The New Palestinian Revolt

Chris Hedges

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

Summary:  Last autumn's fresh outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis has shaken an assumption that has reigned since the 1993 Oslo peace accords: that negotiations and interim agreements can lay the roadwork for a lasting peace. Now Oslo's delegitimization has swayed public opinion in Israel and the occupied territories away from compromise and toward more radical solutions.

Chris Hedges is a reporter for The New York Times. He was Middle East Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, based in Jerusalem and Cairo, from 1988 to 1995.

A DAY OF RECKONING

It was not clear who fired first. It may have been the cluster of young Palestinian men hidden in chest-high undergrowth near the Nezarim junction in Gaza. It may have been the Israeli soldiers at their outpost. Within a few seconds it no longer mattered. The crowd of 200 Palestinians, who had gathered for the daily protest, frantically sought cover. Bullets cracked and whizzed through the air.

The shooting was another fleeting and largely unheeded incident in the new Palestinian intifada. This conflict bears increasingly little resemblance to the one that took place from 1987 to 1993 and ended with the Oslo peace accords, which set up the framework for Palestinian interim self-government in the West Bank and Gaza. Each shot at Nezarim was another round fired into the carcass of the accords. The battle against the Israeli occupation is becoming an intercommunal war, one that could go on for months, perhaps years. What is happening harks back to the 1930s, when armed bands of Zionist settlers and Arabs took potshots at each other in a battle of attrition that culminated with the 1948 war over Israel's founding.

The new intifada is reverberating throughout the Middle East, rattling the dusty and inefficient Arab regimes in Cairo and Damascus, emboldening extremist Arab states such as Iraq, and weakening the power of Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Most important, it foreshadows a day of reckoning for Israel when it will have to decide between the swift establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state including in some manner East Jerusalem, and a prolonged, debilitating conflict.

The empty highway where the Nezarim gunfight took place was littered with the usual detritus -- rocks, smashed bottles, brass bullet casings, trash, pieces of wood, and lumps of blackened rubber from tires that had been set afire. The Palestinian police had set up a table a few hundred yards down the road and had watched the clashes from the shade of a small porch. War and death have become a form of street theater here, as is common in such upheavals.

Young men carrying plastic bags filled with gasoline bombs sprinted from sand pile to sand pile, laid there for this purpose by the Palestinian police the night before. They worked their way toward a concrete wall around which they could hurl the bombs at an Israeli military outpost. The bottles, licked by bright red flame, arched skyward and then crashed, sending up voluminous clouds of inky black smoke. When the shooting became heavy, the demonstrators chanted Islamic slogans.

There were several sharp cracks -- the signature sound of sniper rifles. Marwan Shamalekh, 22, a bottle in his hand, collapsed dead in a lump on the ground. His companions scooped him up, each taking an arm or a leg, and ran to the back of a waiting ambulance near the Palestinian police. The white van, its pulsating siren and red light providing a brief distraction, roared away.

The Palestinians had another martyr, more fuel for the insurrection. The next morning Shamalekh was carried on a bier through the streets of Gaza, his body wrapped in a Palestinian flag, a prop to whip up angry, vengeful crowds. After laying him in a shallow pit in the sandy cemetery at the edge of the city, groups of young men left to confront the Israelis and exact their revenge. The cycle continued.

seeking martyrdom

Gaza, like Kosovo's capital of Pristina, is a derelict, concrete slum where car exhaust mingles with the stench of raw sewage. One million Palestinians -- 70 percent of whom are either refugees from what is now Israel or the descendents of refugees -- live crammed into this dusty, flat, coastal area twice the size of Washington, D.C. Most are stateless and have never left the Palestinian territories and Israel. Families are piled in boxy, concrete rooms capped with corrugated tin roofs weighed down by rocks. They have little furniture. Water and electricity come sporadically. The population growth rate is one of the highest on the planet -- a 3.7 percent annual birthrate compared with 1.7 percent in Israel. Donkey carts crowd the streets and orange garbage bins, donated by the European Union, overflow with pungent heaps of refuse.