World

By Johanna McGeary

Yitzhak, 20, a conscript serving in the Israeli army's elite Givati brigade, has been stationed in the occupied Gaza Strip for nearly seven weeks. Late one night, he recalls, his patrol was directed to "make our presence felt" in a refugee camp by entering houses, dragging all the male occupants outside and beating them severely. "The men screamed in pain," said Yitzhak of the victims. Some soldiers, repelled by their mission, maneuvered to act as cover outside the houses. "No one refused the orders," Yitzhak is quick to point out. But when the mission was over, arguments and even a fistfight broke out between those in the unit who approved of the brutality and those who did not.

Since independence 40 years ago, the Israel Defense Forces have proved a formidable fighting force in five major conflicts and a seemingly endless guerrilla war with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Today, however, the 104,000-strong standing army of the I.D.F. is mired in a different -- and more deeply frustrating -- kind of mission: containing the uprising of 1.4 million Palestinians no longer willing to submit to Israel's 20-year rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That conflict is producing serious moral and emotional problems for many of the 7,000 soldiers on duty in the occupied territories. It is also raising fears among psychologists and army officers that the occupation will cause lasting damage to one of the world's most respected fighting forces -- and Israel's most revered institution. Israel's young soldiers are being asked to shoulder the central burden of the nation: to remain a Jewish democratic state while continuing to occupy the territories by force.

The soldiers face that moral dilemma daily as they struggle to carry out a policy enunciated three weeks ago by Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of using "force, strength and blows" to put down the rioting. Since then Israeli soldiers have wielded boots, batons and rifle butts against hundreds of unarmed Palestinian men, women and children. Israeli officials noted that the policy is far more humane than the earlier approach of using live ammunition against the rioters, which left slightly more than three dozen Palestinians dead. Though the beatings seemed to bring an uneasy calm to the occupied territories, Israel's image in the eyes of the world suffered greatly as civilian injuries mounted.

The beatings have provided only a temporary respite. Last week fresh waves of violence swept over the West Bank and Gaza. For two days the Casbah of Nablus rang with a harsh tattoo as young stick-wielding Palestinian militants pounded on closed shop shutters and metallic junk barricades. Defying a curfew, the youths, armed with slingshots and iron bars, declared the old, walled portion of the West Bank city to be a Palestinian enclave. Forbidden red-black-white-an d-green Palestinian flags waved from the mosques, the gangs controlled the streets, and the army refused to enter.

Overnight, however, heavily reinforced army units retook Nablus. They arrested more than 20 troublemakers and beat countless others. The city and its surrounding refugee camps were placed under a curfew. The violence spread elsewhere, and the army began using bullets once again. Three Palestinians were killed and half a dozen wounded in clashes between troops and stone- throwing protesters in the West Bank village of Anabta.

A few miles away, near Ramallah, a Jewish settler was severely burned by a Molotov cocktail lobbed through his car windshield. Fellow settlers responded by rampaging through Anabta while it was under curfew, smashing windows and wrecking cars before Israeli soldiers ordered them away. In the town of Tulkarm, rumors of further settlers' invasions the next day sparked violent protests that left one Palestinian dead. In Gaza, another died of his wounds, bringing the death toll to 43. Defense Minister Rabin angrily called the settlers a "burden" on hard-pressed security forces. But clashes continued throughout the territories, from remote villages in the north of the West Bank to the cities and camps of Gaza. Reopened only one day, all 800 West Bank schools and universities were recessed indefinitely.

As the violence continues, Israeli soldiers are growing hostile and frustrated. Beset by fatigue, rain and midwinter cold, many say they are fed up with their mission in the territories. "It's a horrible routine," complained one young conscript as he plodded through the daily ritual of forcing striking merchants to open their shops. Slamming up the shutters and using crowbars to crack flimsy padlocks, the soldiers move wearily down the main street of Ramallah every morning through a silent crowd of grinning Arabs. As soon as the unit passes, the shops are quickly shuttered again. The process goes on all day, and many troops wonder why they even bother. "We do what we're told," said one soldier. "We're just puppets on a string."

The soldiers spent their four months of basic training learning to fight enemy armies, not to police occupied lands or control riots. The troops have also labored under a series of ambiguous orders as their bewildered generals struggled to find policies that worked. Though Israeli leaders insist that the soldiers are supposed to open fire only when their lives are endangered and beat Palestinians only when confronted, inexperienced conscripts find it hard to define those conditions precisely. And while military leaders now insist that there was no blanket order to administer indiscriminate beatings, the soldiers in the field and the Palestinians in the hospitals give tangible evidence otherwise. Though some troops are only too eager to inflict pain on an Arab, others recoil from the actual process of breaking limbs and splitting heads. Major General Amram Mitzna, commander of Israel's West Bank forces, acknowledged that his troops are troubled by such duty, and so is he. Said Mitzna: "I don't feel so well when I wake up in the morning."

To deal with such qualms, Israel has in recent weeks sent teams of psychologists into the occupied territories to counsel the troops. In a confidential report being prepared by the army, the psychologists warned of grave long-term trouble for the defense forces if the situation goes on. Says one psychologist: "I predict and I assume that if the phenomenon of soldiers using violence in the territories will go on for a long time, it will cause serious problems."

Eventually, the psychologists caution, the systematic use of violence could breed lack of discipline, poor motivation and ingrained brutality. Many warn that the soldiers will transfer some of their aggressive behavior in the occupied territories to civilian life back home. One senior psychologist says , he already sees symptoms of two contradictory reactions among the soldiers. At one extreme, he says, are those who are "psychically numb," insensitive and undiscriminating in the use of violence. They view beatings and bullets as the primary solutions to problems they face, and are willing to apply those remedies widely. At the other end of the spectrum are soldiers who shrink from the brutal acts they are ordered to perform. Confused over where their loyalties lie, they suffer from nightmares, depression and lack of motivation. Says the psychologist: "They feel trapped between a commitment to our value system and norms of behavior, and a commitment to the army and its orders. Do they obey the call of orders or the call of conscience?"

In an open letter published two weeks ago in Israel's Hebrew-language newspapers, some 500 psychologists and psychiatrists expressed similar concerns about the effect of the occupation on Israel as a whole. "This situation has a horrible influence on the Jewish population," they wrote. "We are busy every day in the act of oppression. We are losing our sensitivity to human suffering, and our children are being brought up on values of discrimination and racism. Our soldiers are put in an impossible situation from a moral point of view."

For the moment, most soldiers are coping relatively well. "If you don't behave as strong as a conqueror, you can't survive there," says a 23-year-old stationed in the West Bank. "You have to cut out thinking, be strong and do nasty things." To those troops who felt humiliated at having to stand by helplessly while Arabs taunted them, the beatings policy has served as a welcome antidote. Army casualties in the occupied territories have been light, but Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanon, attempting to capitalize on the uprising, killed two Israeli soldiers while seeking to attack Jewish settlements in northern Galilee.

Nizan, a 20-year-old in the Golani brigade, finds the beatings policy too weak. "I would have liked to behave in a more brutal way toward them and to really stick it to them," he said. "I'm sure if we pressed them to the wall, people here would start to understand we are the ones who run the show." Shmuel, a self-declared "rightist" who emigrated from France in 1984, agreed: "Three weeks ago, when we used the easy hand on them, it didn't work. The only thing they understand is the strong hand. I thought I could get along with the Arabs, but today I realize that is not possible anymore."

While the tougher tactics have eased frustrations within the ranks, some officers are worried that their troops' skills and discipline are being undermined. "There is a professional problem," says Nimrod, 34, commander of a Golani battalion. "I'm not doing what I'm trained to do. I'm not training soldiers to do what we should be doing." Like his men, Nimrod feels the stress of trying to obey his superiors. "As part of an explicit policy, I explicitly order my men to beat people, to beat them hard," he says. "I accept it because if we don't beat them, we will have to shoot them. But I myself can't beat them. For the first time in my life I give an order, and then I turn my back so I won't see it done." What the army is doing in the territories, says the officer, a fighter in the unaccustomed role of occupier, "is against everything I believe in." That is a dilemma the entire nation must face.

With reporting by Ron Ben-Yishai/Jerusalem