When it comes to the fighting between PALESTINIANS and Israelis, there is one thing almost everyone agrees on: the conflict has been going on too long. The situation in 1990, when stoning and fisticuffs were common, seems almost tame compared with today’s violence.
The glaziers of Jerusalem will be rich if the intifadeh goes on like this. They charge $1,500 to install car windows that are shatter-resistant. People are paying. The Palestinian uprising is 2 1/2 years old. It has hardened into a dreary, bitter ritual. The reciprocal stoning and beating obey Newton’s Third Law of Motion–for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Each side has found its threshold of acceptable suffering and cruelty.
On both sides, the leadership, such as it is, grows more evasive, craven and empty. In a war of victims, no one plays the grownup. Among the Palestinians, effective moral authority now has a median age of 14 or 15 and a good throwing arm. Fathers and grandfathers have signed over their moral duties to the children in the streets. The traditional patriarchy begins to disintegrate…At the birth of Israel 42 years ago, one people crashed back into history, another spilled out of it. For the world’s Jews, 1948 was a miracle after nearly 2,000 years of diaspora. For the Palestinians, the year was what they call al nakba, the disaster.
–TIME, July 23,1990
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