An Intifadeh Of the Soul

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.