Intifada Showing Signs of Failure, Discontent : Israel: Arabs display unhappiness at mounting physical and economic losses. Infighting is increasing.

IDNA, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — The Arab uprising, which for 31 months has been the focus of the Palestinian quest for independence, is showing signs of disintegrating.

On the surface, the intifada , as the uprising is called in Arabic, continues without significant change: daily commercial strikes, spasms of stone throwing, cat-and-mouse resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If it is not actually winding down, it appears to be entering a new phase. No longer do you hear the triumphant cry that “an independent state is just a stone’s throw away.”

Instead, there are hints of failure, murmurings of discontent at the mounting physical and economic losses. Fingers are being pointed--at the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories and at the Palestine Liberation Organization operating in exile. There are violent factional disputes.

Faisal Husseini, a political leader of the uprising, recently told an Arabic-language newspaper:

“If we don’t control ourselves and unify our ranks, and (instead) allow tribal and factional differences to act up, then we will fail, and the price will be returning to square one.”

This sense of malaise dovetails with new Israeli government policy, which focuses not so much on asserting control at every moment in every town and village as on keeping the revolt at manageable levels. In some instances, the absence of Israeli troops on regular patrols has led to infighting and lawlessness among the Palestinians.

Privately, Arab political leaders talk of the need to refocus the energies of the population. Such is the fragmentation of the underground leadership that it is not clear whether any person or group can take charge. Arrests and dogged pursuit by Israeli troops, who have sometimes targeted and shot down well-known activists in the street, have taken their toll.

“I think that the confidence of the people in the promise of the intifada is being lost,” said Hamdi Farraj, a Palestinian journalist in Bethlehem. “We look for the intifada leadership to come up with new thinking.”

In May, an outpouring of street protests following the shooting of seven Palestinian workers in Rishon Le Zion by a civilian Israeli gunman was seen as a boost of adrenaline for the uprising. Mass demonstrations, combined with an intense army crackdown--21 Palestinians were shot to death--seemed to signal a revival of the uprising.

But the passion of Rishon Le Zion, as it developed, was an exception. Clearly, the Palestinians’ distaste for the occupation had not flagged, but this was not channeled into new tactics. Palestinians quickly returned to sporadic, and sometimes self-destructive, activity.

In Idna, a treeless hill town near Hebron, the uprising has been suspended because of a bloody dispute among families connected with different PLO factions--with the Communist Party and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine on the one hand and with Fatah, the main faction of the PLO, on the other.

Power struggles, religious differences--the Communists and the PFLP are viewed as godless--and family rivalries that predate the uprising are at the heart of the feuding. All this came to a boil in early July, when a Communist activist threw a hand grenade into a group of rivals, killing three youths, including a 13-year-old passer-by.

“All the good done in Idna for the intifada has been obscured by this attack,” an elderly resident said.

Although the Idna feud is the most heated, clashes have been reported elsewhere, mostly between Muslim activists and secular members of the PLO.

In Nablus, the West Bank’s largest city, a row between PLO members and rivals from the Muslim group Hamas turned violent after the PLO group spread rumors that a Muslim was a homosexual. Two PLO youths were stabbed and severely wounded.

At a mosque in Battir, a village near Bethlehem, Koranic books were ripped up, fueling a simmering quarrel. In the Israeli prison camp of Ketziot, Muslim prisoners from Gaza wrote a public letter accusing PLO inmates of abusing them.

For many months of the uprising, as seasoned activists were jailed or killed off, youths ranging in age from the early teens to the mid-20s formed the core of the uprising. Some Palestinians worried that this youthfulness would lead to careless abuses of authority, something already highlighted by the continued assaults on suspected collaborators. Now, this practice may be expanding.

In Bethlehem and Hebron, high school gangs have forced teachers to rig final examinations to ensure that militants pass and get a chance at a college education. These strong-arm tactics are rationalized on the grounds that the students have not had enough time to study in the months since schools were reopened by the Israeli government.

“You can’t just look at the final test,” one student told an interviewer. “You have to look at the past three years. We have been throwing stones, we have been working for our society. We need help.”

A surge of robberies and shakedowns in Bethlehem has created tension between merchants and street activists. In one incident, a teen-ager demanded about $200 from a storekeeper, who refused. The storekeeper appealed to political leaders in Jerusalem for support, and they agreed that he should not pay. Still, the youth returned to the store, with friends, and demanded twice as much money--and got it.

Elias Freij, the mayor of Bethlehem, has complained of a rash of car thefts and break-ins at stores, compounded in his view by Israeli soldiers who are eager to stop demonstrators but uninterested in stopping petty crime. In one case, a municipal car was stolen from a guarded city lot.

“There is no solution,” Freij said, “unless people realize that the intifada requires people to be disciplined. Those who commit crimes are anti-nationalist.”

Generational resentment underlies some of the shakedowns. Younger activists commonly accuse veterans of withholding PLO money and pocketing the funds.

The other day, a reporter visiting Nablus was in a drugstore interviewing Said Kanaan, a PLO contact, when three youths walked in and told Kanaan they were collecting money for a prisoner relief fund. He gave them a few shekels and, after they had gone, said:

“They know there is money going to prisoners, but they ask the merchants anyway. People are fed up with this. Groups use nationalism as a cover to get spending money.”

The intifada has been unable to produce new forms of protest. Large demonstrations and marches rarely take place. Efforts at civil disobedience have failed to attract adherents. Few Palestinians pay attention to leaflets published in the name of the underground leaders, except to note the days set for general strikes.

Because of the uprising’s sagging fortunes, many of the activists are taking a hard look at the situation. They feel that diplomacy--the stalled effort by the Bush Administration to organize Israeli-Palestinian talks--has reached a dead-end. They think Washington’s decision to break off talks with the PLO indicates a failure of moderate diplomacy and has eroded the organization’s credibility.

There are rumblings that the PLO, by taking charge of the uprising after the first few months, helped create a state of paralysis. Residents of the West Bank and Gaza wait passively for outside developments.

“We always felt that the PLO should be our only representative,” an activist in Battir said. “So the inside leadership always deferred to the outside. Maybe we needed a strong, visible inside leadership in case the PLO failed.”

Farraj, the journalist in Bethlehem, said: “When the intifada began, the slogan was ‘No voice speaks louder than the intifada .’ But as the months went on, everything was concentrated on the outside. The PLO did not give local leaders the freedom to do what we wanted. Now, we are in a state of waiting.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli government’s response to the uprising has been evolving, and the present level of the revolt fits into its plans.

Over time, shootings, mass arrests, the demolition of houses, the curtailment of education--universities are still closed, although elementary and high schools have been reopened--and heavy taxation have all contributed to wearing down the revolt. More than 650 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israeli soldiers, and about 20 have been killed by civilian settlers. For their part, the Palestinians have slain more than 230 of their own people suspected of informing or being involved in crimes of vice. Forty-six Israelis have died in violence associated with the uprising.

For most of the last year, the Israeli army focused on putting street leaders out of action. Soldiers were permitted to shoot on sight Palestinians wearing masks. Several cases of targeting and shooting down known activists in the street were brought to light. Arrests and rearrests continued. There are between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinians behind bars.

A new rightist government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir took power in June and committed itself to crushing the revolt. So far, it has shown comparative restraint and is concentrating on keeping stone throwers from disrupting traffic on main West Bank and Gaza roads. As a concession to Israeli settlers, the government is permitting armed vigilante groups to operate.

In June, eight Palestinians died by army gunfire, the lowest monthly total since the uprising began. For the first time, none were killed in Gaza, although a Palestinian teen-ager was electrocuted while trying to hang a flag on a power line.

Israeli observers speak of Defense Minister Moshe Arens’ preference for the carrot rather than the stick. Publicly, Arens wants to encourage Palestinians to get on with their lives and leave the revolt behind. He is talking with traditional groups of “notables” from the West Bank and Gaza, urging them to accept Israeli terms for self-rule.

Arens is also toying with new kinds of punishment that might deter stone throwing and avoid splashy headlines. Among them is banishing rebels from their home towns to other areas and relocating schools from the main roads. The army is recommending that jails be expanded and that the parents of stone throwers be fined.

More often than not, the very presence of soldiers seems to sharply boost the likelihood that violence and injury will occur. After several weeks of calm, the Gaza Strip refugee camp of Rafah erupted in violence Friday when soldiers began patrols after a long absence. Thirty Palestinians were wounded by army fire.

Israeli and Palestinian analysts suggest that the changing Israeli strategy reflects the changed political views of the government. Under the previous coalition government, the Defense Ministry was under the control of Yitzhak Rabin, whose Labor Party favored giving up at least some of the West Bank and Gaza in return for peace. To ensure that the government would be in a strong position to make such a concession, Rabin maintained strong pressure on the Palestinians.

The Likud Party of Shamir and Arens rejects the land-for-peace formula. The Likud government, analysts say, believes it is more important to keep the uprising out of the news, to avoid offending Washington and to avoid building up pressure for talks it has no intention of entering.

BACKGROUND

The intifada began inauspiciously enough, just another incident in a long string of violent incidents in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. On Dec. 9, 1987, an Israeli driving a large truck rammed a van carrying Arab workers from the Gaza Strip to jobs in Israel. Four Arabs died. The rumor spread rapidly throughout Gaza that the crash had been an act of retaliation for the murder of an Israeli shopkeeper in Gaza days before. Arabs began throwing stones at Israeli cars and passers-by.