An Intifadeh Of the Soul

By LANCE MORROW

Now, after five days, the army lifts the curfew.

In a bright June morning, all the locked-up normalities come tumbling into the streets of Nablus -- the fruits and vegetables, the figs and grape leaves and fragrant mint, the baklava with its hovering bees, the butchered goats and lambs and live chicks in cardboard boxes, rectangles of softly agitating yellow fluff. The narrow alleys of the Casbah fill with the smells and bustle of marketing after curfew. Palestinian life in the steep-sided hills of the occupied West Bank makes one of its dreamlike passages back to the state of mind in which, for a moment, it feels normal.

Then, just at noon, news shoots through the Casbah, an articulate electricity: there was an Israeli army raid a moment ago -- one activist killed, many captured.

Now groceries tumble back behind shutters. Mothers drag children, fleeing up the lanes. Adolescent boys collect on corners, muscles jumping, vibrating for revenge.

A thin young man with the look of an unslept jailbird -- he is wanted by the army, like his best friend who was killed just now -- stops for a second, his body's engine racing, in front of a shop with a mannequin in its window dressed in a stately white wedding gown. The fugitive speaks with a distracted courtesy, wanting to be polite but needing to flee for his life, and then vanishes into an alley. The owner of the shop slams down his steel curtain over the window with the wedding gown. The mannequin bride goes blank.

Curfew again: Nablus returns to its motionless antiworld, its un-Palestine.

The glaziers of Jerusalem will be rich if the intifadeh goes on like this. They charge $1,500 to install car windows that are shatter-resistant. People are paying. The Palestinian uprising is 2 1/2 years old. It has hardened into a dreary, bitter ritual. The reciprocal stoning and beating obey Newton's Third Law of Motion -- for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Each side has found its threshold of acceptable suffering and cruelty.

On both sides, the leadership, such as it is, grows more evasive, craven and empty. In a war of victims, no one plays the grownup. Among the Palestinians, effective moral authority now has a median age of 14 or 15 and a good throwing arm. Fathers and grandfathers have signed over their moral duties to the children in the streets. The traditional patriarchy begins to disintegrate. The Palestine Liberation Organization still serves as banner and facade, but many Palestinians believe that it is increasingly feckless, corrupt and out of touch. The failures of leadership on either side of the struggle collaborate to create a sense of hopelessness. Hamas, the fundamentalist Islamic movement, feeds handsomely upon the ambient despair.

Some American Plains Indians in their late 19th century twilight took to ritual "ghost dancing" in the hope of ridding themselves of the white man. The intifadeh is either ghost dancing or nation building, and sometimes it is both simultaneously. It has crystallized the Palestinians' sense of themselves as a nation, but it is a phantom nation still, incandescent but insubstantial.

To many Israelis, the intifadeh is no more than a chronic irritation. They worry more about the possibility of war with Syria or Iraq. Worry more, that is, until the stones get personal. One Sunday a month ago, the philosopher David Hartman, who says, "I will not be at peace in Israel until the Palestinian has achieved his dignity," was riding in a taxi up the Mount of Olives. He was thinking about Maimonides and the relationship between Jewish tradition and modernity. Suddenly modernity came through the window in the form of a chunk of Jerusalem stone the size of an avocado, heavy and jagged. It hit Hartman in the face and might have killed him. Hartman keeps the stone on the windowsill in his office. As you walk in the door, he stabs the air with his finger: "Look at this! This is not an instrument of protest, this is an instrument of murder!" And then, recovering philosophy a little, he shakes his head: "The veneer of civilization is very thin."

There is no such veneer in Shati refugee camp in Gaza. Not long ago, Mohammed Abu Zinnada, a 68-year-old blind imam, died after the Israel Defense Forces raided his house in the middle of the night. The I.D.F. says it touched no one, and the man died of a heart attack. The family tells a rather detailed story of how the I.D.F. forced its way in, clubbed the blind imam with rifle butts, beat his grandson Naim, 9, and even knocked around his manifestly retarded son Hussein, 29.

An Israeli patrol chased Imad Khatib, 13, just down the street from the imam's house the other day. The boy's crime was flashing a V sign at the soldiers. They caught Imad, who weighs 70 lbs., beat him repeatedly, raised him high in the air, threw him to the ground and kicked him with their boots. Several witnesses say that three of the soldiers took souvenir pictures of this exploit -- even passing the camera around so everyone could be in the shot.

In 1937 Britain's Palestine Royal Commission observed, "No other problem of our time is rooted so deeply in the past." I have seen the past, and it doesn't work. It is a deepening disgrace.

At the birth of Israel 42 years ago, one people crashed back into history, another spilled out of it. For the world's Jews, 1948 was a miracle after nearly 2,000 years of diaspora. For the Palestinians, the year was what they call al nakba, the disaster.

When the intifadeh began, the Palestinians thought they had arrived at last at their St. Crispin's Day -- their long delayed critical mass as a people. They would mobilize a new identity, reassemble the atoms of dispersal. In a story by the late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, the driver of a tanker truck is smuggling Palestinians across the desert to illicit jobs in the Persian Gulf. The occupants silently suffocate in the heat of the tanker as it waits at a border checkpoint. They could have banged on the sides to attract attention in order to save themselves, but they were too afraid.

The intifadeh has been a loud, persistent banging on the sides of the tanker. And although the uprising has helped develop the Palestinians as a people, they remain inside the tanker, and the sense of suffocation is growing more desperate. The Arab Godot has not arrived to deliver their freedom. The Palestinians in the occupied territories have grown tired of waiting.

The Zionist idea was so powerful, it has been said, that it created not one nation but two. The Palestinian existence since 1948 has been one long, surreal search for that nationhood. As the Palestinian American author Edward Said has written, "Their story cannot be told smoothly." The Palestinians, in any case, are diverse. Like any people, they have many stories.

THE MADMAN'S VICTIM'S TALE

There is not a Palestinian anywhere who believes that the killings at Rishon Le-Zion, south of Tel Aviv, on May 20 were the work of a madman lost in some apolitical lunacy. Conversely, every Israeli probably believes that the man held responsible, Ami Popper, 21, an Israeli soldier dismissed from the army as being unsuitable for military service, was exactly that: an isolated crazy.

The seven laborers killed by Popper came from Gaza towns and refugee camps. One of the dead, 35-year-old Youssef Abu Dakka, traveled each day to work as a laborer building houses in Israel. Now, in the bright midday sun of the courtyard of his house, the family gathers to receive official sympathizers. The victim's mother, her sharp bird's eyes silently following everything, sits on a sheepskin in a shadowed corner. The father, Ibrahim Abu Dakka, has a ceremonial place among the encircling men. A leader of the Gaza Laborers' Union, a man of swelling gravitas, delivers a harangue about the son's unforgettable martyrdom.

Jamal Abu Dakka, 28, Youssef's brother-in-law, who was there at the shootings, tells what happened. At 6 in the morning, the laborers were driving in a Peugeot 504 toward work in Rishon Le-Zion. A man dressed in an Israeli army uniform waved their car down. He told the laborers to get out but to leave the car's engine running. He ordered the six men in the car to join other Palestinians sitting on the ground, and asked in Hebrew, "Do you know why you are here?" The men said no. The Israeli said, "Better for you not to know." Then he opened fire with a Galil assault rifle, killing seven of the laborers and wounding eleven. He jumped into the Peugeot and drove away.

The killings on "Black Sunday" blew fresh rage into the uprising. The territories rioted for three days; 14 more Palestinians died and an additional 800 were wounded.

EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK'S

On the road outside the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, a bus is burning. A Molotov cocktail sailed out of the dusk moments ago and burst into bright wild blossom. Presently the flames subside, and the bus is reduced to an abandoned black shell, like that of a hermit crab on the beach.

The American Colony is the Rick's Cafe Americain of East Jerusalem, a place where journalists, diplomats, scholars and P.L.O. contacts meet. The hotel's basement bar is a rock-walled grotto, a honeycomb of whisperings. In an upstairs salon called the Pasha's Room, Mohammed, a leader of the Palestinian popular committee in Bethlehem, explains how it came to pass that 40 years ago he was born in a cave.

His village was partly demolished by the Haganah, the Jewish militia, in 1947. His family moved to a cave at Wadi Fokin, southwest of Bethlehem. There his mother gave birth to Mohammed. Eventually, the family settled into Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, in what was then Jordanian territory. When he was 17, there came the second nakba, the decisive disaster of the 1967 war. The air shrieked with Israeli jet fighters, and with rumors that they would destroy the camp and massacre everyone in it. The Palestinians took to the roads again, struggling to get across the Jordan River.

Once in Jordan, Mohammed joined Al Fatah, the largest faction within the P.L.O. He forsook Islam. He groped toward an identity, inventing himself. He put himself on a heady diet of Hegel, Nietzsche, Arab nationalism. He became a communist.

But Mohammed has an independent, defiant mind that tends to swerve in unorthodox directions. After a year in prison, "I decided that the slogan of destroying Israel was a waste of time," he says. "This conflict has to be settled through two states, Israeli and Palestinian." When he was in jail in the mid-'70s, he tried to persuade fellow prisoners of that. The prisoners' court judged him a traitor and tried to kill him for being an Israeli stooge. The Israelis tortured him, he says, for being a Palestinian agitator. The countervailing dangers seem to have given him a strange serenity.

Mohammed, unorthodox still, accepts a cold beer. "Each people," he says, "must have its story of ordeal."

THE TRIBE OF BLESSINGS

The hills of Moorpark, Calif., look like a memory of Palestine, except they are greener. They do not have the harsh abstraction of the landscape that lies ten time zones to the east -- or the army vehicles that crawl up the roads like porcupines, bristling weapons.

When the intifadeh was younger, more hopeful for them, the Barakat family gathered for a reunion in Moorpark. Barakat means "blessings." This was an ingathering of the tribe of blessings. The five brothers were there, all together for the first time in 30 years. Adnan arrived from Jordan, Samih from Kuwait, Walid from Germany, Khaled from Morocco. Adel, who lives in Moorpark, was host. Each brother speaks English with a different accent, and each has a ^ passport from a different country. "This is what it means," they said, "being a Palestinian."

The brothers told the story of a Palestinian, carrying only Egyptian travel documents, who spent six weeks in 1983 flying from one airport to another in the Arab world, refused entry in one country after another. His papers said he was stateless. Finally, Jordan let the wanderer in.

Other Arabs mistrust Palestinians almost as much as Israelis do, and often treat them worse. Palestinians are considered too cosmopolitan, too educated, too apt to stir up trouble, too dangerous politically. "The Jews of the Arab world," the Palestinians call themselves with a complex, rueful pride. The Arab states think it best to keep them in refugee camps, watched by the secret police, in order to dramatize their misery and to justify revenge: to force them to play their part in the pageant of Arab honor.

But Palestinians have also proved to be their own accomplished enemies, with a long record of missed political chances and a tradition of terrorism that the West has had trouble accepting as the work of freedom fighters. It is no wonder that even their Arab brothers are sometimes afraid to let them in.

The Barakats, reunited, told stories about when they were young in Anabta, their native village, near Nablus. Adel, now prosperous with real estate, remembers the primal Anabta, famous for its olive and almond trees, where he wants to retire to play backgammon and think of his childhood: "You have the most happiness in your life when you are a child. You had good dreams and you were happy in your village."

Palestinian memories of the native villages grow idealized in exile and occupation. The world's 4.5 million Palestinians have polished the stone of that primal Palestine in nightly retellings until it shines in the mind like the first innocence: ur-Palestine, the origin myth.

The Palestinian after the fall has been double-selfed, abstracted out of homeland. But many Palestinians have also flourished, soared even, in their forced dispersion. It is not always pitiable to be double-selfed.

The memories are a stylized passion for the essential thing: a land, and therefore an identity of one's own. Would all those Palestinians prospering in Kuwait or Detroit, working as doctors, merchants, engineers, really wish to return, to invest their money and skills in the Palestinian homeland they demand? If the homeland ever comes, reality will test nostalgia.

THE DAUGHTERS OF GAZA

Three daughters of Abu Faisal sit in the sunlight in a courtyard in Gaza. Zeita remembers the evening during Ramadan when soldiers fired tear gas because the shabab (young Palestinians) had been throwing stones in their refugee camp, Jabalia. A canister sailed over the wall into the courtyard. Screams, confusion. The canister pinwheeled on the floor, spewing gas. The daughters ran for the bottles of cologne that they keep. They soaked tissues with it and held them to nose and mouth as they retreated gasping to the corners of the house. Cologne works against tear gas. So do onions.

Two of the sisters are named for other sisters who are now dead. One night in 1971, six armed P.L.O. fedayeen were crossing the street, just outside the house, and heading east toward Israel when they were spotted by an Israeli patrol.

A street battle started. One Palestinian fell wounded. Faika, who was 18, also belonged to the P.L.O. She grabbed her two-year-old sister Hanan as a prop -- just a baby-sitter blundering into a fight -- and got to the fallen man, seizing his Kalashnikov. She was about to start firing when the Israelis shot her down, and her two-year-old sister. There are many martyred babies in the tribal cause. "We are proud of our sisters who were killed," say the girls in the courtyard. Their shining black eyes are direct and passionate.

The house of Abu Faisal is a peaceful island this morning. Outside its walls, the unpaved, rutted streets brim with last night's rain. Goats browse in the street garbage. Donkeys graze among gravestones. An open sewer empties into an enormous, death-gray cesspond. Astonishing metal debris lies everywhere, as if a sadist of automobiles had been stabbing cars and ripping them apart and scattering their flesh.

THE ZEAL OF THE ABSENTEE

Samar Dudin Karajah has a sharp and beautiful face. She is 28, the daughter of a former Jordanian minister, and dresses like a European woman of privilege. Married to a young lawyer, she lives in Amman and teaches drama at the Aliya Girls School. She is now on a maternity leave.

"A Palestinian always has a sense of pain wherever he is or whatever he does," she says. "Every Palestinian is in exile." When she teaches grade- school children, she makes up plays. Here is a Palestinian girl crossing the Allenby Bridge from Jordan to the West Bank. An Israeli soldier gives the girl candy, but then he breaks open her doll to see if she is carrying anything dangerous. The girl throws the candy back at the soldier.

"We were brought up," says Samar, "to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. My mother had many Sephardic Jewish friends. But Zionism emerged out of the Holocaust. So why do the Palestinians have to pay for that? They were the victims. Now we are the victims. They came and took our land! They cannot solve their agony by victimizing the Palestinians."

She chokes on her outrage. "Why do we have to explain ourselves so much?"

THE POLTERGEIST'S TALE

Steep Nazareth in a bright sun. The 60,000 Arabs here are Israeli citizens, but the character of the town is distinctly Arab, with winding streets and souks. The Jews live on an opposite hill in modern houses with broad streets that might have been transplanted from suburban America.

In Israel more than 700,000 citizens are Arab. They regard themselves as third-class citizens. They have made a double-jointed accommodation with the Israeli state.

Johny Jahshan works as an accountant in the Galilee Christian College. His house on a hillside overlooking Nazareth has a middle-class comfort that makes a stranger think twice. This is a dissonance one sometimes feels among Palestinians who live very well. Their comfort does not invalidate their grievance, but it subtly shifts the moral ground, or at least complicates their status as victims. Israel has been economically profitable for many Palestinians, even as Israelis have exploited Palestinian labor and markets. Now, however, Palestinians are boycotting as many Israeli products as they can.

The Palestinians living in Israel feel thrice removed. First in privilege and status come the European Jews, then come the Oriental Jews, then, a distant third, the Israeli Arabs. Many of their grievances sound like the complaints of American blacks, and sometimes Israel gives off something of the Old South, of race hate and sheer meanness. The other evening on Salah el-Din Street in East Jerusalem, a middle-aged man in a business suit was stopped by a beefy policeman who addressed him in Arabic: "Ya, walid ((Hey, boy))!" The policeman took the Palestinian's left hand and twisted it back slowly, painfully, saying softly all the while in Arabic, "You do intifadeh, boy? I think you're intifadeh, boy!"

It sometimes seems to a Palestinian in Israel as if he and his family had been killed in an accident and now live on as ghosts in the same house. Another family, Jewish, has moved in. The ghosts observe the new tenants with sardonic commentary. The new tenants watch the furniture move and objects fly through the air. The Arabs have become poltergeists at their old address.

But it is, after all, a Jewish state. A stranger proffers hard-line Israeli logic: "Look, wars have consequences. This is a violent and dislocating century that has created millions of refugees all over the world. There are more than 200 million Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa, occupying 5 million sq. mi. There are 3.8 million Israeli Jews on a tiny sliver of land. The Arabs have tried in war after war to destroy Israel. The Jews have prevailed. What do you expect from them? Besides, what law of history says that a people aspiring to be a nation will have a state? Look at the Kurds, the Armenians, the Basques, the Ibos."

Jahshan answers, "The Crusaders and the Turks were here for a long time, and then they left. Israel is only 42 years old. They can kill us all and send us anywhere. Do you think we will forget? Honor! People die for honor! He who does not have land does not have honor."

BUTCH AND SUNDANCE

The village of Kafr Ni'ma lies in the hills west of Ramallah, a high village with an ancient terracing of stones. The people there grow figs, olives, almonds, grapes, plums. On a hill opposite, across the valley, one sees the bright white cubes and rectangles of a Jewish settlement -- a bedroom community for people who work in Jerusalem. The settlements on the West Bank are usually erected on the high ground for defense, and sit upon the landscape like moon stations.

A green-eyed 16-year-old named Farid, who wants to become a doctor when he grows up, is sitting in the back seat of the car, explaining how to stone Israeli soldiers. "You stay behind walls, follow the soldiers, throw and then dodge out of sight. Always know where you are, and have a way to escape in mind."

It is his duty to throw stones, Farid believes. "Sooner or later you will die, so there is nothing to be afraid of. They took our land, they killed our brothers, they arrested my friends. Our life is not so good that we can regret losing it."

Palestinian flags flutter everywhere in the village. The walls are coated with spray-painted slogans. The army will arrive soon and order the villagers at gunpoint to take down the flags and paint out the slogans. When the army leaves, the flags and slogans reappear.

Nassim and Mahmoud, leaders of the popular committees that run the village, sit smoking in a large bare room. Nassim, 31, is tall, thin, with calm dark eyes, though his crossed leg jumps in spasms when he speaks. Mahmoud is a short, blondish tough guy. They are Butch and Sundance, outlaws of the intifadeh.

The popular committees formed during the uprising have assumed much of the social, economic and political authority of running the territories. There are food committees, education committees, health committees, and public-safety committees, which guard the villages against Israeli settlers.

The surrounding hills are filled with caves, where the Palestinian activists often hide. One moonlit night, some months after our talk, a young collaborator led Israeli soldiers to the bush that concealed the cave where Mahmoud had set up a cozy apartment, with mattress and blanket, a lantern and jars of olives. Mahmoud is now in an Israeli jail.

THE EXECUTIONER

Of the 947 Palestinians killed so far during the uprising, at least 230 have been shot, beaten, stabbed or hacked to death by fellow Palestinians. Collaboration is not the only capital offense. Some victims have offended Islamic factions by trafficking in drugs and sex. Others were killed in personal vendettas.

An activist who calls himself Yazeed is 29. He bites at his fingernails, his thin face crossed by sudden gusts of anger and fear, and says, "Killing the collaborators will cut the fingers of the Shin Bet." Yazeed has spent seven years in Israeli jails for his work in what he calls the "armed struggle against the Zionist occupation." He refuses to marry: "Why should I? I have nothing to offer my children." Besides, he expects to be a martyr.

Yazeed says he has personally executed three people accused of collaboration. He feels no remorse. He insists that collaborators are given warnings, a chance to "come to their senses."

Why does a Palestinian become a collaborator? Life under occupation is very inconvenient; the occupier controls every detail. The Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security agency, can arrange a thousand favors to ease the way. They might come to an unemployed university graduate, for example, and say, "Why suffer? We can make you a teacher." In return the Shin Bet will start by asking something very easy: "We just need the names of your neighbors." By degrees the collaborator is drawn deeper into the web. If he tries to retreat, ^ the Israelis say, "We will expose you as a collaborator." It is widely believed in Nablus that Shin Bet agents have given drugged drinks to Palestinian women, then removed their clothing and taken pictures, threatening to shame them by showing the pictures to their families unless they cooperate. Some corrupt village mukhtars (headmen) have collaborated in exchange for permission to gouge money from their people. That is a dangerous game. Such collaborators wind up turning their homes into armed fortresses, with transmitters to keep in touch with the Shin Bet.

THE PRISONER'S TALE

Pictures hang high on the walls of a Palestinian's house, the tops of the frames nearly touching the ceiling. Is it that such elevation of the gaze suggests respect for the figures pictured there -- for the father staring down in formal Arab robes, for the first son, working in one of the gulf states and sending home the money that the family survives on? Such images look down upon Qassem in his sitting room. His own gaze is lowered. He is talking about his prison time and about being interrogated by Israeli agents.

Qassem has served three stretches in jail on suspicion of being an activist. He is a man in his mid-30s, with black Heathcliff eyes and deep grooves like parentheses around his mouth. In the dusk he recalls the rituals of interrogation.

"You begin with two days and nights isolated, standing up, handcuffed, with a sack over your head. You just hear crying, loud voices, an iron door slamming. You are very frightened. If you fall, they throw cold water on you to wake you up."

Ex-prisoners are always very precise about how many hours, or days, they have been subjected to various stages of interrogation, but it is hard to know how they can be sure of the passage of time, especially if their heads are covered with sacks.

He continues. "Then they start the interrogation. They make you very, very tired, physically and mentally. You forget everything outside after a time. You are utterly alone. There are two of them, and they play good guy and bad guy, the bad guy slapping you and spitting on you. You wonder, 'Where does he get so much spit from?' They dig at your genitals with a boot or a stick. Sometimes they tie you to a pipe so that you cannot stand or sit or kneel and leave you that way for days.

"The sacks they put on your head are never cleaned, and they smell of vomit. They can add more sacks, and you begin to suffocate -- that works very fast on some guys.

"You cannot imagine your joy at the words 'Take him to the cell.' After many days of isolation," says Qassem, "I sometimes missed seeing the interrogator if he did not show up. To see a human face -- even his!"

THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

In the village of Deir Dibwan, northeast of Ramallah, the newer houses are made of rich blond limestone, with lemon trees in the front yards and, on the roofs, miniature Eiffel Towers to brace television antennas. The village has simultaneously the smell of goats and an air of affluence. It is a theme park of Palestinian authenticity, a once-was village sustained by money from America. Deir Dibwan has a population of 8,000. At any given time, some 4,000 are in the U.S. making money.

Once immigration was irrevocable. The refugee boarded a ship and departed for the New World. He might return to the ancestral village years later and try to remember his childhood. But now immigrants can go time-traveling in their own histories, back and forth. One family, the Dalias, have been commuting thus between their pasts and their futures since 1926, when a forebear, Abdul-Hameed Dalia, began shuttling between the Middle East and the New World. The resulting state of mind may be painfully torn, but is often miraculously freed and creative. A sense of being treacherous to the tribe and its values coincides with a heady liberation.

THE STONES

The diamond cutter stares at the stone until it discloses its inner structure, its secret. If the moralist stares long enough at Palestine/Israel, he thinks it will disclose a miracle of resolution.

But the place is not one stone. Here are two monoliths that by an intolerable trick of metaphysics stand upon the same spot. The Muslim's Dome of the Rock looms above the Jew's Western Wall. The promised land is also hell in a very small place.

Sunlight shafts down upon Jerusalem through gunpowder clouds, the city immobile, the sky above in tumbling motion like time-lapse photography. Pure light and Jerusalem stone give the city its astonishing beauty. The dolomite limestone changes miraculously with the light: blind white at noon gone to pink and rose and peach at sunset.

The stones have a strange abstract fertility, like dreams breeding. They come teeming up in geometries to make temples, cities. They also have their power in smaller sizes. They come up in the hands of children and fly through , the air, to make a nation, or at least to trouble the dream of Zion.

With reporting by Jamil Hamad