Losing Control

IT WAS Easter Sunday.

Shouting, "revenge, revenge" and firing recklessly into a crowd of worshippers, Alan Harry Goodman--a deranged Israeli solider--murdered two Arabs while they prayed at Islan's third-holiest shrine, Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock Mosque. Goodman critically wounded four other Muslims before he was arrested.

This shocking act of violent desecration touched off a new wave of protests in the occupied areas of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Last month, four Arabs and one Israeli died in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli troops. During the latest demonstrations, an eight year-old Arab boy has already been killed, and 30 other people have been injured. The Supreme Muslim Council of East Jerusalem led a successful general strike by Arabs, and throughout the Arab world there have been strikes and demonstrations to express Arab unity and solidarity with the occupied people.

The diplomatic fallout from the Goodman incident is yet to be measured. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Menachem Begin has been planning to invade Lebanon again. But Goodman's attack makes Begin vulnerable to charges that Israel is irresponsible and militaristic, and that invasion may be called off. Moreover, the mosque slayings ironically increase pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai by April 25--something the Israelis were beginning to hesitate about. Here again, the Israelis are on the defensive and must demonstrate their good faith internationally.

Even more serious for Israel are the implications the incident could have for its domestic policy. Israeli officials have always pointed proudly to their record in protecting Islamic holy places as a justification for their control of East Jerusalem. This calm has grown increasingly tense, especially since there are reports that soldiers gratuitously lobbed tear gas into the mosque well after Goodman had been arrested. Arabs have never trusted the Israelis to safeguard their mosques--now they may take more militant action to regain control.

THE RECENT STRIKES and demonstrations in the territories once again raise questions about the restraint--or lack thereof--on the part of security forces. Each dead Palestinian youth merely adds to Arab indignation. Indeed, Israeli strong-arm tactics in the occupied lands help to perpetuate a cycle of violence and counter-violence that seems to have no end.

Of course, such violence and rebellion are inevitable as long as military occupation continues. This is the essential dilemma, the intractable problem that Good man's mayhem merely exacerbated. Quite sin ply Israeli control over a rapidly growing Arab population in Palestinian territory can't be peacefully maintained. And the only alternative to peaceful control is forcible occupation--an alternative that looks less attractive with every set of demonstrations, shootings and arrests. Indeed, each new clash only makes it clearer that ultimately the price of Israeli occupation will be civil war.

Begin and other right-wing Israeli leaders seem willing to pay that price. Their fears a of maniacal Palestinian state blind them to the political instability and moral disarray that 15 years of occupation have brought to Israel. Perhaps they prefer Israel's steady transformation into a paranoid garrison state, at peace with neither its neighbors nor itself. Or perhaps they really believe that the Palestine's problem can be managed by an "autonomy" scheme worked out with Egypt.

GOODMAN'S ATTACK offers a vivid example of the extremism fostered by the Israelis uncompromising attitude--what Defense Minister Ariel Sharon calls the "will to live." It should therefore make Israelis take stock and reassess their country's intransigence. By basing their nation's survival upon military force and repression, Israelis are skirting future disaster--and risking the betrayal of the Zionist principles of social justice upon which their nation was founded. In other words, "the evil will to live" may ultimately bring about willful self-destruction. Israel's true security--its liberation--can only be maintained if the country relieves itself of a burden it cannot carry, a burden which is crushing the Jewish state. That is a risky course to advocate. But surely the events of the past few weeks show that the present policy cannot succeed.