Word: palestinians
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...pounded indignantly on the car in Gaza. He banged on it with a sort of symbolic fierceness. There was no murder in the eyes -- they were too innocent for that -- but there was something more difficult to know, a dreamy glaze, an enamel of unseeing. He and the other Palestinians, none older than 15 or so, came round and pounded on the car with fists. Their indignation was furious, but also a sort of abstraction, and mixed in it a fierce atmosphere of carnival, an electricity of freedom and breaking loose -- up out of nonentity into entity, a violent flowering...
...Palestinian and Jew, memory is a profound influence, a medium of hope, but something else as well. Each has felt the passionate ache of nostalgia for the same land. In the circumstances, memory is sometimes a fanatic and a poison. Observant Jews believe God gave Abraham title to the land of Israel sometime in the Bronze Age. The Book of Genesis declares, ''The Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.'' The more secular deed, in modern times, was the Balfour...
...protect the dream from the discrepancy. History, religion, politics, ethics -- everything made sense except geography. The moral and material backing for Israel has always come primarily from the West. But the state itself was built in the overwhelmingly Arab, Islamic Levant. The creation of Israel dispersed another people, the Palestinian Arabs. At the moment of its birth, Israel was fighting for its life. The neighboring Arab states tried to annihilate the alien creation in its midst. At the end of the War of Independence in 1948, the Israelis held a C-shaped majority of the land that ran from Galilee...
...essentially political reasons, not because its immediate survival was at stake but as part of a larger design to alter the distributions of power in the region. The business of peacemaking fell into disrepair. Ultimately, last December, the Israelis' repressive hand in the occupied territories stirred the Palestinians to their current fury of rebellion. Last week what the Palestinians call the intifadeh (uprising) proceeded, and the peace process did not. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir returned home from a nine-day visit to the U.S., in which he had resisted the American proposal for an international peace conference. Shamir's supporters...
...Still, as Israel turns 40, it seems unhappy, agitated and exhausting. The idealistic founding energies have matured into certain disillusions of middle age. The moral discrepancy in the original ideal has come home to roost. Israel's political leadership is divided and essentially stagnant, taken by surprise by the Palestinian uprising, paralyzed by the dilemma of the territories. Public opinion is splintered between hard-liners who want to keep all the land and those willing to take the chance of giving some of it up for peace. On neither side, in Israel, is the matter as theoretical as it might...