Democratic Palestine : 28 (ص 26)
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- Democratic Palestine : 28 (ص 26)
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tional conference, with the Palestinians
participating in a joint Jordanian
delegation.
On the other hand, efforts to merge
the Citizens Rights Movement and
Mapam failed, but the two agreed on
electoral coordination. These parties
call for Israeli withdrawal from the
(1967) occupied territories lest ‘Israel’
become a binational state.
ISRAELI PROTEST
Beyond the realm of official party
politics, there have been a series of
protests against Israeli brutality in the
territories. Peace Now and Down with
the Occupation organized the biggest
demonstrations in ‘Israel’ since the
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. On
December 19th, 3,000 marched in Tel
Aviv in protest of the government’s
measures in the occupied territories.
Again in Tel Aviv, during the seventh
week of the uprising, 100,000 Israelis -
demonstrated in support of a political
solution. On March 12th, in Tel Aviv,
100,000 Israelis marched, demanding
Israeli withdrawal from the (1967) oc-
cupied territories. Peace Now leader
Tzali Rashiv delivered a speech, em-
phasizing that peace could not be
established between occupier and oc-
cupied, but between two equals.
Since December, there has a been a
wave of smaller-scale protests as well,
some of them _ expressing direct
solidarity with the Palestinians under
siege. Another significant expression of
dissent was the statement, signed by
over 600 Israeli academics, including
the former president of the Hebrew
University, expressing grave concern
about the future of ‘Israel’. According
to the Jerusalem Post, February 2nd,
these academics have joined in a cam-
paign to end the Israeli occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and are
working to spread the campaign to all
the Israeli universities.
Perhaps the most important dissent
was that which emerged among
soldiers. By the third week of the
Palestinian uprising, over 160 reservists
and new draftees had refused to serve in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is
a Limit, the movement that emerged
among soldiers during the 1982 Israeli
invasion of Lebanon, distributed a
statement declaring that they would not
26
be «blind weapons in anyone’s hand.»
Israeli soldiers were called upon to
desist from participation in repression.
The statement noted that twenty years
of occupation and repression had not
stopped the Palestinians from strugg]-
ing, and that the uprising had exposed
the high price extracted by the occupa-
tion and the absence of a political solu-
tion.
By this time, there were more Israeli
soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip than at the time of their capture in
1967. Zeev Schiff, foremost Israeli
commentator on military affairs, told
Newsweek magazine (February 8th
edition), that Israeli soldiers are «con-
fused and frustrated... doing
demoralizing police work, confronting
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women and children.» He characterized
the Israeli army’s performance during
the uprising as a failure: «Despite the
great military might we’ve built up over
the past 40 years... the IDF has been a
powerless giant in the face of this
uprising... events of the last few weeks
have written the darkest chapter in the
history of our military forces... Worst
of all, by stooping to indiscriminate
beating of hundreds of people, it
widened the cycle of Arab-Israeli
hostility and violated moral borders
that should never have been crossed.»
In the same interview, Schiff
castigated the Israeli intelligence ser-
vice’s failure to predict the uprising as
«even worse than their failure to
foresee the 1973. Yom Kippur war. At - هو جزء من
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