On Dec. 9 one year ago, 1.3 million Palestinians rose up in violent insurrection against Israeli military authority in Israel`s occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The uprising caught Israel by surprise, as did the intensity of its fury, an intensity that has refused to abate even 12 months later.
The rebellion has led to dramatic political events that may have immense significance in future months. Responding to the apparent popular will, as manifested by near-daily street demonstrations by Palestinians young and old, the Palestine Liberation Organization`s parliament voted a little over three weeks ago to proclaim an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories. In so doing, the parliament and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reversed a longtime PLO position by at last endorsing United Nations Resolution 242, which implicitly recognizes Israel`s right to exist in exchange for a return of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which Israel had captured in the Six Day War of 1967. While unlikely in itself to lead directly to peace-the PLO demanded, for example, that Jerusalem be the capital of the new state, a position that would be anathema to Israel-the proclamation was an act with great symbolic meaning that could open the door to meaningful peace talks.
On the other hand, the uprising has inflamed Israeli public sentiment and strengthened the hand of the nation`s right-wing factions. In recent elections, right-wing parties gained enough seats to secure a place in the new government. These parties won concessions that not only could scuttle future peace talks with the Palestinians even before they begin but could affect the religious and cultural life of the Jewish nation for generations to come.
Meanwhile, the tense atmosphere continues in the occupied territories. It is the angry face of the Palestinian uprising that is captured here by Tribune photographer Frank Hanes, who traveled to Israel earlier this year to record the confrontations between demonstrators and Israeli soldiers.
One of the saddest realities of the yearlong insurrection, called the intifada by the Palestinians, is the continuity of generations represented in the conflict. Many of the teenage Israeli soldiers assigned to police the occupied territories no doubt are grandsons of Israeli soldiers who 40 years ago fought against the grandfathers of Palestinian teenagers now revolting against Israeli occupation.
The seed of conflict and of war is passed from one generation to the next. Such a banality becomes a stunning, almost biblical truth in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. The blood of contending forces of Arabs and Jews has been flowing in the Middle East for thousands of years. The blood of those people who now call themselves Israeli and Palestinian has been flowing for 100 years.
In 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, the Austrian writer Theodor Herzl proposed to the world that it was time for the scattered legions of Jews throughout the world to return to their Jewish homeland, namely to Palestine. Herzl made his proposal at the First International Zionist Congress, convinced that only through the creation of a Jewish state could the Jewish people be saved from the persecution, discrimination and abuse that have plagued them for 2,000 years.
The following year, at the second Zionist Congress held in Vienna, the acolytes to Herzl`s dream ignored a specially commissioned survey of conditions in Palestine. The survey reported that ”the most fertile parts of our land are occupied by Arabs . . . 650,000 souls. . . .” The survey went on to report that already, in the land coveted by the Zionists, there ”have been innumerable clashes between Jews and incited Arabs.” More attention was given to another report to the congress, one that said Palestine was 90 percent uninhabited. The second report also said that Palestine`s population was ”Semitic, i.e., related to us by blood. We shall undoubtedly be able to get along with them.”
As Herzl`s dream continued to live, so did the ”Jews and incited Arabs” continue to clash in Palestine. In 1905 Lebanese writer Najib Azouri pondered the first stirrings of two opposing forces destined to dominate political life in the Middle East for the remainder of this century-Arab and Jewish nationalism. A Christian and Arab nationalist himself, Azouri wrote, ”The awakening of the Arab nation, and the latent effort of the Jews to
reconstitute, on a large scale, the ancient kingdom of Israel-these two movements are destined to fight continually until one is victorious over the other.”
During World War I Britain took control of Palestine from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Britain sympathized with the dream of re-establishing a Jewish homeland and committed itself to the dream in a declaration made in November, 1917, by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour. ”His Majesty`s Government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people,” said the Balfour Declaration. It contained one condition-that the Jewish national home would not ignore ”the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
To the Arabs of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration was a bitter injustice, a giveaway of land to which Britain had no legal claim in the first place. In Arab eyes, the declaration was yet another manifestation of arrogant, insensitive, baldfaced, white European imperialism. Clashes continued between Arabs and the ever-increasing communities of Jewish settlers coming into Palestine. On occasion, as in 1920, 1929 and 1935-36, the Arabs rose up in what amounted to a full-scale rebellion against British authority. Depending on whose version of history-Jewish or Arab-you listen to, the 30-year British rule of Palestine was blatantly one-sided-pro-Jewish or pro-Arab. But however fair or heavy-handed the British administration was, it didn`t make too much difference once Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s.
Hitler introduced a form of national insanity that has since defied rational analysis. The Nazi policy to rid Europe of its ”Jewish problem” by the systematic murder of 6 million European Jews irrevocably decided the fate of Britain`s Palestinian protectorate. At the end of World War II, the triumphant Western democracies, sickened by the Holocaust, agreed to allow Theodor Herzl`s dream to become a reality.
The creation of Israel in 1948 was intended to be the answer to a 2,000-year-old conundrum. With a land of their own, an ethos, a government on equal footing with other nations and a national identity firmly rooted in an actual, physical place, Jews throughout the world would no longer be so vulnerable to murderous, periodic binges of anti-Semitism. The universal silence of other nations in the 1930s allowed Hitler to inflict unspeakable torment on Jews. The existence of Israel meant that never again could a Hitler-like figure operate with such criminal impunity against the Jewish people without at least one nation-Israel-piercing that kind of silence in protest.
There was Jewish euphoria on May 14, 1948, the day Israel was founded. At the stroke of midnight of that same day, however, enraged Arab armies were on the move, determined to crush the fledgling Jewish nation. There was no mention from either side that Jews and Arabs shared a Semitic ancestry or that the two sides could ultimately ”get along” with each other.
The Arab armies fought to annihilate the Jews, but instead the victorious Israelis forced some 700,000 Arabs out of their villages and out of Israel completely. Thus, in one stroke, Israel opened vast areas for Jewish settlement and ensured that numerically the new state would have an overwhelming Jewish majority. It was the first of five wars that Israel and its Arab neighbors have fought.
Between those wars, Israel has been fighting an ongoing, daily battle against the enduring rage of the 2 million Palestinian Arabs inside its borders. The rage runs deepest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where 1.3 million Palestinians have festered under Israeli military administration since 1967.
The Palestinians in the territories wear their rage like a badge of honor. Older Palestinians, veterans of the earlier wars against Israel, are cheered by the vehemence with which Palestinian schoolboys riot against Israeli troops. Of the more than 300 Palestinians killed so far in the intifada (at least 11 Israelis have also died), scores have been children, including 9- and 10-year-olds shot down in the streets with firebombs in their hands. The public beatings, the curfews, the wholesale deportation of Palestinian leaders imposed by the Israelis have seemingly served only to stiffen the resistance in the territories.
The occupied territories have become something of an albatross around the neck of Israel, the cause of deep political divisions within the Jewish state. Some Israelis have advocated ceding the West Bank and Gaza back to its Arab neighbors. Others have urged that Israel expel all Palestinians from the territories and permanently resettle the areas with Israelis. Hard-liners seem to have prevailed at the present time, reflecting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir`s assertion last August that ”Israel will prevent in the most determined way any attempt to carry out any idea-to the extent that there are madmen who raise it-of establishing a Palestinian government.” But the situation within Israel could change at any time.
Just as fluid may be PLO policy. PLO hard-liners, outvoted for the moment by the moderates, are still a force to be reckoned with.
Thus, there is no way to anticipate what the future holds. The most tragic aspect to Frank Hanes` photographs on these pages may well be that they not only record life in the occupied territories over the last year; they may accurately portray events as they will unfold for some time to come.
