The Road to Palestine

The Road from Bethlehem to Hebron winds through rocky mountains and terraced hillsides, over vast plateaus that stretch down to the Dead Sea. Under a huge, cloudless sky bleached almost white by intense sunlight, this simple back road bends to accommodate land, people, animals, and crops. Curving past ancient stone walls and hardy olive trees, it passes below sheep and goats that graze on barren hillsides, through military checkpoints staffed by Israeli soldiers.

The trip is only 20 miles long, but the journey takes a traveler through thousands of years of history. It is this land that God promised to the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. It is here that Jesus was born. And it is this desolate, yet beautiful, place that the children of Isaac and Ishmael struggle to make their home. Up ahead there is a fork in the road.

Meanwhile, there is much to see: Bedouin shepherds grazing their livestock near the ruins of Herod's Palace; simple, generations-old Palestinian dwellings being destroyed to make way for high-rise Israeli condominiums; and donkeys loaded with kindling for Palestinians who now live in tents, ambling along the roadside, almost stumbling over the narrow pipe that carries water across miles of dry, barren land to the Israeli settlement that sits on the next hill.

A few miles outside Hebron, the road passes through the small Palestinian village of Sa'ir. Because of its isolation, steep hillsides, and its activist population, Sa'ir has become a stronghold of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

On this day huge boulders span the road, blocking the entrance to Sa'ir. It is unclear whether the Israeli army has placed the boulders there to keep the villagers in, or whether the villagers have blocked the road to keep the army out. As determined travelers spend more than 30 minutes clearing the road, village children perched high on a steep hillside watch closely.

Israeli soldiers don't always come to Palestinian towns and villages wearing their army green and riding in military jeeps or trucks. The people of Sa'ir have been tricked before--by Israeli soldiers driving into their village in a local ambulance; by soldiers pretending to be Palestinians riding a West Bank commuter bus; and by soldiers and intelligence agents posing as foreign journalists and sneaking into town in rental cars.

Such surprises have proved costly for Sa'ir. Village children have been arrested, beaten, and sometimes shot. Undercover military patrols have also provided the protection military bulldozers needed to enter the village and destroy houses.

So when a West Bank bus tries to enter Sa'ir on November 29, a partial strike day, the villagers of Sa'ir are suspicious and vigilant. Within minutes of the vehicle's arrival at the barricade, hundreds of the local "children of the stones" have mobilized. They swarm onto rooftops and hillsides, crowding alleys and streets. Children as young as 5 years old surround the bus, stones in hand, wanting to know who is inside.

Almost 75 percent of the Palestinian population is under age 21, meaning that a large majority of Palestinians have lived their entire lives under occupation. Palestinian children have been at the forefront of the intifada since its inception, and the shebab, literally "the boys," are the Palestinian youth who organize demonstrations, enforce strikes, and otherwise embody the intifada.

Clearly, the shebab control Sa'ir. Outlawed Palestinian flags fly everywhere: on electrical wires, from houses, from the minaret of the town mosque. The shebab of Sa'ir also determine who is allowed into their village.

Slowly and carefully, the bus creeps down the village's narrow main street, flanked by steep hills and hundreds of scared, but angry, children with rocks. The bus driver and travel guide negotiate with the shebab, trying to vouch for the good will of their passengers. Finally, determined that Israeli soldiers and spies will not trick and hurt him again, one of the boys steps onto the bus. "Passports, please," he says, checking the identity of each passenger.

At last, convinced that the passengers are American tourists, the shebab spreads the word to the other children: "Let the bus pass." But, even with that word of approval, passage is not easy. The children have worked hard to ensure the protection of their village, and stone barricades block the road every few yards. Finally, the bus rolls out of Sa'ir and continues down the intifada road.

THIS IS THE ROAD TO PALESTINE, a new state in the making. The intifada road, while not on any map, winds all through the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories occupied by Israel. It passes through Sa'ir, Jabalya, Beita, Nablus, Kissan, and Beit Sahur. The intifada road is the Jericho road, the road through Bethlehem, Kalandia, Ramallah, Deir Belah, Jenin, Kalkilya, and Jiftlik.

This road to Palestine is paved with stones, suffering, and solidarity, built by young, angry Palestinian children and old, strong Palestinian women and men. Already more than 492 Palestinians and 16 Israelis have died on the intifada road, and neither the road nor the journey is finished.

This intifada road began in a direction parallel to other rough and dangerous roads in the Middle East. Construction of the road to Israel had cost more than 6 million Jewish lives, and roads within Israel, often traveled by extremist Palestinians determined to erase Israel from their map and reclaim their homes, were sometimes littered with the bodies of Israeli civilians who had been killed by Palestinian terrorists. Such incidents only made the road increasingly dangerous for all travelers, Israeli and Palestinian, as Israelis, fearing for their lives, their homes, and their nation, took extreme measures to guarantee their safety and extend their traveling rights.

But the builders of this intifada road have turned toward a new direction, away from terrorism. The intifada road does not seek to replace the Israel road; it has intersected that path and now goes its own way. No one knows how long it will take the road builders and travelers to reach their destination. But for all who can read them, the signs on this road are clear: This road to Palestine is a one-way street; there is no turning back.

Palestinians insist that their intifada will not end until the government of Israel ceases its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The intifada will not end, they say, until the 1.7 million Palestinians who have lived under military occupation for more than 21 years have their own, independent Palestinian state.

"It will last until we get a solution," a young woman in Beit Sahur says of the intifada. "We are sick and tired of this [the occupation]. We will either die or have a solution."

Such determined perseverance is the universal Palestinian sentiment in the Occupied Territories, but most Palestinians also realize that the intifada will bring them not death or a solution, but death and, finally, possibly, a solution. This prospect does not deter them. For more than 21 years they endured death and oppression, gaining nothing by it. Now, they say, they are suffering and dying for their self-determination, for their children's freedom, and for peace.

"We hope people will at least recognize that we are human beings and that we have human rights," a Palestinian attorney in the Gaza Strip said of his goals for the intifada.

"We're not always going to be angry at Israel," says a Palestinian man who, as a child, was driven from his home by Israeli forces and has lived in Kalandia refugee camp, near Jerusalem, for 36 years. "We would live peacefully side-by-side with Israel. We want to live in peace. Just as Israel has a government, we want one, too."

Holding a so-called rubber bullet shot at his children by Israeli soldiers, an angry Palestinian man explains that "Arabs and Muslims" have been sleeping too long, but are now waking up to take their rights. "It doesn't matter if we ourselves are killed," he says. "Others will come after us."

"The Israelis don't understand that there is a time when the poor and oppressed have nothing more to lose, and whatever they do will be achievement, not loss," says Rev. Elias Chacour, a Palestinian Israeli who, as a child, watched Israeli forces level his upper Galilee village on Christmas Day, 1952.

In these difficult, but heady, days of the intifada, Palestinians are intoxicated with the euphoric confidence that is common among people who are struggling and gaining against great odds, who feel they have the moral upper hand. Small children throwing rocks have confronted the world's fourth largest military power.

"Someone once said the Israelis would take away all the stones from the West Bank. But we would still have soil and water," says a young Palestinian woman. "The Palestinians [in the territories] have no weapons," chuckles Father Chacour. "Well, God has provided Palestine with a fabulous number of small rocks."

"I wasn't happy at any time in my life more than in these days [of the intifada]," says Jenin resident Kamal Abdel-Fattah, whose son just spent three months in prison without charge or trial. "I am happy. I am hopeful. We are now masters of our own survival," says this Bir Zeit University professor whose school is closed and who, just days earlier, was forced by Israeli soldiers to leave his house at midnight and sit outside at gunpoint, with all the men of his neighborhood, for two hours.

"Of course, we have to sacrifice, and we are willing," he says. "We are believers in God. We are believers in fate. Whatever will happen, will happen. This gives us inspiration. The daily miseries we see ... we have to endure. We will win, but we have to sacrifice. I am hopeful. We can wait."

But theirs is not a passive waiting, and battle-ready Israeli soldiers do not sit idly by.

THE BLOOD OF BEITA'S LATEST MARTYR still stains this rocky ground. Ammar Muheib Hamail was a scared 13-year-old looking for a place to hide when an Israeli soldier trapped him at the edge of the hillside and, standing less than 20 feet away, shot him in the back of the head with a rubber bullet.

Witnesses say the wounded boy fell from the terraced ridge and landed about 10 feet away, where he lay unconscious until he was taken by military helicopter to an Israeli hospital. Three days later, on November 22, Hamail died there, the bullet still lodged in his brain.

That was nine days ago. The place where Hamail fell and bled is now marked with a pile of stones. Standing on that spot, which for the villagers of Beita has become hallowed ground, one can look across a narrow valley and see where the boy was buried, at a plateau on the next hill. Grieving family and friends stand at his grave, which is marked with two Palestinian flags.

Such tragedy is not new to Beita. It was in this beautiful agricultural village of 6,000 people that Israeli soldiers demolished 14 houses and arrested more than 20 villagers in April after an Israeli guard shot and killed an Israeli settler girl and two young Palestinian men from the village.

Hamail's father, with all the practiced stoicism of a man who has no tears left to cry, tells a group of visiting Americans that he is "very proud" his youngest son has died for the cause of the Palestinian intifada. But it is hard to understand how someone could kill such a young boy.

Drawing Hamail's 14-year-old best friend to his side, the father says, "If this child was in front of me and I was a few yards away, and nobody saw me, and he was Jewish--could I hurt him?" The answer, quite clearly, is "No."

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD AMMAR MUHEIB HAMAIL was the 282nd Palestinian to be shot and killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since December 8, 1987, the date widely accepted as the beginning of the intifada. It was on that day in the Gaza Strip that an Israeli military vehicle collided with a truck carrying Palestinian workers to their jobs inside Israel, killing four Palestinians and injuring several others.

Palestinians believed the act was deliberate, and it ignited the anger that had been building for more than two decades of repression, humiliation, and suffering at the hands of Israeli occupation forces. Demonstrations broke out, and the next day 15-year-old Hatem Sissi, a resident of Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp, was shot in the heart and killed by an Israeli soldier. The intifada was under way, and neither Palestinians nor Israelis would ever be the same.

Intifada, commonly translated as "uprising," literally means "shaking off." It was the word Jesus used when he told his disciples to shake the dust off their feet when they left an unfriendly town, Father Chacour explains.

This modern intifada of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is about Palestinians first shaking off their own fears, and then working together to shake off the Israeli occupation. The intifada reflects the desires and aspirations of Palestinians to be recognized and treated as human beings, to have their own state, and to live in peace with the state of Israel.

While the media have focused on Palestinian demonstrations, firebombs, and stone throwing, most tools of the intifada are nonviolent. They include tax resistance, strikes, boycotts of Israeli products, organizing, and resignations of Palestinian police officers and tax collectors.

But the intifada is also about creating and building up. The Palestinians' struggle has been not only to throw off "unlivable living conditions," but also to win their human and political rights.

"The problem is fundamentally a political one," says Rita Giacaman, a professor of health at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "It is about the right to vote, the right to make laws, the right to take charge of our own lives, as human beings .... We are calling for the right to make choices about what kind of life we want.

"Now," she continues, "we don't have the right to make anything. Everything is imposed on us. We are calling for the right of participation. We are calling for the right to be part of society instead of outside society. We don't want to be those who are acted upon; we want to be the actors."

The intifada has created a sense of Palestinian pride, unifying and empowering Palestinians to begin working toward self-sufficiency. Palestinians are already building the grassroots organizations that will be needed to sustain a nascent Palestinian state. The Unified National Command of the Uprising, the intifada's underground leadership; popular committees that provide education, health care, food, and other necessities; intifada gardens that grow food for consumption during prolonged curfews; the changing role of women in society; and the growing vitality and importance of women's work committees are all living symbols of the empowerment of the Palestinian people.

The bottom-up nature of the intifada means that, for the first time, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are struggling for their own freedom rather than depending on the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or Arab states to do the work for them. Palestinians still acknowledge the PLO as the sole, legitimate representative of their interests, however.

Through the intifada "the residents of the Occupied Territories began to give orders to the PLO," says Nafez Assaily, acting director of Mubarak Awad's Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, based in East Jerusalem. "Before, the PLO told us what to do," Assaily says. "Now we tell them what to do, what we want and need."

A new, key message of the intifada to the PLO has been that the majority of Palestinians have relinquished their dreams of returning to their homes in a unified Palestine. Willing to accept Israel's 1948 borders, they now will settle for a Palestinian state limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Assaily says. The Palestine National Council's (PNC) recognition of key United Nations resolutions in November, and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat's reiterated recognition of Israel, renunciation of terrorism, and calls for an international peace conference that would work toward a two-state solution are clear evidence of significant movement in the leadership, content, and goals of the Palestinian struggle, says Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab.

According to Giacaman, the intifada has shifted the movement for Palestinian liberation "from armed struggle to mass insurgency." Through the intifada Palestinians have liberated themselves and are now struggling for independence; they have accepted Israel's right to exist and simply want their own state.

BUT THE INTIFADA, LIKE THE Israeli occupation it resists, has its price. According to the DataBase Project on Palestinian Human Rights and the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center, almost one-third of the more than 492 Palestinians who have died were age 18 or younger. (Official Israeli figures, which include only deaths by gunshots from Israeli soldiers, are much lower.) Among the 16 Israelis killed were a young woman and her three children, who burned to death when Palestinian youths reportedly firebombed their civilian bus in Jericho.

Of those Palestinians killed, more than 334 were shot by Israeli soldiers or settlers; more than 72 died from tear gas inhalation; and more than 39 were beaten, stoned, burned, or otherwise killed. The causes and agents of more than 47 additional Palestinian deaths are still under investigation. (Hundreds of Palestinian women have also suffered miscarriages after exposure to tear gas, but no clear scientific cause and effect has been established, so fetal deaths from what Palestinians call "tear gas abortions" are not counted.)

Another 46,000 Palestinians have been seriously wounded in the intifada. Israeli authorities have arrested more than 20,000 Palestinians, more than 5,000 of them administrative detainees imprisoned without charge or trial, and deported more than 46.

Palestinian refugee camps, villages, and towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been placed under curfew or military siege for a cumulative total of more than 2,000 days, and the military has waged in more than 150 sieges lasting seven days or longer, in which utilities are cut off, harvesting or tending of crops is prohibited, and people are prevented from leaving their houses.

More than 100,000 olive and fruit trees, which are vital to the land-based Palestinian economy, have been uprooted by Israeli soldiers or settlers, and the Israeli army has demolished or sealed more than 560 houses--including 100 in one day in the Jiftlik area--displacing more than 5,000 people. Israeli authorities have closed the federation of Palestinian trade unions and In'ash el-Usra, a charitable organization whose programs serve 15,000 Palestinians, for at least two years.

In what many Palestinians call the "war against education," Israeli authorities kept some 1,200 primary and secondary schools in the West Bank closed for more than eight months in the intifada's first year. Israel also shut down the West Bank's four universities, as well as all community college and trade schools.

More than 300,000 school-age children, 18,000 college and university students, and 9,000 teachers have been affected. Israel has also outlawed alternative classes, homework, and tutoring. Adult members of popular education committees can be arrested and imprisoned for up to 10 years for teaching a group of children in their homes.

"I am liable to go to prison because, I admit, I am teaching the neighbors' children the ABCs," Giacaman says. "Every day we sing it, in defiance." Meanwhile, thousands of younger children have forgotten how to read. "They are rendering an entire population illiterate," Giacaman says of the school closings.

But such statistics are not what the intifada is about. Deaths, injuries, arrests, deportations, house demolitions, school closures, and land confiscations have been the trademarks of Israeli occupation for more than 21 years. Such actions have simply increased during the intifada.

ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION OF THE WEST BANK and Gaza Strip is, in its most basic form, the Middle Eastern incarnation of apartheid. One racial and ethnic group has, through a succession of wars, land seizures, economic arrangements, and unjust laws and policies, created a two-tiered, sharply segregated society in which the rights and privileges of one group are gained and preserved through the deliberate exploitation and oppression of another.

The occupation affects every aspect of Palestinian life: where Palestinians can live, what kinds of jobs they can have; where, and whether, they can go to school; what they learn in school; the content of newspapers, magazines, and plays; medical care; licensing of cars and houses; travel; "acceptable" music and dance; and membership in youth and social clubs.

An Israeli citizen's average income is 10 times higher than per capita income for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and four times higher than Palestinian per capita income in the West Bank. A recent study by Israeli Meron Benvenisti concluded that Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are now worse off in economic and social development than they were 22 years ago, before the occupation started. Numbers of hospital beds, schools, and housing units have not kept pace with the population increase.

Many Palestinians, as well as some Israelis, believe that this Israeli apartheid, for all its systematic oppression, is only the means to another, harsher end. "This is an occupation with an agenda: the old Jewish agenda of restoring the land of Israel," says Fateh Azzam, Palestinian director of al-Haq/Law in the Service of Man, the Ramallah, West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. "Israel engages in gross, systematic, and intentional violations of human rights for a specific purpose."

Long before Israel became a state, Zionists determined to create "Eretz Yisrael" were denying the rights, and almost the very existence, of historic Palestine's indigenous Arabs. The Zionist slogan "land without people for people without a land" blindly ignored the reality of the more than 1 million Arabs who lived there at the time. As late as 1969, many Israelis were, like Prime Minister Golda Meir, still insisting that Palestinian people "did not exist."

When it became clear that the creation of a Jewish state would require some method for dealing with the native Arabs, Jewish leaders adopted the "transfer" policy that still guides Israeli political leaders. R. Weitz, former head of the Jewish Agency's colonization department in the 1940s, articulated the policy: "It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country .... There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer all of them: Not one village, not one tribe, should be left."

"Transfer" was to be achieved through whatever means necessary: military or terrorist attacks, mass expulsions, destruction of villages, harassment, intimidation, and, in some cases, massacres. The most notorious Zionist attack occurred on April 9 and 10, 1948, when Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir led some 100 members of the Irgun and Stern gangs, as well as some 20 Haganah soldiers, in an attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. Using dynamite, machine guns, hand grenades, and knives, the Zionists massacred 250 villagers, stuffing many of the bodies down the village well.

Israeli expansionism did not end when Israel achieved statehood. Attacks, massacres, and forced expulsions continued throughout the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war. When that war ended, the new state of Israel occupied 77 percent of the territory of historic Palestine, more than 770,000 Palestinian Arabs had been driven from their homes, and more than 60 percent of Palestinian Arabs had been deprived of their agricultural livelihoods. Since 1947, Israeli forces have destroyed 385 of 475 Arab villages within Israel's 1948 borders.

Israel further expanded its territory in the 1967 "Six Day War." On June 5, fearing an attack by Arab states, Israel launched a massive pre-emptive strike against Egypt, destroying 300 Egyptian planes on the ground within three hours. During the next five days, Israel also routed the armies of Jordan and Syria--which had counterattacked--and attacked the unarmed American spy ship USS Liberty, killing 34 U.S. crew members and wounding 171 others.

As a result of the '67 war, Israel captured and occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, also annexing East Jerusalem and driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. Israeli government and military leaders have since confirmed that the '67 war was an act of Israeli aggression, and that Israel had not faced serious danger of defeat or "extermination" by Arab forces. According to then defense minister Moshe Dayan, the "main objective [of the '67 war and subsequent occupation policies] is the creation of a new map, new frontiers, and a new Israel."

Israel has since survived an Arab attack in the 1973 Yom Kippur War; withdrawn from the Sinai, in keeping with the Camp David accords; annexed the Golan Heights; and, in 1982, invaded Beirut, killing more than 18,000 civilians, and declared southern Lebanon a "security zone."

Terrorist attacks by the PLO, created in 1964 and led by Yasir Arafat since 1967, have often been directed against Israeli civilians. In May 1974, for example, PLO guerrillas seized an Israeli school in Maalot with 90 teenagers inside. Before Israeli Defense Forces stormed the school, the guerrillas killed 20 children. In another attack, in March 1978, PLO guerrillas seized two Israeli passenger buses on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road and killed 25 people. Extremist PLO factions have also committed acts of terror against Israeli military posts and moderate Palestinians, as well as European and other civilian targets.

Such actions by extremist Palestinians have only magnified Israeli fears of annihilation, further justified Israeli security concerns, escalated anti-Palestinian hostilities, perpetuated cycles of violence, and incited increased Israeli repression and violence against Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories. It has been impossible for many Israelis to consider an independent Palestinian homeland next door to their own when such terrorist acts made them fear for their lives and reminded them of the long-standing pledge by many Arabs to "push them into the sea."

Ever so slowly, political views and personal sentiments on both sides of the divide are beginning to change. Palestinians now say they are willing to accept the state of Israel, and they have renounced terrorism. Many Israelis are also willing to consider some type of autonomy for Palestinians. But the unchanging, fundamental essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict remains the "Palestinian question," and Israel's continued military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

THE ZIONIST GOAL OF "GREATER ISRAEL," and its corresponding "transfer" methodology, have continued to drive Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli confiscation of Palestinian lands and the establishment of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories serve the multifaceted purpose of preventing Palestinian expansion, driving Palestinians from their homes, increasing Israeli control over the territories, and establishing there a permanent Israeli population that is guaranteed to resist strongly any moves toward Palestinian autonomy.

It is legal, according to Israeli law, for the government of Israel to confiscate Palestinian land, without compensation, for government use, "security reasons," or public lands. Such regulations have allowed the construction of numerous government buildings, apartment complexes, and the Hyatt Hotel on confiscated Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has built condominiums, resorts, farms, and road systems on confiscated Palestinian land. Since 1967, Israel has spent more than $2 billion building 135 settlements in the West Bank and 19 in the Gaza Strip.

More than 100,000 Israeli settlers live in the modem, high-rise apartment buildings that virtually surround East Jerusalem with an imposing presence. In the West Bank, the Israeli government and 70,000 Israeli settlers now control more than 52 percent of the land and 80 percent of the water, forcing almost 1 million Palestinians to subsist on the remainder. And almost 700,000 Palestinians live in the very densely populated Gaza Strip, yet only 2,500 Israeli settlers control more than one-third of the land and one-third of the water.

The new Israeli government has agreed to build five to eight new settlements next year. Meanwhile, Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories are denied building permits by the Israeli government. Forced by population growth to build anyway, Palestinians risk the demolitions of their "unlicensed" houses by the Israeli army. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center, demolitions and land confiscations also continue for the construction or expansion of settlements and their road systems.

ON NOVEMBER 14, THE ISRAELI ARMY came to Kissan, a desolate, rocky area south of Bethlehem, and told poor Bedouin shepherds, whose families had lived there for more than 100 years, that they were on "state land." The nearby Ma'ale Amos settlement was being expanded, and they would have to leave.

The soldiers gave the people a little more than five minutes to gather their belongings. Then the demolitions started. When the day was over military bulldozers had razed 27 houses in the area, leaving only 17. Now the shepherds live with their children in white tents donated by the Red Cross.

Two men, their wrinkled faces disclosing decades of shepherding under the blazing, wilderness sun, hold the carefully folded photocopy of their family's deed to this property. Signed by an official of the Ottoman Empire, it is dated 1818.

Another man explains how his great-great-grandparents bought this land with sheep and flour. He, too, displays a document, the copy of a topographical map his family presented to Israeli authorities when applying for a building permit. Frustrated by repeated denials, the family finally built a crude shelter. But now even that has been destroyed by the Israeli army.

"This is our land," the man says. "We don't have anywhere else to go. [Even] if they slaughter us in here," he says, turning to look at his sheep, "we will not leave."

IT IS 4 P.M. ON A WORKING DAY, and the line of cars and buses stretches two-and-a-half, maybe three miles toward the incongruous, arching sign that says, in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, "Welcome to Gaza." Israeli soldiers stop and search every car coming into this squalid place, and some weary workers will wait as long as five hours to get through the military checkpoint and back to their crowded, refugee-camp homes.

Like more than 108,000 other Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, these laborers go to work inside Israel every day but cannot stay there overnight without special permission. Most of them work in agriculture and construction, earning about half the pay of their Israeli counterparts. The Israeli government deducts from Palestinian paychecks about 30 percent of their wages for employment-related taxes, but Palestinian workers receive no benefits. Since 1970, this has totaled more than $800 million in deducted Palestinian employment taxes that has not been paid to Palestinian workers in social security benefits.

The Israeli government also collects income taxes, business taxes, value-added (sales) taxes, and license and permit fees from Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Since the occupation began, Israel has collected more than $800 million in taxes from the territories, more than twice as much as it has spent there.

The occupation fosters an economic co-dependence that has forced Palestinians in the territories to rely on Israel for jobs and products, while basing much of the Israeli economy on cheap Palestinian labor, tax revenues, and markets. The territories have been Israel's second largest export market (after the United States), providing Israel with more than $1 billion a year in export earnings, or 10 percent of Israel's total exports.

BECAUSE THESE ECONOMIC aspects of the occupation are no less oppressive for Palestinians than omnipresent Israeli soldiers and restrictive, anti-Palestinian laws, intifada leaders have adopted boycotts, strikes, and tax resistance as key strategies. A Palestinian boycott of Israeli products has resulted in a 50 percent drop in Israeli exports to the Occupied Territories. Tourism, one of Israel's biggest businesses, has dropped more than 65 percent since the intifada began. According to the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv, the direct and indirect financial costs of the intifada to the Israeli government totaled about $2 billion in the uprising's first year.

Like clockwork, Palestinian shopkeepers all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip bang their metal shutters closed at noon every day. The short day is a hardship for both Palestinian business owners and shoppers, but the Unified National Command of the Uprising has determined that, after noon, Palestinians will not do business. Within minutes, once busy streets are deserted.

The Unified Command communicates instructions and information about the intifada on hand-delivered leaflets that, copied and passed on, somehow reach 1.7 million Palestinians. On days designated by the leadership as general strikes, Palestinian shops do not open at all, transportation in the territories stops, and Palestinians who normally work inside Israel stay home.

In the middle-class Palestinian village of Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem, residents have simply stopped paying their taxes to Israel. In response, Israeli authorities have closed local businesses, confiscated residents' identity cards, searched houses, and imposed long curfews. In July, Beit Sahur was placed under curfew for two weeks. Residents were forbidden to leave their houses and their phone lines were cut, but they were well-prepared. Local popular committees had started raising chickens and vegetables and stockpiling staples and, though unable to get to the market, families had enough to eat.

In November, Beit Sahur residents still were not paying their taxes. Walking past the town high school, which the Israeli army has closed and converted into an army barracks and command post, one notices that the adjacent parking lot is filled with cars. "Two weeks ago the army set up a checkpoint to stop people who don't pay taxes," explains a town resident. "The soldiers took their cars and locked them up."

In Beit Sahur, as in many Palestinian villages and towns, the intifada is as much a test of wills as an exchange of stones and bullets. Residents persist in plastering buildings and walls with pictures of the town's martyrs, who include 17-year-old Edmon Ganem, killed in July when Israeli soldiers dropped a rock on his head from a five-story building. Such incidents have only strengthened the resolve of Beit Sahur residents not to pay their taxes. But Israeli officials are determined to break their resistance, through punishment, beatings, and simple harassment.

At 10 p.m. most residents of Beit Sahur have gone to sleep. Their houses are dark. But Israeli soldiers do not sleep yet. Driving in military jeeps and trucks through the deserted streets of Beit Sahur, the soldiers aim powerful searchlights into one dark window, then another, proceeding down the block. A young Palestinian woman shakes her head and forces a weak smile for her house guests. It is another night in Beit Sahur.

DRIVING INTO GAZA'S JABALYA REFUGEE camp, the words of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) director were still ringing in our ears when the first evidence of tear gas burned our noses. "You have to recognize that by putting troops into a community situation you will have problems," Zecharaiah Backer, a Norwegian, had said.

A burning tire blocked the street and, through the smoke, we could see four teenaged boys running. Behind them, Israeli soldiers gave chase in a jeep. "Troops are trained to attack. You always need more discipline not to shoot than to shoot," Backer had said. "They are putting soldiers in situations they're not trained for." Scattered all over the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, scores of Israeli army bivouacs remind Palestinians, some of whom have been "refugees" for 40 years, who is in charge.

Crying, a young woman wearing traditional Arab dress and veil walked into Jabalya's primitive UNRWA clinic, her left eye cut and swollen. A soldier had hit her, she said. She didn't know why. The doctor, relieved for a change to see such a minor injury, took the woman aside and began stitching her eye.

Five doctors and 15 nurses staff this clinic for a total of 12 hours a day, still not long enough to meet the health needs of 74,000 Jabalya residents. Thousands of children and other camp residents suffer from malnutrition or gastrointestinal disease, usually contracted from the tons of raw sewage that flow down dusty, crowded alleys and streets before finally reaching the camp's open sewer, a foul, noxious pit the size of a football field.

Under the best of circumstances, this and other UNRWA clinics can provide only the most basic health care--immunizations, first aid, aspirin, and some antibiotics. But intifada casualties have forced every clinic in the Occupied Territories to function as an emergency room; the intifada has transformed every hospital into a pediatric ward or an intensive care unit.

In January 1988, Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Israel would supplement its long-standing "iron fist" policy with "force, power, and blows" to quell the uprising. Since that time, and after the introduction of various forms of "non-lethal" ammunition, both injury and death rates have increased dramatically. December 1988, the intifada's 13th month, was the bloodiest yet.

Hospitals are filled with patients suffering from gunshot wounds, broken bones and other injuries sustained from beatings, and the ill-effects of tear gas inhalation. In Gaza, 58 percent of those suffering intifada casualties are 15 years old or younger. Gaza City's Ahli Hospital, an old 65-bed facility run by the Anglican Church, received more than 2,000 casualties in the first 11 months of the intifada.

The Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights group reported in March 1988 an "uncontrolled epidemic of violence by soldiers and police in the West Bank and Gaza Strip .... The application of force is both indiscriminate in choice of victim and particular in consequence, suggesting an attempt to inflict maximum damage while minimizing the risk of death .... The violence is not only producing injuries with serious short-term consequences. It is steadily creating a cohort of patients with serious long-term orthopedic, neurological, and neuropsychiatric injuries."

Physicians for Social Responsibility and Amnesty International have also reported Israeli army attacks on hospitals, clinics, ambulances, and doctors. Medical personnel often risk arrest and detention for publicly assisting the victims of army violence, but they are not deterred. "If they put me in jail for 20 years," says a nurse in Jabalya, "I will not let my people bleed to death."

'THE SOLDIERS CAME TO MY home about midnight. They didn't find my brother, so they took me. They took me to Dhahriyya [a military prison]. For the first 10 days every day from 5 a.m. until midnight they made me stand outside in the rain with only a thin undershirt on.

"I had to stand with my feet together. I had plastic handcuffs. I was blindfolded, and had to keep my head down. If I moved, they beat me. About every five minutes they came by and beat on me, especially in the stomach.

"When they called my number for interrogation, they took me inside a room. I sat on a stool in a room full of soldiers. One soldier put his boot on my genitals. If I answered 'no,' I would get it. They also beat me in the ears, until I couldn't hear anymore.

"They put us in a room, 6-by-4 meters. There were 40 people in the room. We took turns sleeping .... Sometimes they put you in a very hot room and poured cold water over your head.

"There is much I don't want to say because I don't want to remember .... After 18 days of this they said they didn't have anything on me, and they told me to go."

The prison experience of 24-year-old Nabil is not unusual. Since 1967 more than 400,000 Palestinians--one-fourth of the current Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories--have passed through Israel's military prisons, many of them held for months without charge or trial. During the intifada, more than 20,000--some human rights groups say the number is closer to 30,000--have been arrested.

In early December, at least 5,000 arrested Palestinians were being held in military detention centers or schools, and more than 1,500 of those were being held under "administrative detention" orders, which permit their imprisonment for up to six months without charge.

Israeli prisons are filled with Palestinian union members, student council leaders, journalists, stone throwers, and children. Palestinians can be sentenced to five years in prison for committing such "Hostile Terrorist Acts" as carrying a Palestinian flag, yelling "PLO," writing Palestinian graffiti, singing the national Palestinian song, burning a tire, wearing Palestinian colors (green, red, black, and white), possessing nationalist literature, and giving the "V" for victory sign. Membership in education, health, and other popular committees, which were outlawed last September, carries a prison term of up to 10 years.

According to Fateh Azzam of al-Haq, the human rights organization in the West Bank, Israel has issued some 1,200 military orders since 1967. But during the intifada, military commanders have issued as many as 20 new military orders a day. "They go by feelings now," says an attorney in Gaza. "The real law is the gun."

In a March 1988 statement to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International reported that, "Members of the [Israeli] armed forces have carried out arbitrary arrests without warrants and without telling people why they were being arrested .... [There have been] reports of mass arrests .... Defendants [are] denied basic rights in summary trials .... [We heard] reports of ill-treatment and torture of detainees ..., including hoodings; beatings on testicles and soles of feet; being hung by rope; exposure to cold air; prolonged sleep deprivation, etc."

More than 2,000 Palestinians are held in Ansar III prison, a new Israeli detention center of makeshift tents in the hostile Negev Desert. The New York-based Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights reported in December that Ansar III violates international law and should be closed.

A 31-year-old journalist recently released from six months' administrative detention in Ansar III, called "the camp of slow death" by detainees, tells of extreme conditions of heat and cold, collective punishment, forced labor, horrible food, snakes, and forced exposure to sun and cold for prolonged periods.

But the intifada struggle continues in prison, the journalist says. Detainees conduct hunger strikes, write and smuggle political letters to the outside world, and choose to disobey the orders of their Israeli captors. "If you do everything they say, you can't live," he says.

PALESTINIANS ARE NOT THE only people who want Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to end. The intifada, if anything, has further polarized Israeli society. While almost 39 percent of Israelis who responded to a recent poll said they do not view Palestinians as people with their own rights, and another 16.8 percent answered that "this depends on which rights are at stake," many Israeli citizens do support self-determination and independence for Palestinians in the territories.

The Israeli peace movement is growing in both numbers and depth. Of the approximately 90 Israeli peace groups, Israelis say only 15 to 25 are very active, and most of them are quite small. But some groups have escalated their resistance to their government's policies by demonstrating and practicing civil disobedience. Some groups are also working to foster reconciliation and to build solidarity between Israelis and Palestinians.

"We want to totally separate ourselves from the occupation," says Edit Doron of the peace group The 21st Year. "The occupation has made Israel a non-democracy." The 21st Year conducts public education campaigns, boycotts products from Israeli settlements, and has recently started a "Witnesses for Occupation" project, which takes small groups of Israeli Jews into Palestinian villages and towns in the territories so they can learn what the occupation is about. "Many people in Israel don't realize what kind of repression it takes to maintain this occupation," Doron says.

Other peace groups include the largest, Peace Now, which has started a "Talk with the PLO Now" campaign in Jerusalem; Women in Black, which conducts weekly vigils in West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa; End the Occupation; Israelis by Choice; Women Against the Occupation; the Beita Committee, which provides material and legal support for residents of the Palestinian village of Beita; the religious peace group Oz veShalom (see '"Life Is Holier Than Land,'" page 18); and Yesh G'vul ("There Is a Limit").

Yesh G'vul, a group for military resisters formed during Israel's war against Lebanon in 1982, has seen its membership surge during the intifada, when the annual requirement for military reserve duty has doubled from 30 to 62 days. "The intifada is a different situation," says member Jeremy Migrom. "No one was trained to repress civilians."

Last June more than 450 Israeli army reservists signed a Yesh G'vul newspaper advertisement saying they would not serve in the territories. Already more than 30 army reservists have served jail terms of 30 days or longer for their refusal to serve in the territories.

IT IS HARD TO SAY EXACTLY when or where the intifada road began. But both Jews and Palestinians, Israelis and refugees, had started down the intifada road long before it reached Gaza in December 1987. The intifada road, or its prototype, might well have begun in Auschwitz or Buchenwald. The Nazis, as well as the British, certainly contributed to the road that passed through ravaged Palestinian villages, impoverished refugee camps, and firebombed Israeli buses on its way to Gaza, Sa'ir, and Beita.

Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, offers a glimpse into the tragic cycles of unspeakable violence committed by one people against another. Built on land formerly belonging to the destroyed Palestinian village of Ein Kerem, Yad Vashem displays the graphic record of Nazi atrocities against European Jews, and of the world's failure to respond.

"Jewish property was confiscated; their food rations were cut drastically; freedom to move from place to place was restricted; they were humiliated as Jews and as human beings; synagogues were set fire to; educational welfare organizations were closed down; on any and every pretext Jews were killed singly and collectively; Nazis set up ghettoes isolating the Jewish population behind walls and barbed wire ... and the gates of the world were sealed ...."

The sins of one generation are visited upon the next. "The Germans did that to the Jews in World War II, not the Palestinians," says a Palestinian woman in Kalandia refugee camp, expressing a common Palestinian sentiment. "So why must Palestinians pay the price? They break the bones of our children .... When I was a child, we played together with the Jews. We did everything together. Then the world pressure started, and they came to our house and threw us out."

"I hope Israel will wake up to the oppression," says Rev. Riah Abu El-Assal, Arab Israeli rector of the Anglican church in Nazareth. "The sad fact is that the oppressed of yesterday have become the oppressors of today."

"We received the Jews as our co-persecuted brothers," says Rev. Elias Chacour, another Palestinian Israeli. "Why did they become our persecutors? We are the co-persecuted people, and the tragedy is that the two are now persecuting each other."

INSHALLAH, MEANING "GOD WILLING," is a common Arabic phrase. An expression of both hope and faith, it is used regularly in personal and political conversation. A son will be released from prison. "Inshallah." Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Muslims, will live together in peace. "Inshallah." Palestinians will have their own state. "Inshallah."

But Palestinians do not hope only in God; they do not simply wait for Allah to provide for them. Palestinians also hope and trust in their own perseverance, the goodness of the Israeli people, and the leadership of the United States. The intifada leadership printed two leaflets in Hebrew last year and distributed them to Israeli soldiers, explaining that the intifada was not directed against them personally but was simply working for the rights of Palestinians.

"There is always the possibility of peace if there is good will. From our side we are ready," says a young Palestinian man. "Nobody is going to throw anybody anywhere," says Elias Jabbour, vice mayor of the Arab town of Shefar-am in Israel. "In the end the real fact is that we are going to live together. In the long run, Jews will stand up against their system and say, 'No more.' Inshallah."

Meanwhile, the intifada road rolls on, perhaps to Palestine. In Bethlehem scores of Israeli soldiers clad in riot gear patrol Manger Square every day. Standing in the shadows of the Church of the Nativity and the town mosque, two Palestinian brothers, both recently married, share their own plans for the intifada journey.

The first man and his wife will wait three or four years to have children--"so they will have their own state." But his brother and his wife do not want to wait. They will have "intifada babies."

"What I really want," the brother says, "is to teach my children to love. Palestinians and Jews should teach their children to love each other, not to hate. That is how it should be. Inshallah."

Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.