Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising, Israel's Third Front.

• Author: Polner, Murray

Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising - Israel's Third Front.

Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari. Simon and Schuster, $22.95. When the intifada, or Palestinian revolt, began in Gaza in December 1987, the official Israeli response (and, of course, that of their American "Israel right-or-wrong" supporters) was to blame the Syrians and the PLO. Yet according to Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of Ha'aretz, an Israel daily, and Ehud Ya'ari, Israeli Television's Middle East specialist, neither played much of a role. The two Israeli writers believe that these inaccurate characterizations were indicative of the confusion and ineptitude that has beset Israel since the civil war began. "Let there be no doubt about it," they conclude in one of their more dramatic passages, "though it developed into a statement of major political import, the intifada began not as a national uprising to throw off the yoke of foreign domination but as a rebellion of the poor, an awesome outburst by the forsaken and forgotten at the bottom of the social heap."

What this "roar of protest" has led to was entirely unexpected: the embarrassment of the PLO as it has sought - not always successfully - to lead the various factions among the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. Which is not to say that the PLO has no devoted followers among the overwhelming number of people in the occupied territories. It does, but during the first two years of the uprising at least, many rebels preferred doing it their way.

More significant, though, Schiff and Ya'ari turn a devastating eye at what the intifada has done to their fellow Jews. For one thing, it has destroyed the "veil of hypocrisy and self-deceit that what Israel had practiced for over 21 years was a `benevolent occupation.'" With the Israelis "battering away at defenseless civilians, it is hardly surprising that thousands of Palestinians - many of them innocent of wrongdoing - were badly injured, to the point where some remained handicapped," they write. What has happened? they ask, in horror. The Israeli troops "were brutalizing the Palestinian population because the intifada had brutalized the [Israeli Defense Forces]." But now their nation "was...