Wise observers seem united in their view that whether or not the Israel-PLO agreement will lead to a stable Arab-Israeli peace hinges mainly on the Palestinians. Can the PLO, in particular PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement, abide by the terms of the Oslo, Washington and Cairo agreements? Can it effectively govern the districts of Jericho and Gaza, decrease terrorist violence emanating from the territories, and win municipal and national elections against rivals uncommitted to the specific terms of the Rabin-Arafat pact?
The signals are mixed. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip gave an enthusiastic response to the PLO policemen who replaced Israeli soldiers there in the spring. The intifada there is officially over. As measured by the killing of "collaborators," intra-Palestinian violence has greatly diminished. But the recent bloody clashes between Muslim militants and Palestinian police pose a severe challenge to Arafat's leadership. Even Fatah stalwarts have been unhappy with his performance. He has interfered with international donor efforts to fund development projects directly, through Palestinian professionals. Despite some improvement, the economic situation in Gaza is still desperate. For every worker allowed to travel and work for eighteen hours a day in Israel (thereby earning, after expenses, an average of $10-$12), there are nine who are refused permission. The continued closure of East Jerusalem is not only a dangerous political embarrassment to Arafat and his supporters. It also imposes heavy economic, social and psychological burdens on West Bank Palestinians.
In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the intifada continues, albeit at a lower level of intensity. Indeed the autonomy granted within the tiny area surrounding Jericho has had little effect on the spirits of most West Bank Palestinians, confronted as they are every day with the Israeli army, large-scale construction in expanded East Jerusalem, and tens of thousands of armed and hostile Israeli settlers. In both Gaza and the West Bank the young intifada leaders and the ex-prisoners rankle at Arafat's dictatorial ways and his refusal to share real power with them. Arafat's rhetoric about jihad, his failure to appoint a fully functioning bureaucracy for the embryonic "National Authority" in Jericho and Gaza, his refusal or inability to guide the PLO toward amending its covenant, as well as the continued attacks by Hamas' military wing and by Islamic Jihad against Israeli soldiers and settlers, keep Israeli opponents of the peace process energized and jeopardize the slender majority that Rabin has over his opponents. The recent bloody attacks by Gaza-based Palestinians in West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and at the Netzarim settlement in Gaza, as well as the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier raised the spectre of Gaza and the West Bank, freed of Israeli rule but transformed into a new Beirut or Kabul: violent, impenetrable havens for terrorists and hostage-takers.
Measuring progress or the likelihood of success by such tokens and events, however, reflects a failure to appreciate the scale of the changes now underway and the inevitability of setbacks, legal untidiness, rhetorical excess, dramatic confrontations and violence. Most important of all, it reflects a failure to appreciate both the scale of the opposition in Israel to the government's policy and the exceedingly cautious strategy Rabin has adopted to deal with this opposition. Understanding the unfolding process of negotiations, reformulations and crises that is in fact, if not in name, the "transition" to a two-state solution, means understanding the effects on Israeli politics of more than two and a half decades of rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
As it pursues settlement of the Israeli Palestinian conflict based on removing Israel from the territories captured in 1967, the Rabin government must untie the Gordian knots binding the country to them. Had this task been undertaken in the late 1960s or early to mid-1970s it would have been difficult, but it would have been an order of magnitude easier than it is today. Just as much to the point, had Yitzhak Rabin negotiated with the PLO when he was prime minister in the 1970s, he would have been able to rely much more heavily than he can today on the discretion, political clout and administrative effectiveness of Yasser Arafat and on the organizational integrity of the PLO.
It may seem unkind to criticize Rabin for moving too timidly or slowly. Compared to the policies of his predecessors, his willingness to negotiate a rather open-ended agreement with the PLO is certainly bold. But compared to other strategies he might have adopted-and still can adopt-Rabin's policies reflect a preference for safety over completeness, of short-term tranquility over long-term stability, and of formulas over substance.
Israel's next election must take place no later than June 1996, and Rabin is of course worried about keeping himself, or at least his party, in office. A right-wing victory would surely put an end to any forward movement in the peace process and probably destroy any hope of a durable settlement for another decade. But the actual imperatives under which Rabin is laboring are much more powerful than the usual concerns of incumbents anxious to protect their political flanks and futures. Indeed the cautiousness of the Rabin government toward the settlement issue, the principle of a Palestinian state, the scope of withdrawal in the West Bank, and the issue of Jerusalem, is molded more powerfully by a desire to protect the Israeli polity from severe disruption than it is by concern about protecting his career, the future success of the Labor party, or specific ''national interests," such as security or water resources. It is in this context of both regime-level and incumbent-level concerns that Rabin has fashioned policies designed to minimize the short-term risks of regime instability by exporting most of the political pain to the Palestinians. Because of the relative weakness of the PLO and of Arafat within it, this represents a dangerous choice. As shown by the real threat of Palestinian civil war in Gaza, it is a choice which puts the peace process at risk and which means that even a "successful" outcome is one likely to be marked by antagonism, violence, illegitimacy and irredentism. In accordance with a kind of historical law of "conservation of suffering and risk," Israeli decisions that protect domestic tranquility in the short term by forcing Palestinians to accept too stringent, delayed and limited a settlement may result in the collapse of the Palestinian side's ability to enforce its end of the agreement and/or generations of difficulties that could be avoided if a shorter, sharper disengagement were implemented, albeit with a somewhat greater risk of disruption within Israel.
Rabin's decision to respond to short-term rather than long-term threats is particularly noteworthy and unfortunate because the balance of power and opinion within the Israeli political class, especially within the military, puts his government in a position to absorb substantially greater political risks than it has shown itself willing to incur. This analysis can be substantiated by comparing the constraints and opportunities bearing upon the Israeli government in 1994 to those which faced British Prime Minister Asquith in 1914, when he attempted (unsuccessfully) to implement Home Rule for all of Ireland, and to those facing Charles de Gaulle from 1959 to 1961, as he confronted settler, right-wing and military opposition to his policy of independence for Algeria. First, however, the basis for making this comparison must be established.
THE ANNEXATIONIST CAMPAIGN AND ITS POLITICAL LEGACY
Even without the devoted efforts of Israeli annexationists, the sheer inertia of Israel's 27-year rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip would have made disengaging from them a challenging political task. But a fervently annexationist camp (including the Likud, the National Religious party, Gush Emunim, and fundamentalist or ultranationalist groups such as Tehiya, Tzomet, Kach and Moledet) did arise in Israel and has waged an energetic, expensive and sustained struggle to bind these territories so tightly to Israel that disengagement would be impossible. In the context of a Zionist movement which had never reached agreement on the acceptability of excluding any part of the Land of Israel from Jewish statehood, and remembering the historically central role which the mountainous regions of "Judea and Samaria" played in the ancient Jewish kingdoms, it would have been amazing if this effort to build the territories captured in the 1967 War into the Jewish state had not substantially reduced the ability of any Israeli government to dispose of them.
The struggle to institutionalize Israeli rule of the "whole Land of Israel" began almost immediately after the Six-Day War, under the direction of (then) Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Prominent elements of this campaign in the first years of the occupation included rearranging the legal system so that Israelis could live in the territories without being subjected to military authority or Jordanian law, opening Israel up to infusions of cheap Palestinian labor, maintaining the territories as "export markets" for Israeli consumer goods, and strictly proscribing all political activity by Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza. Within the greatly expanded municipality of Jerusalem, large Jewish neighborhoods rapidly expanded, accompanied in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a whole by a scattering of approximately 15,000 settlers. Most of these settlements were located within the sparsely populated Jordan Valley, in Gush Etzion (where Jews had lived before 1948), and in a few sensitive places such as Sebastiya and Hebron, where Gush Emunim had squatted and been allowed to remain by governments fearful of the consequences of removing them.
Before 1977, however, the annexationist intent of these policies was masked by substantial support within the Labor party for territorial compromise and by Dayan's own ambivalence. While he believed it was necessary to "create facts" that would prevent any non-Israeli state from taking effective political control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he did not want to officially rule out Israeli withdrawal from the areas. To do so would have removed the rationale for Arabs under his rule to avoid political activity, hoping that their own prudence and help from the outside would somehow, someday bring an end to the occupation. Nor did Dayan wish to absorb Arabs living in the territories by making them Israeli citizens. The result of Dayan's ambivalence, his clout within the Labor party, and the hawkishness of Labor's main coalition partner, the National Religious party, was a policy of "deciding not to decide."
From 1977 to 1992 the Likud and its annexationist allies controlled successive Israeli governments. Apart from 1984-86, when Shimon Peres was prime minister in a Labor-Likud coalition, these governments pursued, as their central and overriding objective, the permanent absorption of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Both Begin and Shamir knew that most Israelis did not share their view of the cardinal importance of Jewish sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel and that the time was not ripe to actually implement sovereign claims. Instead they sought to achieve de-facto annexation by intensifying Dayan's strategy of faits accomplis and by utilizing the economic resources of the state to induce tens of thousands of Jews to settle in densely populated areas of the West Bank, areas that advocates of territorial compromise had always anticipated would be returned to Arab rule.
The actual political objective of settlement and other annexation-oriented policies was to create conditions wherein future Israeli leaders who might want to withdraw from the territories and who might have the legal right to do so would be dissuaded from trying by the scale of the political upheaval they might imagine could result from decisive movement toward withdrawal. Labor governments had rejected negotiating initiatives by West Bank notables in the late 1960s, King Hussein in 1972 and Henry Kissinger in 1975-76 because of a fear of unravelling the Labor party or the coalitions it headed. The Likud's ambition, however, was to create so tight and pervasive a set of connections between Israel and the territories that any future government wishing to withdraw would not only face losing its coalition majority, but also feel itself having to risk riots in the streets, challenges to the legitimacy and authority of the regime, and even violent clashes among Jews over the "betrayal" of Zionism.
ISRAEL CROSSES THE REGIME THRESHOLD
When reversing a policy means paying "regime-level" costs as well as "incumbent-level" costs, the challenge facing the government is an order of magnitude more difficult than when reversing the policy only entailed risking incumbent-level interests, i.e., careers and coalitions. This kind of change is best thought of in terms of a threshold. The crossing of this threshold makes reversal of the policy an order of magnitude more difficult than it would have been had the threshold not been crossed. I call this point the "regime threshold," when the scale of expected dislocation changes from fluctuations in the identity of incumbents or the complexion of governing coalitions to include threats to the authority and stability of the rules governing political competition.
The regime threshold is the point at which elites contemplating a change in policy no longer make calculations only about the wisdom of the changes or the consequences of the new policy for their careers or for the health of their parties and their governing coalition. The regime threshold has been crossed when to those considerations are added calculations about the effect of policy options on the integrity of the institutional order which regulates political competition and establishes the authoritativeness of "legal" decisions. Once both incumbent-level and regime-level factors are in play, policies under consideration have become an order of magnitude more difficult to change. Solving a problem which has been embedded in the body politic at the level of the regime requires "re-scaling" it, stripping it of its regime threatening characteristics before proceeding with the implementation of actual policy.
In Israel with respect to the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the regime threshold was crossed in 1982-84. Indeed Yitzhak Rabin's Labor government in the mid-1970s was the last Israeli Cabinet, oriented toward territorial compromise, that could contemplate such policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without calculating their implications for the stability and legitimacy of the legal-political order. The next Labor prime minister was Shimon Peres, who headed the first Labor-Likud national unity government from 1984 to 1986. As with Rabin ten years earlier, Peres's efforts to achieve a land-for-peace deal with Jordan and the Palestinians were hamstrung by the incumbent-level difficulties of securing a supportive majority of Knesset members. But when, in 1985, Peres's efforts did appear to be making progress, public debate and private calculation expanded to reflect the fact that a winning coalition within the Knesset could no longer be considered sufficient to justify or sustain such a policy. It became clear that threats of illegal and violent challenges to the legitimacy of governmental authority would also have to be mastered.1
This substantial shift toward the incorporation of the territories into the State of Israel was the direct result of policies of de-facto annexation pursued by the first and second Likud governments, in partnership with its extra-governmental allies, especially Gush Emunim.2 The ultimate intent of their efforts had been to make the territories indistinguishable from Israel proper, at least in the minds of Israelis, and thereby remove the question of what to do with them from the agenda of Israeli politics. They did not achieve this objective. By the mid-1980s, however, their efforts had had a substantial enough demographic, cultural, psychological and political impact to push the problem of withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip beyond the regime threshold.
The effects of having passed this regime threshold were most dramatically evident in the political crisis of 1989-90 when the Likud Labor "unity" government broke up and for several months neither Shimon Peres's Labor nor Yitzhak Shamir's Likud was able to form a government. The country was wracked by unprecedentedly bitter disputes over the viability of the electoral system, the potential for catastrophe that each side claimed would attend formation of a narrow government by the other, proliferating assassination threats, controversy over whether the army would follow orders from a Likud government to ''crush the intifada," etc. After months of uncertainty and political strife, Yitzhak Shamir managed to exploit fears by Rabbi Eliezer Shach, spiritual leader of two small ultra-orthodox parties, that the peace policies of a Labor government would lead to civil war. Shach's decision to oppose Labor-party efforts to form a government led directly to Shamir's formation of a narrow, far-right government-the government that ruled Israel until the June 1992 elections brought Yitzhak Rabin to power.
THE CHALLENGE FACING RABIN
As a result of the 1992 elections, the most hawkish government in Israel's history was suddenly replaced by the most dovish government in its history. A clear majority of Knesset deputies affiliated with parties belonging to the new governing coalition favored not only a relatively generous land-for-peace settlement but were also willing to enter into direct negotiations with the PLO toward that objective. Yet the concrete proposals Rabin offered Palestinian negotiators during most of his first year in office did not differ fundamentally from those put forward by the Likud government. His inclination was to move extremely slowly, trying to achieve an agreement that would not involve direct negotiations with the PLO, open avenues toward a Palestinian state, or result in Palestinian rule over portions of the occupied territories during a lengthy, perhaps open-ended "transitional" period.
This policy represented a clear preference for avoiding even minor risks of settler and right-wing resistance and a hope that by the time substantive concessions would be necessary a wider base of support within Israel would have emerged to help carry out a territorial compromise. By the spring and summer of 1993 it was apparent, even to Rabin, that the burden his strategy was placing on the Palestinian negotiators was much too heavy for them to bear; that if any movement toward a settlement were to be achieved, it would have to involve direct talks with the PLO, more substantive signs of Israeli commitment to Palestinian self-determination, and somewhat greater risks of a showdown with right-wing Israeli opposition. Rabin's opening to the PLO shows he understood this, but his continued emphasis on deferring all "ultimate status" issues for up to five years, his refusal to move any of the Jewish settlements in the territories, and his vehement refusal to discuss the fate of East Jerusalem, all reflect his continued preference for what I call "serial decomposition," a salami-slicing strategy for coping with the Israeli right.
This is a technique for crossing back through the regime threshold toward disengagement that accomplishes the transition by dividing up the troublesome problem temporally (over many years) rather than spatially (e.g., the Allon Plan). In the Israeli case, serial decomposition entails a more or less complete withdrawal from the territories while obfuscating its completeness by deceitful, disingenuous characterizations of the policy's intent. Rabin's policy of adhering to a long "interim" period postpones the necessity to make formal decisions about sovereignty for at least five years. Rabin's obvious intent is to deprive the right-wing-religious-settler coalition of a strategic opportunity to mobilize its full strength against the "amputation" of the homeland. 3 The risk of this strategy is that it requires the PLO to absorb almost all the political heat. The PLO has had to explain to its constituency that despite Israeli pronouncements about East Jerusalem and its continued closure to West Bank Arabs, despite the extremely limited forms of self-government contemplated, and despite the slow and elaborately paced mechanisms for implementing the IDF's "redeployment," Palestinians should have faith in their leadership and in the ultimately satisfying outcome of the process.
Rabin's choice of this strategy is explained by his reluctance to run the risks of illegal challenges to his authority and of the regime instability he would encounter by being forthright about his intentions to establish the conditions for the emergence of an independent Palestinian state.4 Of course no one fears an organized putsch against the regime by settlers, right-wing parties and disaffected military units, and Rabin has shown some real ferocity in some of his comments about extremists among the settlers and their allies.5 There is fear, however, that the parliamentary rules of the game will be discarded by opponents of the government if settlements are evacuated, if the principle of a Palestinian state is accepted, or if a compromise is reached on the question of Jerusalem. Opposition tactics are likely to be many and varied:
(1) acts of terrorist provocation against Arabs (such as the Hebron mosque massacre), (2) assassination of Jewish political leaders, (3) organized campaigns of land seizures and illegal settlement construction to precipitate confrontations with the army or between settlers and Palestinians, (4) use of force against Palestinian policemen, (5) declarations of secession or independence by defiant Jewish settlement blocs, (6) organized efforts to persuade soldiers and officers to refuse orders to implement withdrawal or redeployment orders, (7) mass civil disobedience campaigns, (8) antigovernment riots in Israel's major cities and (9) attempts to destroy Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. This kind of semi-legal or illegal mobilization is feared both for its own sake and because an agreement enforced against such opposition might leave permanent scars on Israeli politics, weakening the integrity of its parliamentary system. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish protestors are ready, it is said, to physically prevent the evacuation of settlements or the arrival of Arafat in Jerusalem. Unless it is prepared to use the coercive power of the state against large numbers of Jews, the government knows that it is liable to be exposed as unable to enforce its legal decisions.
Rabin's serial-decomposition strategy for minimizing the risks of severe disruption within Israel requires he Palestinians, and particularly Palestinian moderates, to carry most of the burden of this long and uncertain process. This point was vividly illustrated by Rabin's reaction to the Hebron massacre in late February 1994. In the face of intense right-wing opposition, including rabbinical calls to soldiers to disobey orders and riots by hundreds of settlers and their supporters in Hebron, Rabin backed away from proposals to evacuate Jewish settlers from the center of the city. Instead a prolonged curfew was clamped on the Arab inhabitants of Hebron, forcing the PLO leadership to accept punishment of the victims of the massacre if it wanted to resume negotiations on how to implement the Gaza-Jericho accord. Again, in July, Rabin failed to prosecute rampaging settlers and resisted pressures from his Cabinet to forcibly eject settlers near Hebron from houses they had illegally occupied in favor of a compromise arrangement that handed the right-wing's extra-legal struggle against the peace process its first victory.
If the Palestinian leadership in the territories were possessed of a large, well-institutionalized, legal political apparatus with a record of reformist accomplishments and wide resources for patronage, a long series of political humiliations of this sort might be successfully absorbed. However, under the Jordanian, Egyptian and Israeli occupations, Palestinians have been systematically deprived of a political arena within which to build these structures. Nor has the PLO shown itself ready and willing to integrate the young indigenous leadership of the intifada, including ex-prisoners, into the "national authority" it is seeking to create now in the territories.
Therefore, because of the burdens placed upon the shrunken Arafatist wing of the PLO by Rabin's slow strategy for disengagement, because of the absence of historical opportunities to establish a PLO institutional presence in the territories, and because of Arafat's own limitations as a political leader, the Rabin government is running the dangerous risk that the prestige of PLO supporters of the peace process will continue to deteriorate, along with their ability to enforce whatever agreements are reached. Elections will likely have to be postponed, further weakening the PLO's ability to put itself forward as the Palestinians "sole, legitimate representative." As opposition within Israel gathers strength in response to Arafat's posturing and to continued bloodshed, the economic and other incentives for adhering to the principles declared in September 1993 will be overshadowed by fear, despair, horror and anger. This would present the government of Israel with a choice: either drift toward new elections with a chaotic situation on the ground and no effective change in the political status of the territories, or change its re-scaling strategy to one that would entail (but exploit) more substantial risks of regime crisis.
This could be accomplished by moving directly to discussions about permanent status issues such as the rights of settlers and the boundary of Israeli Jerusalem,6 removing settlements from sensitive areas or removing settlements from which vigilantes are known to have operated, prosecuting to the full extent of the law those who attack Arabs and Arab property, banning weapons from mass demonstrations, arresting organizers of illegal campaigns of settlement or provocation, and treating any group that advocates illegal resistance as a "subversive organization." The development and implementation of this policy will test the political craftiness of Rabin and his cabinet. What will be required is not simply the survival of the political firestorm that will erupt, but exploitation of fears raised in the midst of that turmoil: of intra-Jewish bloodshed, of the unravelling of democracy, of attacks on the army by settlers, of the consequences of widespread, murderous provocations against Arabs, or of attempts to inflame the Middle East by seizing or destroying Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Using the kind of pedagogical rhetoric Rabin has employed in regard to the Golan Heights-teaching Israelis about the ultimate necessity to trade the entire Golan, including Jewish settlements there, for peace with Syria-the government, in the midst of a regime-threatening crisis, would seek to redirect public concern from the question of the disposition of the territories to the legitimacy of state authority, the safety and honor of the armed forces and the treasonous irresponsibility of those advocating rebellion against the law of the land. Enough political capital could be amassed to justify, if necessary, enforcing emergency restrictions on political activity and mobilizing large numbers of reservists.
Such a policy would entail substantial risks but would promise great rewards and may be the only way to carry the peace process through to completion. Brief consideration of two episodes in the history of British and French relations to Ireland and Algeria will suggest that Israeli leaders are relatively well-positioned to employ this. strategy successfully. This is a strategy for state contraction advocated by Winston Churchill to defeat opposition to Home Rule for Ireland in 1914 and implemented by de Gaulle toward opposition to his Algerian policy in 1959-61. As in those instances, so too in Israel, government leaders would exploit fears of violent instability within the state to delegitimize, isolate and neutralize die-hard opponents of territorial compromise. The stage would then be set for decisive moves toward withdrawal from disputed lands.
INSTRUCTIVE CRISES
Consideration of ways in which Britain and France crossed the regime threshold to disengage from most of Ireland and all of Algeria illuminates the prospects for success of a high-risk/high-gain strategy in the Israeli-Palestinian case and the consequences of trying to play it too safe. Analogies between Israel's predicament in the occupied territories and France's in Algeria are often drawn by both Israeli and Arab observers. Comparisons are much more rarely made to the British predicament in Ireland, before British withdrawal from most of Ireland after the 1922 treaty that established the Irish Free State. However, in order to learn from either case about the options open to the Rabin government and the consequences likely to be associated with the choices it makes at this critical juncture, salient aspects of both European cases must be taken into account.
Britain and the Ulster Crisis of 1914
From 1885 to World War I British political life was afflicted by the question of Ireland more disruptively than by any other issue. In early 1914, the British Parliament finally passed a Home Rule for Ireland bill that would have granted political autonomy to the entire island. The Asquith government's commitment to the project was grounded not only in the longstanding policy of the Liberal party (since Gladstone's day) of supporting Irish Home Rule as a means of removing the burden of Ireland from British affairs, but also in Asquith's need for the votes of the Irish Nationalists in Parliament. The measure was vehemently opposed by the Unionist (Conservative) party and the Protestant (Loyalist) population of Ireland, concentrated in Ulster. Nearly half a million of these "settlers" signed a covenant swearing their readiness to defy any government that would abandon them to Irish Catholics. The British officer corps, within whose ranks Ulster Protestants were generously over-represented, was sympathetic to calls for defiance of the government and to Unionist condemnation of the agreement as the product of a "traitorous" and "abominable" bargain with the Irish Catholic nationalists. High-ranking officers and the most prestigious retired commanders in Britain helped train and arm a 100,000 man Protestant militia that gave disciplined expression to Unionist and Loyalist warnings of civil war over Ireland.
Winston Churchill was designated to organize Cabinet policy toward Ireland and toward the armed opposition developing against Home Rule. His plan was to goad the Ulsterites into attacks on the British army and British police, then proscribe the "Ulster Volunteer Force" and isolate Unionist politicians by identifying their behavior as seditious and as a dangerous threat to the stability of the British state and the principle of law and order. To this end Churchill made a belligerent public address at Bradford. He accused the entire Unionist party leadership and the leaders of the Protestants in Ireland as engaged in a "sinister and revolutionary purpose" aimed at "subverting Parliamentary government, and [challenging] all the civil and constitutional foundations of society.'' The Cabinet subcommittee he headed sent a fleet of warships to Belfast and ordered large army units into Ulster to disarm the Protestant militias and prepare for the implementation of Home Rule.
But in March 1914, when 58 officers in command of the Curragh military base in Ireland announced that they would resign their commissions rather than march into Ulster, Asquith backed down. Ordering Churchill to reverse course, Asquith deferred implementation of the Home Rule Act. Subsequent British governments, both during and after World War I, approached the problem of Ireland by separating the six Ulster counties where the Loyalist presence predominated from the fate of the rest of Ireland. It was Asquith's reluctance to confront a full-scale regime crisis in 1914 that ultimately led to the partition of Ireland in 1922, the creation of the Irish Free State in the "south" of Ireland, the Irish civil war between the pro- and anti-Treaty Irish nationalists, the emergence of the Republic of Ireland from the Irish Free State, and the 70-year-old British problem of what to do with Northern Ireland.
France and Algeria: The Crises of 1960 and 1961
After World War II, successive efforts to introduce comprehensive reforms of France's Algerian policies were thwarted by coalitions of European settlers in Algeria (numbering almost one million out of eight million inhabitants), French businessmen with interests in North Africa, and right-wing parties drawing upon jingoist lower-class and lower-middle-class sentiment. These failures led to the Algerian Revolution of 1954-62, the fall of the Fourth Republic in 1958, and its replacement by Charles de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic he designed and implemented.
De Gaulle came to power on a wave of disgust with Fourth Republic politicians and his own promise to save Algeria for France. As late as 1957, and despite French disengagement from Indochina, Tunisia, Morocco and other colonies, French public-opinion polls showed that Algeria was still not perceived as a colony. Fewer than 20 percent of all Frenchmen responded to polling questions by indicating a willingness to accept the permanent separation of Algeria from France. For the great majority of the French people, more than a century of declarations and laws, as well as the vast scale of European settlement, had made French withdrawal from Algeria virtually inconceivable. Yet in a referendum on the question of self-determination for Algeria held in January 1961, a majority of 75 percent voted "yes." Fifteen months later, 90 percent of the French electorate, in another referendum, approved the Evian agreements ending the Algerian war. These agreements provided for the separation of Algeria from France, setting the stage for the FLN (National Liberation Front) to declare the country's immediate independence.
The separation of Algeria from France was not the result of the defeat of the French army by Algerian guerrillas. By the middle of 1956, nearly half a million French troops were fighting in Algeria to crush the rebellion. In the course of the eight-year conflict, 500,000 Algerian Muslims were killed, compared to 10,000 European settlers and 20,000 French soldiers. By the end of 1958, the French military had all but eliminated armed resistance within Algeria and had effectively sealed its borders against incursions by the FLN's "external army."
But France, militarily strong in Algeria, was politically weak at home. The Fourth Republic lurched through six governments from 1954 to 1958. Horrified by revelations of brutal methods used by French officers and men to combat the FLN, many intellectuals, clerics and professionals declared their support for Algerian self-determination. When social and economic reforms were threatened by the taxes and inflation associated with the war, both businessmen and trade unionists began to question the importance of Algerie francaise. Unable to cope with the deep divisions within France over the Algerian war, the regime collapsed.
Ignoring the preferences of the military officers, Gaullists and colon leaders who had helped bring him to power, de Gaulle moved instead toward complete disengagement from Algeria. He did this by using methods which Churchill, based on his 1914 strategy toward Ireland, would have greatly approved. By declaring himself in favor of Algerian self-determination and then humiliating and removing General Massu from his Algerian command in 1959, de Gaulle provoked the pieds noirs (French Algerians) into the "Barricades Rebellion" of January 1960, an attack which cost the lives of 14 gendarmes and more than 100 wounded. Declaring the attack a "stab in the back for France'' and exploiting widespread fears in the metropole of civil war, de Gaulle isolated active supporters of Algerie francaise from wider strata of sympathizers. After purging the army, he declared that Algeria was simply not profitable for France to rule any longer, thereby provoking diehard opponents of his Algerian policy within the military into a putsch attempt in April 1961. Again relying on overriding metropolitan fears of a Spanish-civil-war scenario if he were not given support in his stand against the Algerie francaise extremists, de Gaulle declared a state of emergency. Thus he shifted the terms of the crisis from whether or not France would "abandon" its departments in Algeria to whether or not parliamentary democracy would remain intact and whether or not the lives and property of ordinary Frenchmen would be secure. When the French masses responded to his call for loyalty to the French Republic and conscripts refused to follow the orders of their rebellious commanders, the revolt collapsed.
De Gaulle's willingness to risk destruction of the Fifth Republic paid off. France abandoned its claims to the Sahara and to the protection of the harkis (Algerians who had fought with the French army) and moved swiftly and decisively toward implementing its agreement with the FLN. Within a year France was entirely free of Algeria. This despite a bloody reign of terror launched by the extreme settler underground, the Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS), the main consequence of which was the elimination of security guarantees for Europeans who might have continued living in Algeria after French withdrawal. Instead withdrawal was accompanied by the flight of nearly the entire European population of Algeria, upwards of 900,000 people.
PROSPECTS FOR A CHURCHILL/DE GAULLE STYLE POLICY IN ISRAEL
In Israel there are several reasons to think the Rabin government and Israel as a whole would benefit from a high-risk, crisis-prone strategy that would test loyalties to the integrity of the regime against ideological commitments to the whole land of Israel. Comparison of the circumstances surrounding the Rabin government, as it moves toward the contraction of the Israeli state, with the circumstances that surrounded the British and French governments, as they undertook state contraction, suggests that the Rabin government can afford to be bold.
Although the challenge to the regime that Israeli settlers are capable of making on the issue of territorial withdrawal might be more substantial than that of the Europeans of Algeria, it would be less weighty than that of the Protestants of Ireland. Israelis in the occupied territories (excluding the Jewish population of expanded East Jerusalem) are a proportion of the total Israeli Jewish population that is just a bit smaller than that of the Irish Protestant population in relation to the population of Britain but about 20 percent larger than the European population of Algeria relative to the population of France.
Of course equivalent population proportions do not directly translate into equivalent political potential. Any regime challenge emanating from the West Bank and Gaza settlers would be spearheaded by veterans of Gush Emunim, in cooperation with activists and politicians within the fundamentalist and ultranationalist parties to the right of Likud. Unlike the rather ad hoc organizations that emerged among the pieds noirs during the first years of the Fifth Republic, Gush Emunim (now represented organizationally by Yesha, the organization of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) contains an extremely talented and experienced elite, thousands of zealous adherents, and a proven track record of sustained, disciplined political mobilization. This elite has wide-ranging political experience, giving it the self-confidence to view itself as capable of leading the state. It has intimate knowledge of and close contacts with the leadership of the National Religious party and all the parties to the right of Labor. Its ideological appeals are capable of justifying extreme measures to its followers and to a large proportion of the economically motivated Israeli residents of the territories. Depending on specific circumstances, these appeals have the potential of rallying active support from 20 to 30 percent of Israeli Jews.
Although not nearly as formidable a force as the Ulster Volunteers, nor as numerous as the pied noir militia (the Unites territoriales), settlers in the occupied territories have organized well-armed paramilitary and terrorist groups. Together they possess a dense communications network, enough small arms and ammunition to supply 10, 15,000 resistants, and a logistical and organizational infrastructure capable of being used effectively against Arabs or antiannexationist Jews, or to up the ante considerably for any government inclined toward a confrontation over the future of the territories.
The compactness, leadership and political sophistication of Yesha settlers suggest that their contribution to a regime crisis might be more substantial than that of the Europeans of Algeria. No Israeli government is likely to experience the relative ease with which de Gaulle outmaneuvered the pieds noirs, first convincing them that he was their savior, then goading European firebrands into the Barricades Rebellion, and subsequently using terrorist (OAS) excesses to eliminate most if not all French sympathy for the Europeans of Algeria. Still, the settlers in the occupied territories do not match the solidarity, discipline and elaborate preparation for armed resistance and self-government manifested by Ulster Protestants, at least in the years 1911-14.
One difficulty facing the Asquith government in 1914 is therefore not as likely to be present in the Israeli case, namely a settler population so firmly united behind its leadership that government threats of confrontation can neither shake its determination nor spur settler extremists to engage in politically disastrous actions.
Geography is an important factor that will likely reduce the willingness of large numbers of West Bank and Gaza settlers to rally behind a violent challenge to the regime, even if faced with an explicit government policy of relinquishing the territories. Because of the separation of Ireland and Algeria from Britain and France by substantial bodies of water, the Irish Protestants and European Algerians had good reason to believe that political separation from the metropole would mean a transformation in their entire way of life, including for most a significant decline in their standard of living. Jewish settlers in the occupied territories, on the other hand, know that even if they are forced to evacuate the territories and return to homes within the Green Line, they will move only a short distance, maintaining lifestyles and employment opportunities that would be only marginally less attractive, and possibly even more attractive, than those to which they have become accustomed in their settlements. In other words, one ingredient in the political effectiveness of regime challenges by settlers in Ireland and (especially) Algeria-the belief by the great majority of settlers that standards of living would be drastically reduced if the indigenous majority were accorded self-determination-is not present in the Israeli case. Indeed, if the compensation offered to Jewish settlers in the event of evacuation were even a substantial fraction of the funds made available to Yamit settlers in 1981-82, most settler families would experience an absolute improvement in their economic situation.
Another key variable helping to explain differences between the British government's timidity in 1914 and de Gaulle's boldness in 195 1 was the distribution of power within the anti-disengagement coalition in each country. In Britain the Unionist party fully and completely committed itself to the regime-threatening strategy of Edward Carson and the Ulster Volunteers. It’s very name connoted its fundamental commitment to maintaining British rule of Ireland, but even that objective was subordinate to its desire to return to power within a stabilized, not a transformed, regime. These characteristics contributed to a solution based on avoiding a full-fledged regime crisis by dividing the problem of Ireland, solving part of it and postponing the rest.
In France, on the other hand, transforming the regime (from a parliamentary to a presidential system) was itself the highest priority of the Gaullists, the senior partner within the anti-disengagement coalition that overthrew the Fourth Republic. As many suspected even in 1958, and as everyone appreciated soon afterward, only a minority of Gaullists were committed to Algerie francaise in a fundamental way. Certainly de Gaulle was not. This helps explain why "recomposing" the regime to enhance its survivability in the midst of a regime crisis, instead of "decomposing" the problem in order to minimize the size of the crisis, was so much more salient as a re-scaling mechanism in the French case than in the British. The relative fragmentation of the main conservative party in France (the Independants or moderes) and its nature as a collection of notables with traditional and highly localized bases of support were reflected in the decision of most of its leaders to sacrifice their relatively casual commitments to French rule over Algeria in return for maintaining positions of status within de Gaulle's Fifth Republic. Of particular note is the inclination of most modere leaders in 1960 and 1961 to rally behind legally constituted authority when confronted with revolts by settlers or army officers or with the prospect of civil war. Even more than the Unionists of Britain, the conservatives of France were committed above all else to preserving a coherent central authority and respect for legal institutions upon which they relied to protect their wealth and status.
Of course the Likud has resembled British Unionists, French conservatives and Fourth Republic Gaullists in its use of the problematic future of outlying territory to gain and maintain political power by fully identifying itself with campaigns to prevent disengagement. In doing so the Likud followed the direction of its organizational core, the Herut (Revisionist) movement. Herut's late leader, Menachem Begin, was a true believer in the principle of the whole Land of Israel, especially as implemented west of the Jordan River. His personal commitment to the state-building enterprise in the territories, as well as that of his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, exceeded in intensity and sincerity the commitments of the top British Unionists regarding the maintenance of Ireland within the Union and of the vast majority of Gaullist and modere leaders regarding preservation of Algerie francaise. Most of those forming the traditional core of Herut-followers of Jabotinsky, graduates of the Betar youth movement or veterans of the Irgun-share an undeviating belief in the imperative of enforcing Jewish sovereignty over those portions of Eretz Yisrael that fell under Israeli jurisdiction following the Six-Day War.
In the meantime, the Likud has changed and continues to evolve. The businessmen who joined the Likud from the old Liberal party are notorious for their opportunism and are certainly no more likely than most Independent notables were to risk their property, status and influence by supporting a violent challenge to regime authority on behalf of integralist or fundamentalist religious principles of territorial ''completeness." Many other positions of influence in the party are now held by development town mayors and other representatives of the Sephardi community who voice the same slogans as Herut veterans but entertain and represent ambitions for political, social and economic advancement that play a much more determining role in their thinking. It has often been noted, for example, how small is the proportion of Sephardi Jews within the ranks of ideologically motivated settlers, how weak is their identification with the settlement project in the occupied territories, and how unimportant to their political preferences are appeals to maintain the completeness of the Land of Israel.
Support for legally constituted authority was the choice made by most Independent politicians and their traditional supporters in France during the Fifth Republic. Once the six-county decomposition of the Irish problem had been guaranteed, this was also the choice made by virtually all British Unionists. Since recomposition of the regime has never been an objective of Herut or Likud, and since its electoral strength is drawn from a wide range of practical interests, prejudices and affiliations unconnected to the fate of the territories, there is no reason to expect that the Likud would in toto embrace a violent or even illegal challenge to the regime. On the other hand, substantial elements within the Likud, especially those long-identified with the Herut movement, are likely to follow the course adopted by Soustellian Gaullists and the minority of moderes and MRP militants who followed Duchet and Bidault. These elements will likely endorse and even join a regime-challenging resistance movement. Together with activists within the ultranationalist and fundamentalist parties and Gush Emunim settlers, they would be willing to risk regime disintegration rather than accept substantial movement toward disengagement.
The single most important element distinguishing the constellation of forces likely to determine the course and outcome of a regime crisis in Israel from that prevailing in Britain and France is the position of the military high command and officer corps. In March 1914, sympathy for the Ulster Volunteers within the British officer corps was evident in the organized refusal by scores of officers in Ireland to carry out orders they believed were designed to lead to the imposition of Home Rule on Ulster and by the participation of Britain's most prestigious retired generals in the organization and command of Ulster resistance forces. Sir Henry Wilson, director of military operations in the Office of the Chief of Staff, systematically connived with Lord Milner, Edward Carson and the other leaders of the Unionist regime challenge. Support for the "mutineers" at the Curragh by the officers at Aldershot military base near London created the strong impression that the army could disintegrate if ordered to force Home Rule on Ulster. This evidence suggests that even if Churchill's plan to provoke an Ulster Volunteer attack on British forces had worked, and even if enough units had remained loyal to deliver a crushing military and political blow, this could not have been entertained by Asquith as more than an informed and optimistic judgment. De Gaulle's careful policy toward the French army, mixing solicitousness, deceit and reassurance with repeated purges, reflected his judgment that, as of late 1958, most of the high command of the French Army, a substantial proportion of the officer corps, paratroop and legionnaire battalions stationed in Algeria, as well as important veterans organizations, were fully prepared to challenge him and the Fifth Republic over the principle of disengagement from Algeria. The recalcitrance of many officers in January 1960 and the army revolt of 1961 bore out his suspicions. To overcome opposition to his policy from the military, de Gaulle sought not only to isolate Algerie francaise officers from sources of political support within French society, but also to divide the French army horizontally. In May 1961, de Gaulle successfully appealed to conscripts, over the heads of their officers, to obey the law as he and the Fifth Republic defined it and to refuse to participate in the revolt.
For any government in Israel contemplating a policy likely to lead to confrontation and an annexationist-inspired regime challenge, the risks of military insubordination by a dangerously large segment of the IDF high command would be small compared to those faced by Asquith as a result of Churchill's gambit or compared to those which de Gaulle accepted, and survived, from 1958 to 1961. This is not to say that the IDF would not be put under strain by orders to crack down on right-wing militants and cordon off or evacuate settlements. Already the IDF has been forced to discipline officers, soldiers and reservists who have refused orders or announced their intention to refuse orders to participate in the evacuation of Gaza and Jericho or the containment of settler vigilantism. But unlike the French army with its paras and legionnaires, or the British army with its strongly pro-Unionist political ties and abundance of high-ranking Irish Protestant officers, the IDF does not contain an elite with a particular political coloration. The segment of Israeli society that is significantly over-represented in the Army's high command are the kibbutzim, whose members vote overwhelmingly for the Labor party and its left-wing/dovish allies.
Though political authorities set upon a policy of confrontation with the annexationist right might well be concerned with reactions within the ranks and will certainly expect difficulties with substantial numbers of middle-level officers, they would be unlikely to worry about a politically motivated defection of integrated units led by well-known and popular commanders.7
In both Churchill's plan and de Gaulle's actions, however, the decisive element was not the ability to withstand regime-threatening crises, but the mobilization of substantial new bases of positive support arising from them. By accepting the risks of bringing the latent regime challenge out into the open, each hoped to treat the crisis that would result, not as a problem, but as an opportunity. The accumulation of enough political capital to push the problem of state contraction past the regime threshold was to be accomplished as a result of the fears engendered among most British and French citizens, and their impulse to seek, above all else, reassurance that their lives and property would not be jeopardized by political disarray or civil war. In similar fashion, those in Israel who might try such a strategy will need to push the annexationist camp just as hard as Churchill and de Gaulle pushed their political foes. As noted earlier, provocations by extremists which would result could enable a determined government to identify the stability of ordinary people's lives and the most valued institutions of the society, including the army, as at risk. This in tum could justify far-reaching measures to isolate the leadership of the annexationist camp and impose emergency constraints against rights of assembly and speech that might include banning threatening political parties or groups. The prognosis for successful exploitation of a regime crisis by an anti-annexationist government is also enhanced by the fact that in recent years Israeli Arabs, Russian immigrants and ultra-orthodox Jews have been the fastest-growing segments of the Israeli population. Unsurprisingly, Israeli Arabs strongly support establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories. In the 1992 elections, Russian immigrants voted heavily in favor of the Labor party and its secular-dovish allies. Indeed there is virtually no support among these immigrants for religious life-styles or parties and little interest in living in West Bank settlements. If Israel's economic prosperity were seen to hang in the balance, if those leading the regime challenge were doing so in the name of religious or mystically nationalist ideological principles, and if the Army's support for the political solution espoused by the government were clear, these new citizens would almost certainly rally to the side of their government. Excluding the highly visible but politically unpredictable Lubavitch sect, most ultra-orthodox Jews reject the messianic claims of Gush Emunim, viewing Israel as a state like any other state (which just happens to have a majority of Jews) whose laws must be obeyed so that the protection and benefits of an effective and generous government can continue to be enjoyed by the Torah-faithful. Even those ultra-orthodox Jews living in thoroughly haredi West Bank settlements make it clear that if and when their rabbis tell them to leave the territories they will do so without complaint or protest.
FROM ENEMY TO PARTNER: THE IRA, THE FLN AND THE PLO
Based on a comparison of the British and French cases it is also clear that Israeli scenarios cannot be evaluated without considering the character of the nationalist movement in the outlying territory and the dialectical relationship of that movement with the metropole. A sharp contrast is evident between the comparative readiness of the Irish nationalist movement to accept a fairly radical compromise of their objectives in 1921 versus the unwavering insistence by the FLN on rapid and complete French withdrawal from all of Algeria (including the Sahara). Standing behind this difference is the failure of Irish Protestants to prevent the mobilization of Irish nationalist sentiment within the British political arena, the conservative influence of the Catholic church, and British policies of redistributing land to Irish farmers. These factors produced an Irish nationalist movement whose physical force wing was ultimately subordinated by a bourgeois leadership well-practiced in the arts of political compromise, accommodation and administration-a leadership whose credibility remained intact even as it joined with the British to suppress the militant wing of the movement.8 In the French case, by contrast, a more drastic denial of political space to middle class, professional and religious elites among Algerian Muslims, explained by the systematic success of the pieds noirs and their metropolitan allies in preventing any effective mobilization of Algerian nationalist sentiment within the French political system, contributed to a revolutionary movement dominated by individuals outside the country and by specialists in violence. The effectiveness of these nationalist leaders depended on strict adherence to the achievement of independence for all of Algeria. Indeed they could not hope to survive anything more than minor concessions or relatively insubstantial forms of cooperation with the French authorities.
The dialectical relationship between Israelis and Palestinians has led to a Palestinian national movement whose characteristics place it somewhere between the relatively accommodative representatives of Irish nationalism, who signed and enforced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and the uncompromising FLN leadership, whose narrow range of maneuver helps account for its refusal of virtually all concessions, even in the face of staggering losses and military defeat. In general, levels of Israeli repression have been less destructive than those prevailing in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, but substantially more rigorous than British policies in Ireland. From 1967 to 1992 Israel forbade free political activity to Palestinians in the occupied territories (including expanded East Jerusalem). Since Palestinians in the territories are not Israeli citizens, or even, as in the French case, Israeli "nationals," they have not been a factor within Israeli electoral or coalition politics. On the other hand, despite constraints and repression, Palestinian professional, educational, labor and business organizations have been allowed to function (under varying degrees of harassment). Elections within those organizations, an independent though censored Palestinian press in East Jerusalem, participation in demonstrations and symposia within the Green Line, and alliances with Israeli Arabs and sympathetic Jews, have provided political space for leaders to arise whose skills and credibility would enable them to maneuver in a complex political arena.
Confronted, however, with a series of aggressively annexationist Israeli governments, this leadership has found itself under severe pressure. Large-scale land expropriation, harsh and humiliating treatment by Israeli soldiers and settlers, deportations and extensive use of collective punishment have left thousands of Palestinians with a personal desire for revenge, providing Palestinian extremists with plenty of recruits for anti-Israeli or anti-Arab terrorism. Against this background, regional events such as the Iranian revolution, the Lebanese Civil War and the Gulf War, have fueled an Islamic extremist trend which rejects, in principle, the separate state solution to the Palestinian problem espoused by the PLO and its supporters in the occupied territories. With deep roots in the teeming refugee camps of Gaza and the West Bank, Muslim radicals and their tactics of terrorist provocation and revenge pose a severe challenge to the PLO's ability to maintain the required discipline in the territories during what Israel is currently insisting will be a long and not very generous "interim" period.
The substantial influence of Islamist extremism, along with vigorous opposition to the Israel-PLO accord by the Damascus based rejectionist groups constrains the subtlety and length of Israeli strategies of serial decomposition-of slicing the problem, salami fashion, across time rather than space in order to minimize the danger of a full-scale confrontation with the annexationist right. This strategy requires "good behavior," unity, patience and discipline from Palestinian partners as a method of camouflaging the end result of a series of interim arrangements. In essence it forces the Palestinian leadership to absorb from its constituents the fury, resentment and uncertainty about the terms of the agreement that the Israeli leadership is unwilling to face within its own political arena.
This may be more comfortable for the Rabin government in the short run, but if it makes the position of the mainstream PLO leadership untenable, it may result in the unraveling of the peace process or the evolution of a set of permanent arrangements incapable of surviving the resentments that will remain among the Palestinians.
The character of the process that leads to Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, by affecting the generosity of the arrangements for Palestinian self-determination, will determine whether future generations of Israelis will be left with a Northern-Ireland-style problem of residual Palestinian national claims. Comparison of the British-Irish and French-Algerian relationships suggests that the higher the risks and the more decisive the Israeli moves toward state contraction in the short-term, the more stable the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is likely to be in the long run.
1 For details of this and other episodes mentioned in this article see my book Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
2 Of course these efforts exploited the settlement and land acquisition policies and administrative precedents fostered by Dayan during previous Labor-led governments.
3 For one of many characterizations of the crucial role deception of the Israeli public is playing in the Rabin government's policy see Yoel Marcus, "And What About the Home Turf?" Haaretz, November 16, 1993, translated by FBIS, Daily Report: Near East and South Asia, November 16, 1993, pp. 49-50.
4 F or explicit comments by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres explaining the government's decision not to dismantle settlements as a way to "avoid a terrible clash in Israel itself," see an interview in Le Soir, translated in FBIS, November 29, 1993, p. 41. In December 191)3 he explained on Israeli Television that "we had to choose between splitting the nation in pieces and finding a difficult, complicated and unprecedented solution." Jerusalem New Channel 2 broadcast, December 4, 1993, transcribed in FBIS, December 6, 1993, p. 34.
5 Rabin has called his right-wing opponents "allies of Hamas" and accused them of "dancing on blood" by exploiting terrorist attacks to launch their demonstrations.
6 Concerning the political flexibility of Israel regarding the boundary of Israeli Jerusalem, see Ian S. Lustick, "Reinventing Jerusalem," Foreign Policy, Number 93 (Winter 1993-94) pp. 41-59.
7 The dovish inclinations of the Israeli officer corps were vividly displayed by a quasi-mutiny of one hundred of the highest ranking officers in the army, who confronted Defense Minister Sharon after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla Camps to demand his resignation.
8 Indeed the Irish Free State crushed the anti-treaty forces using British artillery and ammunition, inflicting many more Irish casualties in the brief civil war than had been suffered during three years of Anglo-Irish struggle.
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