The Middle East Beatings in Place of Bullets

As Israel tries a new tack, negotiations stay on the back burner

The Israelis have tried tear gas, rubber bullets and real ones, mass arrests, imprisonment and deportations. All of those strategies have failed to stop the wave of unrest that has engulfed Israel's occupied territories during the past seven weeks. So last week Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin shifted tactics one more time. From now on, he said, his soldiers would not fire on stone-tossing protesters -- they would beat them up.

In a speech before Labor Party officials in the Knesset, Rabin defended the policy by pointing out that "no demonstrators have died from being thwacked on the head." Israeli troops armed...

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