THE CONSEQUENCES OF MASS MURDER

Charles Glass forecasts that the occupied

territories will see two civil wars: Israeli against Israeli, Palestinian against Palestinian

Jerusalem DRIVING THROUGH the Israeli-occu- pied territories can be a jittery experience these days. Settlers stone cars with territo- ries' number .plates, and Palestinians throw stones at cars with Israeli plates. The Israeli military has imposed a curfew, and the Palestinians have called a strike, both actions a result of last Friday's massacre at the Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron. In Bethle- hem, the curfew applies to the town's Arab residents, but not to the coachloads of tourists who visit the Church of the Nativi- ty. A few soldiers chased four little boys from Manger Square to their houses, while the tourists took photographs of one another in front of Christ's putative birth- place. In other parts of the town, Israeli soldiers ordered young men out of their houses and lined them against walls.

My driver, a Palestinian from a village near Jerusalem, arrived for work with bloodshot, eyes. When I asked why, he said that Israeli soldiers had stopped his car the night before. He was driving through a refugee camp on his way home. They pressed his hands against the wall, along- side other Palestinians pulled from cars. He said they then fired tear-gas at them and laughed.

Violence is engulfing this country, inside the occupied territories and in Israel itself. It is becoming mundane and trivial in both Israeli and Palestinian societies. The tem- perature is rising slowly enough for most people to adjust. The 23-year-old daughter of an Israeli friend in Jaffa watched a riot outside her house, when her Arab neigh- bours marched to demonstrate their sym- pathy for the Palestinians murdered in the Hebron mosque. A few Israeli Jews threw stones at the procession, and the Arabs reacted violently. She heard the noise, saw the boys running and the police chasing them. 'It is the first time in our lives,' she said, 'that my friends and I are afraid.'

'We are now taking the first steps toward an abyss from which there is no return,' Shlomo Gazit, former head of Israeli mili- tary intelligence, wrote in the Jerusalem Post on 7 February, two weeks before the Hebron massacre. 'Israel's problem is not the breach of a consensus which never existed; it is whether the two parts of the people, split in their convictions, can live together and resolve their differences with- out careening into civil war.' Gazit's two parts were those Israelis in favour of and those opposed to aggressive Jewish coloni- sation of the occupied territories.

In the few months since 13 September 1993, when President Clinton staged the signing of the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles in Washington, the seeds have been sown for not one but two civil wars. The first is the one feared by Shlomo Gazit among Israelis, and the second is among the Palestinians. Gazit criticised the settlers for dividing Israel: 'Israel has been split over this issue for 27 years, with half the

'We'll ask Clinton for financial aid to pay our espionage bill.' country believing the Six Day War of 1967 posed a Messianic-national challenge to consolidate and perpetuate the borders of Greater Israel, and the other half regarding such an outcome as the most awful existen- tial and strategic threat to the future of Zionism.'

Secular Israelis outside the territories resent the settlers, particularly the religious zealots of Kiryat Arba who exulted in the Hebron carnage. They know that while the settlers are only 2 per cent of the Israeli population, they receive 12 per cent of the state's municipal budgets. Settler families pay on average $1,000 less in income tax every year than families in Israel. Settlers receive subsidies for transport and housing. Half of all settlers are on the government payroll as civil servants. Israelis send their sons to protect the settlers. The settlements are expensive in a society that has seen government statistics place 800,000 Israelis below the official poverty line.

When most Israelis listen to the Kiryat Arba settlers praising Dr Baruch Goldstein for his act of mass murder, they are horri- fied. It is a moral abhorrence so profound that some tremble when they speak of it. They read that Eliyakim Ha'etzni, head of the Action Committee for Abolition of the Autonomy Plan, is calling for Jewish civil disobedience and for Jews to fill Israeli prisons, and they wonder whether settler lawlessness will lead to anarchy.

Soldiers from Israel serving in the occu- pied territories have submitted petitions to the government deploring what one reservist called 'the hostile attitude towards the soldiers by the very settlers they were ordered to protect'. The same reservist wrote in the weekly Ha'olam Ha'ze of his service in Hebron: 'When we had to inter- vene in a skirmish between the Arabs and the settlers, I felt more secure when my back was turned to the Arabs than to the settlers.' Soldiers regularly arrest Arabs, but they are prevented from arresting Jew- ish settlers, whose acts of violence are more common. One officer complained that he had 'never received adequate expla- nations from the permanent commanders of the area of the standard procedure by which Jews are never arrested'.

'We are all Goldsteins,' shouted one man at the killer's funeral. But thousands of Israelis insist they are not Goldsteins, that they will never be Goldsteins, that if to keep the occupied territories they have to become Goldsteins, they would rather give them up. Many demand that all the Gold- steins be disarmed. The Rabin government is not going to do that. But, some day, if it is to award the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians, it may have to confront the Goldsteins it has until now supported. Some, mainly secular, settlers are already considering leaving and have asked for gov- ernment compensation to resume their lives in Israel proper. The government has refused even that. 'Can they be removed by force?' an Israeli friend in west Jerusalem asked. 'If there is force, what will happen?'

Divisions among the Palestinians run as deep, and they will widen if and when Israel permits Yasser Arafat to deploy between 8,000 and 10,000 policemen in Gaza and Jericho. After the Hebron mur- ders, Palestinians were chanting 'Death to Arafat'. Many fear that his forces in Gaza and Jericho will be more oppressive and arbitrary than the Israelis have been, and that, when Palestinians are killing Palestini- ans, the world will be less interested than it is now.

There is clear evidence that Arafat's Al Fatah commando organisation began co- operating with the Israeli occupation authorities last September. General Mattan Vilnay, head of the Israeli army Southern Command, which includes Gaza, told Israeli newspapers that Gaza was under the control of a Fatah committee — though still under Israel. He praised Fatah and apologised for the killing last year of a Fatah commander, saying Israeli soldiers shot him by mistake when he was in the company of Hamas militants. Fatah, through its 'Hawks' militia, has become a vigilante in Gaza with Israeli approval. Many Fatah activists have resigned, irked that Arafat is awarding the best jobs to loyal sycophants from Tunis rather than Gazans and West Bankers who have served their time in Israeli prisons. Yediot Ahranot quoted one Fatah dissident: 'We demand democratic elections in the Gaza Strip. We demand that each man first be elected by his own organisation, contrary to the PLO insistence that everything be decided by fax from Tunis.'

Hamas guerrillas have said that they do not want an open confrontation with their main rival Fatah, but they will resist by force any attempt by Arafat to prevent them from attacking Israelis in the territo- ries. The clear brief that Arafat is being given by the Israelis is that he maintain peace for the Israelis. It is on the basis of his performance in protecting Israelis rather than instituting democracy that Rabin will judge him. If Arafat leaves Hamas alone, Israel will give him nothing. If Arafat seeks to control Hamas, he will end up at war with them.

Israeli journalists, like defence corre- spondent Ze'ev Shiff, are writing of the `Lebanisation' of the occupied territories. Those of us who remember Lebanon on the eve of its civil war in 1975 agree, but the race between Israelis and Palestinians over whose war will begin first is now on.