Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [241]
There was always strain between the PLO’s foreign-based representatives, with their nice apartments, suits and ties, and their hotel suites in Europe, and the Palestinians in the occupied territories. To them the PLO counselled ‘fortitude’ or ‘steadfastness’ while Arafat vainly attempted to defend Fatah’s military presence in the Lebanon, whence liberation would come from outside. Arafat may have enjoyed immense personal prestige among the Palestinians as the father of their nation, but his madcap diplomatic gambits had become near irrelevant to the grim experiences of young Palestinians in the occupied territories.34
The Gaza Strip is twenty-eight miles long and between three and eight miles wide, and in the 1980s was home to 650,000 Palestinians, including those crammed densely and insalubriously into refugee camps, a burden resented by the indigenous Arab population. There are also powerful clans, which operate somewhere between extended families and Mafia gangs, with memberships of up to five thousand. When it suits them, they adopt titles like Army of Islam to disguise the crime of kidnapping for ransoms. Half the population were under fifteen, the result of an exceptionally high birth rate. Unemployed young men hung around, angry and bored, in the burning summer heat, a problem afflicting the Arab world from the Gulf to the Algerian Maghreb, which teems with superfluous young men, a problem common to many post-industrial Western societies. A skeletal Israeli Civil Administration controlled the Strip with a rigorous inefficiency against which there was little legal redress. The Strip was riddled with undercover officers of the domestic security agency Shin Beth, on the lookout for pliant informers. Although standards of education were good, thanks to external aid, job opportunities were few, with the lucky hundred thousand or so performing manual labour for neighbouring Israelis. Demeaning treatment by Arab or Israeli contractors, squeezing muscles as if they were assessing a mule, was followed by degrading treatment at the exit checkpoints, where bored guards sometimes gave meaning to their dull day by messing Arabs around with that irritating air of nonchalant gun-toting punctiliousness. Every hour in a queue was an hour’s lost pay and less for a family to eat. Passive anti-Arab racism was as consequential as the active variety which exists in Israel. The majority of Israelis averted their eyes from the occupied territories and the festering hatreds they were engendering. Their government regarded disturbances as episodic and containable, the handiwork of malign extraneous influences.
The first Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, originated in a sequence of bizarrely random events that crowned months of tension. In May 1987 six members of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad broke out of Gaza Central prison, where they had been confined for such acts as killing Israeli taxi drivers. Sunni admirers of the ayatollah Khomeini, Islamic Jihad’s three hundred militants were armed and directed by Islamist elements in Fatah’s Western Sector command. Although the fugitives were mostly run to ground, while on the loose they continued their terrorist attacks, thereby acquiring folkloric kudos among young people receptive to their calls for the liberation of Palestine as the prelude to a wider Islamic revival. Even when Shin Beth agents ambushed and killed three of the Islamic Jihad fugitives in October, they lived on in handbills as ‘ghosts who will pursue the Jews everywhere and for all time’.
The autumn months of 1987 saw a spate of stabbings of lone Israelis, culminating on