Word: shabab
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...Adel, 19, is a veteran of the streets. At 16 he joined the Shabiba, an illegal P.L.O.-affiliated youth group, and later he led a protest strike and was jailed twice. When the intifadeh caught fire, he moved to the front line of the shabab, the young militants who keep the rebellion alight. Last winter the Israeli authorities threatened to demolish his family's home if he did not turn himself in. He complied and spent 8 1/2 months under administrative detention. At one point, he and two of his brothers shared a tent in the harsh desert camp...
...first, the uprising was a spontaneous outburst of angry young men, known locally as the shabab (an Arabic word loosely translated as "guys"), driven not by leaders but by the bitter frustration of 20 years of Israeli rule. As the uprising gained momentum, the established Palestinian political factions inside the territories belatedly sought control. In late January these familiar elements started to convert the spontaneous violence into a permanent, organized struggle for control of the territories. Temporarily burying their longtime rivalries, local members of the factions -- Arafat's Fatah as well as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine...
...checked kaffiyeh from his head as he began talking. He was fresh out of jail, having served 14 days for throwing a tear-gas canister back at Israeli soldiers. "The army is the provocation," he said. "The fact that they come into our camp is enough so that the shabab react by throwing stones." Osama admitted to being a provocateur. "Since he was a kid, he has belonged to the profession of stone thrower," said his friend Tarek Ali, 18, with some reverence...
...used to ward off Israel's punitive measures: onions for the eyes, lemons for the stomach to counter the effect of tear gas. There is no remedy for the rubber bullets, which burn the skin and sometimes break bones. The day before, Osama noted, soldiers threw rocks at the shabab from their helicopters. When it gets too rough, he said, "we run away for a while, then get together again to wait for the next time...
Israeli military authorities have found to their dismay that they cannot stop the rioting of the shabab by cutting off its head. The youth movement is so fluid that the arrest of some 2,000 "leaders" of the uprising seems to have had little effect. There are now some 6,500 soldiers in the occupied territories, five times the number on the ground when the unrest broke out in early December. "We can go on like this for a long time," says army Chief of Staff Dan Shomron. "But I know very well that the influence on the forces...