14

The Earthquake

Students of Gaza, teach us some of what you know, for we have forgotten. Teach us to become men, for our men have turned into soft clay. Crazy people of Gaza, a thousand halloos. You freed us from the rotten age of political logic and taught us to be crazy, too.

—“The Angry Ones,” by
Syrian-born poet Nizar Kibani.
Published in THE NEW YORK TIMES,
February 14, 1988

The Israeli National Tourist Bureau canceled an advertisement it was running in Dutch newspapers that said Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were only a “stone’s throw” apart.

—News item in USA TODAY,
February 18, 1988

It had been a bad week for Yasir Arafat, and neither of us knew when I sat down to interview him that it was about to get much worse. The kings and presidents of the Arab world had just completed a summit conference in Amman, Jordan, in the second week of November 1987. But for the first time since the Arab League was founded in 1945, the main item on the summit’s agenda was not the Palestine question. Instead, it was how to deal with the relentless threat to the Arab world from Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran.

Arafat was relegated to such secondary status that his longtime rival for Palestinian leadership, Jordan’s King Hussein, felt free to snub the PLO chairman and not even bother to greet him at the airport. Hours after his arrival, while Arafat was still simmering over this slight, an acquaintance of mine, a woman journalist from the Beirut office of Agence France-Presse, went to Arafat’s suite at the Amman Palace Hotel to interview him. Arafat greeted her warmly and told her to wait in his living room for fifteen minutes while he paid a courtesy call on the Emir of Qatar. While Arafat was gone, the AFP reporter went into an adjacent suite to interview PLO spokesman Yasir Abed Rabbo, an old friend of hers from Beirut. When Arafat returned, he asked where the reporter was and was informed by an aide that she was in Abed Rabbo’s suite.

“Well, if that’s who she wants to talk to, then that’s who she can talk to,” Arafat fumed, then stomped into his room, slammed the door behind him, and refused to speak to the woman. She was distraught and Abed Rabbo was insulted—so much so that he stormed into Arafat’s suite bellowing, “What? Am I nothing? No one can talk to me?” The two men then had a shouting match about each other’s relative importance in front of everyone in the room.

I arrived for my interview two days later, only two hours after the summit had closed. Arafat had woken from an afternoon nap just as King Hussein was holding a televised press conference. When Arafat strode into the living room of his suite, his guards all scrambled to attention.

“What is he talking about?” Arafat asked about King Hussein.

“You,” said one of his aides.

King Hussein, in fact, was telling reporters that “hopefully” the PLO would be invited to an international Middle East peace conference, but not necessarily as an independent negotiating party. It might be represented as part of a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. This was yet another dig at Arafat, since one of the few concessions the PLO chairman had wrung from the summit was affirmation that the PLO would be represented at any peace talks on an independent and “equal footing” with all other participants. No sooner was the ink on the final communique dry than King Hussein was declaring otherwise. After listening to the King’s remarks, Arafat walked into the dining room and took a seat at the head of a long, polished table.

“What did you think about King Hussein’s statement?” I asked.

“There is nothing to worry about,” Arafat said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It is all spelled out very clearly in the final communique. That is all that counts,” he said, “the final communiqué—not what King Hussein says in any press conference.” Then, just to underscore the point, Arafat asked me, “Do you have a copy of the communiqué?”

“Yes, right here,” I answered, handing him the English version I had been given by the Jordanians on my way to Arafat’s hotel.

Pointing with his finger to the resolutions about the PLO—which came after those about Iran—Arafat put on his eyeglasses and began to read from my copy. When he got to the sentence about the convening of an international conference, he began to read aloud. “Here it says, ‘under the sponsorship of the United Nations and with the participation of all parties concerned, including the Palestine Liberation Organization … Including the Palestine Liberation Organization’ …”

Arafat kept repeating the line, as if something he expected to follow it wasn’t there. Then he brought the text up to his eyes and said in a voice quivering with fury, “No, there is something missing.”

While twisting a chain of worry beads in one hand and tapping on the communique with the other, Arafat went into a boil right in front of me. “This is a scandal,” he stammered in Arabic. “You have a big story. You have a scoop.”

Arafat had just discovered that the English translation of the summit’s final communique, which the Jordanians had distributed to the world press, omitted the standard reference to the PLO as the “sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” This was apparently King Hussein’s way of sending Arafat home with the same sort of slap in the face with which he had received him.

Shifting back and forth in his chair with irritation, Arafat kept repeating, “This is bluffing, this is bluffing … Where did you get this?”

“I got it from the Jordanians,” I answered, slightly dumbstruck at the scene I was watching unfold before my eyes.

“Yes, the Jordanians,” Arafat hissed in a voice larded with suspicion. “You cannot take from them. You have to take from the Arab League. You have a big scoop … It is a scandal. This is a scandal.”

At that point, Arafat lifted a pen from his breast pocket, took my copy of the communique, and carefully wrote in his own longhand the words “the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” after the reference to the PLO. At least one reporter would have a correct text! I kept it as a souvenir.

I never did get my interview, however. Arafat became so distraught over the missing language that he could talk of virtually nothing else. In retrospect, this was not surprising. Ever since Arafat had been driven from Beirut by the Israelis in 1982, he and the Palestinian cause which he symbolized had been drifting aimlessly. With his headquarters in the backwater of Tunis, his guerrilla army spread out to the four corners of the Arab world, and the Jordanians and Israelis keeping him away from the West Bank, Arafat seemed to be in danger of becoming irrelevant, and the petulance he demonstrated in Amman suggested that he knew it. When the substance of power vanishes for a leader, all the symbols, the trappings, and the insults take on mammoth proportions—because that is all there is.

Maybe the most telling sign of how low Arafat had fallen was the assassination in London of the famous Palestinian newspaper cartoonist Naji al-Ali. Al-Ali was shot in the face on July 22, 1987, outside the Chelsea offices of the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Qabas.His killer was never found, but Scotland Yard reportedly suspected that the assassin was dispatched either by Arafat or by PLO officials very close to him. Al-Ali had regularly lampooned Arafat as an armchair revolutionary who always flew first class and a leader who had surrounded himself by a venal and corrupt clique. One of his last cartoons was of a woman alleged to have been a girlfriend of Arafat’s, who was supposedly giving her cronies jobs on the PLO-funded general secretariat of the Palestinian Writers and Journalists Association. Al-Ali, himself a Palestinian refugee, had been thrown out of Kuwait in 1985—reportedly at Arafat’s insistence. Arafat had always prided himself on the image that he had no Palestinian blood on his hands; he never liquidated his rivals but, rather, coopted or outmaneuvered them. That he might have become obsessed with the drawings of a cartoonist to the point of having him murdered indicates just how small Arafat’s world had become. But then, when the emperor has no clothes, the barbs and arrows of even a cartoonist sting as much as any bullets.

I was almost embarrassed watching Arafat stomp around his Amman suite that afternoon, showing every PLO and Arab League official who walked in my copy of the communique with the missing language. But there was one thing Arafat said that stayed in my mind. Another reporter in the room asked Arafat if he thought the Jordanians were effectively eroding his position as leader of the Palestinians. At that point, a smile crossed the PLO chairman’s face. “Just ask the people in the West Bank and Gaza,” he said confidently. “They will tell you.”

Arafat had no idea how right he was. He had no idea that the Palestinians under Israeli occupation—who constitute a little under half of the 4 to 5 million Palestinians in the world—were about to revive his political career and give him back the leadership role and the army he had been searching for from the day he walked up the gangway in Beirut harbor. As always, it wasn’t great decisions or actions on Arafat’s part that would resurrect him. Instead, it was his role as a symbol, and some unexpected emotional chemistry within the soul of the Palestinian community under Israeli occupation, that would bring him back to political life. The way the Palestinian issue was shunted aside by King Hussein and the other Arab leaders in Amman, the way Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev ignored it a few weeks later at their summit meeting in Washington, the way Israeli leaders were boasting that no one cared about the PLO any longer, were taken as direct insults by many West Bankers and Gazans. After all, Arafat and the PLO were the symbols of their national aspirations, their only symbols on the world stage; if they were being marginalized by the Arabs and the Great Powers, this meant that all Palestinian aspirations were being marginalized—possibly for good. This fear would combine with twenty years of steadily mounting rage against Israel to leave the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip feeling that the Arabs, the Jews, and the world had humiliated them just one too many times. As with an individual who suffers too many slights, there comes a moment when he gets so angry he says to himself, “The next person who lays a finger on me is really gonna get it.”

Who would have thought that a careless Israeli truck driver would be that person?

On December 6, 1987, a forty-five-year-old Israeli Jew, Shlomo Sakle, a merchant from the northern Negev town of Beit Yam, went to the Gaza marketplace to do some shopping. The prices were always lower there and the selection of merchandise rich and varied. While Sakle was standing inside a shop browsing through some women’s clothing, an unidentified Palestinian slipped in behind him and stuck a knife into the back of his neck. Blood splattered onto the floor as Sakle staggered toward the door. His attacker beat him to the exit, though, and was quickly swallowed up in the maze of shops and alleyways that make up the Gaza souk. As soon as the nearby shopkeepers spotted Sakle awash in his own blood, they rolled down their steel shutters and disappeared into the afternoon sun before the Israeli soldiers could question them. Sorry, they would say after Sakle died, we saw nothing.

Two days later, at around 4:00 p.m. on December 8, 1987, an Israeli trucker driving a large semi trailer on the main road out of Gaza carelessly turned his vehicle into a lane of oncoming traffic. That traffic consisted entirely of Palestinian workers packed inside station wagons and tenders, returning to Gaza from their day jobs inside Israel. Four Palestinians were killed and seven others wounded in the accident. All the casualties hailed from Jabaliya, Gaza’s largest Palestinian refugee camp. Israeli police rushed to the scene and held the driver for questioning.

Rumors immediately spread through the Jabaliya camp and the adjacent Shifa Palestinian hospital that the Israeli truck driver had intentionally swerved his vehicle into the onrushing traffic to avenge the murder of Sakle. Some said he was Sakle’s brother; others said he was a cousin. Either way, everyone knew that when it came to Jews and Palestinians there were no accidents, only acts of war.

Shortly after 8:00 a.m. the next day, December 9, 1987, Palestinian youths in Jabaliya pelted a group of Israeli reserve soldiers making their morning rounds through the refugee camp in an open safari truck. The Israeli officer in charge ordered his soldiers to dismount, and he personally led them against the Palestinian youths, who evaporated like a mirage. As the Israeli soldiers scurried about the camp trying to find the stone-throwers, they left only one sentry behind to guard their truck. When they returned, they found their vehicle surrounded by a group of angry Palestinians, one of whom was trying to wrestle the rifle from the lone sentry’s hands. Out of nowhere, someone threw two flaming bottles at the truck, and then the thickening crowd began to close in on the soldiers. Did they want to kill them? Probably not. Similar confrontations had happened hundreds of times in the past. But the crowd was furious, and they apparently wanted the soldiers to taste some of that fury. The Israeli officer in charge panicked and opened fire, putting two bullets through the heart of Hatem Abu Sisi, a seventeen-year-old Gazan, who went to his grave unaware that his death would spark a full-scale Palestinian uprising that would become known in Arabic as the intifada. Later that day the army tried to take Abu Sisi’s body for an autopsy and the usual midnight burial. They would not succeed. Thousands, some say as many as 30,000, Palestinians from Gaza gathered in Jabaliya camp around the Shifa hospital, took Abu Sisi’s body from the morgue, and held their own mass funeral procession, which quickly turned into a riot. The Israeli reserve soldiers who were sitting at their checkposts inside the camp found themselves overwhelmed. The angry crowd, armed with bottles, rakes, stones, and tree limbs, devoured the army’s tear-gas grenades and rubber bullets, which seemed only to nourish their rage. Israeli soldiers said they heard shouts of “Itbach al-yahud”—murder the Jews.

The next day, Thursday, December 10, 1987, the nearby town of Khan Yunis joined in the demonstrations, then the Balata and Kalandia refugee camps in the West Bank, then small Palestinian villages and city neighborhoods: there were more confrontations with Israeli troops, more casualties, and more burning tires smudging the skies of the West Bank and Gaza for days on end. Before anyone knew it, virtually all the Palestinians under Israeli occupation were engaged in a spontaneous primal scream that would be heard around the world.

What exactly were they saying?

“I’m going to fuck your mother, I’m going to fuck your sister,” the Palestinian teenager shouted at the Israeli soldier in Hebrew, pointing his finger at the same time to make sure that the soldier knew it was his mother and his sister who were going to get fucked.

“Curse your mother’s cunt that brought you into this world,” the Israeli soldier shouted back at the Palestinian in Arabic, using a familiar vulgarity.

“I am ten years old and I will fuck you, you maniac fucker,” another Palestinian youth shouted back in Hebrew, as he stood 100 yards away.

“Fuck you,” blurted the Israeli soldier, his fingers wrapped tightly around his riot stick, which already had a few dents in it. “Curse your sister’s cunt,” he added.

“If you are a real man, you will put down your gun and come here and fight,” screamed another Palestinian youth, gripping a stone in his hand. Then, as if to deliver the ultimate insult, the Palestinian added in Hebrew, “Your father is an Arab.”

I watched this encounter in the middle of the Jabaliya refugee camp during the third week of the Palestinian uprising. Jabaliya is a wretched place—a warren of open sewers, corrugated-tinroofed houses, and dusty unpaved streets, all sandwiched together in the heart of the Gaza Strip. On this particular day, I had gone out with an Israeli army patrol to get a feel for the street. There were no television cameras around. No one knew I was a reporter, so I got to see the real, unedited confrontation taking place between eighteen-year-old Israelis and eighteen-year-old Palestinians, and it was repeated 1,001 times across the West Bank and Gaza Strip for months after.

What the Palestinians had to say during these early clashes with Israeli soldiers wasn’t really political, and it certainly wasn’t diplomatic. It wasn’t “242” or “338,” and it wasn’t “Let’s give peace a chance.” It was an expression of basic, elemental rage—rage at the Israelis who never allowed them to feel at home, rage at the Arabs who were ready to sell them out, and rage at a world that wanted to forget them. As East Jerusalem Palestinian merchant Eid Kawasmi put it when asked by Moment magazine about the origins of the intifada: “First of all Palestinians have been angry a lot. Their anger makes this uprising. It is an uprising of anger more than having a purpose. At the beginning, it had no purpose or aims. It started just like that.”

Abu Laila, one of the leaders of the uprising in the Kalandia refugee camp, north of Jerusalem, told me one night in an almost dreamlike voice of the raw hurt he was expressing by taking stone in hand against the Israelis. “When I throw a stone, I feel there is a movie going on in my head. And it is showing all the pain, all the time that I spent in prison, all the times the Israelis asked me for my identity card, all the insults Israeli soldiers said to me. I see all the times the soldiers beat me, and beat my parents. That is what I feel when I throw a stone.”

Brigadier General Ya’acov “Mendy” Orr, the Israeli division commander in the Gaza Strip, said he first realized just how deep and pervasive was the anger that had burst spontaneously from inside Palestinians like a volcanic eruption when he went on patrol through the Jabaliya camp in the early days of the intifada. “I was walking down a street and I saw this little boy—I think he was a boy—he wasn’t much more than one year old,” General Orr said. “He had just learned to walk. He had a stone in his hand. He could barely hold on to it, but he was walking around with a stone to throw at someone. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I smiled and he dropped the stone. I think it was probably too heavy for him. I’m telling you, he had just learned to walk. I went home and he went home. I thought about it later, and I thought, For that little kid, anger is a part of his life, a part of growing up—as much as talking or eating. He still didn’t know exactly against whom he was angry; he was too young for that. He will know after a while. But for now, he knew he was supposed to be angry. He knew he was supposed to throw a stone at someone.”

General Orr then paused for a moment and added for a third time, while shaking his head, “He had just learned to walk.”

But as the uprising continued and widened, the Palestinians began to realize that they were also trying to say some very specific things with their rocks. It was almost as though once their raw anger burst the psychological dam inside them, the West Bankers and Gazans discovered a whole range of feelings and ideas which they had been developing for years, and, which, through the intifada, would finally be given tangible expression. What began as an irrational primal scream of rage on their part gradually developed into something very rational and sophisticated: a complete liberation strategy that was in many ways unique in the history of the Palestinian struggle.

The reason it was unique was that many of the feelings which the West Bankers and Gazans expressed, and many of the strategies they eventually developed, were forged—and could only have been forged—by Palestinians who had been living under Israeli occupation for twenty years. The intifada was, in every sense of the word, “made in Israel.” Those Palestinians living in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, those PLO officials following the intifada through FAX machines in Tunis, will never fully understand what happened to their compatriots in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the winter of 1987–88. They can admire what they did and they can identify with what they did, but they can never fully understand why they did it the way they did it; you had to have been there for the previous twenty years.

To begin with, I believe the most important feeling the West Bankers and Gazans wanted to convey to the Israelis—after they got their raw anger out of the way—was: “I am not part of you.” They wanted to tell Israelis with their stones: “I may have worked in your fields and factories for twenty years; I may have spoken Hebrew, carried your identity cards, and sold your yarmulkes. But I am telling you here and now that I am not part of you, and I have no intention of becoming part of you.”

One cannot understand the intifada unless one appreciates how deeply the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza had integrated with, and been coopted by, Israel. I was always struck by the fact that it was the Palestinians who named their uprising anintifada.They did not call it a thawra—the standard Arabic word for a revolt. This was odd, because for years one of the most popular Palestinian chants among the PLO guerrillas in Beirut was “Thawra, thawra, hat al-nasr”—Revolution, revolution, until victory. The standard Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic translates intifada as a “tremor, a shudder or a shiver.” But to understand the real reason this word was chosen over thawra, one needs to go back to its root. Almost all Arabic words are based on a three-letter root, which, in the case of intifada, consists of the Arabic letters nun, fa’, dad, or nafada. Nafada means “to shake, to shake off, shake out, dust off, to shake off one’s laziness, to have reached the end of, be finished with, to rid oneself of something, to refuse to have anything to do with something, to break with someone.”

The West Bankers and Gazans used this term instead of “revolt” because they, unlike their compatriots in Lebanon, did not see themselves, first and foremost, as overthrowing Israel as much as purifying themselves of “Israeliness”—getting Israeli habits, language, controls, and products out of their systems. I was always struck by the fact that one of the first things the underground leadership of the intifada did was to order a commercial strike—either full days or partial days, depending on the situation. But they never issued any demands. Initially, I couldn’t understand this. I would drive past all the shuttered stores in East Jerusalem and ask myself, Who goes on strike without issuing demands? It is like saying, I am going to hold my breath until you turn blue. But then I realized that the strike was not meant to bring pressure on Israel, it was meant to disconnect the Palestinians from Israel.

Indeed, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, erecting stone barricades at the entrances of their villages, and going on commercial strikes was the Palestinians’ way of reasserting some psychological distance between ruler and ruled, and of re-creating the conditions of hostility between the two communities, after years of sleeping together. Palestinian storekeepers literally told Israeli soldiers, “Our leadership will decide when to open and close from now on, not you.” Before, the Israelis had always defined the terms of the relationship. Suddenly the Palestinians said they were going to define their own terms. It was their way of recovering their bodies, which had been sucked into the Israeli system.

That is why I always think of the intifada as an earthquake—an eruption of twenty years’ worth of pent-up geothermal steam—raw Palestinian rage—that opened the Palestinian—Israeli fault line and created a physical chasm between the two communities. But it didn’t open a chasm wide enough to totally disconnect the two communities. That would take time and much effort, because Israelis and Palestinians were simply too intertwined.

Early in the uprising, Dr. Andre Kerem, an Israeli heart specialist working at Jerusalem’s Bikur Holim Hospital, found himself performing a heart catheterization on a thirty-four-year-old Palestinian contractor from Hebron. It was a delicate operation, done only with a local anesthetic. While the Palestinian was laid out on a surgical table and Dr. Kerem was going about his work, one of the Israeli nurses, who was supposed to assist him, burst into the hospital room, shrieking at the top of her lungs, “They burned our car! They burned our car! The Arabs burned our car.”

“She said she had just received a phone call from her husband that some Palestinians had fire-bombed their car,” recalled Dr. Kerem. “She lived in an area of Jerusalem near an Arab neighborhood.

“She was absolutely hysterical,” added the Israeli doctor. “She said she had to go home immediately and would not be able to assist us. People don’t behave like that in the operating room. I told her to shut up and to get out immediately. All this time, the Palestinian patient, who had this nice big beard, was lying on his back looking up at me. He could see that I had a very angry look on my face. I was mad at the nurse, but he didn’t know that, so he became frightened. When I looked back down at him, the first thing he said to me—in Hebrew—was: ‘I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.’ He was afraid I was going to blame him for this nurse’s burned car and take it out on him. I said to him, ‘I know you weren’t there! You were right here!’”

According to a Palestinian journalist I knew, Leaflet Number 10, one of a series of instruction sheets issued by the secret underground leadership of the intifada, the Unified Command, was photocopied by a Palestinian activist at the Israeli Ministry of Interior office on Jerusalem’s Nablus Road. The young man walked into the building with a bagful of Israeli money and the illegal leaflet. He made 100 copies and then stepped out onto Nablus Road and began distributing them to Palestinians walking by. The copy machine is subsidized by the Israeli government.

Most of the cloth for the thousands of green, red, black, and white Palestinian flags that were hung up on telephone lines across the West Bank and Gaza Strip came from Israeli manufacturers. “Where do you think we get all the material for our flags?” a youth in Kalandia asked me. “We just go into the store and say to them, ‘Give me the four colors,’ and they know just what we want.”

The mere fact that both Palestinians and Israeli soldiers spoke a common language—Hebrew—and were of the same generation at times made for certain unusual interactions.

“One day we were throwing stones at soldiers all morning and they were charging at us. We were going back and forth,” said Abu Laila from Kalandia. “Finally we sent one of ours up to one of theirs and said, ‘You go eat and we’ll go eat and we’ll all come back later.’ They agreed. So we all went home.”

No wonder Musa al-Kam, a Palestinian lawyer in his early thirties whom I met in Israel’s Dahariya prison, near Hebron, did not hesitate when I asked him what was the most important thing the intifada had accomplished.

“First of all, it was to show the Israeli public that we are not Israelis,” said al-Kam, who had been arrested shortly after the uprising began, for alleged Palestinian nationalist agitation. “If it did not happen today, we would be just like Israelis—only without our land and without our Palestinian identities. In twenty more years Palestinians would be without personalities. We would be Israelis in our thoughts.”

In pulling their bodies out from under the Israeli system, which was a painful process, many Palestinians were also performing a form of penitence. They were punishing themselves for having allowed themselves to be bought off and coopted by the Israelis for twenty years. One day in June 1988 as I was driving through the West Bank with Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, we decided to stop for a drink at a roadside stand north of Ramallah, directly across the street from the Israeli West Bank military jail and Civil Administration headquarters at Beth El. The restaurant was owned by a Palestinian, Samir Ibrahim Khalil, age thirty-five, a refugee from the Jerusalem area. Samir explained to us that he had opened the restaurant five years earlier to cater primarily to Israeli soldiers working at Beth El. He even gave his restaurant a Hebrew name: Mifgash Beth El—Samir, which roughly translated would be Samir’s Beth El Meeting Place. The menu was in Hebrew and Arabic, and the radio was set on the Voice of Peace, an Israeli station. Samir would speak and joke with the Israeli soldiers in their native tongue.

After the intifada began, though, Samir said he got religion. When we stopped in, it was just before noon and Samir was about to close for the day, because the Unified Command had ordered through leaflets that all commercial shops operate only on half time. It was the Palestinians’ way of establishing their own time zone, distinct from Israel’s. Two Israeli soldiers, their assault rifles lying on the table, were chomping away on hummus-filled pita sandwiches and sipping RC Colas when Samir came out to pull down his shutters.

“Why are you closing?” one of the Israeli soldiers shouted at Samir. “Are you afraid? You think the shabiba [Palestinian youth] will shoot you if you don’t close?”

“No,” said Samir, continuing to lock his shutters. “I am closing out of conviction.”

The Israeli soldier grunted and went back to his sandwich.

As the soldiers got up to leave, I engaged Samir in a conversation about how the intifada had affected him. He was eager to talk. I had the feeling we were in a confessional. “I used to sell Hebrew newspapers and cigarettes here,” explained Samir. “It was strange. I felt as if I was in my own country, among my own people, yet the Israeli soldiers who came here felt as if they were in Tel Aviv. But after the intifada began, I stopped selling Israeli products. No more.

“Everything you see here is old,” he insisted, showing me the sell-by date on a box of Israeli chocolates, “and I am not ordering any new stock. That is it. Now we are selling Palestinian cakes and cookies. See, right here; they even come in the colors of the PLO flag. I am paying a price for my pride and freedom, and I am happy to pay it. I am looking forward to the day when I run out of money. I am looking forward to the day when I cannot afford to buy lunch. It means I have exchanged the money for other things which make me happier. Before, I had reached a situation where I felt closer to Israelis than I did to Arabs. I was talking to them in Hebrew, eating together with them, and some of us became friends. For twenty years we saw stone-throwing, but before, when I saw people throwing stones, I would tell them to stop it. I never thought it would accomplish anything. I felt the same when the intifada began, but then I could see that this was something special, so I started throwing stones myself. Since then the population has become like one. Before, the people were jealous of me because I made so much money, but now they worry about my business because I am open only a few hours. Before, we Palestinians felt that our national identity was over and it was every man for himself. I get Israeli-made Coca-Cola and Palestinian-made RC Cola for the same price, but now I charge one and a half shekels for the Coke and half a shekel for the RC Cola to help my own people.”

I then asked Samir who drew the three handwritten stylized Hebrew signs hanging over his kiosk. He confessed that he had drawn them himself. He had picked up the expressions from a movie. They were in many ways the real yardsticks of how far this man had strayed from his own Arab tradition and culture. One Hebrew sign said: “Your mother doesn’t work here, so please clean up your own mess.” The second said: “Eat here and leave your wife home.” The third said: “Eat and fuck, because you are going to die tomorrow.”

“Every day I look at those signs and say to myself I want to take them down.” Samir sighed.

He stared at them for a moment and then with three quick snatches ripped them off the ceiling right before my eyes. He angrily tore each one to shreds and then stuffed the scraps in the garbage pail.

The Palestinians, however, didn’t just want to tell the Israelis, “We are not you.” They also wanted to tell the Israelis and themselves who they were. The fact that the uprising spread so spontaneously from the refugee camps of Gaza to the opulent Palestinian villas outside Ramallah, and from the most remote hilltop villages to the Westernized cities, and from young to old, was the Palestinians’ way of demonstrating to the Israelis and themselves what the Israelis had always denied and what they themselves had begun to wonder about: that they were a nation. When the uprising began, it was hard to tell who was more surprised by its spontaneous nature—the Israelis or the Palestinians.

One of the most impressive photographs from the intifada appeared on the front page of the Jerusalem Post of March 7, 1988. It showed a middle-aged Palestinian Christian woman wearing a stylish tight black dress with a slit up the leg. She had just walked out of Sunday church services in the village of Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem, and had taken off her high-heeled shoes, which she was holding daintily in one hand. In the other hand she was heaving a rock at an Israeli soldier. Next to her were three boys, one of whom was firing a slingshot. I am sure that for twenty years that woman went to church services every Sunday and then went home, had lunch, and cursed the Israelis in private. But with the intifada something snapped. She suddenly crossed a line, picked up a stone, and, in effect, told the Israelis: “You don’t know me. You thought you knew me. You thought you were ‘experts’ on the Arabs. But you only knew my body, as it waited on your tables and swept your floors. You never knew my mind. This is who I really am, and this is how I want you to think of me from now on.”

The very reason that Israelis, particularly right-wingers, insisted at first that the uprising was not spontaneous, that it had been ordered by a small group of agitators, was that if all these Palestinians were spontaneously rising together, if they were all feeling the same thing at the same time, then they had to be a community with a shared past and a shared destiny; people with nothing in common don’t rise up in unison. Since most Israelis viewed the West Bankers and Gazans as a disparate and amorphous collection of Arab individuals—either waiters and carpenters who could be ordered around like objects or terrorist criminals who could be ignored or killed without a second thought—their appearance as a nation came as quite a shock.

I don’t believe it was a coincidence that after the intifada became a mass movement, many Israeli newspapers began for the first time to print some of the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers. Before then, they were just faceless, nameless objects. “Three Palestinians were killed in Nablus today” was usually all one would find in the Israeli press. But once the Palestinians proved to the Israelis that they were a community, that they were subjects trying to take charge of their own lives, the Israelis bestowed upon them an almost unconscious recognition by printing their names more frequently. Suddenly the gardener had a name, suddenly his dead son had a name, suddenly the whole community living on the same land with the Israelis had a name—Palestinians. This also explains why several Israelis remarked to me after the intifada began that they felt as though they were living in a new country, because a reality that had always been invisible suddenly became visible. The whole human landscape looked different.

No less so for Palestinians. Only through the intifada did the West Bankers and Gazans really emerge as a nation in the fullest sense. Every nationalist movement has a defining moment—a moment of real bonding—when all differences are suspended, and this was theirs. The intifada, in effect, marked the culmination of the process of transforming the West Bankers and Gazans from Jordanized and Egyptianized Palestinians into a Palestinian people—period. In many ways, it was Israel, through its repressive and humiliating treatment, which managed to give the Palestinians a common experience of bitterness to reinforce their historical and cultural ties and cement them together; whatever differences they had with each other, they eventually discovered, paled in comparison with the differences they had as a community with the Israelis.

For so many years thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had talked about being one people, but they hadn’t behaved like it. That changed with the intifada. All PLO factions began working together within a unified command leadership. Muslim fundamentalists set aside their differences with secularists and Christians, and in virtually every village collaborators were either punished, or stood up, apologized to their neighbors, and vowed never to work for the Israelis again. In fact, the thing Palestinians kept talking about over and over again in the first few months of their uprising was not their “victories” over the Israelis but their own newfound sense of solidarity. Said Musa al-Kam, the imprisoned Palestinian lawyer, “In some towns or villages I had friends who went out and got arrested when all their other friends did. They just wanted to be with their friends; otherwise in the eyes of the society they would not be good.”

The unity and courage Palestinians demonstrated in challenging fully armed Israeli soldiers with stones gave the West Bankers and Gazans a sense of dignity and self-worth that they had never previously enjoyed. It also gave them a new weight in PLO decision-making. In the old days, it was Arafat and the guerrillas in Beirut who gave the orders and the West Bankers and Gazans who were largely on the receiving end. After Arafat was driven from Beirut, though, the balance of power gradually began to shift in favor of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, and that shift was made even more pronounced as a result of the intifada. The West Bankers and Gazans were no longer sitting on their hands by their radios listening to news of what Arafat and his guerrillas were doing in Amman or Beirut or Baghdad. Now it was Arafat and his guerrillas listening to the radio reports about them. “We’re suffering the casualties,” West Bankers could and did tell the PLO, “and you’re flying first class.”

Moreover, the West Bankers and Gazans were no longer whining about this or that Israeli arrest or house demolition; they were going out and literally daring the Israelis to arrest them, or shoot them, by the hundreds. They were no longer waiting for others to save them; rather, they were taking responsibility for saving themselves—not as individuals, but as a community. The fact that in the early stage of the uprising masses of Palestinians took to the streets meant that Israel could no longer control these 1.7 million people with a few hundred border policemen and Shin Bet agents. It required whole battalions of the Israeli army—thousands of men around the clock—and this led to thousands of public confrontations. In the first year of the uprising, the army arrested nearly 20,000 Palestinians, killed more than 300, and injured between 3,500 and 20,000, depending on whose figures one trusts. (During the same period only 11 Israeli soldiers and civilians died at the hands of Palestinians, while some 1,100 were injured.)

I once met a strapping, muscle-bound, twenty-year-old Palestinian man in the Kalandia refugee camp by the name of Jameel. With his physique, he would have been an elite commando in any Palestinian army. But when I asked him whether he was trying to hurt Israelis when he threw a stone, he answered in a way that made me realize how much the stone was really meant for him—meant to liberate him from his own sense of impotence and humiliation.

“A woman is being raped,” said Jameel, “and while she is being raped she uses her nails to scratch the body of the rapist. Is that violence? We have been raped for years, but instead of our brothers helping us, they stood around and watched.”

And now that you have taken your destiny into your own hands?

“The wounds of the rape are starting to heal,” he said. “The woman is combing her hair and looking in the mirror again.”

When the uprising began, Palestinians threw stones at the Israelis, not because they had all suddenly read the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and become nonviolent, not because they didn’t want to hurt the Israelis, but because when their anger suddenly exploded, stones and clubs and kitchen knives were all that most of them found available and operationally expedient.

The Palestinians under occupation knew their enemy well. Unlike the PLO bureaucrats in Beirut and Tunis, they knew the real dimensions of Israel’s strength and weaknesses. They knew that in contrast to the Syrians or the Algerians or the Jordanians, the Israelis would not simply move in tanks and mow down hundreds of protestors with machine-gun fire, or level whole villages or towns, to quell the rebellion. The Israelis could be ruthless, the Palestinians under occupation knew, but not that ruthless. They might have played by Hama Rules in Beirut, but not in their own back yard surrounded by television cameras. Yes, the Palestinians labeled them Goliaths, but they knew in their heart of hearts that the Israelis were, as Benvenisti liked to say, “Goliaths with David’s guilty conscience.”

The Palestinians understood that, as long as they used stones, the Jews would respond with largely—though by no means exclusively—proportional measures: sporadic gunfire, imprisonment, tear gas, plastic bullets, and even a machine they invented to throw pebbles at a very high speed. Palestinians knew that although these Israeli countermeasures were sometimes lethal, they would never be sufficient to snuff out the rebellion; one or two casualties a day would not be enough to dissuade people from taking to the streets. Whenever I probed Palestinian youths as to why they threw stones, they did not respond by quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. They simply said, “Because we don’t want to face Israeli tanks.” With good reason. Prime Minister Shamir was once asked what would happen to the Palestinians if they began to use firearms widely in their intifada. He answered tersely, “There will not be even a memory of them left.”

Every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza was aware of the relative restraint under which Israeli troops operated. Daoud Kuttab, the Palestinian journalist, interviewed a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy from the village of Burka on the West Bank, who told him that he was out throwing stones during a demonstration one day when he was arrested by Israeli soldiers. They put him in handcuffs, and as they were leading him away, he told Daoud, one of the Israeli soldiers wound up to give him a belt. The boy said he told the soldier in Arabic, “No, no, [Defense Minister Yitzhak] Rabin said that you are not allowed to hit me after I am already in handcuffs.” The soldiers started to laugh. “What—you know Rabin and Shamir?” the boy quoted one of the soldiers as saying to him. In the end, the soldiers were so amused and amazed by the youth’s pluck, and in particular his ability to throw Rabin’s orders back in their face, that they opened his handcuffs and let him go.

The fact that the West Bankers and Gazans had adopted stones for operational reasons was immediately encouraged and exploited by Yasir Arafat and the PLO leaders outside for diplomatic and propaganda reasons. Arafat was no fool, and he also watched television, lots of television. He could see that the nightly broadcasts of heavily armed Israeli troops opening fire on Palestinians armed only with stones had the potential to erase the mark of Cain—the label “terrorist”—which the Israelis had managed to slap onto the forehead of the whole Palestinian national movement. The West Bankers and Gazans, by daring to challenge the Israelis the way David challenged Goliath, actually rehabilitated Arafat and gave him a respectability on the world stage which he had never before experienced. No one loved to rub this point in more than Arafat himself—the man whom the Israelis had turned into the global symbol of the terrorist. As Arafat said in his interview with Playboy (September 1988), shortly after the uprising began, and repeated in virtually every interview after: “Everyone has now discovered who is the REAL terrorist organization: It is the Israeli military junta who are killing women and children, smashing their bones, killing pregnant women. You just have to look at television to see this. So now it is clear and obvious who the real terrorists are.”

But as the uprising developed, the use of stones became symbolic of an entirely new strategy of Palestinian resistance—a strategy which, again, could only have been developed by the West Bankers and Gazans who had lived under Israel. What the Palestinians under occupation were saying by using primarily stones instead of firearms was that the most powerful weapon against the Israelis was not terrorism or guerrilla warfare, which the PLO had practiced futilely for twenty years. Israel was simply too strong to be moved by such tactics, and only an immature liberation movement would think otherwise.

The most powerful weapon, they proclaimed, was massive nonlethal civil disobedience. That is what the stones symbolized. They symbolized not working in Israel, refusing to cooperate with the Israeli military government in the occupied territories, no longer buying Israeli products, going on strike half the business hours of each day, choking the Israeli prisons with detainees, and generally making the Palestinians as a community indigestible for Israel. In that sense, the use of stones was simultaneously a critique of the PLO’s tactics and a discovery by West Bankers and Gazans that they had had within themselves the power to challenge the Israelis all along. They simply had never tapped it. No wonder one of the most popular Arabic chants during the uprising was “Don’t fear, don’t fear, the stone has become a Kalashnikov.”

“The Palestinians came to understand through the uprising what made the Israeli occupation work—it was themselves and their own cooperation with the whole Israeli system,” said Sari Nusseibeh. “The most important achievement of the intifada was to show Palestinians where their chains were and how they could remove them.”

At the same time, though, the stone also contained a political message meant for the Israelis. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, generally speaking, had always had a slightly different political agenda than those Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, who had been Arafat’s main constituency when he was in Beirut. Because most of the refugees living in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon were from those parts of Israel that fell within the pre-1967 boundaries—from places like Haifa, Jaffa, or the Galilee—the only way they would ever feel truly at home again was if Israel disappeared entirely and they were allowed to return to their original villages and original houses and original land. The West Bank and Gaza were as foreign to them as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Their problem, in short, was the Israeli in their house.

This was not true for many of the 1.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To be sure, more than one-third of them were also refugees from pre-1967 Israel living in camps, but even as refugees they were at least residing in homes within Palestine. The majority, though, were Palestinians whose families have lived in towns and villages of the West Bank, and to a lesser extent the Gaza Strip, for generations—long before the Israelis arrived in 1967. Their immediate problem was Israel’s occupation, not its existence. Their problem was not an Israeli family living in their house but an Israeli soldier stationed on their roof. If Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza ended, and Israeli soldiers got off their roofs and returned to pre-1967 Israel, many West Bankers and Gazans could feel at home again in the fullest sense. Therefore, they were, as a community, much more willing to accept a two-state solution—any somtion—that would get Israel back into its pre-1967 boundaries and leave them with their own Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. It wasn’t that they had come to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a homeland, or that they had abandoned all dreams of recovering Haifa and Jaffa; they simply recognized that Israel was too powerful to be eradicated and that they could solve their own immediate problems by coming to terms with her. That, I believe, is what many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were trying to signal by throwing stones—to tell the Israelis that they were not out to murder them but were ready to live next door to them, if they would only vacate the territories and allow a Palestinian state to emerge there. In fact, from the moment the uprising began, most West Bankers and Gazans were telling Israelis privately—and in a garbled way publicly—that this was what the intifada was all about.

But the West Bankers and Gazans were afraid to speak this message aloud to the Israelis, because they knew that they did not have the authority to sign away half of Palestine—only the PLO did—and because they also knew that within the refugee camps of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, not to mention in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, were many Palestinians who still dreamed of and insisted on returning to their original homes in pre-1967 Israel, Palestinians who would kill to defend that right.

The day I went to Dahariya prison to talk to Palestinians arrested in the intifada, I began by interviewing the warden, Lieutenant Colonel David Zamir. The first thing I asked him was to recommend the most interesting prisoners with whom I could speak.

“I have something like 1,200 prisoners in this prison,” said Zamir. “Out of those 1,200, 1,199 say they are innocent. They are innocent. They didn’t do a thing. They were home sleeping or taking a shower or playing sheshbesh [backgammon] when for some reason, they say, Israeli soldiers came and arrested them. They had nothing to do with stones or anything. Everybody is innocent. Except one guy. I have one guy here who says he’s guilty and proud of it.”

Naturally, I asked to interview him.

A few minutes later I was introduced to Mazen Khair Ahmed Radwan, fifteen years old, from the Kalandia refugee camp. He told me that for the past year he had been working in an Israeli juice factory in Atarot—filling and packing bottles of juice.

“I am the oldest son and the only one who can bring money for the family,” he told me, “but I felt that by working I was helping the Israeli economy. It made me hate the Israelis more. They kill people in the streets and come in houses with tear gas. The last time I worked they told me they had no money to pay me.”

So what exactly did you do that landed you here? I asked.

“I threw a stone at some Jews,” said Mazen.

Why?

“Because I didn’t have a grenade. If I had had a grenade I would have thrown that. The stone and the grenade are the same thing for me.”

What is the intifada about for you?

“We want our land back.”

Which land?

“The land the Jews took in 1948.”

Through their intifada the West Bankers and Gazans put the whole Palestinian national movement on a new track. They implemented a new method of resistance—massive, relatively non-lethal civil disobedience—and a new message—clear-cut, unambiguous acceptance of a two-state solution. No more yes-no business. What they needed, however, was a Palestinian leader with enough international standing to take their message to the world and with enough credibility to be able to say to Mazen Khair Ahmed Radwan and all the other refugees living in camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon what the West Bankers and Gazans were saying to Israelis privately: We must formally accept Israel if we are ever going to get anything.

Enter Yasir Arafat. Arafat, as I noted earlier, had been casting about for a role to play ever since Beirut. The uprising gave him that role; if he hadn’t existed, the West Bankers and Gazans would have had to invent him. But when they put out their casting call, the West Bankers and Gazans made it clear to Arafat that they were now the dynamic element within Palestinian politics— not the refugees or PLO bureaucrats on the outside—and that Arafat would have to speak the lines which they dictated. That meant Arafat would have to say the “I-word”—Israel. He would have to publicly recognize the Jewish state.

For a variety of reasons, Arafat was more than ready to grab the deal which the West Bankers and Gazans in effect offered him. To begin with, Arafat had to have known perfectly well how little he and the PLO leadership were responsible for the intifada in its origins; it clearly took them by surprise as much as everyone else. The biggest revolt by Palestinians since the 1930s had begun without PLO direction. Arafat also could not have escaped noticing the fact that his picture was little in evidence when the Palestinians in the occupied territories first took to the streets. They were almost as angry at the PLO for abandoning them as they were at the rest of the world. If Arafat had not fallen in line with the political direction laid down by the West Bankers and Gazans, he would have risked losing his position as leader and symbol of the Palestinian national movement, and he would have opened the door for an alternative authentic leadership to emerge from the occupied territories—the same way he and his cohorts emerged in 1967 and ousted their effete elders. But the time was also right for Arafat to recognize Israel. He and his colleagues had been on the road too long; they wanted to cash in their chips and get at least something for their efforts before the bank closed entirely. Moreover, the Arab world had mellowed since 1967. While the Arab consensus was not ready to embrace Israel, it was increasingly ready to tolerate recognition of its existence. Finally, most of the Palestinian refugees, particularly those exposed to daily threats in the Lebanese jungle, were ready to consider any pragmatic solution that might get them a state of their own to reside in—even if they were not able to go back to their original homes immediately. Pronouncing the “I-word” was a small price to pay for such an opportunity, and Arafat, wordsmith that he always was, would do it without saying explicitly to the refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and elsewhere that they wouldn’t ever be going home, after all; he would keep some shred of dream alive for them. But more about that a little further down the road.

It was an ambush of sorts. The orange Opel 1900 was cruising along the highway into the Gaza Strip about two hundred yards ahead of our car, when a Palestinian boy sauntered into the middle of the road. The Opel’s driver slowed down to avoid hitting the boy and, as soon as he did, other Palestinian youths hiding in the brush by the side of the road jumped up and pelted the car with stones, totally knocking out its front windshield. The Israeli driver, a stout little fellow wearing blue jeans, white tennis shoes, and a ski vest, was hopping mad. His anger was not just political—Jew versus Arab; it wasn’t just that the stone could have killed him or the flying glass blinded him; and it wasn’t just that he felt this was his road and no one had a right to assault him on it. It was that some son of a bitch had just broken his windshield, his $250 windshield, and he wanted him dead.

When we pulled up behind his car, we found him in the process of locking and loading an M-16 rifle he had in the trunk, and heading off to hunt down the Palestinian youths, who had evaporated into the adjacent village. But as the man stalked from his Opel up the dirt path on which the Palestinians had fled, he was suddenly confronted with a scene that forced him to freeze in his tracks. Down the path trudged three Palestinian women dressed in long black robes and beating two dozen sheep with canes. It was the most biblical scene one could imagine, the shepherdesses and their flock walking past mud huts framed in palm trees and cactus plants. It easily could have been 1888, or 1288, or 1088 B.C. Nothing much had really changed since the days of Isaac and Ishmael—not the stones and certainly not the passion; only the Opel and the fancy rifle were new. Israeli soldiers on the scene eventually talked the man out of going into the village. We left him sweeping shards of glass off his front seat and muttering to himself, as a young Palestinian woman riding a donkey-driven cart rolled by—no doubt quietly savoring the scene behind her blank stare.

This encounter, which took place early in the intifada, popped into my mind months later when Aluph Hareven, a prominent Israeli social analyst who specializes in educating for Arab—Jewish coexistence, told me about a conversation his daughter had had with an Israeli taxi driver. His daughter had been discussing with the driver how Israel should respond to the uprising and the driver told her, “You know what we should do? We should take our clubs and hit them over the head, and hit them and hit them and hit them, until they finally stop hating us.”

The Palestinian intifada set off an equally intense explosion of rage on the Israeli side of the fault line. Unlike the Palestinian explosion, however, the Israeli outburst never acquired a name, but it was there nonetheless. You could see it in the X-rays of the hundreds of Palestinians who had their arms or legs or ribs broken by Israeli soldiers; you could see it in the Palestinian shops, whose doors and windows were kicked in by Israeli soldiers when the owners refused to open during the hours set by the Israeli authorities, and you could count it in the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers, who were supposed to be shooting at their legs.

The anger that went into the Israeli clubs and bullets was, like that of the Palestinians, fed by several different sources. On one level, many Israelis felt like the homeowner who wakes up one morning and discovers his live-in maid standing in the master bedroom, playing the stereo at full blast, and announcing to the boss that she is not just a faceless object that can be ordered around but that she is an equal—with an equal claim to his house.

It was enraging for Israelis to have these “niggers”—which was exactly how many Israelis viewed the Palestinians—these people whom they had given “good jobs,” medical care, and all the other benefits that Israelis claimed went into their “enlightened occupation”—suddenly getting uppity and saying that they would not accept their second-class status any longer. More than a few Israelis wanted these “thankless” Palestinian maids and waiters to be put back in their proper places.

Yet there was something else behind the Israeli rage. By repudiating the Israeli system, by openly mocking Israeli authority, by making it unsafe for Israelis to travel on some of their own roads, the Palestinians were depriving the Israelis of their sense of being at home. What the Israeli club said to the Palestinian was just what the taxi driver in Aluph Hareven’s story indicated: “You bastards. How many times do I have to beat you, how many of your bones do I have to break, how many of you do I have to kill, before you recognize that I am here and entitled to relax in my own house?”

There is nothing more frustrating than feeling that you are strong but that you cannot use your strength in a way that will enable you to take your shoes off. Ze’ev Posner, a cameraman for Cable News Network (CNN), told me about a scene he witnessed in the West Bank village of Halhul in February 1988 that drove this point home. An Israeli general arrived in the village, along with a contingent of officers, to observe the Israeli troops there quelling a Palestinian riot. “All of a sudden,” said Posner, “one of these Palestinian kids with his head wrapped in a kaffiyeh decided that he was going to be real brave and stepped forward with a slingshot and fired a stone right at the general, but it missed. The general really got mad. He decided he was going to deal with this himself, so he started chasing after the kids. And he is a general, right, so he has this big belly and everything. The kids knew the village and they ran into all these side alleys. I was following with my camera. All of a sudden this general finds himself in a dead end, facing a row of shouting and cursing kids about 15 meters away. They were all screaming at him, ‘Palestine, Palestine.’ And once he was close enough to get a good look at them, he could see that they weren’t even teenagers; they were just a bunch of twelve-year-olds. He didn’t know what to do. So he just started waving his Motorola walkie-talkie at them and shouting, ‘Go home! Go home! What are you doing here? Go home!’ It was all he could do.”

Finally, there was also real fear behind the Israeli clubs.

The fear came from the fact that the Palestinians threw stones and bottles to announce to Israelis that they were there, that they wanted to be treated as subjects not objects, but for almost a year they failed to accompany those stones and bottles with a clear message explaining to Israelis exactly what their objectives were. From the Israeli point of view, the maid announced that she was moving out of the basement, but without stating explicitly how much of the house she would be satisfied with. Sure, privately many Palestinian individuals in the West Bank and Gaza said they just wanted an end to the Israeli occupation, but they never said it publicly as a community. That is why although there was an asymmetry in firepower in the clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths—Israelis had vastly superior weapons compared to the Palestinians—there was not an asymmetry in the stakes. Israelis felt just as deeply as Palestinians that their communal survival was at stake in what was happening in the streets.

True, many Israeli soldiers were deeply troubled by having to go out and beat Palestinians with clubs, or chase women and children. There was no heroism in such a war and they felt none; Israelis who served in the West Bank and Gaza never told war stories. But 99 percent of them served without question, because if they didn’t do it, where would the stone-throwers stop? No one was quite sure they wouldn’t follow the Jews right back to Tel Aviv. An Israeli army spokesman who escorted me on many interviews I conducted with Israeli soldiers during the intifada always used to say to me of duty in the West Bank, “We hate it, but we do it.”

“I did reserve duty in Gaza several times before the uprising, but in those days we just sat around in cafés and drank coffee,” Menachem Lorberbaum, an Israeli soldier in his mid-twenties, told me after completing twenty-two days of service in Nablus shortly after the intifada began. “In the old days, the Border Police ran the occupation. We didn’t need to get that involved. This time in Nablus I went forty-eight hours without sleep. We were on the go constantly. I had to chase Palestinians into their homes after they threw stones. They all run into the shower. Really. They run home, tear off their clothes, and get in the shower. You burst in and find the one you’re looking for and he’s sopping wet. He says, ‘Hey, I wasn’t throwing stones, I was here taking a shower.’ It is disgusting to have to meet people on such a level. It wasn’t that I felt I shouldn’t do it. I knew I had to do it, but it was simply disgusting. I always knew there was an occupation in the abstract, but I never really thought about the Palestinians. They washed the streets and cleaned up the garbage. Now you can’t ignore the fact that you are an occupier of another people. You have to arrest people and put blindfolds on them and then ride through the middle of Nablus with them in the back of your jeep and everyone in town staring at you. You feel like an occupier.

“I want to come home and tell everyone I meet how bad it is,” added Lorberbaum, as we stood on the stairs of the school at which he taught. “But look at that lady over there pushing her baby carriage, what does she care? What does she want to know? All she knows is that people are rioting and someone has to stop them.”

In the long run, nothing will pressure the Israeli Cabinet into making territorial concessions to the Palestinians more than pressure from Israeli soldiers disgusted with serving in the territories. But as long as the Palestinians are even the slightest bit ambiguous about where their stone-throwing stops and where the Jewish state begins, that pressure from the army will always be diluted—no matter how morally disturbing the occupation becomes. In November 1988, for example, twenty-one Israeli officer trainees were driving past the Kalandia refugee camp when some youths pelted their bus with stones. The twenty-one officer candidates, the future leadership of the Israeli army specially selected from the rank and file, ordered the driver to stop; they piled out of the bus and went on a rampage through Kalandia—smashing windows, overturning cars, and breaking in doors. In their defense, the officers said they were just following orders. When an Israeli newspaper quoted an unidentified senior military official as saying the officers would be disqualified from their course, the Israeli public responded with such a howl of protest that Defense Minister Rabin was forced to write letters to the parents of each of the officer candidates, promising that all twenty-one would be able to join a future officers’ program.

The Palestinian rage that exploded in December 1987 not only opened up the fault line that ran through the West Bank and Gaza Strip but also the one through pre-1967 Israel as well. It took nearly two weeks to hit, but on December 21, the fissure shot right across the Green Line when Israel’s 700,000-member Israeli Arab community mounted a general strike in solidarity with their compatriots’ uprising in the West Bank and Gaza. The strike was called Peace Day, although it was anything but peaceful. From Jaffa to Haifa to Nazareth, Israeli Arab youths took to the streets, waving PLO flags, throwing stones at Jewish cars, and rhythmically shouting such Arabic slogans as “In baladna, yahud kalabna”—“This is our country and the Jews are our dogs.”

Many Israelis professed to be shocked by the reaction of the Israeli Arabs. They had no right to be. For twenty years certain Israeli leaders and Jewish settlers had been insisting that the 1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza did not exist anymore, and that it was all one grand land of Israel. But if there is no 1967 border for the Jews, why should there be one for the Palestinian Arabs?

My friend Laura Blumenfeld wasn’t shocked by Peace Day—just a little disappointed. I met Laura one day while washing my car. She said she had heard I lived across the street and wanted to talk to me. She had been working in an Israeli Arab village, Tira, northeast of Tel Aviv, for nine months, and had gathered many stories. Her tales of Tira were captivating. I gradually realized that Laura was like a woman who was standing on her porch with her Instamatic camera when the earthquake hit. As the ground opened between Israelis and Palestinians, she captured it frame by frame, and this was how it looked from the epicenter.

A twenty-four-year-old American Harvard University graduate, Laura had come to Israel to work for Arab—Jewish coexistence as part of a program called Interns for Peace. Interns sent teams of Jews and Arabs into Israeli Arab and Jewish towns to organize dialogues between Arab and Jewish youngsters and, ideally, build long-term personal relationships that might one day seal the fault line for good. Educated in a yeshiva in New York and speaking fluent Hebrew and some Arabic, Laura was assigned to Tira, in September 1987, three months before the intifada. As a going-away present when she left New York, her brother had given her the cover of a New York Times Magazine article I had written on the Israeli—Palestinian conflict called “My Neighbor, My Enemy.” The color cover photograph showed an Arab woman and her child tilling a field, while off in the distance a group of Jews were marching with a flag. In the middle of this picture Laura’s brother had drawn a little stick figure labeled Laura, and out of her mouth he drew a bubble with a voice saying, “Let’s all be friends.”

Although she had spent a great deal of time in her youth in Israel, and like many liberal American Jews had grown intrigued with the native Arab community, it was actually an encounter that her father had had with an unknown Arab that drove Laura to Interns for Peace.

“An Arab shot my father,” she explained to me in an even voice during our first meeting. “My father was visiting Israel as a tourist,” she continued. “He was walking back to his hotel on Friday night after visiting the Kotel [the Western Wall]. He was walking down David Street, just as the Arab shopkeepers were closing their stores. From Butchers’ Alley someone fired a shot and my father fell. He felt his head and he was bleeding. He started to shout, ‘Help me, help me,’ but all the shopkeepers just turned away and went into their shops. He managed to drag himself to the police station and they took him to Hadassah [hospital]. The bullet had grazed his skull. What was so strange about it was that on that very same night, March 7, 1986, I, as the president of the Harvard—Radcliffe Zionist League, was hosting a dinner at the Harvard Hillel for the Harvard—Radcliffe Arab Students’ Society. Right before dinner I get this call, and the first thing my father says is, ‘Laura, I’m okay, no matter what you hear on television, I’m okay.’ So he tells me what happened, and thirty minutes later I’m sitting across the table from Palestinian students chatting away. This person who shot my father was faceless and in the dark, and I wanted to meet him. It was very important for me to look him in the eye and say to him, ‘Look, jerk, my dad wants a Palestinian state alongside Israel and his daughter was meeting with Palestinians at the Harvard Hillel the night you shot him.’”

Like her fellow interns, Laura had started out believing that with enough education and contact Arabs and Jews could overcome their differences. “The elementary school in Tira where I worked faced the West Bank,” she explained. “One time during one of these meetings between Arab and Jewish schoolchildren, I was looking past the parents and the kids and out the door and I saw the hills of the West Bank, and I thought to myself, Stupid dirt. It is just dirt. Stupid hills. I could never understand this idea of fighting over dirt. I had this idea that nothing is more dear than the soul of a human being, and I think that they are crazy fighting over land and ‘liberating’ territories. What did they liberate? Grass? It was a very American reaction. So I got up to shut the door and the door wouldn’t shut. It kept swinging open. I wanted to shield my kids from the dirt. They were sitting there singing some nauseatingly adorable song and I kept trying to shut the door, but the handle was broken and it kept swinging open. The hills were laughing at me. I just couldn’t close them out.”

Nevertheless, during her early months in Tira, Laura thought she was making enough headway that she might not have to shut the world out. One day, she asked her class of Arab fifth-grade boys in Tira to put together collages using pictures and headlines fromThe New York Times. She later showed them to me, stopping at the one which had caused her the most pain. One of the Arab boys had pasted together a picture of Israeli troops putting down a Druse demonstration in the Golan Heights, a picture of Shimon Peres, and a picture of Nazi war criminal John Ivan Demjanjuk, who was convicted by an Israeli court of murdering Jews at the Treblinka death camp. Under the picture of the Druse, the boy wrote: “The doing of the Jewish in the Golan.” Under Peres’s picture, he wrote: “I feel angry with Peres because he talks something he cannot do it.” And next to Demjanjuk he wrote: “I feel too bad from Demjanjuk.”

“So I said to him,” recalled Laura, “why do you feel bad for Demjanjuk? He said, ‘Because I think he is innocent.’

“So I said, ‘Do you know that he is accused of killing many Jews?’ And he said, ‘Well’—and this is one of my most sensitive students—‘even if he killed Jews, that would be a good thing.’

“It really hit me right here,” said Laura, pounding her chest. “I remember feeling hot, scared, and sad all at the same time. I also felt despair. I said to him, ‘Do you know that I’m Jewish?’ I had been working with him for months, and he was a really nice kid. He turned completely red. And he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that there could be Jews like you.’ And he took this collage out of my hands, ripped off the picture of Demjanjuk, and scribbled out what he had written with a blue crayon. The next day he showed up at my house with this huge crate of strawberries and said, ‘I want to give these to you. I am sorry. You really taught me something.’ That at least made me feel that I was accomplishing something, breaking down at least some stereotypes and getting people to know each other as human beings.”

The first stage of Laura’s work in Tira involved her in preparing the Arab fifth-graders for meeting the Jewish fifth-graders from the adjacent Israeli town of Kfar Saba.

Said Laura, “I asked them one day, ‘How many here have ever seen a Jew?’ They all stood up. Then I asked, ‘How many have ever spoken to a Jew?’ They all sat down. ‘So where did you see a Jew?’ Well, one said he saw this soldier on television, and another said he saw an army patrol come through Tira.”

Nevertheless, kids being kids, the first get-together between the fifth-graders from Kfar Saba and the fifth-graders from Tira proved to be a smashing success, with many friendships formed, including one between Said of Tira and Eitan of Kfar Saba, two of Laura’s favorites. Said was so eager to show Eitan around and demonstrate his rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew that he pointed out everything in sight, including: “This is a donkey, this is a house, this is a cemetery.” The boys ate at Said’s home, visited a mosque together, and heard a lecture about the meaning of the pilgrimage to Mecca. A relationship was born.

“When the intifada happened a few weeks later, it had no impact at first on our programs,” said Laura. “It was as if we were in our own little world and I was keeping the door to the outside shut. I thought I could keep it that way. Then Peace Day came along. That day I was visiting Said’s mother, and he comes running in and says, ‘Guess what, Laura, I was on the road throwing rocks at Jewish cars.’ He had been the most enthusiastic kid during the meetings with Jews. It was one of those moments that I realized no matter how much you clear away you always have a bedrock. At that moment I felt so sad. I felt frustrated, and I even felt a little bit frightened. His mother didn’t say anything. I felt as if things were suddenly changing. Then we started to see Arabic graffiti on the walls in Tira: We are all together; We support our Palestinian brothers until the land is liberated; The hand of our enemy will be cut off. That night, I locked my door for the first time. A few days later, I was in a taxi from Kfar Saba to Tira and the driver had the PLO radio station on. At one point they took a break from the nationalist songs and gave a weather report. The broadcaster said there would be unusually strong winds in Palestine today and a mother in the taxi looked at her little girl and said, ‘Allah is blowing the poison gas back on the Jewish soldiers.’”

The shift in mood on the Jewish side came just as quickly.

“About a week later I was in the teachers’ lounge at the school in Kfar Saba,” said Laura. “Eitan’s mother walked in and literally grabbed me by the collar and said, ‘Look, I have a son. From the night he turns eighteen to the morning he wakes up at fifty-five life for me is going to be one sleepless nightmare [because he would have to be in the army and then do annual reserve duty]. I am not ready to lose sleep yet. What are you dragging my kid to Tira for? He is ten years old.’ Then Eitan’s teacher joined in: ‘Who are you? You are an American, naive. You come here, preach democracy, and tell us what to do, and then go home and sit on your cozy leather couch and watch us on television and say, Tsk tsk, how inhumane. You are only doing this so you won’t feel embarrassed at your company’s cocktail parties.’ They were really angry. I tried to explain that the Israeli Arabs wanted to continue with the contacts and that they would be alienated all the more if the Jews rejected them now. So the teacher said, ‘Of course they want to continue! Don’t you know they are a double-dealing people. Here we went and raised their standard of living, and you know what our thanks will be. We will all end up living in Manhattan!’ Then this other teacher jumps in and says, ‘My son is beating Arab children in Gaza. How can I bring my students to meet Arab children in Tira? I want to freeze all activity.’”

At that point, recalled Laura, the school principal joined the argument. “Did I hear someone talk about freezing the meetings?” said the principal. “Do you know where I come from? I come from Poland. I lived in a ghetto. I couldn’t travel. I lost two of my friends fighting the Arabs of Tira in 1948. I lost them so that Jews could have a place to feel free and safe, and if you don’t get on the bus tomorrow to Tira, then we’re all going back to the ghetto, and I will be damned if we’re going back to the ghetto.”

The next Arab—Jewish meeting did go ahead, but only twenty out of the forty Jewish kids attended. The Arab kids were hurt, said Laura. It wasn’t a political thing. They were offended personally. Where is my friend from Kfar Saba? they asked her. Why is he afraid to come to my house? What does he think I am? A week later it was time for a return visit by the Arab kids to Kfar Saba, and this time some of the Jewish parents kept their kids home from school, including Eitan’s mother.

“Said was crushed,” said Laura. “To him it was purely a personal thing. He said, ‘That’s it. I don’t want any more meetings. No more.’”

The next week Laura was back at the Jewish school in Kfar Saba. “I explained to the kids what happened,” she said. “I told them that for now there would be no more meetings because of the parents, but that we could still be pen pals. I suggested that for now they write letters to the kids in Tira. In the middle of my talk to the class, this alarm goes off—rrrrrrrrrrrrr—and this teacher bursts in and says, ‘We are having a civil-defense drill, pretend that the Arabs are attacking.’ So the classroom was drained. All the kids went down to the bomb shelter, and I sat on this low cement wall shivering in my Interns for Peace T-shirt.”

So where does it all leave you now? I asked.

“It leaves me feeling that blood is thicker than water—literally,” said Laura. “Here is Tira, here is Tulkarm [a West Bank Arab town] and here is Ra’anana [an Israeli Jewish town],” she explained, splaying out three fingers from one hand. “What we now have is the Arabs in Tira donating their blood to the Arabs in Tulkarm so that the Arabs in Tulkarm can throw stones at the Jews in Ra’anana. And Laura is in the middle saying, ‘Let’s be friends.’

“Before, when I asked the Jewish kids, What is the difference between the people who live in Tira and the people who live in Tulkarm? they would say, ‘Well, the ones in Tira are like Jewish Muslims and the others are real Arabs.’ I would patiently explain to them that there are West Bank Arabs and there are Israeli Arabs and why they are different. But ever since Peace Day I cannot say that anymore. The Israeli Arabs themselves are schizophrenic. First the Israeli side dominated them; now the Palestinian side is taking over.

“Every weekend I come home from Tira to Jerusalem to relax,” Laura continued. “So I go in last week and put on the television, and you know what series has been playing on television here all year? North and South, the one about the American Civil War. I don’t know whose idea that was. I would just turn the television off and shut myself into my room and put on my Vivaldi. I had some Reese’s Pieces I had brought back with me from America—a whole supply. I would take some of them out and just lose myself in my Reese’s Pieces.

“They are enemies. They really are enemies and I cannot deny that anymore,” concluded Laura of the Palestinians and Israelis. “In all relationships we pretend that things are wonderful and we get along, and then you hit a certain level where there is just conflict and you can’t get beyond it. I really think that my work is really ignoring reality, but sometimes that’s the only way you can live and be happy.”

When the fault line cracked open, anyone who tried to straddle it was pulled apart like a wishbone. Ask Naomi Shapiro, an American Jewish woman in her mid-twenties, who had also worked as an Intern for Peace in Tira for two years. Like many American Jews who came to Israel and got involved in working for Arab–Jewish coexistence, Naomi found that she always lived sort of a double life. She sympathized with the Palestinians of Tira, but never to the point of giving up her own Jewishness or identification with Israel; she identified with Israel and Zionism, but never so blindly that she could not also understand the Palestinians’ quest for their own state. That balancing act worked fine until the intifada opened the fault line wide enough that Naomi had to jump to one side or the other. Her moment of truth came quite unexpectedly one day while she was trying to buy a piece of cake at the cafeteria in the Central Bus Station of Jerusalem.

“It was several months after the intifada had started,” Shapiro told me, “and I was wearing a button that said END THE OCCUPATION, written in Hebrew, English, and Arabic. I went up to the counter to order, and there was this Palestinian waiter there. I had seen him before. He must spend his whole day serving Jews and being polite to them. As he took the piece of cake I wanted out of the glass case and was about to hand it to me, I caught him staring at my shirt. I suddenly remembered that I was wearing this button. We had been speaking in Hebrew, but he immediately switched to English and said, ‘Where did you get that button?’

“I told him I got it from a friend,” recalled Shapiro. “So he said, ‘Do you have another?’ I said no. So then he started to plead with me. I mean he really started to beg. He said, ‘Please, please, let me have that button. I want that button. I need to have that button.’”

Seeing that he was obviously desperate, Shapiro took off the button and handed it to him, along with the money for her piece of cake. The Palestinian waiter took the button and handed Shapiro back her money.

“He kept saying, ‘Thank you, thank you,’” said Shapiro. “Meanwhile, all these Israelis sitting around the cafeteria were watching this. There was this Orthodox man, a real black hat, who was just staring at me with this ‘What-are-you-doing-with-that-filthy-Arab kind of look.”

When the Palestinian waiter started to follow Shapiro out of the restaurant, she realized that this was not one of those cute little American-Jew-meets-Palestinian encounters, where a few words of Arabic are exchanged with the native and everyone goes home smiling.

“When we got outside, he asked me where I was from and I said America,” said Shapiro. “And then—this was really strange—he said to me, ‘Do you know what is happening?’ It was as if we were in some spy movie and we were the only two people in the world who knew this secret of the intifada, and all the Israelis in the restaurant and the bus station were frozen. He just kept whispering, ‘Do you know what is happening?’ So I said, Yes, yes, I know what is happening. And we both just nodded our heads at each other. I shook his hand, and as he walked away he kept saying, ‘Please, please come back again.’ When he walked off, I was shaking so much I spilled half the coffee on my shirt.”

Why were you so upset? I asked.

“Well, at first I had wanted to identify with him and say, Yes, yes, go on throwing stones, go on with your violence,” Shapiro explained. “But then I started shaking because I realized that he didn’t see me as I saw myself. He did not see me as a Jew but as an American, a non-Jewish American, as an ally. To put it crudely, he saw me as a pro-Arab American. I am a Jew and pro-Israeli, but I lived in an Arab village. I was angry with myself for not telling him that I was Jewish. Yet it was because he did not see me as I saw myself that we were able to talk at all. I could just see my mother watching this scene from high above me, shouting, ‘These are not your people! What are you doing with that Arab?’

“The situation is so much more dangerous now for your identity,” said Shapiro, in a voice riddled with anguish. “It is very easy to walk around with a button until the moment you have to make a choice. He thought I had already made a choice to come over to his side, but I hadn’t. I was so angry with myself for not telling him, ‘I am not who you think I am and that is very important for you to know.’ The button said that I can identify with you and still feel strongly as a Jew, but the intifada said I couldn’t. It said I had to make a choice. The P.S. to the story is that I have not gone into that cafeteria again. If I did, I would have to approach him as who I am, and I am not sure I want to do that.”

It took Yasir Arafat several tries, but in December 1988, almost exactly one year after the intifada began, he finally publicly recognized Israel’s right to exist. This process of getting Arafat to say the magic words began a month earlier, in November 1988, with a meeting of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, in Algiers. During this PNC session, Arafat continued his traditional policy of trying to balance the interests of those West Bankers and Gazans who wanted the PLO to formally recognize Israel and create the conditions for real peace negotiations with those who still wanted to hold out for the dream of all of Palestine. What the PNC did, as a result, was to declare an independent Palestinian state, but without specifying its borders. At the same time, though, the PNC, in very convoluted language, conditionally accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 and the 1947 partition plan—thus implying a recognition of Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries. But when the PNC was over and Arafat was asked explicitly if he now recognized Israel, he ducked the question with his usual verbal fan dance.

The PNC meeting was then followed up by a series of statements by Arafat “clarifying” what the PNC resolutions “really” meant. Both moderate Arab leaders and West Bankers and Gazans urged the PLO chairman to be more specific about Israel. This clarification process culminated in Geneva. On December 13, 1988, Arafat addressed a special session of the UN General Assembly, gathered in Switzerland because the PLO chairman had been denied a visa to the United States by Secretary of State George Shultz on the grounds that he had not renounced terrorism. Arafat’s UN speech fell an eyelash short of unconditional acceptance of Israel and renunciation of terrorism—which were Washington’s preconditions for speaking with the PLO. Finally, the next day, in yet another clarification press conference, Arafat choked out his recognition of “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to exist in peace and security, and, as I have mentioned, including the state of Palestine, Israel, and other neighbors.” He added that the PLO “totally and absolutely renounced all forms of terrorism.”

Secretary of State Shultz determined that Arafat’s declaration finally satisfied American conditions for dealing with the PLO, and he immediately ordered U.S. diplomats in Tunis to open a dialogue with the organization. Most Israelis, however, and most Israeli politicians, did not rush to embrace Arafat.

Why?

The reasons vary from Israeli to Israeli, but they are important to understand because, unless they can be overcome, the prospects for Palestinian—Israeli peace will remain nil.

To begin with, many Israelis didn’t even hear what Arafat said. Yes, they heard the word “Israel,” but it in no way touched them. The words and language Arafat used in Geneva had one audience and one audience only in mind—the United States. Arafat wanted to end the PLO’s diplomatic isolation from Washington, and in order to do so he had to speak words literally dictated by George Shultz. Shultz, in effect, told Arafat: “Read my lips,” and after several tries Arafat finally read his lips. But for most Israelis, Arafat was speaking a dead language. He was speaking in the diplomatic Latin of international diplomacy, which involved such code words as: “242,” “338,” and “recognition.” This was the language of 1947, and at best 1967, but not the language of 1988. It must be remembered that Israelis view any Arab peace overture in the context of Anwar Sadat’s initiative. Israelis saw Sadat address their own parliament; they saw him salute the Israeli flag; they saw him kiss former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir on the cheek and visit the Israeli Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem. What he did was so far-reaching, so clear-cut in its recognition of Israelis, that no one could challenge his sincerity. At the same time, Sadat, by going to Jerusalem, did something so courageous Israelis could not help but take notice. He put himself in a position where he could not afford to fail. There was little of this daring or sincerity in Arafat’s recognition; there was little attempt to truly allay Israeli fears or suspicions about him.

A few days after Arafat’s declaration, I called David Hartman to ask him his reaction to this event that had shaken the world. “That Arafat is prepared to recognize me as a fact is irrelevant,” remarked David. “Israelis know they are a fact, they don’t need Arafat to tell them. What they need to hear from Arafat and the Palestinians is that they see the Jews in Israel as having come home, because the deepest impulse that brought Jews back to Israel was their enormous sense of homelessness, of not having a real place in history. Arafat says I’m a fact, but then he calls my government a junta. He says I’m a fact, but an alien implant. He says I’m a fact because I have power, not because I’m home. Until he speaks to Israelis in terms of how they see themselves, it will be as though he hasn’t even spoken to them at all.”

For some Israelis, though—like my grocer—nothing Arafat could have said in Geneva would have been taken as sincere. There was a supermarket on Jaffa Road where I used to shop almost every day. It was owned by an Iraqi Jewish family which had immigrated to Israel from Baghdad in 1943. The patriarch of the family, an elderly curmudgeon, manned the cash register. Sasson, as the old man was called, saw himself as an expert on three things—apples, oranges, and Arabs, and not necessarily in that order.

Everything Sasson had learned, smelled, and touched his whole life had led him to the conviction that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state in their midst and that any concessions to the Palestinians would eventually be used to destroy Israel, piece by piece. To emphasize this point, Sasson would hold up the index finger of his right hand and pretend that his left hand was a butcher knife. Balancing both hands on the top of his cash register, he would then pretend to chop off bits of his finger until he got down to the knuckle. When Sasson was all done chopping, and with the people standing in the checkout line behind me getting impatient, he would pronounce with great conviction and much head nodding, “That’s what the Palestinians will do to us if we give them a chance.”

Whenever Sasson heard Israeli or American Jewish doves saying that the Palestinians really wanted to live in peace with the Jews, it sounded as improbable to him as the notion that an apple was an orange. It simply ran counter to everything life in Iraq and Jerusalem had taught him, and neither the Camp David treaty with Egypt nor any declarations by Yasir Arafat could convince him otherwise.

As far as Sasson is concerned, the problem between himself and the Palestinians is not that they don’t understand each other but that they do—all too well. Deep down, Sasson knows what he took from the Palestinians, and he knows that the Palestinians know what he took. He took their land—some of it he bought fair and square, some of it he expropriated and some of it he conquered in war. How he got it, though, doesn’t matter. All he knows is that the Palestinians want it back—all of it—because they wanted it all in the beginning. So when Arafat comes forward one day and announces, in effect, that he has just had therapy, that he is a new man and is now ready to accept the 1947 partition plan, Sasson doesn’t buy it. Instead, he just nods his head silently and says to Arafat, “Look, my friend, you stand up in front of the world and declare that you now want to implement the 1947 partition plan and that it was a great injustice that the Palestinian state in this plan was never born. But you never tell the world that you rejected this plan for forty years. I know you rejected it and you know you rejected it. If you can’t be honest about where you’ve been, why should I believe you now when you say you’re somewhere new? Yasir, you can trick the foreigner, but you can’t trick me. We know each other; we’ve been fighting for one hundred years, so let’s stop pretending to be new men.”

Many other Israelis were not interested in what Arafat had to say because they didn’t believe he can really deliver what they most want. Again, this argument can best be understood in light of the Sadat initiative. Sadat was able to offer the Israelis something total—an end to war with the largest Arab state, which, given the balance of power in the region, meant in effect an end to war between Israel and all Arab states, at least in the near term. When Israelis weigh making a deal with Arafat over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they ask themselves, If I agree to give up these territories, will it be the end of the story between me and the Palestinians, even if Arafat has the best of intentions? The answer is no. They will still have to deal with Abu Nidal, Abu Musa, and all the other Palestinian refugees who refuse to live in the West Bank or Gaza and insist on returning to their homes in pre-1967 Israel. Therefore, they view the choice as between no peace with all the land and no peace with part of the land. Most of them would prefer no peace with all the land, at least for now.

This calculation is not entirely irrational. In the spring of 1988, I spent an evening in the Kalandia refugee camp interviewing a group of Palestinian teenagers about the intifada. As we sat around the sparsely furnished living room of one of the boys’ homes, I asked them the following question: Let’s assume that tomorrow the Israelis recognize you and give the Palestinians a West Bank—Gaza state, and the day after tomorrow hard-line Palestinian guerrilla leader George Habash comes and says he wants to launch a guerrilla raid against the Israeli city of Haifa, in an attempt to liberate it from the Jews. What would you say to him?

They all began talking at once: the curly-haired Palestinian youth to my right just kept nodding his head and repeating in Arabic, “From the river to the sea, from the river to the sea”—referring to the Palestinian claims to all of Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. The teenager next to him launched into a detailed explanation about Palestinian democracy and said that only a majority decision could approve such an attack and it never would, while the twenty-year-old next to him just waved his hand like a policeman directing traffic through an intersection, saying to Habash, “Please, please go right ahead.”

Still, the truth is that the reluctance of Israelis to deal with Arafat exists not only because some cannot hear him and others do not trust him, but also because most of them don’t want to hear him. All you have to do is ride the New York subway to understand why. Sometimes you get on the subway at Grand Central Station and take the last seat in the car. The train moves on to the next station and who should get on but a little old lady carrying two big grocery bags. What is the first thing you do? You take The New York Timesyou are reading and put it up in front of your face, covering your eyes, because if your eye meets her eye, you are going to have to give up your seat.

So it is with the Israelis and Arafat. The Jews have been standing on the subway of life for two thousand years. One day, in 1948, they finally got a seat. Ever since then, there has been this lady carrying two shopping bags standing over them, shouting, “Hey, Jew, you’re in my seat. I’ve got that reservation. Get up.” When the Jew refuses, she starts throwing cans and bottles, and everyone else in the car starts in: “Hey, Jew, get up. You’re in the lady’s seat.” After forty years of this, though, the lady gets tired. She stops throwing cans and instead just pokes the Jew in the side with her umbrella, while mumbling under her breath that she would now be ready to share the seat with the Jew peacefully—if he would just move over a bit. But the Jew has gotten used to the whole seat. It is more comfortable and secure for him that way. After forty years of fighting with this woman, he prefers holding the whole seat over the psychological uncertainties involved in sharing it—even with this lady poking him in the side all the time. So he keeps The New York Times locked in front of his face and mumbles back at the little old lady from behind his newspaper, “Speak up, I can’t hear you!” The lady eventually starts shouting at the Jew: “I am ready to share. I am ready to share,” but the Jew just sits there with the newspaper in front of his face, saying, “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear you.”

The Jews’ sense of finally getting a seat, after so many years of standing, runs deep in the soul of Israel. Israel, in fact, is a nation made up of people who have been evicted from their seats on subways around the world. They have an almost metaphysical attachment to the seat they are in, and they do not have much sympathy for others who say they were evicted and must sit down exactly where the Jew is. I am convinced that one day Yasir Arafat is going to stand up and sing “Hatikva,” the Israeli national anthem, in perfect Hebrew. When he does, some Israelis are going to shake their heads and say, “Geez, we’d love to talk to you, but you sang our national anthem in the wrong key. Come back when you can sing it right.”

This attitude is particularly strong among Israeli leaders who know that deciding how much of the seat to give away could embroil their nation in a civil war. Voluntarily relinquishing the West Bank or Gaza to the Palestinians requires that Israelis definitively answer the question: Who are we as a nation? Are we going to have biblical boundaries or pragmatic boundaries? Are we here to pave the way for the Messiah or to build a Jewish France? For reasons which I have already explained, most Israeli leaders are not ready to answer this question. “What do I need such headaches for?” they say. “Better to deal with the Palestinians as a technical security problem than tear ourselves apart in order to give them a state.” That is why Israelis are always ready to talk to Egyptians, Jordanians, or even Syrians, even though they have killed many more Israelis than the Palestinians ever have, because talking to them does not force the Israelis to really look in the mirror and answer the question: Who am I?

I was at a dinner party in Herzliya in the summer of 1988 and was seated next to one of the most senior Labor Party Cabinet ministers—a man deeply involved in security matters. We talked about the usual things—America, the economy, the Arabs—before I asked him what kind of moral challenge the intifada was posing to the Israeli army. The Labor Minister was eating some lamb at the time. He stopped chewing, turned to me with a piece of lamb on his fork, and said straightaway, “If you ask me, the sooner the Palestinians return to terrorism, the better it will be for us.”

Then he went back to eating his lamb.

When might the Israelis be ready to hear Arafat’s message?

Only when they have to. No nation-state in the history of the world has ever voluntarily given up a piece of territory that it wanted to hold, for either ideological or security reasons, and felt that it could hold. Israelis and Palestinians are no exception to this rule. In 1947, the Palestinians felt that all the land of Palestine belonged to them and that they had the power to hold on to it. When the United Nations suggested that Palestine be partitioned, the Palestinians rejected this proposal out of hand. It did not matter to the Palestinians that the Zionists had declared their willingness to share, and to recognize a Palestinian state next door. Unfortunately for them, the Palestinians did not appreciate the power realities at the time; the Zionists were much stronger than they appeared.

Now the tables are turned: the Israelis control all the land, and the Palestinians are seeking partition, and now it’s the Israelis’ turn to ignore the Palestinians for as long as they can. That may seem cruel and stupid, but that is how the game has always been played on this land. I am convinced that Israelis will be interested in hearing what Arafat and the Palestinians have to say as a nation only when the Israelis feel that they have no choice but to make a deal with the Palestinians as another nation on the land. A person is interested in the terms of a deal only when he feels he has to make a deal. The intifada has not, as of the writing of this book, exerted enough internal pressure on the Israelis, or offered them enough incentives, to convince a significant majority that they can and should share either power or sovereignty with the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

To be sure, the uprising has been serious enough to force the Israeli army to double from thirty days to sixty days the maximum amount of annual reserve duty required of Israeli males between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-five. Economically, as a result of theintifada, Israel’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew between only 1 and 2 percent in 1988, compared with a growth of 5.2 percent in 1987. It did grow, however. In terms of casualties, the eleven Israelis killed in the first year of the uprising amount to roughly the number of people killed in traffic accidents on the Israeli highways every two weeks. All of this adds up to a situation which, while unpleasant, could hardly be described as leaving Israelis with their backs to the wall.

I was having a drink one day in June 1988 at the Bonanza Bar in Tel Aviv with Ze’ev Chafets. We sat in a corner booth at the Bonanza and watched as the tables filled up with end-of-the-week regulars—businessmen and poets, women on the make eyeing men on the make, journalists, arms dealers, hucksters, and soldiers home for the weekend—a regular Israeli crowd. Even before the band started playing, the room was reverberating with a symphony of voices: people arguing, laughing, and telling lies. A loud voice from somewhere was talking about black panties. From the Bonanza Bar, the intifada, the West Bank, the stone-throwers were all a distant drum—something most Israelis read about in the newspaper, something most Israelis thought about for a few seconds on the way to work or sitting around with friends on Friday evening. Like most Israelis, the folks at the Bonanza Bar rarely visited the West Bank and Gaza even before the intifada, so the fact that these areas had become even more dangerous now was a purely academic matter for the army to deal with. In Jerusalem, which is closer to the West Bank and where real Palestinian disturbances took place in the Arab half of the city, one finds political graffiti in the men’s toilets—things like STOP ISRAELI BRUTALITY—but in the Bonanza Bar all there is on the wall is SHIT YOU ASSHOLE. NO PARKING ALLOWED.

Shai, the bon vivant former boxer who owns the Bonanza, explains the facts of life to me: “Nobody is really into the intifada at the Bonanza. There isn’t a single guy here who gets drunk because of it. We are here to have fun, and we did it before the intifadaand we do it after. The simple Palestinian, he wants a Palestinian country. I understand that. He doesn’t like the Jews, but here we are. My chef is from the Gaza Strip. There were a couple of days he could not come to work, but it was not his fault. He was loyal to me. He and the waiters realized that no money is going to come from the intifada. I never talk politics with them, but I can tell you that a couple of months ago there was a feeling back there in the kitchen that they are going to have a Palestinian country. Now that’s gone. Everything is back to normal with the Arab workers.”

Shai moves on to greet some other customers, and the two-man band begins to play. Their medley begins with a popular Israeli folk song called “Eretz, Eretz, Eretz.” Everyone in the bar sings along. Meanwhile, a friend of mine, Zvi el-Peleg, an Israeli Arabist and former governor of the Gaza Strip, spots me from across the bar, walks over, and pulls up a chair next to me. The band is playing very loud and the sing-along is getting rowdy. Peleg begins to ask me a question, but I cannot hear him over the noise.

“What?” I say, cupping a hand to my ear. “Speak up, I can’t hear you.”

Finally, practically shouting in my ear, Peleg says, “What did you think of the Abu Sharif statement?”

He was referring to an article published a day earlier by Bassam Abu Sharif, an aide to Yasir Arafat. The article called for direct peace talks between the PLO and Israel at an international conference. It was, at the time, the boldest overture to Israel ever to come out of the Arafat circle.

“I haven’t seen it yet,” I shouted back at Peleg.

He simply nodded his head.

We decided to wait until the music was finished before we continued. I turned my attention back to Chafets.

“What do the words to this song mean? Everyone seems to know it,” I shouted across the table.

“The main verse,” Chafets answered, “is Eretz [land], Eretz, Eretz, a land that we were born in, a land that we will live in, no matter what happens.”

The symbol of the intifada has become a Palestinian throwing a stone. That is fine for the cover of Newsweek. But if the intifada is ever to achieve anything tangible for the Palestinians, it will never be through either stones or guns. The Israelis will always use their vastly superior force to smother both before they ever become truly threatening. The only way the Palestinians can really put meaningful pressure on the Israelis is by concentrating on their original tactic of civil disobedience.

There are two reasons why real civil disobedience is so threatening to Israel. The first is that, to be successful, it cannot be carried out by just one or a few people. It must be a communal act. “If only one Palestinian refuses to work in Israel, carry his identity card, or pay his taxes,” explained Sari Nusseibeh, “that is not going to be meaningful; it only works if 100,000 people do it, and if 100,000 people do it, it would threaten the whole structure of the occupation, which is based on our voluntary cooperation.” In fact, if 100,000 Palestinians refused to work in Israel, burned their identity cards, and failed to pay taxes, it would mean utter chaos for the Israeli military authorities. They would either have to arrest them all—and there would not be room enough in Israeli jails for so many people—or resign themselves to the fact that they could no longer tell these people what to do, because they won’t play the game by the Israeli rules anymore. What this does is to turn the Palestinians’ massive demographic weight, their sheer numbers, into real political weight. Ten Palestinians going out to get shot by Israeli troops is nothing for Israel. It doesn’t threaten the occupation, it doesn’t disturb most Israelis, because they view these people as troublemakers who deserve to be shot, and it doesn’t force the Israelis to contend with the full demographic weight of the Palestinians. Even if 100 of them were shot, it wouldn’t make a difference. But 100,000 Palestinians tearing up their identity cards, or refusing to work in Israel, is another matter. Israelis cannot shoot them and be done with it. They become a permanent problem. They become permanently indigestible for Israel, and there is nothing worse than permanent indigestion.

The second reason real civil disobedience is so threatening is that in order for Palestinians to be able to disengage socially, economically, and politically from the Israeli system and not starve to death, they would have to develop their own autonomous economic, educational, social, cultural, and political infrastructure. They would have to establish their own schools and their own mutual support systems. Civil disobedience, in other words, demands slow and painful communal power building. A successful effort of this sort would also translate the Palestinians’ demographic weight into political weight. Palestinians rioting in the streets and shouting for an independent state will not impress Israelis. But Palestinians actually establishing the framework of an independent entity cannot be ignored; it proves to Israelis beyond any doubt that there is another national collective on the land yearning to be free. It becomes the tangible expression on the ground of the declaration of independence made by the PNC in Algiers.

The intifada began along this path of civil disobedience. There was a real attempt by Palestinians to set up their own schools and food-sharing and communal-support programs. In fact, the only time I really saw Israeli officials get truly worried during the uprising was when they felt the Palestinians might actually be disengaging from them. Israelis had faced one- and two-day commercial strikes from the Palestinians many times before, but never the kind of mass civil disobedience they witnessed in the early months of theintifada, when the underground Palestinian leadership ordered all shopkeepers to open only for a few hours each day; when hundreds of Palestinians who worked for the Israeli occupation administration, either as policemen or clerks, quit their jobs; when thousands of Palestinian laborers refused or were prevented from going to work in Israel; and when thousands of Palestinian merchants refused to pay their taxes or buy Israeli products.

This Palestinian civil disobedience and disengagement, however, bogged down after the first year of the uprising. The Israeli system was too powerful for the Palestinians to elude its grasp easily. Consider only one small example. In August 1987, four months before the intifada, the Israeli Ministry of Defense brought on line an $8.5 million computerized data bank for the occupied territories. The data bank was designed to keep track of every Palestinian’s property, real estate, family ties, political attitude, involvement in illegal activities, licensing, occupation, and consumption pattern. As West Bank expert Meron Benvenisti put it, this computer “was the ultimate instrument of population control.”

As soon as Palestinians tried to engage in civil disobedience, the Israelis put the computer to good use to break them—particularly in the Gaza Strip, whose inhabitants were almost entirely dependent on employment in Israel to earn their daily bread. When some Palestinians in Gaza stopped paying taxes after the intifada erupted, Israel announced that it was issuing new identity cards. Any Palestinian who did not have a new card by a certain date would neither be allowed out of the Gaza Strip to work nor granted such crucial papers as a driver’s license, travel document, water quota, or import-export permit. In order to obtain a new identity card, however, each Palestinian had to prove that he or she had paid up all back taxes and that no one in the family was wanted by the Israeli security forces. In other words, by simply pressing a few buttons on a computer, an Israeli officer could restore or revoke all the documents a Palestinian needed to survive under the Israeli occupation.

I went down to Gaza one day to see this carrot-and-stick operation firsthand. The Israeli army had set up rows and rows of benches in the courtyard of the Sheik Adjlin School in the beachfront neighborhood of Remal. The school was surrounded by coils of barbed wire, which in one spot were flattened to make an entryway. The idea that Palestinians had to step on barbed wire to get into this place struck me as the ultimate humiliation. The benches, which were packed with roughly 1,000 men at a time, were covered by mosquito netting to provide some protection from the blazing sun. Many people had been waiting two or three days to hear their name called. The place had all the trappings of a bingo game at the Minnesota State Fair, only in this case it was the audience which shelled out the prizes to those running the game. There was a loudspeaker at the front that would blare out a name; that person would then jump up, as though he had just scored a bingo, and disappear into a room at the front, where he would be rewarded by having all his records checked and being asked to pay his occupiers what he owed in back taxes. Then he would be presented with a new identity card. Anyone wanted by the Shin Bet would be arrested.

I walked to the middle of the benches, introduced myself as a reporter, and was immediately swarmed by angry Gazans desperate to tell someone, anyone, about their plight and discomfort. They kept saying to me, “If we talk to you, will it be in the newspaper in America tomorrow? You promise? Tomorrow?”

Why did you come here? I asked the men surrounding me. Why didn’t you just tell the Israelis to shove it?

Riyad Feisal, a twenty-four-year-old Gazan refugee working as a waiter for $400 a month in a Jaffa fish restaurant, stepped forward to explain their predicament: “If we say no, we are going to suffer so much. Without the identity card, I can’t travel, I can’t work, and I am supporting six other people. The identity card is like my soul. If the Israelis take it away, it is like I am dead. Every Palestinian male when he wakes up in the morning to go to work always pats his back pocket to make sure that his identity card is in there. It is our new national custom.”

The Israeli officer in charge of the operation put it to me in somewhat more brutal language. “Why are they here? Because we are basically stronger. Look, 60,000 people from the Gaza Strip go to work in Israel every day. Who is going to feed them if they stay home? The other day their leadership called a general strike. You know what happened? We had 4,000 people come here to get their identity cards. Usually we only get 2,800 a day. It means that they used their one-day strike not to protest but to get their identity cards from us. They all come like good children. The identity card is life. The Palestinian can’t move without it. Why does a baby have an umbilical cord? To get food from the mother. The minute he has a bottle from someone else, he can get rid of the umbilical cord and live free of his mother. We are the mother, and the PLO was supposed to provide the bottle. But it never did.”

The PLO tried to smuggle money in through various avenues, mostly Israeli Arabs. Some of it was intercepted by Israel, some was siphoned off by different hands along the way, and some got through—but nowhere near enough to support mass civil disobedience for a population of 1.7 million people. The Arab states did not send a dime.

“With proper organization and money we could have done wonders,” said one West Bank Palestinian professor deeply involved in the uprising, “but we didn’t have either. People were really ready to sacrifice, but our infrastructure never matched people’s feelings. When some of the Palestinian policemen quit their jobs [in March 1988] with the Civil Administration, the whole community was watching to see what would happen to them. This wasn’t just kids going into the streets; this was adults really ready to disengage from Israel. Many others were ready to follow. But the policemen who quit never got any support, so they had to go back to work. The whole community saw that, and that is why others were not ready to follow. The underground committees on health, finance, education, and welfare never really developed into an effective network. They could call strikes, but that is all.”

What happened instead was that many Palestinians, but by no means all, went back to dealing with Israel or working in Israel—in some cases sporadically, in others on a reduced level—while young Palestinian children, often eleven- and twelve-year-olds, continued rioting, throwing stones, and getting shot. Their deaths seemed to become the warrant which allowed their parents to go on working in Israel and not engage in truly significant civil disobedience. Palestinians would point to the number of people being killed each day and say, “See, we are suffering. Now let us have our state.”

This double bookkeeping explains some of the more unusual Israeli—Palestinian encounters which developed after the intifada was well under way.

Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

“Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!”

A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.”

That was also true of the hundreds of people in Gaza who continued studying Hebrew. On August 4, 1988, the eighth month of the intifada, the Ha’aretz newspaper reported that the Israeli government’s Hebrew adult-education course in Gaza was going as strong as ever, and that Hebrew language classes continued to be taught in Gaza’s junior high schools throughout the uprising.

“A surrealistic scene,” reported Ha’aretz from Gaza. “At the height of the intifada, Palestinian students were studying S. Y. Agnon’s story ‘From Foe to Friend,’ Michal Snunit’s book Soulbird, Hannah Senesh’s prayer-poem ‘God—may there be no end,’ and the story of Rabbi Akiva’s love for the daughter of Kalba Sabbua. Last month they had a final exam on this material.”

An Israeli paratrooper in Gaza once told me that he was patrolling the Shati refugee camp when a Palestinian boy came walking down the street wearing a T-shirt from his high school in Petach Tiqvah, the Brenner School. When he asked the Palestinian where he got it, he said, “I don’t know. I just found it.”

The same paratrooper also was on duty at the gate of Shati one evening after Israel had clamped a curfew on the whole area, beginning at 6:00 p.m. “At around 8:00 p.m. this old Palestinian man shows up at the gate,” said the Israeli soldier. “I asked him where he had been. He said he had come from Israel, so I said, ‘What were you doing there?’ and he started singing to me in Hebrew the song ‘Mi Yivne Bayit.’ I just laughed and let him go.”

The main verse to the song “Mi Yivne Bayit” is: “Who will build a house in Israel? We are the pioneers. We will build Israel, come along with us.”

When I returned to America in the summer of 1988, I was struck at how Arab Americans were reacting to the Palestinian uprising. There was something familiar to me about the puffed-up pride with which they discussed the intifada on television and in the news media. Then I realized that it was the same way Jewish Americans had responded to Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. The intifada was the Arab Americans’ Six-Day War. They were living out all their fantasies of power and dignity through the Palestinian rock-throwers, the same way American Jews had lived vicariously through Israel’s military achievements.

The problem was that not all the natives—neither the Jews nor the Arabs—wanted to cooperate in being material for the imagination of their compatriots in the viewing stands. They refused to be the tinder for the revolutionary fires raging in the minds of those who don’t have to pay the price. While their supporters back in America treated them as flags to be waved, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were living human beings, with middle-class dreams and children to educate. The grand colors, those bright blues and reds and greens with which the intifada was painted on all the posters and pamphlets distributed in the West, always looked to be more shades of gray to the people actually living it. Those poor Palestinian villagers, camp dwellers, and shopkeepers were supposed to be so desperate that they had nothing to lose; that is very easy to say from the comfort of America. But in the real world, everyone has something to lose. To be sure, all Palestinians shared the intifada’s aspirations, but not all were ready to share its burdens. Life had taught them to have little faith in politics or history or uprisings.

In April 1988, I spent a morning at the American consulate in East Jerusalem interviewing Palestinians who were trying to go to America. The consulate had to be closed for the day thirty minutes after opening because it was besieged by so many Palestinians seeking visas to the United States or to put their American passports in order. According to American consul Howard Kavaler, during the first four months of the intifada Palestinian visa applications to the United States were up 30 percent over the same period the year before and 1,000 out of the 7,000 Palestinian Americans living in the West Bank returned to America.

“Just call me Abu Visa”—Howard smiled up at me as I entered his office and found him flipping through a stack of visa applications. “I don’t know about the intifada; all I know is that I’ve got what they want. Palestinians who have the right to immigrant visas come here any way they can to pick them up. It doesn’t matter if they are supposed to be on strike or whatever. They come. Our no-show rate for people granted visas is zero. Those who come and get turned down are really upset—especially males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. There is that moment when you tell them, ‘No, I’m sorry,’ and some of them get this anxiety reaction. It’s very sad. Those who can get out are leaving. You don’t have a sense when talking to them that they feel like they are on the verge of liberation. There is no euphoria. If we opened the gates and said any Palestinian who wants to come to America can come, well … Arafat and their love of this land notwithstanding, I don’t think too many of them would be left here. That’s true for plenty of Israelis, too. In our sitting room upstairs, Jews and Arabs wait together for their visas, and when it comes to that, they are all brothers. As soon as they each know they can go to America, all the anger between them disappears.”

I spoke with several Palestinian visa applicants after Howard interviewed them. The first was a woman from Ramallah. She was a Palestinian whose husband was working in San Francisco and she had come to register her fourteen-year-old daughter for a passport.

“Why do you want to leave now?” I asked.

“My daughter has been out of school for four months,” explained the stylishly dressed Palestinian woman, wearing spiked high heels and a white scarf around her neck. “I am concerned for her education. We don’t know when school might open again. She could miss a whole year.”

“But this is a crucial moment in Palestinian history,” I said.

“It is very frightening,” she responded, tying her fingers in knots. “No one knows what is going to happen. At night you hear all kinds of sounds and we are always worried that the Israelis are going to come.”

“Are your neighbors upset with you for leaving?”

“Are you crazy?” she said, shaking her head no. “They say anyone who can get out should get out. They wish they were me.”

Another businessman from Ramallah, a Christian town, was leaving. The elderly man with a broad white mustache had three of his six children already in the United States and wanted to visit them with one of his younger sons, who was standing by his side.

This is an important moment in your people’s history, I said, don’t you want your sons in America to be here now?

“No, no, no,” he said emphatically. “They are all working in America. They have established themselves in America.”

He was followed by Abdullah, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate of Bethlehem University, who said he had been accepted at an institute in New Jersey to study English literature.

What do you think of the intifada?

“Not good,” he remarked, with a scowl. “Students cannot study.”

But how can you leave now?

“It is painful—but I am going to study,” he explained.

What will your neighbors say?

“The people will not be angry, because I am going to study, not to have a good time,” he insisted.

The last in line was Najwa, a researcher at the West Bank’s Bir Zeit University, who was going to her sister’s graduation in Indiana.

What do you want out of the uprising? I asked.

“I would like to feel free,” she answered without hesitation. “I cannot see a Palestinian state really coming about—but that is what I would like.”

What do you think about all these people trying to get to America?

“I don’t like the idea of people escaping from the situation,” said Najwa. “Some don’t like those who leave and some just don’t care.”

Such is the real world—ambiguous, unheroic, full of transient emotional highs and many more lows. Nevertheless, the intifada has done a great deal for the Palestinians. Most important, it got the Palestinian national movement to adopt the right methods—primarily non-lethal mass civil disobedience—and the right message—increasing recognition of Israel. In addition, it has given the Palestinians as a nation greater self-confidence, greater unity, a much improved international image, and a sense that their movement is really going somewhere. Who knows, one day soon it may even lead to direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO. For all these reasons the intifada must be considered a truly significant event in the history of the Palestinian—Israeli conflict.

But will it lead to a resolution of that conflict? The answer to this question is probably years away. In my opinion, the only way the intifada will produce tangible results for the Palestinians—not just pride, not just negotiations, not just another American peace plan, but a firm agreement by Israel to share with the Palestinians either real power or a real chunk of land—is if the Palestinians reenergize their uprising and continue much further with their original method of civil disobedience and their message of recognizing the Jews. The Palestinians will take nothing away from the bargaining table with Israel that they don’t earn ahead of time through a combination of this method with this message. They will find no shortcuts through either Washington, Moscow, or the United Nations.

The Palestinians must make themselves so indigestible to Israelis that they want to disgorge them into their own state, while at the same time reassuring the Israelis that they can disgorge them without committing suicide. This is a very difficult trick which will be accomplished only with the stick of non-lethal civil disobedience and the carrot of explicit recognition. The Israelis have to be convinced from within, rather than by external American pressure, that the Palestinians are struggling not to destroy Israel but to build something for themselves alongside it. Only then will a significant majority of Israelis from the right and the left—without whom there will be no settlement—recognize and allow themselves to sympathize with what the Palestinians are doing. The Palestinians cannot permit their own self-discovery to turn into narcissism; in order to really meet themselves in the fullest sense, they have to meet the Israelis in the fullest sense.

This is not going to be easy for the Palestinians, because to make themselves indigestible through civil disobedience is going to require protracted economic and social hardship, and even after that, bringing away anything significant from the bargaining table will require additional political sacrifices. Given Israel’s vastly superior power, the most Palestinians can hope for is some form of real autonomy under Israeli rule in the short run, and a ministate in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—without Jerusalem—in the long run.

The more the West Bankers and Gazans suffer, the more they are going to want to get something for their efforts. This is bound to create tension between them and Arafat, because part of Arafat will always feel compelled to represent those refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, who nurtured the PLO. This means part of him will always try to keep some hope alive for the Arab and Palestinian hard-liners that one day Palestine in its entirety may be redeemed, as Arafat himself promised for so many years. Arafat can never totally turn his back on these peoples, because he was one of them, and he can never fully understand the needs and feelings of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, because he has never been one of them. Thus, it will be extremely difficult for him to make the kinds of concessions to the Israelis—and to speak the kinds of lines—which Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza may inevitably demand when the cost of the uprising becomes too great for them to bear and they insist on making some type of deal with their occupiers. This is when the Palestinians whose problem is the Israeli in their house and the Palestinians whose problem is the Israeli on their roof are really going to have to face up to their differences. For now they have suspended these differences, as they each adhere to the official PLO position: Israeli evacuation from all of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, the creation there of a Palestinian state, and then peace negotiations with Israel. But how long will those paying the price of the uprising chase this rainbow?

Possibly for as long as Yasir Arafat is alive. Yasir Arafat is the PLO, and the symbol of Palestinian nationalism. As a symbol, he unites the Palestinians on the land with those off the land. But he has no heirs, and when he is gone the unity of his organization is almost certain to fracture. Then there are likely to be many PLOs, and then, and only then, might West Bankers and Gazans have their own PLO, which will legitimize their own deal with Israel.

In the meantime, Israelis could make the Palestinians’ lives much easier by giving Arafat some incentive to recognize them more and by taking the initiative to forge a territorial compromise that many Palestinians might accept. But this is not likely to happen. Israel has simply too much power and paranoia relative to the Palestinians to want to undergo the risks and the wrenching internal debates that would be required to really bring the Palestinians along and create the conditions for a territorial settlement. Israelis might respond to a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, but they won’t go out and create one.

“Israelis are paralyzed,” explained David Hartman. “The army is screaming at the Cabinet that it can’t solve the uprising without a political solution, and the Cabinet is screaming at the army that it can’t produce a political solution until the uprising is put down. There is no Israeli statesman ready to make the bold move that might get us out of this vicious cycle—to say to the Palestinians clearly, without ambiguity, that we now see that they are a nation as much as we are, that we now understand that our own declaration that they ‘never had it so good under our occupation’ was a vulgarity and one which Jews themselves suffered from for centuries, that we now recognize that the Palestinians’ own dignity will never be fulfilled, any more than ours could have been, without political freedom.”

No. For the time being it seems there will be no such far-reaching statements from the Israeli leadership, and none from the Palestinians either. Many Israelis still want to believe that the intifada is the storm before the lull, while many Palestinians want to believe that it is the storm that swept away everything in its path. It has been neither. If the Palestinians don’t continue along the new road they have charted, and if the Israelis don’t wake up to the fact that their superior power will never buy them the peace and quiet they so desperately seek, then the intifada will be remembered not for having changed reality but for having brought attention to a reality that never changes. The term “intifada” will continue, but only as a new name for the status quo—maybe a more violent, more painful, status quo, but a status quo with which both sides, nevertheless, will learn to live. The Israelis will remain on top, the Palestinians will make sure that they never enjoy it, and everything else will just be commentary.

In the quiet of their hearts, away from the glare of the television cameras and the euphoria of demonstrations, those Palestinians living on the land understand exactly how far they have come and how far they still have to go.

Fallah, a twenty-four-year-old candy seller I met in the Old City of Jerusalem, made this utterly clear when I paid him a visit a week after meeting a friend of his at the American consulate. A graduate of Bir Zeit University, the hotbed of Palestinian nationalism, Fallah took pride in the intifada when it began, but by the time it had dragged into its fifth month he had had enough. Standing amid sacks of raisins and candies in his tiny shop in the Arab market, Fallah answered my question about how his business was holding up—now that he was on strike for half the day—with some basic English that got the point across: “It is not bad, it is not too bad, it is too too bad.

“We cannot say yet whether the intifada is important or not,” explained Fallah, “because we have not seen the results. Maybe the situation will be worse. Maybe it will be fifty-fifty and maybe it will be better. Now we, the sellers, are worse off.”

As we talked, though, Fallah kept getting angrier and angrier about the situation. There was no business. He was selling only old stocks. Perishables he long ago had had to throw away.

“All of these people on the outside telling us, ‘We want you to do this, we want, we want, we want,’” he complained, voice rising. “Well, I have not gotten one agora [Israeli penny] of help from the people outside,” he adds, pinching his thumb and forefinger together as if squeezing a dime. “Jordan, Egypt, Syria, they say hoorah, hoorah. But did they take one extra Palestinian into their universities?”

He paused for a moment to pop a raisin into his mouth. “You know what this intifada is?” he said, spitting out the words. “It is a drop of water in the sea.”