This Week

Troubled Times

The Rosh Hashanah Riots

As Israeli Arabs join the violence against Israel, many wonder if the nation can heal.

Left: Palestinians hurl
stones at Israeli soldiers
after demonstration against
Israeli opposition leader
Ariel Sharon in the West Bank
town of Ramallah Sept. 28.
Clashes erupted in Ramallah
and in east Jerusalem
at the Temple Mount_
compound after Sharon
visited the area.

Inset: Surrounded by
security, leader of the
Likud opposition party
Ariel Sharon, smiling; visits
the Temple Mount
in east Jerusalem's
Old City on Sept. 28.

DAVID LANDAU

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Tel Aviv

J

ews joined the world in anguish at the video
broadcast around the globe this week of a 12-
year-old Palestinian boy shot to death as he
crouched with his father for safety.
It spoke to the horror that befell Israel and the
Palestinians this past week as more than 50 died in
days of-rioting, touched off Sept. 28 when Likud Party
leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem, a site holy to both Jews and Muslims.
On the very cusp of a historic peace agreement, the
two nations seem to have flung themselves backward
into the blood and strife of the past.
For Israelis, the week's nightmare has been immea-
surably exacerbated by other footage — less stark per-
haps but no less shocking — of Israeli Arab citizens
fighting with, and being shot down by Israeli Jewish
policemen in towns and on roads in the heart of the
country. At least nine Israeli Arabs had died by
Wednesday.

Repainting The Green Line

For the wider world, the distinction between the near-
ly 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza

10/6
2000

16

Related editorial: page 41

and the roughly 1 million Palestinians who are citizens
of Israel blurred behind the palls of smoke. The
Palestinian propaganda machine was naturally eager to
intensify this blurring process.
But for Israelis, this week's internal intifada, or upris-
ing, came as a devastating surprise.
Never before in its 52-year history has Israel seen
such widespread violence.
Jaffa, Haifa, Acre — mixed cities that have known
harmony for decades — suddenly turned into battle-
fields. In the all-Arab areas of the Galilee, roads were
blocked, civilians and police were attacked, and banks
and Jewish businesses were brutalized.
At the height of the 1987-92 Palestinian Intifada,
Israeli Arabs, though plainly sympathetic toward the
plight and the struggle of their cousins across the bor-
der, were always careful to stop short of joining the
violence themselves.
Israeli Jews, for their part, grew to believe in the dis-
tinction demarcated by the "green line" separating the
West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israel proper.
This week, the -Arab political leadership accused the
police in northern Israel of provoking the extreme vio-
lence that engulfed their community by resorting far
too readily to the use of rubber-coated bullets instead
of the nonlethal riot equipment usually deployed by
police forces in democratic countries.
The scenes in Prague last week, when thousands of

police successfully contained anti-World Bank demon-
strators from all across Europe with such methods,
were widely cited.

Uncertainty For Barak

The social and political ramifications of the new Israeli
Arab militancy are hard to predict.
In the heat of the rioting, many feared that the deli-
cate fabric of Jewish-Arab coexistence inside Israel had
been irreparably torn apart.
As the week went on, some were saying that efforts
needed to be redoubled to allay deep-seated grievances
simmering beneath the political and religious fury that
triggered the week's events.
But the fact that nine Israeli Arabs are lying in fresh
graves will not quickly or easily be forgotten by a corn-
munity that numbers almost 20 percent of the coun-
try's total population.
That fact must inevitably cast a pall of uncertainty
over Prime Minister Ehud Barak's ability to retain cru-
cial support from the 10 Arab Knesset members.
Without that support, he can have no hope of main-
taining a narrow-based, center-left government into
the parliament's winter term, which opens at the end
of this month.
Beyond political arithmetic, Jews and Arabs are
wondering how much trust, if any, remains between

