When Palestinian frustration at two decades of Israeli occupation broke out into protests in the Gaza Strip in early December 1987, the Israeli response was swift and brutal. Israel’s Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin rejected criticism of Israel’s use of live ammunition saying that his country “would not allow use of public disorder, terror, to show that those who … carry them out can achieve their goals by these means.” Rabin still is remembered by Palestinians for saying he would crush what came to be known as the Intifada with “might, force and beatings.”
The rhetoric and methods that Rabin used all those years ago is strikingly similar to the Israeli response today, and sounds very much like the old saw “beatings will continue until morale improves.” But here the beatings are too often deadly. The U.S. has largely gone along with the Israeli view that the present violence is instigated deliberately by the Palestinian Authority or Palestinian Liberation Organizations and can be stopped by them if they apply enough effort.
In 1987, Israel’s position did not find such a ready support even among its friends in Washington. The Reagan administration repeatedly urged Israel to adopt non-lethal means in responding to protests. Richard Murphy, then assistant secretary of state, told the House the violence was not instigated. Rather, hopelessness and frustration had led to “a sense that the future is stretching out gray and endless without the prospect of any political resolution of this four-decades-old problem.”
Israelis at first strongly rejected this view, but later even Rabin came to understand that bones could be broken by the Israeli army, but not the will of a people to be free. It was this realization that gave Rabin the courage to go to Washington and shake hands with Yasser Arafat, bringing his reluctant nation with him.
Thirteen years after the Intifada broke out, and seven years after Oslo, the sense of hopelessness and frustration has again reached boiling point. There is no one who can convince young people to go out and face a powerful army, whether it is a tank on the streets of Beijing or the Israeli army in the streets of Gaza, unless those people have lost all hope that change will come in any other way. A normal teenager with a future to look forward to cannot be incited by anyone to give up his life. What is also becoming clear after the failure of numerous truces is that there is also no government that can stop the protests as long it is has no better future to offer them.
For Palestinians, the Oslo peace process has gone on too long and brought them too little–regardless of whose fault this may be. While preaching that negotiations are the only way to come to terms, Israel has incessantly used bulldozers to predetermine the outcome in advance. When the first protests broke out in Gaza in 1987, there were 2,500 Israeli settlers there. Today there are 6,000, still occupying one third of the land, while more than a million Palestinians are crammed into the rest of the narrow strip. In the West Bank as well, confiscation of land and construction of settlements has proceeded faster under the Ehud Barak government than that of Benjamin Netanyahu. Lack of freedom of movement for Palestinians has stifled economic and social development and brought back a sense of despair that the slim hopes offered by the Oslo process can no longer contain. These grim realities have destroyed any hope in the future and rendered the prospect of a tiny Palestinian statelet, perhaps under permanent Israeli domination, deeply unattractive for most Palestinians.
Experienced observers of the Middle East predict that Palestinian protests will not die down soon. The number of Palestinian dead in just the past three weeks exceeds those from the first five months of the Intifada. It would be a shame if the lesson that Yitzhak Rabin learned and the courage he showed were so quickly forgotten. Violence is the awful symptom, but occupation is the disease that still needs to be cured.Ali Abunimah is vice president of the Arab-American Action Network and is Palestinian.
