generally civil, and often friendly contacts, Israelis had with Palestinians at the time. The local population had, after all, been under other occupation powers before 1967: Jordan in the West Bank, and Egypt in Gaza. Assuming our administration was less onerous, most Israelis believed a way to coexist could be found. And that sooner or later, there would be a land-for-peace agreement and we would withdraw from at least most of the territory. But as the years passed, with no sign of a willingness by the PLO to consider any kind of peace talks, we made the cardinal error of assuming the occupation was sustainable. Yes, there might be periods of violence, but nothing that a combination of political resolve, arrests, detention and, where necessary, military force could not hold in check. For us, and certainly for me, the Palestinians became essentially a security issue. As one of Israel’s finest novelists, David Grossman, would lay bare in a bestselling book of reportage called The Yellow Wind, about a year into the intifada, we had ceased to see the human effects of 20 years of occupation, not only on the Palestinians but on Israeli society as well. Yet the power of Professor Shamir’s presentation lay not so much 1n its novelty as its succinctness, clarity and, above all, its timing. The rioting had already gone on for longer than any of us had expected. It seemed to be gathering strength. But until our meeting, we were still looking at it essentially as a civil disturbance. 7hat was what began to change, for all of us. What didn’t change was the need to try to bring the violence to an end. Dan immediately put me in charge of looking for alternatives to live ammunition. I began with our own research and development engineers. We also asked military attachés in our embassies to talk to law-enforcement agencies, academics, or anyone else with knowledge of non-lethal methods of crowd control overseas. Some of the more far-flung examples seemed promising, at least unti