An Intifadeh Of the Soul

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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.