If the aims of the Palestinians are a state on the West Bank and Gaza, a presence in Jerusalem, and peaceful coexistence with Israel, why have they taken in such numbers, with such ferocity, and at the cost of so many lives, to the streets that soon would have been theirs absolutely? Why have they unleashed anguished and accusatory rhetoric sufficient to whip up not one but half a dozen wars? Why do they speak of war at all when they were at the cusp of getting virtually everything Bill Clinton thought they wanted?
The answer is not they are inexplicably self-destructive and lack self-control, for they are constant, purposeful, and often well disciplined. It is not that they had no other choice after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount with an escort of 1,000 police. These precincts have known Islamic administration and Israeli sovereignty since June 1967. The visit was intensely provocative but also brief. Had the Palestinians done nothing, such actions in the very near future would have become impossible. Mr. Sharon's presence at a mosque that was intentionally built atop the ruins of Judaism's holiest site (just as, after the recent destruction of Joseph's Tomb a mosque began to rise from its rubble), was intended to illuminate the true and intractable lines of a conflict that the Madeleine Albrights of the world believed had gone away because they had prayed hard and faithfully to Tinker Bell.
Nor is the answer the casualties and suffering sustained by the Palestinians since the beginning of this latest intifada, as much as this may feed it day by day, for the Palestinians initiated the violence knowing from experience that what would follow was more or less a sure thing. They took to the streets initially for the reason they take to the streets day by day. Contrary to the common wisdom, they are so great a distance from their genuine aim that the little way they have moved in its direction seems negligible. Indeed, the "achievement" in which President Clinton has invested most of the foreign-affairs capital of his (and our) past eight years is something the Palestinians are happy to write off for the sake of a speculative gamble to get what they really want. They would rather chance a return to pure occupation than risk that the expedient step they would take as a purely tactical stopgap would be frozen into permanence by the immense powers of the nations th! at would guarantee it.
In short, they are having second thoughts and shaking off the uncomfortable fiction that for years has been the face they have presented to the West. In the Arab world they speak without ambiguity. "Occupied Palestine" means all of Palestine. The "occupied territories" means all the territories of Palestine. Palestine will not coexist with Israel but, rather, will replace it. The West hears these pronouncements but does not register them. What do the Arabs think of this state of hypnosis? What does Yasser Arafat think when the American secretary of state literally runs after him in her heels? Perhaps they react as did Count Ciano, Mussolini's foreign minister, to a 1939 entreaty by Neville Chamberlain, a letter far less abject than Mrs. Albright's lateral grovelings:
[Chamberlain] expresses his concern over the international situation and asks the help of the Duce to establish mutual trust and make certain the continuance of peace. Mussolini will answer after striking at Albania.
In the asymmetrical war the Palestinians pursue to alter the status quo their chief weapon is public opinion, and they are winning. When they began this round it was clear that they had begun it, and public opinion ran against them. But they have turned things around by their steady accumulation of casualties. Even if the rash and daring Palestinians who fall to Israeli bullets have no desire to be martyrs in the religious sense, they serve politically with undeniable effect. The Palestinians' greater loss blurs the fact that they are propelling the conflict and promotes the equation of the two sides that then, death by death, news report by news report, becomes sympathy for whoever suffers most. And in the tides of sympathy it is forgotten that the Palestinians refuse to take yes for an answer because they always have wanted, want now, and will want a yes of far greater magnitude.
Why then doesn't Israel take steps to reduce Palestinian casualties and block the world's tendency to equate one side with the other? That it does not use phalanxes of riot policemen with shields that would protect them from hurled rocks, that it mysteriously forgoes other commonly used crowd- and riot-control measures, is seen of confirmation of the Arab claim that Israel is gratuitously contemptuous of Arab lives. To quote Mahmood Elahi of Ottawa, in a letter to the International Herald Tribune, "You use tear gas and water cannon against rock-throwing youngsters and not rubber-coated steel bullets. If Israel had shown restraint, the present crisis could have been avoided."
Although the Israelis already use a great deal of tear gas, to little effect, and rubber bullets are not rubber-coated steel bullets but rubber with a BB-sized steel center, Mr. Elahi's sentiments might seem to a reasonable person to be unimpeachable. Why not use conventional crowd-control techniques? Amnesty International's Elizabeth Hodgkin, after investigating for six days (perhaps on the seventh she rested), concluded that "there may have been one or two points where Israeli soldiers had the right to return fire because they were fired on, but really there was practically no occasion that we visited that could not have been solved by other policing methods . . . without the loss of life."
This is the crux of it, and why Israel cannot win the battle of public opinion. But to quote an Israeli I interviewed in Paris, "Believe me, we would not want to see one single person hurt. It's not good for us either. It's bad for us." This view is shared by those in authority in the Israeli government. Why then do they not follow Amnesty's recommendations?
Because they cannot. They are not faced with American university students or European Greens with an uncontrollable animus for McDonald's. At the world's insistence, the Palestinians are armed. There are probably 100,000 or more AK-47s in the hands of the police and militia, and countless others stockpiled by civilians and secret organizations, not to mention heavier weapons such as grenade launchers and rockets.
Every day, from the periphery and from within the rock-throwing and gasoline-bomb-tossing crowds, automatic weapons fire is directed at the Israelis, who are thus forced to use small-unit tactics and keep themselves dispersed. The Israelis cannot close with the crowds, using shields and batons, because to do so they would need to concentrate hundreds or perhaps thousands of men in these battles, soldiers who in such antiquated formations would be a vulnerable and irresistible target.
The Israelis cannot deal with the Palestinians as if they were discontented university students, because the Palestinians who fight them on the street are backed by gunmen who daily use their weapons. That is why the horrific toll mounts. And when judging the toll and the reasons for it, it is prudent to keep in mind one incontrovertible fact. For every Palestinian who falls, Israel is weakened and Yasser Arafat gains strength.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. His column appears Tuesdays.
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