Word: shamir
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These are the candid, plangent voices of Israel's soldiers, angry reservists confronting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir last week in a makeshift encampment outside Nablus, the largest and most turbulent Arab city on the occupied West Bank. Nothing since the 1982 war in Lebanon has eaten into the heart of Israel's most revered institution, the Israel Defense Forces, as the past 14 months of bitter war against children and stones has done. Seemingly impervious to Israel's iron fist, the Palestinian uprising rages on, and that is exacting a price from the I.D.F. measured less in injuries than...
...soldiers, the moral dilemma only deepened as the determined government of Shamir ordered yet another military crackdown. "We will increase the punishment so there is a higher price to pay for throwing stones," explained army Chief of Staff Dan Shomron. A new kind of ammunition has been introduced: a round, rubber-clad metal ball advertised as nonlethal but responsible for nearly half a dozen deaths so far this month. Soldiers are permitted to fire supposedly less lethal plastic bullets more readily, including at the backs of fleeing protesters. Stone throwers can be jailed for five years, their parents fined...
...visibly irate Shamir defended these and all of the other measures the I.D.F. has employed against the uprising by blaming the Palestinians. "They force us to take guns and do things you don't like to do," he told the reservists. "We hate those P.L.O. people because they make us kill Arab children. But you must do that to survive...
...vocal calls for harsher measures come from the Jewish settlers in the territories, who have increasingly become the main target of Palestinian stones. For months the 70,000 settlers, who claim the West Bank as their biblical right, have complained that the army is failing to protect them. When Shamir started to speak at a memorial service this month for two Israeli victims of the intifadeh, mourners yelled, "You are doing nothing!" Nor did the new battle order satisfy the settlers, who have demanded such extreme reprisals as shooting all stone throwers on sight. "For them ((the Palestinians...
Mubarak said that Shamir should not fear that Arab states will gang up on Israel during negotiations. "Frankly speaking," he said, "I wonder why he fears an international conference. It will lead immediately to direct negotiations," as Shamir demands. Shamir is now suggesting he might countenance U.N. sponsorship to launch peace talks, but he remains firmly opposed to any more substantive international participation. In a separate interview in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens explained why. At an international conference, he said, "there's the danger of having pressure applied to you, not by the party with whom you have...