman.’ I told her she would die, and she just said, ‘Take your hands off me.’ I saw this Saudi policeman come up to this old man and ask him, ‘Are you an Iranian or a Turk?’ And this man knew that if he said Iranian the policeman would beat him, but he said it anyway. The policeman beat him all over until he bled—but he didn’t cry.

“Every story he told me ended with the same line—‘but they didn’t cry,’” recalled Bailey. “He was in awe of their courage, because I think it was in such contrast to that of his own people. The Shiites in Lebanon, the Afghans, everybody else was out there ready to pay a price for their freedom, but not them, not the West Bankers.”

Instead of organizing real and significant communal resistance on their own, some of the most articulate Palestinian leaders and community spokesmen in the West Bank and Gaza became professional complainers, ready to be interviewed at any hour of the day on American television about their suffering under the “brutal” Israelis.

Jonathan Broder, a colleague of mine, was an Associated Press reporter in January 1970, when former British Foreign Secretary George Brown visited Israel and the West Bank as a guest of Israeli statesman Yigal Allon. As part of his visit, Brown went to Nablus and was received there by the mayor, Hamdi Qana’an, who came from the one of the wealthiest merchant families in the West Bank—a fact attested to by his huge stomach.

“Before their talks began,” Broder told me, “Brown and Hamdi sat side by side on this ornate couch for a photo opportunity. But Hamdi couldn’t wait to launch into the Palestinian ‘lament.’ So while we were all standing around them, Hamdi started to say to Brown, ‘You know, the Israelis, they are breaking our bones, they are stealing our land, they are beating our children, they are taking the food from our mouths.’ With that last line Brown couldn’t take it anymore. So he looked over at Hamdi, whacked his big fat belly with the back of his hand, and said in this heavy British accent, ‘You don’t seem to be doing too badly for yourself, old chap.’ At which point we were all ushered out of the room.”

A reserve [Israeli] army unit stationed in Ramallah spent several days chasing down and shooting at kites decorated with the colors of the PLO flag. The “dangerous” kites were caught by the soldiers, taken away from the children, and burned.

—from Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper,
August 25, 1985

One of the most popular fads among West Bank Palestinian youths in the early 1980s was to wear T-shirts emblazoned with the words I Love Palestine over an olive tree. They would usually wear them, though, under their regular shirts, so the Israeli soldiers couldn’t see them. If Israeli soldiers caught Palestinians dressed in such attire, they were under orders to strip them and then arrest them. I always wondered what the charge would be. Inflammatory underwear? Seditious skivvies? This Israeli crackdown on T-shirt terrorism only served to produce some imaginative alternative tactics by the Palestinians. One favorite ploy was to lasso the tops of small supple trees, tie a red, white, green, and black Palestinian flag to the treetop, and then let the tree spring back up, leaving it for Israeli soldiers to figure out how to get the flag down. Usually the Israelis just took an ax and chopped down the whole tree. In recent years it was hard to find a laundry line in the West Bank or Gaza Strip that did not have some item of clothing hanging on it in the colors of the Palestinian flag, and few Palestinian youths did not own at least one scarf, key chain, necklace, or bracelet in the shape or colors of Palestine that was made in a secret underground factory.

This was no idle West Bank fad that would fade away after a season, to be replaced by mini-skirts and pet rocks. Rather, it was an expression of a process of Palestinian nation-building and identity-building, which took place as a direct result of the Israeli occupation which began in 1967. Men are as often defined by their enemies as by themselves and this was particularly true of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

How so? It must be remembered that after 1948 Palestine was broken up into three different pieces—one chunk had been taken over by the Jews, another chunk in the Gaza Strip had been seized by the Egyptians, and a third chunk, the West Bank, had been carried off by the Jordanians. Palestine as a geographical entity was done for, which was one reason the whole Palestine question went into remission between 1948 and 1967. After all, an evicted people might be able to get its land back from one nation, but not from three. Paradoxically, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 put Palestine back together again as a geographical entity and put the Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel back together again as a single community. As a result, the whole Palestine issue came back to life: once again the exact same communities—Jews and Palestinian Arabs—were fighting over the exact same territory—British Mandatory Palestine—that their forefathers had fought over twenty years earlier. The only difference was that the British were not around anymore to oversee things; the Jews were now in charge.

At the same time that Israel’s victory in 1967 enabled the Palestine issue to be reborn, it also created the conditions for a rebirth of Palestinian identity as well. The process began with the young generation of Palestinians who came of age after the 1967 war and spread upward to their parents. The older generation of Palestinians grew up between 1948 and 1967 when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian rule. Because Egyptian and Jordanian cultures were in many ways similar to that of the Palestinian Arabs, the older generation did not feel compelled to constantly assert their uniquely Palestinian identities—not politically and not culturally. In fact, many members of the older generation of West Bankers and Gazans actually became “Jordanized” or “Egyptianized” between 1948 and 1967. Since Jordan granted Palestinians citizenship (Egypt did not) many Palestinians of this pre-1967 generation came to look upon the Bedouin King Hussein as their leader more than any Palestinian.

But the Palestinian youths from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were born under Israeli occupation had their identities shaped in an entirely different atmosphere. They never had the chance to inherit the world of their fathers. Jordan was not around when they came of age in the West Bank, or Egypt in the Gaza Strip. Israel had supplanted both and had brought with it its own unique blend of Western and Hebrew culture, which was not an option for Palestinians growing up in the occupied territories in the way Egyptian or Jordanian culture had been an option for their parents. To the contrary, these youths despised the Israelis and wanted to emphasize how different they were from them. Since Jordanian or Egyptian identities were no longer available, it was natural for Palestinians to fall back on their own roots and to emphasize more than ever before their uniquely Palestinian political and cultural heritage.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that it took the pressure of a truly foreign, non-Arab community like Israel to provoke Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into fully asserting their own distinctive identities. Munir Fasheh, the dean of students at Bir Zeit University, who grew up in the West Bank when it was under Jordanian control and continued to live there after it fell to Israel, once remarked to me that “between 1947 and 1967 whenever anyone asked me what I was, I always hesitated. Legally I was Jordanian, but emotionally I was Palestinian. Now there is no kid on the West Bank under the age of twenty-five who has ever experienced anything other than being a Palestinian. When you consider that 60 percent of the West Bank population is under the age of twenty, it means that for three-quarters of them Jordan is something that doesn’t exist.”

At the same time, it took a Western-style democracy such as Israel to allow Palestinians the liberty to establish ostensibly nonpolitical trade unions, universities, newspapers, theater groups, and other cultural associations—with a level of free expression that while not equal to that of Israelis was far greater than anything Palestinians had ever enjoyed in Jordan or Egypt. Yasir Arafat’s picture and name probably appeared in the Israeli-censored Palestinian Arabic press in East Jerusalem more frequently than it ever did in Amman. These Palestinian cultural institutions became the vessel and rudimentary framework for their national aspirations.

As I noted earlier in my Beirut journey, the 1967 war also created the conditions for those Palestinian refugees living outside the area of Palestine—in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria—to be transformed from poor forlorn refugees into a political force. In the wake of the ’67 defeat, the Arab regimes for the first time allowed the Palestinian refugees to take control of their own destiny after having monopolized the Palestinian cause and made it an exclusively pan-Arab issue between the years 1948 and 1967. Having been vanquished by Israel, the Arab regimes needed some time to regroup, and while they did, they gave the Palestinians and the PLO free rein to carry on the war with Israel. It was this opening, this emancipation, which Arafat and his PLO exploited to the fullest.

In short, the biggest victors of the 1967 war turned out to be the Palestinians, both the refugees outside and the West Bankers and Gazans inside. But while these two different Palestinian communities shared the same objectives, they developed along very different, parallel tracks. Instead of being shaped by Israel, the PLO and its followers in Beirut were highly influenced by inter-Arab politics, Lebanon, and the whole late 1960s revolutionary mood. Arafat and the PLO came on the scene at the same time as students in Paris were manning the barricades and the Vietcong were challenging the American superpower.

The West Bankers and Gazans, however, were shaped by a very different history and in a very different furnace. To begin with, because they were confronted with Israeli culture, which they could not and did not want to be a part of, they became more and more Palestinian in their minds and in their communal institutions. But because Israel absorbed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and because many Palestinians living there physically assimilated into the Israeli system for economic reasons, they became less and less Palestinian in their bodies. This put them into an identity bind. From the head upward they swore allegiance to Yasir Arafat, and from the shoulders downward they paid allegiance to the Prime Minister of Israel. The T-shirts Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza wore under their sweaters, the Palestinian calendars they put on their desks, and the key chains they hid in their pockets were not meant for the Israelis; they were meant for themselves. They were their own identity cards, issued by themselves to themselves—the tangible proof that they really were Palestinians, as their minds declared, and not Israelis, as their bodies seemed to suggest.

I first detected this identity bind listening to Palestinians living in the occupied territories talk about how they no longer felt at home in their own houses and their own villages—even though they were feeling more and more Palestinian in their heads. Sometimes, Palestinians would say, it was just the little things that made them feel not at home—like dialing a number somewhere in Israel or the West Bank and getting a recording in Hebrew, which they could not understand. Sometimes it was the road signs, with Hebrew and English letters spelling out place names, sandwiching the smaller Arabic in between. In Ramallah, an exclusively Arab town north of Jerusalem, for example, the local Israeli police station sign spells out “Police” in Hebrew and English, but not in Arabic—as if police protection were not something meant for Palestinians. Sometimes it was the little indignities. A Palestinian teenager in the Kalandia refugee camp outside Jerusalem told me how one hot summer day the residents of his camp were on a political strike. That afternoon, he said, an Israeli soldier stopped him, took away his watch and his bicycle, and told him he would not get either of them back until he got a shopkeeper to open and give the soldier and his unit some ice cream. And sometimes it was the big things: the insecurity of never knowing when your land might be confiscated—Israel has seized or restricted use of more than 50 percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip since 1967—or not knowing when your son might be arrested in a security sweep after a bombing, or when your father might be slapped before your eyes for saying the wrong thing to an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint.

I was once interviewing an Israeli infantry soldier, Moshe Shukun, about his work in the Gaza Strip. He said the strangest missions he had to go on were always those that involved arresting Palestinians in their beds at night—which is standard Israeli procedure, since that is when they have the best chance of finding someone home.

“When we go into homes, we surprise people at night,” Shukun explained to me. “Sometimes you burst in at delicate times. One time we came in on this couple in Gaza and it was either just before or just after—ah well, you know. And this Palestinian woman was wearing a very see-through nightgown. I mean it was something that did not leave anything to the imagination, and this lady was beautiful. And there we were—four guys with machine guns pointed at her husband. He got out of bed and asked us if he could go out back to take a piss. So we said okay, and then the four of us just stood there watching over this girl with our guns pointed at her. I have to tell you, they had to practically drag us out of there.”

Listening to this story, I could not help but wonder how terrifying, not to mention humiliating, it must have been for that Palestinian man and woman—guilty or not—to have had their most private sanctum and moment violated in such a way.

Not surprisingly, for many young West Bank Palestinians “home” has become the most frightening place in the world. Mohammed Ishteyyeh, a short, curly-haired, Bir Zeit University political-science graduate in his early thirties, came from a village near Nablus and had been arrested at home three times for political agitation. Home is not where his heart is any longer.

“I don’t feel at home when I am at home,” Ishteyyeh told me. “Actually, my family’s home is the most dangerous place for me, because that is the address where the Israelis will come to find me. When the Israelis came to arrest me in 1979, it was at night and the dogs in the village started barking. Ever since then, I hate that sound. When I am at home and the dogs bark at night, I spend hours sitting in front of the window watching who is coming. I wish the daylight could be for twenty-four hours. I don’t feel comfortable sleeping in my own bed. I always sleep better out of the country. It is really sad for my mother. When I am home she is afraid. But when I am not home, she wants me there.”

Johar Assi, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian from a village near Ramallah, whom I met while interviewing Palestinian inmates at Israel’s Dahariya prison near Hebron, took me by surprise when I asked him whether he was anxious to get out and return home.

“How can I feel at home?” he growled, “when I have five uncles in Jordan who are not allowed to travel here. When I am in my village I am afraid to go for a walk outside the village because I might run into an Israeli soldier who will ask me for my ID card and want to know where I work and then tell me to come to the military headquarters tomorrow so they can try to talk me into being a collaborator. If I go for a walk in the village and someone sees Johar talking quietly to Mohammed, there will always be some informer around who will tell the Israelis, and a week later I will get called in by the army and they will say, ‘Why were you and Mohammed whispering to each other last week?’ So I just keep to myself and to my house and talk a lot to my father.”

But Israelis didn’t only make it so Palestinians didn’t feel at home in the West Bank and Gaza; they made it so that at times the Palestinians didn’t feel at home in their own skin—even when they were far away from Israel. As I noted earlier, the PLO, in order to grab the attention of the world when it emerged in the late 1960s, engaged in some spectacular acts of terrorism and airplane hijacking. This gave the Israelis an opportunity to brand the entire Palestinian national movement and cause as a criminal “terrorist” phenomenon. Eventually, the two words “Palestinian” and “terrorist” became fused together in the minds of people the world over. Although 99 percent of the Palestinian people have never been involved in terrorist activity, this label—“terrorist”—became a heavy cross they all had to bear wherever they traveled.

Its weight was felt the minute the immigration officer, the customs inspector, the airline official, or the hotel clerk looked at their travel document: the black ink said only Palestinian under nationality, but the invisible ink said terrorist. The reading of it was often followed by a suspicious stare and then the words “Could you please step over here.” I came to appreciate how upsetting this could be when a Palestinian friend, Jameel Hamad, a prominent West Bank journalist from Bethlehem, told me of the bitter end to a journey he had made to the United States.

“I was in Frankfurt Airport, coming home from New York,” said Hamad, who, with his neatly trimmed mustache, glasses, and salt-and-pepper hair, looks more like a grocer without his apron than a potential hijacker. “I was in transit to Tel Aviv. After I went through security in New York, they checked my bags all the way through to Tel Aviv. When I went up to the Lufthansa gate in Frankfurt to get on the flight to Tel Aviv, they asked for my ticket and passport. I was traveling on an Israeli Laissez Passer [a special travel document Israel issues for Palestinian refugees]. The man at the gate said to me, ‘You are flying to Tel Aviv?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘Where are you coming from?’ I said, ‘New York.’ Then he said, ‘Where are your bags?’ I said, ‘I already checked them through in New York.’ He said, ‘Please stand over here.’ They let all the passengers get on the airplane. Then they took me outside to the runway. They took all the luggage off the plane, and I was asked to identify my bags. All the passengers were sitting on the plane watching me out the window. It took about an hour for them to get all the bags off and for me to find mine. Then they took me to a room and told me to take all my clothes off—everything. They checked my groin area even—everything. Then they finally let me on the plane. The people had been waiting inside for ninety minutes, so they were really angry with me. I said to the people seated around me, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am very sorry. I wasn’t in the bar, I wasn’t getting drunk; my problem was very simple: I am a Palestinian.’”

How did you feel at that moment? I asked.

“I have never felt like such a stranger, like such an outsider before,” Hamad said through clenched teeth. “I was just not part of the symphony. I was mad at everyone, the whole world. At that moment, if I had had a bomb, I would have dropped it on the world.”

I was invited for lunch one afternoon at the Islamic University of Gaza, an austere complex of low-slung buildings in the heart of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, but the setting proved far more interesting than the meal. The only decorations on the peeling walls of the university consisted of a few framed Koranic verses, written in a flowing Arabesque script. But in the student cafeteria, on the north wall, hung a huge photograph, maybe fifteen feet high by twenty feet long, of what appeared to be Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, replete with palm trees, white sand, a clear blue sky, and a calm azure ocean.

“What is that doing there?” I asked my Palestinian hosts.

“We wanted to make some kind of compensation for students,” explained Dean of Students Atif Radwan. “They are surrounded by miserable scenes all day long. It is important that when they eat they see something beautiful.”

Murals of Waikiki or Swiss mountain panoramas can be found almost as frequently as Koranic verses in Palestinian homes in the West Bank. These calendar scenes always struck me as substitute windows on the world for Palestinians; since the Israeli world enveloping them only left them feeling like strangers in their own land, they imported their own panoramas—with landscapes empty of Jews, unthreatening, soothing, and, most important, mute. For the Israeli shadow that followed Palestinians wherever they went was a shadow with a voice, and the voice kept whispering in every Palestinian’s ear, “It’s not yours. Palestine is not yours. It’s ours.”

Try as they might, though, most Palestinians could not shut out that whispering Israeli shadow for long. Sooner or later it came in through the door or in a window or over the phone. This produced a Palestinian rage, which built in intensity with each year of the Israeli occupation. It was enraging to Palestinians that just at the moment when their Palestinian identities were crystallizing and being recognized as never before on the world stage, they could not fully express them politically or culturally. That Palestinian rage formed like pockets of geothermal steam beneath the crust of Israeli society.

In Jerusalem, you could see that steam rising each day around 5:30 a.m. in what became known as the human “meat market.” Just as the sun would curl up over the mountains of Moab to the east, Palestinian workers would begin their morning ritual. Some of them, still bleary-eyed from having left their West Bank villages as early as 4:00 a.m., would line up on the sidewalk leading out from the Damascus Gate of the Old City, clutching their lunch bags in one hand and warming their lungs with cheap cigarettes in the other. There they would stand for hours in front of the Ali Baba Hotel, forming a human labor pool, waiting for Israeli builders and other employers to drive by, look them over, and pluck out the lucky ones for a day’s work. One morning I got up and joined them.

An Israeli contractor in a green Volvo was the first to cruise up. His car drew a dozen Palestinian workers off the sidewalk, each elbowing the other for the chance to cram his head into the open front windows. The contractor got nervous. He did not like being surrounded.

“How much? How much?” the workers shouted at the Israeli.

“Twenty-five shekels [$14.50] for the day,” he answered in Arabic, holding a walkie-talkie in one hand.

“What is the work?” the men asked.

“Asphalting,” said the contractor.

For twenty-five shekels there were few takers. Most of the men had come by bus or taxi from Hebron, which cost them around $5.00 round-trip, so they just shook their heads silently and walked away; but a few young ones hopped into the back seat. The contractor sped off. Then a mini-van approached, the driver slowed down, the workers swarmed toward his vehicle, but the driver suddenly bolted away. As he peeled off, one of the Palestinians spit at the van.

How do you decide who gets the work when it is offered? I asked Mohammed, a forty-year-old father of ten from Yatta, a village near Hebron. “We just attack the car,” he explained. “Whoever gets there first wins. It is like fifty dogs chasing a bone. I would work in Hebron for half the price, but there is no work there.”

I asked a group of teenage boys milling around whether any of them had helped to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

“You don’t go to your own funeral,” said one, explaining why he would never do such a thing. But most of his friends silently nodded their heads yes.

“Don’t you think we know we are helping them build their state?” said Muhammad Nawaf, a twenty-four-year-old Bethlehem University student, who was quick to show me the bit of finger he lost on the job in Israel.

“I helped build Efrat,” he added matter-of-factly, referring to the Jewish settlement near Bethlehem. “It is a real humiliation. Neither side is happy with you, and you know you are doing something against your own people, but you need the food.”

Someone in the back shouted, “Let Arafat do something for us and we would not need to work for the Jews.”

The discussion was cut short by another car driving up, offering work for the day, and, as always, while their mouths spoke of their own dignity and pain, their bodies responded otherwise. The car drew them all away from me like metal filings to a magnet.

It is not easy to have one’s soul be the rope in a tug-of-war between body and mind. It can be excruciatingly painful. Abu Laila taught me that. A twenty-one-year-old Palestinian with a black mop of hair whom I got to know in the Kalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem, Abu Laila had been in and out of Israeli jails since he was first arrested at age fourteen for membership in a pro-Arafat youth group. Abu Laila, “Father of Night,” was his nom de guerre; he never told me his real name. After Abu Laila left school in 1982, whenever he wasn’t in an Israeli prison, he found himself looking for work in Israeli towns. His double life epitomized for me the Palestinian men of his generation—militant Palestinian activist by night, Israeli coolie by day.

“I got my first job in Israel in 1982 right after the Israelis invaded Lebanon,” Abu Laila told me one night as I sat around a living room in Kalandia with him and some friends. “It was in the Mahne Yehuda market in Jerusalem. I would carry vegetables around. The only reason I got the job was that the Israelis had all gone into the army. I knew I was working in the place of soldiers who were killing my brothers in Beirut, but I had no choice. What could I do? I needed the money. Some days we would be driving around in trucks picking up vegetables and the radio would be on in Hebrew and they would be saying the Israeli army entered here and entered there and entered and entered and entered, and all the time I would feel smaller and smaller and smaller.”

The West Bank and Gaza Palestinians were never the most brutalized Arabs in the Middle East—the Israeli occupation was mild compared to some other regimes in the area. They were, however, the most humiliated.

Around noon on December 18, 1986, in the predominantly Christian West Bank town of Ramallah, a sixteen-year-old Palestinian schoolboy walked innocently toward an Israeli soldier patrolling the busy Manara traffic circle in the center of the city.

The Israeli soldier was in full battle dress, armed with a Galili assault rifle, several grenades, and a knife. The Palestinian teenager was carrying a blue school bag, the kind normally used to transport books. As the youth approached the Israeli soldier, he reached into his school bag, pulled out an ax, shouted something about Palestine, and began hacking away at the soldier.

“I felt someone hitting me repeatedly from behind,” the soldier, Ariel Hausler, told reporters later. “When I turned around he hit me again, and the ax grazed my forehead. It was a miracle that I wasn’t more seriously hurt.”

Bleeding from his head, Hausler managed to grab the youth while another soldier wrestled him to the ground. A few days later some Israeli reporters asked the Israeli army spokesman whom the young Palestinian worked for—that is, which PLO faction enlisted him to carry out this brazen daylight attack. The spokesman said that the interrogation of the boy revealed something slightly disturbing from an Israeli point of view: no one had paid him to do it. He was acting on his own initiative. He apparently just got up that morning and decided he wanted to plant a hatchet in the head of an Israeli soldier—so he did.

The incident intrigued me, and I tried to get an interview with the boy, but was turned down. Somehow I felt there was a larger message in his act—that while as a community the Palestinians, particularly the adults who had a great deal to lose economically, had allowed themselves to be coopted by the Israeli system, some individuals and small groups were spontaneously resisting Israel, even as they continued to integrate with it. This individual resistance, which began immediately after the occupation started, was carried out mostly by the young, who had little stake in the system. To the contrary, many of them had gone to high school, technical colleges, or universities, but the only jobs the Israeli system offered them when they graduated were sweeping floors, waiting on tables, or laying bricks.

In early 1987, I got a group of Palestinian students together at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit University to talk about the rage building up beneath the surface of Israeli-Palestinian society—a rage that seemed to be exploding to the surface in small bursts with increasing frequency. The students spoke passionately about the frustrations of their generation, which looked into the future under Israeli occupation and saw only dead ends—politically, culturally, and in terms of their own careers. An eighteen-year-old dark-eyed coed named Meral, speaking with clenched fists and a voice seemingly on the verge of tears, captured the mood when she said, “I think that our generation of Palestinians has reached a point psychologically where we want any means of getting back at the Jews. You just get the feeling that the Jews want to aggravate us. Palestinian violence now is something that just happens. It’s not planned. It just occurs.”

Meron Benvenisti’s West Bank Data Base Project actually charted this mounting Palestinian rage, like a geologist taking the earth’s temperature. Each year Benvenisti counted the number of acts of violence against Israelis involving firearms and perpetrated by organized PLO cells, compared to what he characterized as more spontaneous incidents of stone-throwing, fire-bombing, or knifing. Between 1977 and 1984, he found, there was an average of eleven spontaneous acts of anti-Israeli violence for every one planned from outside. In 1985, there were sixteen spontaneous acts for every one planned abroad, and by 1986 the ratio had ballooned to 18:1.

“This widening ratio,” explained Benvenisti in 1986, “indicates a new phase in Palestinian resistance and the intercommunal strife. Violence is now largely carried out in broad daylight by individuals and groups who spontaneously express their feelings, undeterred by the consequences of their actions.”

Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, the only Palestinian psychiatrist for Gaza’s entire population of 700,000, didn’t need any figures to convince him that a volcanic rage was building within the soul of his community. When I interviewed him in Gaza in the summer of 1987, Dr. el-Sarraj told me of a visit he had just had that left him trembling about what the future might hold.

“I had a teenage boy come into my clinic,” recalled the Palestinian psychiatrist. “He said to me in a whisper, ‘Doctor, I have a secret.’ I thought, Okay, another paranoid—that is how they usually introduce themselves. He then said, ‘I just want to kill one Israeli. I have decided that the solution to the problem is that we must each kill just one Israeli.’ He said that he heard that I had ‘influence’ and maybe I could get him a bomb. I explained to him that I had no such influence. Then I thought, I’d better examine this kid. I was certain that he was psychotic.

“So I examined him for an hour,” said Dr. el-Sarraj. “He was perfectly normal.”

So was Yehuda Ben-Tov.

Shortly after an Israeli civilian was shot and killed by an unidentified Palestinian while shopping in the Gaza marketplace in 1987, the seventeen-year-old Ben-Tov, who hailed from the victim’s hometown of Ashkelon, was interviewed by the Jerusalem Postand asked how Israel should deal with its Gaza problems.

“What they ought to do,” said Ben-Tov, “is bring in the air force to level it—all of it. Like that tornado [which just swept through] Texas.”

Yehuda Ben-Tov was not alone in holding such feelings. Just as a rage began to simmer and bubble to the surface among Palestinians vis-à-vis the Israelis, who never let them feel at home, a similar rage grew inside Israelis vis-à-vis Palestinians, who never let them relax and enjoy their country.

The 1967 war was the turning point here as well. For some Israelis, the 1967 war expanded their sense of home spatially, thanks to the addition of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israelis, who felt as though they had been living in a tiny room for twenty years, could finally stretch their legs, put their cars into fifth gear, and really let out their breath. For the first time they enjoyed a feeling of space, of a back yard with a lawn and garden. For other Israelis, the occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza deepened their sense of home spiritually. Coming back to Hebron, the Old City of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Jericho was, as we’ve seen, the real return to Zion for many spiritually minded Israelis; up to 1967 they felt as though they had only been living on the doorstep, peering into the house through the front window. “For me to live in Judea and Samaria is to return home in the deepest sense,” Jewish settler leader Israel Harel told me one day at his West Bank home in Ofra. “The attachment to the land is almost erotic.”

Sometimes on the Passover holiday when you walked through the Jewish markets in Jerusalem you could smell matzo baking. On Friday evenings in Jerusalem a siren sounds across the city to herald the coming of the Sabbath. On Sabbath mornings there are often so few cars on the road in Jerusalem that residents returning from synagogue, often still draped in their prayer shawls, walk down the middle of the streets. Where have Jews ever felt so much at home?

Yet, there was a catch. These very territories—these additional rooms—that expanded and deepened the Israelis’ sense of being at home came with a population which constantly made the Israelis feel unable to relax. The new rooms contained 1.7 million Palestinians whose own national identity and claim to ownership of the house was sharpened by their contact with the Israelis.

What bad luck! Just at the moment when Israelis were really beginning to believe they had ended their exile, that they had more power than any Jewish collective in history, they found themselves constantly reminded by the Palestinians that they could not take their shoes off.

While the Palestinian challenge to Israelis—both political and military—had existed from 1948 to 1967 as well, in those days it was primarily viewed as an external threat. The Palestinians were seen by Israelis as part of a general Arab horde challenging their existence, and the Palestinians’ own unique identity was submerged to some extent in that pan-Arab coalition. But once the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza fell under Israeli authority, they were no longer an external threat that Israel could just build a fence against or unleash its air force on; they were no longer an enemy that lived behind a clearly delineated borderline, with barbed wire and guard towers, which, if you avoided it, meant you could go through the day without giving security much of a thought. Instead, they became an internal threat that made the lives of every Israeli uncomfortable wherever they went in their own country.

This internal threat was accompanied, as was noted, by the rise of the PLO after 1967 as an international representative of the Palestinian people and as a guerrilla force based in Beirut. With the PLO working from the outside and the West Bankers and Gazans from the inside, the Palestinians as a whole were able to shadow the Israelis as never before. Whether it was at home or abroad, at the United Nations or at women’s conferences in Nairobi, around every corner Israelis bumped into their Palestinian shadow, which by word and deed was always whispering: “It’s not your home. Palestine is not yours. It’s ours.”

This constant challenge, like a continual poke in the ribs, really got to Israelis. Palestinians planted bombs in Israeli supermarkets, on their airplanes, under the seats of their buses, and even in an old refrigerator in the heart of Jerusalem. They hijacked their airplanes, murdered their Olympic team, and shot up their embassies. None of this threatened Israel’s national existence in the way Egypt or Syria could. But in some ways it was worse. It destroyed the Israelis’ sense of belonging, of feeling fully at home, just when they most wanted to feel at home, and it introduced a frightening unpredictability to their daily lives. It was like living in a beautiful mansion on a beautiful plot of land that was constantly being burglarized. Every time an Israeli walked on the street, went to a movie, got on a bus, or stepped inside a supermarket, his eyes were on the lookout for unattended packages and objects. When The New York Times has empty space on a page it will often run a tiny filler advertisement for the Fresh Air Fund, a New York charity that sends inner-city youth to summer camps. When the Jerusalem Post has empty space, it runs a filler ad that reads: “Suspicion saves! Beware of suspicious objects!”

Dalia Dromi, the spokeswoman for the Israeli Nature Preservation Society, was born and raised in Netanya, a coastal town just north of Tel Aviv. Before the 1967 war Netanya was considered, strategically speaking, one of the most dangerous spots in Israel, because it was situated at the narrowest point in the bottleneck between Tel Aviv and Haifa—only nine miles from the nearest Jordanian West Bank military outpost in the town of Tulkarm. After the 1967 war, though, Dalia discovered that her whole sense of home had changed in a way she never would have predicted.

“In Netanya before the ‘67 war, if you put your car in fifth gear you could find yourself across the border,” explained Dromi. “Yet, in a funny way, in those days I never felt the border. What I mean is that Israel was a narrow country then, but I never felt personally threatened. You knew where the border was, you knew that there was an army there protecting you from the enemy on the other side, and you just went about your life. Now I feel threatened all the time. I don’t know where the border is or where the enemy is coming from. Before 1967, I would go to the beach by myself all the time; now I would never go by myself. If I go to the beach, I never sit with a crowd where someone might put a bomb. Before 1967, I never remember being afraid. Since 1967, I am always afraid. Israel was very small before 1967, but it is only now that I feel I am in a small country. Whenever anyone talks to me about ‘strategic borders,’ I laugh. Today the border is everywhere. It is in the village of Wadi Ara when I drive past and get a stone from a Palestinian, and it is on the road to Haifa when I pass [the Israeli Arab village] Jisr a-Zarqa and I get a stone. You see now the border is really in my own bed. It goes home with me at night and gets up with me in the morning. Before, when Israel was nine miles wide, I felt as though it was my country alone. Yes, there were Arabs living here, but they were not thought of as Palestinians who threatened you personally. They were thought of as Israeli Arabs, citizens of the state. I felt free to go everywhere without feeling threatened. Fear came to me only after 1967.”

If I had to reduce Israeli life to a single picture, it would be a photograph taken by Israeli freelance photographer Toby Greenwald. It is the only picture of Israel I brought home to remind me of the place. It shows a beautiful old almond tree, its limbs stretched wide, standing on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. The tree is alone, framed by the placid blue waters of the Galilee. By all rights it should be a picture of total serenity, except that in the shade of the tree, next to its base, is a steel drum set into the ground. On top of the drum is written in Hebrew: SECURITY HOLE. This is where police dump unexploded bombs; such drums are all over Israel.

I had a neighbor in Jerusalem, a young Israeli college student who loved to play Led Zeppelin and other heavy-metal music full blast at 2:00 a.m. on Friday nights. The noise from his speakers would literally jolt me out of bed sometimes. I would lie awake, seething with anger. There I was in my own house, in my own bed, and I could not relax. On more than one occasion I fantasized that I had a bazooka and I was firing it straight into the guy’s apartment, blowing his stereo and speakers to sawdust, leaving behind only a glorious silence. I think many Israelis, without admitting it aloud, developed similar fantasies about the Palestinians, who never let them relax in their own beds and always ruined their pretty pictures. When the racist Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane used to call for transferring all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan, he would always conclude his proposal by looking his Israeli audiences in the eye and declaring, “Remember, I say what you think.” There is a little bit of Kahane in every Israeli.

Ruth Firer, the Israeli high-school teacher whose Polish parents managed to survive the Holocaust and bring her to Israel from Siberia as an infant, has soft, welcoming eyes, but when the subject of Palestinian violence against Jews is raised, her face hardens into granite, her eyes turn a remorseless steel gray, and her liberal politics go out the window.

“These days,” she said to me at a time when the number of Palestinian attacks on Israelis was again on the rise, “I have stopped going to the Old City because of all the stabbings of Jews there. On Shabbat it used to be the place we went to shop and look around. Going there was like going to Disneyland—you passed from the modern world to the exotic Oriental world. Now, to be closed by fear in your own home is horrible, shameful. We came here to this land so as not to be frightened. At the end of the war, my father was offered the chance to go to America, but he said no, he wouldn’t be able to feel at home there. He didn’t want to start all over again being a Jew in a Gentile country. His whole family was killed by the Nazis. So he came here and made this his home. Now the Palestinians are trying to take from us the feeling of being home and we won’t let them. They cannot take from me my basic right to feel at home here. I am ready to share with them, but if they want Tel Aviv and Haifa, too, then they will have to fight me and my two sons. We are not going to live through Masada again—no more.”

Making this whole situation all the more upsetting for Israelis is the fact that they have one of the most sophisticated air forces in the world, an army that could mobilize close to 1 million men and women, and hundreds of modern tanks.

“I am frustrated,” Israel Harel, the Jewish settlement leader, remarked to me one day. “I am frustrated that I have all this might and yet I am unable to use it to protect my property. When I served on the Suez Canal in the 1973 war, I was not afraid in the immediate sense. I fought to be in the first wave of people who would cross. I felt a kind of abstract fear. But let me tell you something. A few years ago I was driving from Petach Tiqvah to Elkanah [a West Bank Jewish settlement] and I had to pass through Kfar Kassem [a Palestinian town]. As I was driving, I suddenly saw a roadblock ahead of me and tens of Palestinian children blocking the way. I could not go around them and they all started to throw stones at my car. My only option was to put the car in reverse. I started backing up and I found dozens more closing in behind me. I felt like a trapped mouse. I thought that after all the wars I had fought, this was going to be my end. The only thing I could think to do was take out my gun and start shooting, but I didn’t, because I knew if I killed one or two I would still be killed. So I just hit the gas pedal and went into reverse really fast. I hit a few of them lightly but I got away. Here I am, Israel Harel; I was with the first Israeli paratroop unit that entered Jerusalem in 1967. I was with the first units that crossed the Suez Canal in 1973. I know the power we have, and I was the one who was frightened—by children!”

In order to feel at home despite the constant Palestinian challenge, Israelis adopted several different approaches. One school, led by left-wing peace activists, argued that home was, and could only be, the place where one’s own people were in a majority and where one could live a free and democratic Jewish life, without the feeling of suppressing another people. Therefore, home was pre-1967 Israel—without the West Bank and Gaza, which, they argued, should be returned to Arab control. Many members of this school intentionally avoided crossing the Green Line into the occupied territories in order to feel at home in their pre-1967 houses. They somehow felt that if they didn’t see Nablus and the hate in the eyes of the Palestinian youths there, they could still feel at home in Tel Aviv. As Janet Aviad, an Israeli sociologist and one of the leaders of the Israeli peace movement observed, “No doubt the biblical areas of the West Bank speak to me very deeply. But despite that, I have erected a boundary in my own head, and I never go there. I don’t want to be associated with a colonization process. I only cross the Green Line for demonstrations. I struggle all the time to re-erect the Green Line, but to my dismay I look at all the maps today and it is not there.”

Around the twentieth anniversary of the 1967 war, a group of peace activists went out on weekends with cans of green paint, brushes, and maps of pre-1967 Israel and actually painted a green line on the streets of Israeli towns and across fields, to remind themselves and others just where home was.

But while Israeli leftists can never feel at home as long as Israel retains the occupied territories, those on the right, led by the messianic Jewish settlers, declare that they could never feel at home if Israel gives them away. The Jewish settlers argue that home is not necessarily where you are in the majority, but where history or the Bible or your very soul tells you you are home. In order for the settlers to feel at home in a place like Elon Moreh, the Jewish settlement overlooking Nablus, a West Bank town with 100,000 Arab inhabitants, they simply pretended that the Palestinians were not there. On a visit to Elon Moreh once, I asked some residents there what they saw when they drove past Nablus and the surrounding Arab villages to get to their homes.

“I feel I am driving through the pages of the Bible,” answered Elchanan Oppenheim, the head of the education department at Elon Moreh. “When I see the Arab women harvesting their crops, I see Ruth the Moabite in the fields of grain. I live in the Bible. I look above all these immediate things.”

The silent majority of Israelis in the middle simply learned to live with the situation, because it was usually quite livable. Most of them rarely visited the occupied territories. Whenever I came back from Gaza or Nablus, Israelis would always quiz me as though I were Mark Twain describing some distant land. “Is it really like that?” people would say. At most, they shopped at some West Bank marketplace on Saturdays, went to Bethlehem occasionally for Arabic food, had their cars repaired in the low-cost Palestinian-owned garages, hired cheap Palestinian labor to build additions to their houses, or used the roads through the West Bank as shortcuts on the drive from Jerusalem to the Galilee. They saw the Palestinians, but they did not view them as members of another legitimate national community inhabiting the same space; they saw them either as Arab terrorists, who should be shot or jailed, or, more often, as objects—waiters, carpenters, maids, and cooks—who could be ordered around. When Ann and I moved to Jerusalem from Beirut, we looked at an apartment next to the King David Hotel that had a very small living room. When we asked the Israeli real-estate agent whether we could knock down a wall to make the living room larger, she answered without hesitation, “Sure, no problem. Just get an Arab and knock down the wall.” It wasn’t get a hammer. It wasn’t get a workman. It was get an Arab.

Raja Shehadah just wanted to cry. It was August 1985 and the Israeli government had just revived the practice of administrative detention, a security measure inherited by Israel from the British Mandate, which allows the government to arrest and hold any suspected troublemaker (read: Palestinian) for up to six months without bringing any charge against him or her. At the time, the only requirement for putting someone into administrative detention was that the person be brought before a military judge within ninety-six hours. The judge had to review the evidence the security forces had gathered against the detainee and either confirm, reduce, or cancel the detention order. The week the practice of administrative detention was revived, Shehadah, one of the leading Palestinian lawyers in the West Bank, found that two of his colleagues had been arrested under this statute and he went to an Israeli military court to plead on their behalf.

“The first group of fifteen administrative detainees had just been arrested, and among them were two field-workers from Law in the Service of Man,” said Shehadah, referring to a legal protection organization which he helped found in the West Bank. “I came to Jeneid Prison [near Nablus] to make appeals on their behalf. I was ushered into a room and found myself with eight other lawyers. We were all looking at each other wondering what the procedure was. After a short while, a rather wolfish-looking man came in carrying a big cardboard box filled with papers, which he hugged to his chest. In my stupidity I thought he was another lawyer who had really prepared well. It made me feel guilty. All I was carrying was a copy of Military Order 378, which described all the procedures for dealing in the military courts with people accused of security offenses. We all sat around waiting for the judge.”

Finally the Israeli army judge showed up. In the West Bank and Gaza all Palestinian security offenses are dealt with through the Israeli military courts, which have their own judges and prosecutors.

“The judge sat down,” recalled Shehadah, “leaned back in his chair, and announced, ‘Who would like to speak?’

“I said, ‘What should I speak about? Where are the charges? Where is the evidence?’

“He said, ‘It is a free place—speak about whatever you want.’

“So first one lawyer stood up, then another, and another, and they each spoke about their clients,” Shehadah recalled. “There was no reaction from the judge, no court reporter taking anything down. We were just little children he wanted to please by letting us speak to our heart’s content. I was sitting in front of the wolfish-looking man, who had placed his box of papers under his chair. One of the Israeli lawyers really thought he had a good case. He argued that his client was being arrested because he had refused to become a collaborator. At that point, the wolfish man got up, walked over, and said something to the military prosecutor. I finally realized that this man was from the Shin Bet [whose secret agents were responsible for gathering the evidence against suspected Palestinian activists]. So we all spoke to our heart’s content, and then the judge asked us to please leave the room. After a while, we were called back. All the prisoners were there. The judge said that there was no point in dealing with each case separately, so he ordered the fifteen prisoners to stand and then he announced, ‘I confirm the administrative detention order for all of you.’”

As with every case in which the Israeli army accuses a Palestinian of security offenses, the lawyers were not allowed to see the evidence against their clients because it was gathered covertly—through informers and wiretaps—by the Shin Bet, and divulging any of it to the accused or his lawyer might expose the secret means by which it was gathered; at least that was what the Shin Bet argued. This made mounting a defense rather difficult—if not absurd—and made a mockery of the principle of due process.

“I was sad and insulted,” Shehadah told me after the incident. “I walked out with tears in my eyes. My clients had to cheer me up. They said, ‘Don’t worry, six months in prison isn’t that long. It will be over soon.’ I just walked out thinking, What am I doing here?”

Deep down, Raja Shehadah knew what he was doing there, and it had little to do with justice or with him. The Shin Bet and the military courts became the tools through which the Israeli public took out its rage against the Palestinians for all the rocks they threw, all the bombs they left under bus seats, all the terrorist attacks they mounted against Israeli targets abroad, and all the speeches they made at the United Nations. The Palestinians, on their side, threw stones, and the Israelis, on the other, threw the book at them.

Dealing with the Palestinians through the Shin Bet and the military courts had two advantages for Israelis. First, it was practically invisible—to Israelis and to the world. The Shin Bet operated like an unseen hand, arresting Palestinians at night, recruiting informers, tapping phones, beating the living daylights out of Palestinians behind the closed doors of interrogation rooms, and, it was widely rumored, even arranging for certain particularly troublesome Palestinians to “accidentally” blow themselves up while supposedly assembling bombs meant for Israelis. This meant the Palestinians were kept in line without any Israelis having to trouble themselves as to how. It was like having an occupation with no hands. Better yet, it was all “legal”—in Israeli terms. The military courts provided a legal veneer that enabled the Israelis to get their revenge on the Palestinians while still feeling clean and civilized. The Israeli security forces rarely did anything “illegal” in dealing with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Every act of repression, no matter how arbitrary, was usually in line with some paragraph in the Israeli military code. When it wasn’t, the code was changed to accommodate it. It was, as Meron Benvenisti used to say, “rule by law, not rule of law.”

Why did Israelis insist on this pretense of law? Because without the mask of the law, the conflict between them and the Palestinians would just be a messy tribal feud, and that would not be consistent with how the Israelis see themselves and how they want the West to see them. So, instead, there are the military courts, with their judges and lawyers and benches and legalese. A Palestinian’s lawyer, such as Raja Shehadah, would come to the military judge and tell him a sad story about his client, a true story, maybe a Jewish story even, and the Israeli judge might say, “Look, I’d love to hear it. I really do feel sorry for your client.” But then he would recite forty-nine paragraphs of the legal code which the Palestinian had violated according to secret evidence gathered by the Shin Bet which no one could see.

“I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal, my hands are tied,” the judge would tell the accused with his eyes. “It’s the law and I’ve got to live by the law … Ten years in jail … Next case.”

I actually began to think of the Shin Bet and Israeli military courts as two huge buildings erected right on the Israeli— Palestinian fault line. By their sheer weight and strength these two buildings were able to absorb all the tremors and steam building up beneath the surface of Israeli society and to keep the fault line from cracking open. Israelis could walk down the street, point at these two buildings, and feel good about themselves and their society. Everything looked normal—from the outside. But what Israelis didn’t see, and didn’t want to see, was that as the Palestinian tremors were becoming more frequent and intense, the foundations of these two buildings were beginning to warp. Eventually, something snapped and cracks began to appear on the outside of these structures for all the world to see.

The first major crack occurred on the night between April 12 and 13, 1984, when four eighteen-year-old Palestinians from the Gaza Strip hijacked an Israeli Egged bus as it was heading south from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. Israeli antiterrorist units eventually shot out the bus’s tires, forcing it to a halt. After a siege that lasted throughout the night, specially trained Israeli troops stormed the bus at dawn, killing two of the hijackers immediately, as well as a young girl soldier who had failed to keep her head down. The two other Palestinian hijackers, cousins by the name of Majdi and Subhi Abu-Jumaa, were dragged off the bus alive. Avraham Shalom, then head of the Shin Bet and the man in charge of the rescue operation, ordered five of his agents on the scene, along with six soldiers and policemen, to beat the two hijackers to death, which they did with a combination of fists, rifle butts, and stones, crushing their two skulls. It was apparently an instinctive tribal reaction on Shalom’s part—one which his men clearly understood and carried out with relish. They all knew that Israel has no capital punishment and that if revenge was not exacted on the spot those two Palestinians might be released in a few years in a prisoner exchange and come back to haunt them. So an eye was taken for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and when it was all over the Israeli army spokesman was told to tell the world that these two Palestinian hijackers “died on the way to the hospital.”

But there was a problem. A new Israeli tabloid newspaper, Hadashot, had taken pictures of one of the handcuffed hijackers being escorted from the bus very much alive, and insisted on investigating how he happened to die on the way to the hospital. (Another Israeli newspaper, Ma’ariv, also had photographs but chose not to report the story.) The matter was kept under wraps by the Israeli censor until my predecessor as Times bureau chief, David K. Shipler, defied censorship and exposed the existence of the photographs. A series of government investigations followed, and in the face of each one Avraham Shalom and three of his aides organized a careful cover-up, directing all the blame onto Brigadier General Yitzhak Mordechai, then the chief infantry and paratroop officer, who had been involved in the initial interrogation of the hijackers to find out if they had booby-trapped the bus. In the fall of 1985, the truth was first exposed when the deputy head of the Shin Bet, Reuven Hazak, and two colleagues informed Prime Minister Peres that while General Mordechai had roughed up the two Palestinians in his interrogation, he had turned them over to the Shin Bet very much alive and that Avraham Shalom was responsible for the murder and cover-up. The senior Shin Bet officials were apparently motivated to speak to Peres, not out of any disquiet over what had happened to the Palestinians, but because of the systematic lying of their superior. Peres for his part did nothing with the information—except stand aside while Avraham Shalom had Hazak and his two associates fired for informing on him.

However, Attorney General Yitzhak Zamir—a true defender of the rule of law, of which there are still many in Israel—got wind of the story and insisted on following the matter up with a police inquiry in May 1986. The whole affair exploded into the headlines a month later, when Shamir, Peres, Rabin, along with most of the Cabinet, decided to get rid of Zamir and replace him with a more pliable Attorney General ready to brush the case under the carpet. A deal was soon struck in which Shalom resigned as Shin Bet chief and in return President Chaim Herzog, on June 26, 1986, gave blanket pardons to him and three aides who had assisted him in the cover-up. The three aides were allowed to keep their jobs, including a Shin Bet lawyer who had fabricated evidence. President Herzog told me a week later that his mail from the Israeli public ran nine to one in favor of the pardons.

As these and other cracks appeared in the Shin Bet’s edifice, the government appointed a commission to look into the practices of the domestic intelligence service with regard to its handling and interrogation of Palestinian security prisoners. The commission was headed by a former Supreme Court Justice, Moshe Landau, and in January 1987 it issued its report. The standard practice for convicting Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who were alleged to have been involved in violence or political action against the state of Israel was not by arresting them and bringing them to trial. There were simply too many, and if each one was granted a trial, the limited Israeli military court system would become totally swamped. More importantly, a Palestinian suspected of involvement in a particular political or violent crime usually would be arrested by the Shin Bet on the basis of covertly gathered evidence which might not be admissible in court or which the Shin Bet would not want to reveal in court to a Palestinian defense attorney. The Shin Bet overcame this problem by getting the vast majority of those accused of security crimes to confess—thereby obviating any need for trials, the gathering of admissible evidence, or appeals. The accused would be brought to court, affirm that he had signed the confession, and then be sentenced. What could be more convenient?

One might ask why the Palestinians were so willing to confess. This was explained for the first time publicly by the Landau Commission. After a Palestinian suspect was apprehended, a Shin Bet agent would take him into a room and tell him that he could either confess to the crime or face an interrogation. Many confessed. Those who chose interrogation were subjected to what the Landau Commission called “physical pressure”—i.e., torture—until they agreed to confess. Once they agreed, an Israeli policeman was brought into the room to take down the confession in Hebrew that would be presented in court. When the Palestinian’s day in court arrived, the Israeli military judge would ask him if he had confessed of his own free will. Many would say no, that they were tortured with a black bag tied over their heads, and could not even read the Hebrew confession statement. The policeman who took the confession would then be summoned to the courtroom and he would testify that he saw no torture or intimidation whatsoever. He would say the accused simply confessed voluntarily right before his eyes, and then signed the statement.

In 1971, however, in the face of repeated allegations that Palestinian prisoners were being tortured before the police were brought in to take their confessions, the military courts decided to begin summoning the Shin Bet agents involved in each case to hear from them.

As the Landau Commission put it: “Now [in 1971] for the first time the [Shin Bet] interrogators faced a serious dilemma: On the witness stand they had to answer questions under oath concerning the extraction of the confession. The law of course obliged them like all witnesses in court to tell the whole truth and only the truth … . [But] truthful testimony would have forced [them] to reveal what was happening in the interrogation facilities, including the methods of interrogation, and, as a result, to render these methods ineffectual in the future, when they became known to the enemy. We are speaking of many and varied methods, including means of pressure used against those interrogated.”

So what did the Shin Bet do? “From the start,” the Landau Commission found, “the interrogators chose to hide … their use of physical pressure” and “lied to courts.” For seventeen years, every time a Palestinian claimed to have been tortured or intimidated into confessing, the Shin Bet told the courts the accused had made up the story. In virtually every case the Israeli military courts accepted the word of the Shin Bet agent over that of the Palestinian—no matter how many black-and-blue marks he showed the judge. The Landau Commission described the Shin Bet practices as “ideological criminality,” since, it said, they were born out of a desire to confront Palestinian terrorism. The commission went on to say that it did not recommend that criminal procedures be taken against any of the Shin Bet officials involved because “they were just carrying out orders.” It added that “the political, judicial and military authorities did not know of the Shin Bet’s practice of perjury and therefore are not to be held responsible for it” either. Then, as always happens when Israel finds that in fighting the Palestinians the law has become an obstacle, the Landau Commission recommended that the law be changed. It recommended an undisclosed series of “guidelines for … limited … psychological and physical pressures,” that is to say, torture and intimidation, and these were accepted by the Cabinet and the parliament without debate.

But it wasn’t only the Shin Bet which was engaged in moral double bookkeeping. When Jewish settlers took revenge on Palestinians by themselves, the system was remarkably understanding. Of the numerous examples of this, one of the most egregious took place in October 1987, when Nissan Ish-Goyev, an Israeli West Bank settler, was driving a garbage truck in the Nablus area. On his way to the Balata refugee camp, he came upon a group of Palestinian youths who were throwing stones at passing cars. Two Israeli policemen who witnessed the confrontation testified that the stones thrown at Ish-Goyev “were nothing serious.” Nevertheless, they said, the Israeli settler got out of his truck and shot two bursts from his Uzi submachine gun at the group, “from the hip, at a straight angle,” killing thirteen-year-old Hashem Lutfi Ib-Maslem, who was standing more than 100 yards away. The Israeli policemen on the scene immediately confiscated Ish-Goyev’s gun and booked him.

When the case went to trial, the prosecuting attorney, Moshe Shiloh, called for a ten- to twelve-year sentence in order to deter other settlers from taking the law into their own hands. Tel Aviv District Court Judge Uri Strosman, who tried the case, saw things otherwise.

At one point during the trial, prosecutor Shiloh said, “From the moment the accused discerned the stone-throwing, he simply should have left the place.” Judge Strosman then interjected, “At one time they educated us differently, you know, Mr. Shiloh.”

After hearing all the arguments, Judge Strosman handed down his decision on February 22, 1988, saying: “Now, as I am coming to determine the judgment, and in giving my opinion on the circumstances in which the accused found himself, and, to my sorrow, these circumstances were caused by [Palestinian] children and youths who, instead of being, in these mad days, under the supervision of their parents and educators, are engaged in throwing stones to the point of danger and bringing out the police, I do not think that the accused should be punished with the full severity of the law for the killing. Accordingly, I sentence the accused to six months’ imprisonment, which he will carry out in public service.”

The Israeli Supreme Court later overturned Strosman’s ruling and sentenced Ish-Goyev to three years in jail.

The Supreme Court’s actions underscored the fact that the Israeli system of military justice and occupation law wasn’t entirely a sham, by any means. Most of the Palestinians convicted by the Shin Bet were guilty of planning or carrying out violent acts against Israeli civilians, even if the evidence against them was incomplete, inadmissible, or obtained through intimidation. Moreover, the mere fact that Israel maintained a legal code and system of courts in dealing with the West Bank and Gaza Strip created a restraining legal culture that had a certain effect on the Israeli military authorities. But the longer the occupation went on, the less restraint the legal system seemed to exercise.

Frankly, I never found the Israeli legal abuses particularly surprising. The Israelis were fighting a war with another community living right next door—a community that itself was not playing by any rules. It was the Israelis’ pretense I found tiresome—their self-delusions that somehow they were always behaving in purely legal and morally upright ways, while their enemies, the Palestinians, were simply vile terrorists beyond the pale of civilization. The truth was, each side understood that they were in a war for communal survival. One side had knives and pistols; the other had secret agents and courts. While each constantly cried out to the world how evil the other was, when they looked one another in the eye—whether in the interrogator’s room or before inserting a knife in a back alley—they said something different: I will do whatever I have to to survive. Have no doubt about it.

And so, for twenty years, the play went on: Palestinians talking to the world about resistance, even resisting individually, but resigning themselves as a community to the Israeli system; Israelis talking to the world about their “enlightened” occupation, and then doing anything they had to, behind closed doors, to keep the Palestinians quiet.

This relationship turned Israelis and Palestinians into intimate neighbors and bitter enemies at the same time. On any given day, one could find the Israeli army arresting all Palestinian males ages eighteen and over in one West Bank village, while in the next village an Israeli contractor would be hiring all Palestinian males eighteen and over to build a new Jewish town. As for the Palestinian, on the same day he could be installing the bus stop at a new Jewish settlement in the West Bank in the morning and in the evening leaving a parcel bomb under the seat of that same bus stop in order to kill or maim any Jew who sat there. Meron Benvenisti termed this crazy conflict a “twilight war”—a half-war half-peace kind of existence in which there were no trenches, no front lines, no barbed wire separating the two sides, and no accepted distinctions between civilians and soldiers, enemies and neighbors. It was a war, as Benvenisti liked to say, “between two peoples who shared the same sewers.”

But then Benvenisti should have known. He lived in a sprawling old stone house in one of the few mixed neighborhoods of Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem. A few years ago, one of his Palestinian neighbors planted a bomb in the front garden of a Jewish home a couple of doors down from Benvenisti’s. It wasn’t a big bomb, just a small plastic bag filled with a little dynamite and a crude detonator—maybe enough to blow apart a small person.

The police soon arrested Zuhair Qawasmeh, the eldest son of Benvenisti’s next-door neighbor, who confessed to planting the bomb. He was sentenced to eighteen years in jail, but was released after only four years as a result of a prisoner exchange between Israel and Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon. Shortly after gaining his freedom, Zuhair Qawasmeh got married and, like a good neighbor, invited Benvenisti to his wedding. He invited him in Hebrew, which he had learned during his stay in prison.

“So there I was at the wedding,” Benvenisti remarked to me one day, “and I am asking myself, Who is he? My enemy or my neighbor? He is my neighbor, but he is a man who could have killed my children. In America you can have a neighbor who is also your enemy, but not in this sense. He is my mortal enemy. He is a soldier. He is fighting for his own people against my people, like in war—but he is my neighbor.”

Precisely because this twilight war involved two entire communities, two peoples, two tribes, two nations, fighting each other without a frontline, neither one really made any distinction between civilians and soldiers. Each side viewed the members of the other community as the potential enemy, and hence as potential soldiers in the enemy army. Relations between Israelis and Palestinians became so thoroughly politicized that after a while there was no such thing as a crime between them, and there was no such thing as an accident between them—there were only acts of war.

There was also no such thing as death between them; there was only martyrdom. Ofra Moses, a thirty-five-year-old mother of three, lived in the West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe, fifteen minutes from the suburbs of Tel Aviv. On April 11, 1987, she was riding with her family to buy matzo for Passover when a Palestinian hiding in an orange grove threw a fire bomb through the window of her Ford Escort and burned her alive. Mrs. Moses thought she was an innocent civilian, but many Palestinians saw her, by her very existence as a West Bank settler, as an occupier, a perpetrator of violence, a soldier, and therefore a legitimate target. The most moderate West Bank Palestinian lawyer I know said to me with great indignation, “I heard on the Israel Arabic radio that the mayor of the Arab village next to Alfei Menashe went to the settlement to express his people’s sorrow at Mrs. Moses’s death. They weren’t sorry. She was a settler, the root of all evil, and they expect us to believe that people are sorry she was killed? I’m not sorry one bit.”

Two days after Mrs. Moses died, Musa Hanafi, a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian from Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, was shot and killed by Israeli troops during a Palestinian nationalist demonstration at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit University. Mr. Hanafi may have thought he was at Berkeley in 1968, taking part in a campus protest, with a little harmless stone-throwing and tire-burning, but that is not how the Israeli soldiers receiving the stones viewed him.

Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Meir, the Nablus area commander, was not in Bir Zeit that day, but he has faced many similar demonstrations. I asked him what his men saw when they looked through their gunsights at the Palestinian student demonstrators.

“They see soldiers without uniforms or ammunition,” said the Israeli officer. “But if [the Palestinian demonstrators] had ammunition they would use it. This is not Berkeley. They are not protesting for books or tuition. These students are motivated to do what they do by a nationalist cause.”

The lack of distinction between civilians and soldiers carried right through to the graveyard. Normally, civilians who are killed in a war get a civilian burial. But not in this twilight war. In Israel and the occupied territories, civilians who died in any way remotely connected to the conflict were buried as martyrs and war heroes, and each community used these deaths to reaffirm the rightness of its cause and to justify revenge against the other. Palestinian and Israeli funerals were so similar it was uncanny. Each side stood over its coffins and drew out the old familiar slogans like pistols from a holster.

At Mrs. Moses’s funeral, Minister of Transportation Chaim Corfu delivered the eulogy. And what did he say of this woman who was killed buying matzo?

“Just as the soldiers who fell yesterday [in Lebanon] were killed defending the security of the Galilee, so you, Ofra, fell in the defense of the security of Jerusalem,” declared Corfu. “You, Ofra, you are our soldier.”

Within a week of her burial, Mrs. Moses had a monument erected to her on the spot where she was immolated.

As for Hanafi, his funeral was more problematic. Israelis understand the power of the memorial, so when Palestinian students are killed, the army usually impounds the body, conducts an autopsy, and then compels the relatives to bury the corpse at midnight, with only immediate family present. (A month before Hanafi’s death, Awad Taqtouq, a money changer from Nablus, was “accidentally” killed by Israeli soldiers. That evening 500 of his friends and family hid in the Nablus cemetery after dark, taking Israeli soldiers totally by surprise when they showed up with the corpse at midnight for a quick burial.) Hanafi’s friends went further. They brought a car to Ramallah hospital and slipped his body out the back door before the Israeli troops got to it. His friends then kept the body packed in ice at a house in the West Bank. Finally, a few days later, they got hold of a car with Israeli license plates and used it to take Hanafi’s corpse back to his home in the Gaza Strip, undetected by Israeli troops. The family quickly put out the word that Musa was back, and 5,000 people turned up to watch his body, draped in a Palestinian flag, lowered into its grave.

“It was kind of a political festival,” said Mohammed Ishteyyeh, who attended the funeral. “People praised Hanafi as a ‘bridge to liberation.’ It was a real push for new sacrifice. You could feel the anger in the young boys there. I was watching them. They had lost the smile of childhood. Everybody was ready to die.”

The next day Israeli troops were reported to have dug up Hanafi’s body and brought it to Tel Aviv for an autopsy. Two days later it was returned and buried again—at midnight.

It seemed as though this situation would continue forever, with Israelis and Palestinians living their strange twilight existence: not exactly war, not exactly quiet; never really friends, but not always enemies; always longing for peace, but never really sacrificing to achieve it.

Most Israelis certainly thought it would last. In June 1987, on the twentieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation, the Civil Administration—the Israeli euphemism for the military administration which runs the West Bank and Gaza Strip—published a glossy booklet, with colored photographs on very expensive paper, entitled 20 Years of Civil Administration. Its cover showed a golden wheat field with a West Bank Arab village off in the distance. At first glance, I thought the booklet was an annual report for an international commodities firm. It included page after page of all the good things the Israelis were doing for the Palestinian natives, from improved public services and hospitals to the installation of modern telephones. In the introduction, Shlomo Goren, who holds the title Coordinator of Government Operations in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District, a rather nice name for a former senior intelligence officer who runs the occupied territories from his bureau in the Ministry of Defense, concluded by saying, “All the achievements of the past twenty years could not have come about without the devoted work of the staff, both civilian and military, of the Civil Administration. To them we extend our deepest gratitude. I am sure that the population of the areas join me in thanking them.”

One aspect of the arrogance of power is that it presumes knowledge. Goren was an Israeli “expert” on the Palestinians, but he did not have a hint what was brewing in their souls on the twentieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation.

Paradoxically, though, neither did many Palestinians. On a warm afternoon in July 1987 I sat on the patio underneath the pomegranate tree of Sari Nusseibeh’s parents’ house and asked him where the Palestinians were headed. How much longer could they lead their twilight existence? The Nusseibeh family home is situated right on what used to be the Green Line dividing Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem. A Jordanian army pillbox could still be seen jutting through the twenty-year-old brush and foliage that had grown over it since June 1967. It was an apt metaphor for our discussion about Palestinians being absorbed by Israel yet remaining in their minds distinct and separate. Unlike Goren, Sari was certain that a radical change was in the wind, but he didn’t know what.

“The only thing that is missing is the consciousness, the self-awareness of what we have been doing,” said Sari of the Palestinian assimilation into Israel. “While our Palestinian bodies are now immersed in the Israeli system, our heads are still above water. Our bodies integrate with it, while our consciousness rejects it. But when consciousness and reality are so far apart, sooner or later either reality will be made to fit the consciousness, or the consciousness made to fit the reality.”

Either the Palestinians will stop paying taxes, stop talking about joining the Jerusalem city council, stop building Jewish settlements, and stop riding the Egged buses, as their heads tell them they should do, said Sari, or their national strategy will be made to fit their assimilation. That is, they will stop trying to wage a twilight war against Israel and demand instead to be made citizens of the Israeli state—with rights equal to the Jews’. Sari thought it was going to be the latter. He told me he had the feeling that the Palestinians were going to wake up one morning soon, realize that they have been in bed with the Israeli system for twenty years, and demand a marriage certificate. And when they did, predicted Sari, the real moment of truth for Israel would arrive.

Sari was wrong. The Palestinians did wake up and find themselves in bed with the Israeli system—but instead of a marriage they demanded a divorce.