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end of the day, dozens of Israelis and Palestinians were injured. Five Palestinians lay dead. Though the media almost instantly labelled it a new “intifada”, this one was very different. It was not a burst of anger, however misdirected, by stone-throwing youths convinced that a road accident in Gaza had been something more sinister. There had been no serious unrest on the day of Arik’s visit. We would later learn this was a deliberate campaign, waged with guns and grenades, by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Fatah offshoot Tanzim, and Arafat’s own police force.

The media had changed, too, in the 13 years since the first intifada, with the rise of twenty-four-seven news broadcasters, including the Arabic-language Al Jazeera. Images of pain and suffering and fear stoked anger on both sides. None, in the first days of the violence, was more powerful, or heart-rending, than the picture of a terrified 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed al-Durrah, sheltered by his father as they took cover from the crossfire in Gaza. The facts of the incident, as best we could establish immediately afterwards, were that the Palestinian security forces had opened fire on Israeli troops near the settlement of Netzarim. Ten Palestinians, including the little boy, lost their lives when the soldiers returned fire. We later established with near certainty that the boy had in fact been killed by Palestinian gunfire. But even if we’d been able to prove that at the time, I’m sure that in the increasingly poisonous atmosphere, it would have made little difference.

Nor would it have changed the next, deeply disturbing escalation: the spread of the violence into Israel itself, with unprecedentedly serious clashes between our own Arab citizens and the police in the Galilee, in Wadi Ara, in the main mixed Arab-Jewish cities, and the Negev. Beyond the political implications, the demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian violence presented a security challenge of a different order: to the ability of the Israeli police, and by extension the government, to ensure basic law and order inside our borders. The worst of the clashes lasted barely a week. But they left thirteen Arab Israeli protestors dead, sparking demonstrations as far afield as Jaffa, as well as ugly incidents of mob violence by Israeli Jews against Arabs in some areas.

President Clinton tried his best to help us halt the violence on the West Bank and in Gaza. I doubted the Americans would succeed, but was fully ready to join in their efforts to try. About ten days into the new intifada, I attended a crisis meeting with Arafat, mediated by Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, at the US ambassador’s residence Paris. It was nominally under the aegis of President

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