An Intifadeh Of the Soul

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The Zionist idea was so powerful, it has been said, that it created not one nation but two. The Palestinian existence since 1948 has been one long, surreal search for that nationhood. As the Palestinian American author Edward Said has written, "Their story cannot be told smoothly." The Palestinians, in any case, are diverse. Like any people, they have many stories.

THE MADMAN'S VICTIM'S TALE

There is not a Palestinian anywhere who believes that the killings at Rishon Le-Zion, south of Tel Aviv, on May 20 were the work of a madman lost in some apolitical lunacy. Conversely, every Israeli probably believes that the man held responsible, Ami Popper, 21, an Israeli soldier dismissed from the army as being unsuitable for military service, was exactly that: an isolated crazy.

The seven laborers killed by Popper came from Gaza towns and refugee camps. One of the dead, 35-year-old Youssef Abu Dakka, traveled each day to work as a laborer building houses in Israel. Now, in the bright midday sun of the courtyard of his house, the family gathers to receive official sympathizers. The victim's mother, her sharp bird's eyes silently following everything, sits on a sheepskin in a shadowed corner. The father, Ibrahim Abu Dakka, has a ceremonial place among the encircling men. A leader of the Gaza Laborers' Union, a man of swelling gravitas, delivers a harangue about the son's unforgettable martyrdom.

Jamal Abu Dakka, 28, Youssef's brother-in-law, who was there at the shootings, tells what happened. At 6 in the morning, the laborers were driving in a Peugeot 504 toward work in Rishon Le-Zion. A man dressed in an Israeli army uniform waved their car down. He told the laborers to get out but to leave the car's engine running. He ordered the six men in the car to join other Palestinians sitting on the ground, and asked in Hebrew, "Do you know why you are here?" The men said no. The Israeli said, "Better for you not to know." Then he opened fire with a Galil assault rifle, killing seven of the laborers and wounding eleven. He jumped into the Peugeot and drove away.

The killings on "Black Sunday" blew fresh rage into the uprising. The territories rioted for three days; 14 more Palestinians died and an additional 800 were wounded.

EVERYBODY COMES TO RICK'S

On the road outside the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, a bus is burning. A Molotov cocktail sailed out of the dusk moments ago and burst into bright wild blossom. Presently the flames subside, and the bus is reduced to an abandoned black shell, like that of a hermit crab on the beach.

The American Colony is the Rick's Cafe Americain of East Jerusalem, a place where journalists, diplomats, scholars and P.L.O. contacts meet. The hotel's basement bar is a rock-walled grotto, a honeycomb of whisperings. In an upstairs salon called the Pasha's Room, Mohammed, a leader of the Palestinian popular committee in Bethlehem, explains how it came to pass that 40 years ago he was born in a cave.