The New York Times · 15 March 1989

CP-1989-033

A Legacy of the Uprising: Bitter West Bank Town

By Youssef M. Ibrahim

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Transcribed from the clipping

BEIT SAHUR, Israeli-occupied West Bank, March 13 — At 7 P.M. this town near Bethlehem is dark, its streets empty under a a chilly drizzle. In a tiny alley called Qanaa, a heavily armed Israeli soldier is barely visible against a wall. Across the street, two companions stand guard nervously while more soldiers search a house.

Neighbors peek from their windows, then quickly retreat. “We do this twice a week,” the soldier said of his all-night patrol. “It’s a lousy job.” The women weep; the alleys are hazardous. Less than three weeks ago, an Israeli soldier died when a cinder block was dropped on his head in a similar twisted alley at the Nablus Casbah.

Yes, said the soldier, who would not give his name, he feels sorry for the Palestinians who are awakened in the early morning hours. Many times the Israeli soldiers are there to ask Palestinians to come out and paint over a slogan praising the Palestine Liberation Organization, or to climb an electric pole and bring down a Palestinian flag hung there by a youth.

“I don’t like to wake up in the middle of the night either,” the Israeli soldier said. A comrade shouted a stern order in Hebrew, ending a brief, tense conversation. It is a nightly ritual now in the life of Beit Sahur, a once well-to-do town in a picturesque valley beneath Bethlehem.

Once a thriving town where wool products, plastics, pharmaceuticals and detergents were made or distributed, today the town is feeling the severe economic consequences of the uprising, and its residents’ attitudes toward Israel and Jews are hardening.

Four days of interviews with more than 40 residents of this largely Christian town, as well as extensive conversations with prominent Palestinians and some Israelis, suggest that the legacy of the intifada — as the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip is known to both Arabs and Israelis — is a bitterness that verges on hatred.

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Bitter tug of war in Arab uprising hardens West Bank town’s residentsCourier-Journal19 March 1989CP-1989-034

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.