Israeli officials explore non‑lethal crowd‑control technologies during early intifada

generally civil, and often friendly contacts, Israelis had with Palestinians at the time. The local population had, after all, been under other occupation powers before 1967: Jordan in the West Bank, and Egypt in Gaza. Assuming our administration was less onerous, most Israelis believed a way to coexist could be found. And that sooner or later, there would be a land-for-peace agreement and we would withdraw from at least most of the territory. But as the years passed, with no sign of a willingness by the PLO to consider any kind of peace talks, we made the cardinal error of assuming the occupation was sustainable. Yes, there might be periods of violence, but nothing that a combination of political resolve, arrests, detention and, where necessary, military force could not hold in check. For us, and certainly for me, the Palestinians became essentially a security issue. As one of Israel’s finest novelists, David Grossman, would lay bare in a bestselling book of reportage called The Yellow Wind, about a year into the intifada, we had ceased to see the human effects of 20 years of occupation, not only on the Palestinians but on Israeli society as well. Yet the power of Professor Shamir’s presentation lay not so much 1n its novelty as its succinctness, clarity and, above all, its timing. The rioting had already gone on for longer than any of us had expected. It seemed to be gathering strength. But until our meeting, we were still looking at it essentially as a civil disturbance. 7hat was what began to change, for all of us. What didn’t change was the need to try to bring the violence to an end. Dan immediately put me in charge of looking for alternatives to live ammunition. I began with our own research and development engineers. We also asked military attachés in our embassies to talk to law-enforcement agencies, academics, or anyone else with knowledge of non-lethal methods of crowd control overseas. Some of the more far-flung examples seemed promising, at least until further investigation. South Korea had years of experience in confronting student protests — generally, though not always, managing to avoid fatalities. But it turned out this typically involved sending in serried rows of up to 25,000 riot police against a few thousand campus protesters. Besides the fact we’d have needed an army the size of the Americans’ to field enough soldiers, it was absurd to imagine dealing with dozens of far-flung confrontations on any given day with parade-ground formations of troops. We looked at anything that seemed it might work. In the early stages, most of the attacks involved rocks and bottles. Our R&D engineers developed a Jeep- mounted “gravel gun” that fired stones at a distance of up to 250 feet. They could cause injuries, but weren’t lethal. We acquired launchers for pepper spray 228 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028076