Israeli army tactics and internal debates during the First Intifada

and tear gas. We even looked at the possibility of dropping nets over crowds of attackers. Very early on, we shifted to using plastic bullets. But even that presented problems. At a distance of a hundred feet or so, they could drastically reduce deaths. But when a young recruit saw hundreds of Palestinians closing in on him, he wasn’t about to take out a tape measure. Over time, we began relying wherever possible on rubber bullets and, in extreme cases, snipers to target the legs of the organizers or ring-leaders. If all of this sounds soul-destroying, that’s because it was. Especially with daily television coverage of the clashes amplifying overseas support for the Palestinians, morale among our soldiers also took a battering. In visits to units on the West Bank and in Gaza, Dan and I, and Rabin too, heard two opposite responses. Some of the young soldiers wanted us to use maximum force. We are the army, they argued. We have the weapons. Why the hell don’t we use them? But we also heard another view, if less often: why are we here at all? We imposed closures and curfews. We made thousands of arrests. Still, hundreds of soldiers and settlers were being injured, a number of them disfigured or disabled. By the end of 1998, the Palestinian death toll was above 300. In February 1989, an Israeli officer was killed by a cement block tossed from a rooftop in Nablus. A month later, a Palestinian knifed several people in Tel Aviv, killing one of them. And in July, in the first attempt inside Israel at a suicide attack, a Palestinian passenger grabbed the wheel of a bus on its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and drove it off the road, killing 16 people. By the summer of 1990, although the violence had begun to flag slightly, I was feeling more drained and exhausted than at any time since my bout of illness in the Sinai after the 1973 war. I even briefly thought of leaving the army after Dan’s term ended the following year. I’m not sure whether I would have done that if the situation had not begun to change. But it did, dramatically. The intifada gradually began to subside, and an entirely new crisis suddenly intervened. On August 2, against a background of longstanding financial and territorial disputes, Iraq’s Sadam Hussein sent in tens of thousands of his troops and occupied the neighboring state of Kuwait. Though the immediate crisis was 229 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028077