Israel's Dilemma

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The protracted and unresolved "Palestine question" has finally come to haunt the state of Israel.

Before 1967 "Palestine" was a geographical expression torn asunder by Israel, Egypt and Jordan. A generation later Palestine embodies a nationalism and community that reawakens troubling questions which an earlier Israeli generation hoped had been settled, or at least indefinitely postponed, on the battlefield.

Israel is now obsessed by this issue. Its liberal culture is threatened by the state's continuing role as an occupier of a foreign people. As a country weary from fighting the first half of a hundred-year war, Israel now finds the Palestine problem to be its principal threat-not only to its external security but to the internal unity of the state.

It took the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza two decades to feel their way toward the self-confidence needed for their intifadeh. That the uprising came from within Palestine should not be surprising, but it embodies a certain paradox. The Arab generation of 1988 has done something that was unimaginable to their earlier zealots: it has adopted as its own model the spirit and strategy of classical Zionism.

Emulating the Zionist nationalist and social revolution of generations before, the Palestinian Arabs under occupation have not only accumulated social, economic and political power, but have also learned and deployed the guerrilla tactics of the Israeli underground in their march toward statehood.

The uprising has succeeded in gaining the sympathies of ever wider circles in the West. Moralism and emotion have served the Palestinians well, as they did the Zionists after World War II. Small boys with rocks have achieved what Yasir Arafat and his oil-rich supporters in the Arab world long failed to provoke: a genuine revolt in the land of Palestine. West Bankers are seeking from Israelis what they never dared to ask for during the 20 years of harsh Jordanian rule from which Israel delivered them in 1967, namely independence.

Israel is struggling now not with the paper tigers of the Arab League whose bellicosity marred Israel's first two decades of statehood. The current struggle is akin to wrestling with a cloud. As a result, the Israeli people are becoming a bewildered and frustrated citizenry. While the Arabs in the present circumstances can stall, Israel must act.