The Middle East Beatings in Place of Bullets

By Michael S. Serrill

The Israelis have tried tear gas, rubber bullets and real ones, mass arrests, imprisonment and deportations. All of those strategies have failed to stop the wave of unrest that has engulfed Israel's occupied territories during the past seven weeks. So last week Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin shifted tactics one more time. From now on, he said, his soldiers would not fire on stone-tossing protesters -- they would beat them up.

In a speech before Labor Party officials in the Knesset, Rabin defended the policy by pointing out that "no demonstrators have died from being thwacked on the head." Israeli troops armed with wooden truncheons were dispatched to potential trouble spots in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. By week's end United Nations relief officials reported that soldiers had used clubs and fists to beat hundreds of Palestinians, including some women who were caught violating the around-the-clock curfew that has confined tens of thousands to their homes. At least ten of those beaten required hospitalization. Government leaders conceded that the pummeling would do nothing to enhance Israel's prestige around the world. Said a senior official: "Our image has been bad, and I'm afraid it will remain so with this new policy."

The curfew, which affected refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, was extended Friday evening to a neighborhood in Arab East Jerusaleum, the first time such a measure had been used there since Israel seized the sector in 1967. The restriction imposed an uneasy tranquillity in the territories, but even Rabin called it a "forced calm" likely to be shattered as soon as the Arab population was allowed back on the streets. Some curfew restrictions were lifted after complaints of food shortages. Israeli officials insisted that any shortages were self-imposed, the result of a commercial strike that has shuttered most Arab shops in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank for more than two weeks.

According to Israeli security sources, an underground Palestinian steering committee has now been set up to organize and encourage future disturbances. It is made up of six to eight people, at least three of them Islamic fundamentalists and the rest with ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization. The P.L.O., initially caught off guard by the spontaneous uprisings, said its main arm, Fatah, was responsible for an attempted raid into northern Israel by three Palestinians. The trio entered the country by cutting a large hole in the security fence along the Lebanese border and apparently intended to attack a nearby kibbutz. The raiders were hunted down by an Israeli border patrol and killed in a firefight.

The assault gave Israeli officials one more reason to reject the possibility of pursuing peace talks with the P.L.O.'s Yasser Arafat. But beyond the policy of beatings, Israeli officials offered no new ideas for dealing with Palestinian unrest. Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader and Foreign Minister in the national unity government, suggested that the elections scheduled for November be moved up in hopes of producing a government better able to deal with the crisis. Predictably, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, head of the right-wing Likud bloc, rejected the idea, saying it "would weaken our standing in the eyes of the Arabs."

Peres, who is eager to make the occupied territories an issue in the election campaign, is pushing the Reagan Administration to renew its peacemaking efforts in the region. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will do the same during his scheduled visit to Washington this week, while Shamir is scheduled to arrive in the U.S. capital for talks in mid-March. At the U.N. last week, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze proposed in a letter that the five permanent members of the Security Council take steps to organize a peace conference. And in Moscow, the Kremlin agreed to receive an Israeli diplomatic delegation for the first time since 1967.

With less than a year left in office, however, Ronald Reagan is in a poor position to offer any new U.S. peace initiatives. "There is no denying Washington has put this issue on the back burner," said a congressional aide involved in foreign affairs. "In fact, it may even fall off the stove."

With reporting by Robert Slater/Jerusalem and Nancy Traver/Washington