CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war,
All pity chok’d with custom of fell deeds.
—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, i, 265–72
WHENEVER AMIRA HASS TRIES to explain her vocation as an Israeli journalist— as a journalist of any nationality—she recalls a seminal moment in her mother’s life. Hannah Hass was being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. “She and the other women had been ten days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying by the road. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side.’ It’s as if I was there and saw it myself.” Amira Hass stares at me through wire-framed glasses as she speaks, to see if I have understood the Jewish Holocaust in her life.
In her evocative book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass eloquently explains why she, an Israeli journalist, went to live in Yassir Arafat’s garbage-strewn statelet. “In the end,” she wrote:
my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is—to the best of my political and historical comprehension—a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel—democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.
It is the summer of 2001. Amira Hass is sitting on the windowsill of my colleague Phil Reeves’s home in Jerusalem and behind her the burnished dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque glitters in the sunlight. Yet she lives not in Jerusalem but in Ramallah—with the Palestinians whom many of her people regard as “terrorists,” listening to the Palestinian curses heaped upon “the Jews” for their confiscations and dispossessions and murder squads and settlements—which makes her among the bravest of reporters. Her daily column in Ha’aretz blazes with indignation at the way her own country, Israel, is mistreating and killing the Palestinians. Only when I meet her, however, do I realise the intensity—the passion—of her work. “There is a misconception that journalists can be objective,” she tells me, the same sharp glance to ensure my comprehension. “Palestinians tell me I’m objective. I think this is important because I’m an Israeli. But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about—it’s to monitor power and the centres of power.”
If only, I kept thinking, the American journalists who report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East—so fearful of Israeli criticism that they turn Israeli murder into “targeted attacks” and illegal settlements into “Jewish neighborhoods”—could listen to Amira Hass. She writes each day an essay about despair, a chronological narrative that she does not abandon when talking about her own life. She begins at the beginning, her mother a Sarajevo Jew who joined Tito’s partisans, who was forced to surrender to the Nazis when they threatened to kill every woman in the Montenegrin town of Cetinje, her father Avraham spending four years in the Transnistria ghetto in the Ukraine, escaping a plague of typhus that killed up to 50 per cent of the Jews, only to lose his toes to frostbite.
“When he came to Israel as a communist activist after the war, he was involved in lots of strikes and demonstrations. In the early Fifties, the Israeli police arrested him and he was brought before a judge who demanded to know why he’d refused to give his fingerprints. My father put his feet without toes on the desk of His Honour the Judge and said: ‘I have already given my fingerprints.’ ” Avraham, Amira Hass says, combined a strong Jewish and secular identity; he was a socialist but never a Zionist.
The story of Hannah and Avraham is essential to an understanding of Amira. They fought for their right to be equal in the Jewish diaspora and had wanted to stay in the lands of Europe which had turned into mass graves. “Many of these people returned to their countries after the war—and the inhabitants there accepted the ordeal of the Jews far too easily. My mother went back to Belgrade as part of [Milovan] Djilas’s [communist] group. It was a new regime in Yugoslavia. But when she went to register as a citizen of Belgrade, the woman clerk said: ‘But you emigrated.’ You see, the Germans had deported her and they always officially recorded that their deportees had ‘emigrated.’ The clerk took the Germans at their word.” It was a common experience. Amid total destruction—in which entire families had been extinguished by the Nazis—the vacuum created by the Jewish Holocaust was too much to bear.
“My parents came here to Israel naively. They were offered a house in Jerusalem. But they refused it. They said: ‘We cannot take the house of other refugees.’ They meant Palestinians. So you see, it’s not such a big deal that I live among Palestinians.” Hass became a journalist by default. She had survived on odd jobs—she once worked as a cleaner—and travelled to Holland. “I sensed there the absence of Jewish existence. And this told me many things, especially about my attitude to Israel, how not to be a Zionist. This is my place, Israel, the language, the people, the culture, the colours . . . ”
Hass dropped out of the Hebrew University where she was researching the history of Nazism and the attitude of the European left to the Jewish Holocaust. “I was stuck. The first intifada broke out and I didn’t want to sit in academia while all this was happening. I used wasta—you know that Arabic word?—to get a copy-editing job on the Ha’aretz newsdesk in ’89.” Wasta means “pull” or “influence.” Ha’aretz is a liberal, free-thinking paper, the nearest Israel has to The Independent. When the Romanian revolution broke out, Hass pleaded to be sent to cover the story—she had many contacts from a visit to Bucharest in 1977—and much to her surprise, Ha’aretz agreed, even though she’d only been three months with the paper.
“When I’d gone to Romania before, I felt I had this philosophical responsibility to taste life under this socialist regime. It was a thousand times worse than I imagined. There was this terrible pressure—life under Israeli occupation is not as bad as life under Ceausescu’s Romania. It was unbelievable suffocation. So I covered the revolution for two weeks and then went back to the paper. Ha’aretz didn’t know if I could write—I knew I could. But I also knew never to look for what all the other journalists are looking for.”
In 1990, with her parents’ support, she joined a group called “Workers’ Hot-line,” which assisted Palestinians who were cheated by their Israeli employers. “During the Gulf War, I reached Gaza under curfew—I’d gone to give Palestinians their cheques from Israeli employers. That’s when my romance with Gaza started. No Israeli journalist knew or covered Gaza. My editor was very sympathetic. When in 1993 the ‘peace process’ broke out”—Hass requests the inverted commas round the phrase—“Ha’aretz suggested I cover Gaza. One of the editors said: ‘We don’t want you to live in Gaza.’ And I knew at once that I wanted to live there.”
From the start, Hass recalls, there was “something very warm about the Palestinian attitude—there was a lot of humour and self-humour in these harsh conditions.” When I suggest that this might be something she had recognised in Jews, Hass immediately agrees. “Of course. I’m an east European Jew and the life of the shtetl is inbuilt in me. And I guess I found in Gaza a shtetl. I remember finding refugees from Jabaliya camp, sitting on a beach, looking at the waves. I asked them what they were doing. And one said he was ‘waiting to be forty years old’— so he’d be old enough to get a permit to work in Israel. This was a very Jewish joke.”
But Hass found no humour in the Israeli policy of “closure,” of besieging Palestinian towns and throttling their economy and people. “I spotted as early as 1991 that the policy of ‘closure’ was a very clever step by the Israeli occupation system, a kind of pre-emptive strike. The way it debilitates any kind of Palestinian action and reaction is amazing. ‘Closure’ was also a goal: a demographic separation which means that Jews have the right to move about the space of mandatory Palestine. The ‘closure’ policy brought this to a real perfection.”
Hass found herself fascinated with the difference between Palestinian image and reality. “Their towns were being portrayed in the Israeli press as a ‘nest of hornets.’ But I really wanted to taste what it means to live under occupation—what it is like to live under curfew, to live in fear of a soldier. I wanted to know what it was like to be an Israeli under Israeli occupation.” She has used that word “taste” again, just as she did about Romania under dictatorship. She says she was still thinking about her mother’s trip to Belsen. “It was this idea of not intervening, not changing anything. And luckily, this combined in me with journalism.” Hass is possessed of the idea that change can only come through social movements and their interaction with the press—an odd notion that seems a little illogical.
But there is nothing vague about her vocation. “Israel is obviously the centre of power which dictates Palestinian life. As an Israeli, my task as a journalist is to monitor power. I’m called ‘a correspondent on Palestinian affairs’ but it’s more true to say that I’m an expert in Israeli occupation.” Israeli reaction, she says, is very violent towards her. “I get messages saying I must have been a kapo [a Jewish death-camp overseer for the Nazis] in my first incarnation. Then I’ll get an email saying: ‘Bravo, you have written a great article—Heil Hitler!’ Someone told me they hoped I had breast cancer. ‘Until we expel all Palestinians, there will be no peace,’ some of them say. I can’t reply to them—there are thousands of these messages.”
But many Israelis tell Amira Hass to keep writing. “People misled themselves into believing that Oslo was a peace process—so they became very angry with the Palestinians. Part of their anger is directed at me. Israelis do not go to the occupied territories. They do not see with their own eyes. They don’t see a Palestinian village with a settler on its land and a village that has no water and needs government permission even to plant a tree, let alone build a new school. People don’t understand how the dispersal of Jewish settlements dictates Israeli control over Palestinian territory.”
As her mother lay dying in the spring of 2001, Amira Hass was fearful that she would be trapped by the Israeli siege of Ramallah—where she still lives—and spent hours commuting the few miles to Jerusalem to be with her. Now she is alone. The woman who taught her to despise those who were “looking from the side” died just two months before we met. Yet for journalists who try to tell the truth about the world’s last colonial war, Hass remains an inspiration. She lectures in America, turns up on countless radio talk shows and interviews, her inexhaustible reporting ever more astute and passionate. How typical that it should be a Jewish woman who writes more eloquently than any other reporter about the Palestinians. How admirable that it should be a Jewish woman, an older but equally committed New York Jew, who can fight for justice for the Lebanese civilians whose lives were destroyed in Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996, whose own research work into the Qana massacre should be far superior to anything written by an Arab author.
When Eva Stern’s grandfather Aaron Hersh climbed off the transport at Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944, along with her mother Hannah and two aunts from their ultra-orthodox Jewish family, he was still holding his prayer shawl. “A Polish prisoner warned him he’d die if he didn’t hand it over, but he refused,” Eva Stern says. “Then a German officer ordered my grandfather to give the shawl to him while he was waiting in line for selection for the gas chambers. He again refused. So he shot my grandfather in the head. That’s how he died.”
In the warmth of a Manhattan hotel lobby, Stern speaks quickly, in an almost subdued voice, recalling the terrible story which her mother told her of the family’s journey from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz. “She was only seventeen and tried to save one of her sister’s children by holding it in her arms. But another prisoner snatched it away and gave it back to her sister—because they would all die if Mengele saw both women with a child. So her sister and her children were all selected to die. And my mother lived. At least seventy members of her family were murdered. She was taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp and was eventually liberated by the Red Army. The incident with the child had the greatest impact on her. I can honestly say that my mother hasn’t slept for fifty years.” But it is the death of her grandfather Aaron Hersh—a Talmudic scholar by the age of twenty who was shot after refusing to surrender his tallit—that has marked Eva Stern’s life.
With anger painfully suppressed, she opens a thick file on the seat beside her. Entitled Israel’s Operation “Grapes of Wrath” and the Qana Massacre, it is her own work, a compilation of news reports and photographs of Israel’s 1996 bombardment in which more than 170 civilians were killed, 106 of them at Qana, 55 of them children. Stern flicks her finger in fury at one of the pictures; it shows Israeli soldiers standing in front of their battle tanks on the Lebanese border. The caption reads: “Israeli soldiers briefly halt their shelling to commemorate Holocaust Day.” And Stern looks at me so that I can see the extent of her fury.
“What would my grandfather say of this?” she asks. “What were those Israelis thinking as they were putting on their prayer shawls? Were they praying: ‘Father who art in heaven, help me to kill as many Arabushim as possible’? Do they now have a right to kill without any guilt?” Arabushim—a racist term for Arabs in the Hebrew language—was later used in an Israeli newspaper interview by one of the artillerymen who fired into the UN base at Qana. Stern has included an English translation of the interview from Kol Ha’ir in her file, a set of documents that she has sent to the UN, to the Lebanese delegation to the UN, and to the most prominent American journalists in New York. She hoped to persuade the latter to mark the first anniversary of the Qana massacre. Her sense of outrage is as brave as it is lonely; although many American Jews are troubled by the behaviour of Israel’s right-wing government and the bloody adventures in which Israel has been involved in Lebanon and in “Palestine,” most do not take kindly to Stern’s concern for the truth to be told. But she is unremitting:
My feelings started slowly. I always had a problem with unquestioned obedience to authority—that’s why I always got into trouble in class. And when I thought about the atrocities committed by the Israelis, I felt that as an American taxpayer and an American Jew, I had an obligation to speak out. If ordinary Germans living under total oppression can be held responsible for the crimes committed by the Nazis—because they did not speak out—how much more responsible are we who live in a country where we have the freedom to speak out? If ordinary Germans were guilty for not speaking out, then surely we are also guilty in remaining silent about Qana. Because we don’t live in fear of death squads. What I am doing is not courageous—it is the decent thing to do. If enough decent Germans had spoken out at the time, perhaps the Holocaust would not have happened. I’m not saying that the level of atrocities committed by the Israelis is on the same scale or in any way comparable to those of the Nazis. Of course not. But I know that I have paid as a taxpayer for the shells that rained down on Qana. And therefore if I’m silent, I’m no better than those Germans. Israel claims to be the representative of the Jewish people. It’s important for people to know that they clearly do not speak for world Jewry. They clearly do not speak for me. So I have a duty to speak out.
A secretary in a Manhattan corporate law firm—she was educated in an ultra-orthodox Brooklyn girls’ school—Eva Stern was encouraged in her campaign by Noam Chomsky, that most irascible and brilliant of America’s philosophers and linguists, and by the work of former Warsaw Ghetto survivor Israel Shahak, whose history of Israel she quotes by heart. “He wrote that ‘any support of human rights in general by a Jew which does not include the support of human rights of non-Jews whose rights are being violated by the “Jewish state” is as deceitful as the support of human rights by a Stalinist.’ That really influenced me.”
Stern’s father, Chaim, was a Hungarian Jew who also survived the concentration camps. “My mother was his cousin and he married her in 1949. I was born seven years later. My parents are still alive and know my feelings about Israeli atrocities. They are sort of ambivalent about it. They believe I’m right in condemning it. But because of what they went through, they believe all the world is anti-Semitic. So when there’s a terrorist attack against the Israelis, they are unable to see it in the context of the Arab–Israeli dispute. I strongly condemn any terrorist attack. But my parents see it in terms of ‘the Arabs are anti-Semitic and that’s why there’s a terrorist attack.’ I refuse to condemn my parents for these feelings. They see all Germans, for example, as Nazis—because in their experience, they only met Nazis. And for most Palestinians, the only Jews they know of are the oppressors. The Palestinians in the refugee camps . . . probably never met a decent, moral Jew.”
But Eva Stern’s attempt to persuade American journalists to mark the anniversary of the Qana slaughter met with little more than indifference. Not a single major mainstream American newspaper carried a paragraph—not even a brief news report—on the UN-attended ceremony held in Lebanon to mark the first anniversary of the bloodbath. Unlike Eva Stern, American journalists remained silent. So did her bosses. The house magazine of her Manhattan corporate law firm encourages employees to write about their interests and out-of-hours work. Stern wrote a passionate account of her inquiries into Qana—and into the 1982 massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Chatila. An official of the firm later declined to publish her article—on the grounds that it was “sensitive” and “might be misunderstood.”
Not long after I met Eva Stern, a letter arrived in my mail in Beirut from Nezar Hindawi. Remember the name? Hindawi was the Palestinian who on 17 April 1986 gave his unsuspecting and pregnant Irish girlfriend Anne-Marie Murphy a bomb to take on board an El Al jet at London Heathrow Airport. The 1.5 kilograms of Semtex would have destroyed the aircraft, killing all on board, including the young chambermaid who fondly believed that Hindawi would be arriving in Israel a few days later to marry her. After seeking the protection of Syrian security men in London, he decided to give himself up. At the Old Bailey six months later, he was given forty-five years in prison, the longest sentence in British criminal history.
Which is why his letter to me carried the address of Her Majesty’s Prison Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire. It was polite but carried a persistent message: if IRA killers imprisoned for “political” crimes could be freed, then he—Nezar Hindawi—should also be released. In his poor English, he wrote: “My case is a political as you know, no one will go to blow up an aircraft for personal matter. I do believe that if it was not an Israeli aircraft and not in UK I would not have that sentenced which it is the longest in UK’s recent history.” The first problem for me in Hindawi’s letter was not political. Many IRA men—and Protestant paramilitary killers—in Northern Ireland discovered, after years in prison, a profound sense of unease and contrition for the terrible deeds they committed. Even old Gusty Spence, the first of “Loyalism”’s sinister murderers, came out of Long Kesh a born-again Christian. Yet not a hint of remorse did I find in Hindawi’s letter to me, not a single tiny clue that he might feel sorry for what he had tried to do. The clause “no one will go to blow up an aircraft for personal matter” was chilling, I was to write in The Independent, his “categorisation of evil” quite clear. It would be unforgivable for him to blow up a plane for “personal” reasons—if, I suppose, he hated the passengers—but not, it appears, for political reasons if the passengers, even his pregnant girlfriend Anne-Marie Murphy, were of no personal interest.
Referring to his own case as “history,” Hindawi continued:
The PLO and Israel made a peace deal with Jordan. Even the relation between Syria and UK is in its best in all aspects . . . look what happened after the peace deal in N. Ireland, the British Government transferred all IRA prisoners to N. Ireland and lots of them been released . . . I wrote to the Prime Minister Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Robben [sic] Cook, Ken Living-stone MP, Tony Benn MP, D. Skinner MP and others asking them to release me . . . I have not reply yet.
Nor was I surprised. For an Irish peace which a majority of people in both Britain and Ireland support, the old Thatcherite policy of criminalising all villains was abandoned. There were child-killers, wife-murderers, mafia murderers and hit men—who must stay in prison—and “political” killers, “political” murderers and “political” hit men who were now going home. Like it or not, that’s how most wars end. There’s a kind of crossing-off of sin. The men we have dubbed “terrorists”— Jomo Kenyatta, Menachem Begin, Archbishop Makarios, Gerry Adams and, yes, Yassir Arafat—have an odd habit of turning up for talks at Downing Street and tea with Queen Elizabeth, or chats in the White House.
But where does that leave prisoners from other wars? In theory, the PLO–Israeli peace could have had some effect on Hindawi. But the peace was now dead and Hindawi wrote—though somewhat obliquely—that he thought he was working for the Syrians.98 I didn’t respond directly to him. But I wrote an article about his letter in which I said I wanted “to know a bit more about the real Nezar Hindawi”—and how a man—whomever he thought he was working for—could hand a bomb to the young girl who loved him, the woman who carried his child, knowing that it represented their doom and that of all those with her. I sent Hindawi a copy of the article. More than three months later, I received another letter from him. It was both angry and agitated, written from the depths of historical indignation. Although crippled by his English, Hindawi made a metaphorical attempt to reconstruct the betrayals of the Middle East—in which he flagellated himself as the instrument of “terrorism,” inviting Britain and France to take up their mandates and create the state of Israel:
I thought it may be good for you to know “a bit more about the real Nezar Hindawi” . . . it seems to me that you have not found that “bit” . . . I am Nezar Hindawi who invited the EMPERORS of England and France to Arabia—Middle East—to slice the CAKE and to teach the Arab how to play Cricket. But the most importante point for the invitation was to found or to fill “a Land without a people for a people without a Land.” So, the Emperor of England brought from Europ “a people without a land for a Land without a people” as I request. For that “people” I gave them that slice of the cake and they named it “Israel.” Free of charge. But the cricket game [is] still on. It is so long. It need time to end. The referee went away
for good. Do you think he may come to stop the game? That game, I am the founder of it. I am Nezar Hindawi, the founder of and the head of the HAGANAH, IRGUN, STERN GANG the terrorist organisations and by my direct orders, unleashed a campaign of terror and violence that deliberately targeted only civilians . . . I ordered the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which resulted in the death of about 90 British. I . . . ordered the invasion of Lebanon and West Beirut and did the Massacres at Sabra and Chatila Camps . . . Some more information for you, Dear Mr. Robert Fisk about Nezar Hindawi and his evil works, I am Nezar Hindawi responsible for killing, tortures and the disappearance of more than 4,000 people in Chile, NOT General Augusto Pinochet. I am the responsible of keeping the sanctions on Iraq . . . Now you may undestand Nezar Hindawi and his evil works.
My use of the word “evil”—before its meaning had been contaminated by George W. Bush—had riled Hindawi. But there was no doubting the meaning of his letter. Little criminals like Hindawi were locked up for forty-five years. Big criminals—Menachem Begin, Pinochet, Britain and France in their long colonial histories—get away with murder. There was a section of his handwritten letter in which he praised “Greater Syria,” the Ottoman province which included Jordan, Palestine and present-day Syria—Asham—Biladu Asham—which existed in the “days before I send the invitation to the Emperors of England and France . . . ”
He wrote that he was proud of his “love” for Syria.
I [was] just born in Part of Syria which [is] called Jordan. But does Jordan make a state? Is it really a state? It is part of Syria and one time it must return to its Mother, to its heart, to Syria, that is [a] tru [sic] fact and you may see it in your time . . . I have a great bright history I am so proud of it. I do not want to write about personal things, this belongs to me only, also this is why I do not want to reply to what you wrote about the girl and the child and love . . . I regard these things as something personal, once the time will allow me to say about this things [sic], make sure you will be one of whom will I tell them . . .
Hindawi ended by expressing his “love” for President Hafez el-Assad of Syria.
There is much more I would like to know about this case, not least why Hindawi’s defence lawyer, Gilbert Gray QC, argued at his 1986 trial that “another nation may take retribution” if Hindawi was convicted—a remark which Sir William Mars-Jones, who sentenced the accused to forty-five years, said “should never have been made.” Was this “nation” supposed to be Syria? A psychologist might also have much to say about Hindawi’s refusal to discuss “the girl and the child and love” because that, surely, is what this whole drama revolves around. Hindawi will confront the political tragedy of the Middle East—and the hypocrisy of a world that will sentence lesser would-be murderers to forty-five years but allow those held responsible for mass murder to go free—but not the immediate and all too relevant issue of his own moral conscience. Yes, I am waiting for Hindawi to tell me about “the girl and the child and love.” And so, too, is Anne-Marie Murphy who, eighteen years after Hindawi tried to smuggle her and her unborn child onto the El Al flight at Heathrow with a bomb, gave her first newspaper interview to complain that Hindawi had been granted legal aid to demand a parole board review of his sentence:
That man is pure unadulterated evil. You are talking about someone who has never shown a flicker of remorse or once said “sorry” . . . What about the human rights of all the people on that plane he was trying to murder? He held me in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks. The next time I saw him, he said we would be getting married. With that he smiled and stood there waving goodbye . . . He carried this bag all the way to the airport and then give [sic] it to me as I was about to go through. He left me at Terminal One because he said his flight was going from Terminal Three. I remember going past the sniffer dogs and two security check points before a guard asked me to step aside for a moment. Then when they opened the bag and looked inside my whole world fell apart.
If I was to enter Hindawi’s mind—I am not sure I want to, and I await more letters from Whitemoor prison on this matter—would I not find the same logic as that employed by Yigal Amir, Rabin’s killer, who could quote the Book of Joshua to justify how “if I was conquering the land, I would have to kill babies and children”? Is this not the same rationality—or lack of it—that allows a Palestinian suicide bomber to see his or her victims before the switch is pressed and the explosives detonated? The suicide bomber eliminates his own life but has the fearful privilege of looking at the future dead, the soldiers or—let us speak frankly— the Israeli children in the pizzeria or the girls on the bus who are about to be eliminated from the world. The Israelis and the White House tried to diminish the self-destructive element of suicide bombers by fatuously calling them “homicide bombers,” which is ridiculous; all bombers, suicidal or otherwise, are homicidal. The difference is that the suicide bomber not only takes their own life—and thus becomes a “martyr” for Palestinian groups—but is an executioner. They see those about to die. They hold in their hands, however briefly, the life and death of innocents. Whether they press the button is their choice. Hindawi, of course, was not planning to press any buttons. Anne-Marie Murphy was going to be the button. And history—if we are to believe his letters to me—was the detonator.
I AM STANDING IN THE DUST and rubble of Khan Younis Palestinian refugee camp at the beginning of that year of 2001. April 15, it says in my notebook, along with the words: “In any other place, it would be a scandal, an outrage.” If Palestinians had wilfully destroyed the homes of 200 Israelis, I wrote in my report to The Independent that night, there would be talk of barbarism, of “terrorism,” grave warnings to Arafat from the new American president, George W. Bush, to “curb violence.” But it was the Israelis who destroyed the homes of at least 200 Palestinians in Gaza on that Easter Sunday morning of 2001, bulldozing their furniture, clothes, cookers, carpets and mattresses into the powdered concrete of their hovels until one end of Khan Younis looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake. So of course it was not “terrorism.” It was “security.”
The old sat like statues amid the rubbish tip that the Israelis had made of their houses. Many of them, like seventy-five-year-old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, had been driven from their homes in Palestine—in his case from Beersheba—in 1948; now they were dispossessed by the same people for the second time in fiftythree years, this time courtesy of Ariel Sharon. Maybe it is impossible to shame history. What happened in Khan Younis—however the Israelis dress up their vandalism with talk of “security”—was a disgrace. This was house destruction—no, let us call it “home destruction”—on a hitherto unprecedented scale as a battery of bulldozers was sent to pulverise this part of Khan Younis above the sea from where—according to the Israeli army—shots had been directed at their occupying soldiers. As the machines careered up the road from the coast just after midnight, thousands of Palestinians ran screaming from their huts and concrete shelters.
Many of them fled to the nearest mosque, where they seized the loudspeakers and appealed to their neighbours “to take arms and resist.” To the apparent surprise of the Israeli army, that is just what their neighbours did. As Palestinian rifles were turned on the bulldozers, at least two Israeli tanks raced up the same road and began firing shells into the nearest apartment blocks. An Apache helicopter gunship appeared out of the darkness, launching missiles into the same buildings. And as old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan and his family remember all too clearly, a crane suddenly moved out of the darkness, a platoon of Israeli soldiers in the bucket from where—once the crane’s chain had hauled the container to its highest point—the troops opened fire.
The gun battle lasted for four hours and left two Palestinians dead and thirty wounded, twelve of them critically, among them a Reuters camera crew who were filming it when a shell exploded against the wall behind which they were standing. Ariel Sharon, the biggest bulldozer of them all, had taught the Palestinians another lesson. But picking one’s way through the muck and dust of thirty-five houses, it didn’t take long to realise that the lesson they had grasped was not quite the one Israel had intended. Mariam Abu Radwan, a cousin of old Ahmed, put it eloquently: “We have no life any more. This is the destruction of our life. Let them shoot us—please let them shoot us—and we can die here. And let the Israelis die too. No one is looking after us—no Arab countries, no foreign countries either.”
One of the dead was Riad Elias, a Palestinian security forces officer—who was presumably fighting the Israelis when he died—but the second, Hani Rizk, was identified to me as a cleaner at the local Naser Hospital, the same hospital to which his body was taken before his funeral that Sunday afternoon. Ibrahim Amer, a thirty-five-year-old agricultural worker who says he was hit in the back and side by machine-gun bullets from the helicopter as he ran—he now lay in blood-soaked pain in one of the hospital’s beds—saw Rizk running in the street “when a spray of bullets from the helicopter ricocheted against a wall and hit him—he had at least twelve bullets in his body.” Had Palestinians been shooting at the Israelis from these houses? Ask anyone amid the rubble and they would invariably say that they “never saw anyone”; which is not quite the same as saying that no one ever fired from here. But this was more than disproportionate; the Israeli operation was a deliberate attack on civilians.
Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, like many of his cousins, was a Bedouin farmer when the Israelis advanced towards his Beersheba home in 1948 where he lived with his father Hassan, his mother Shema and his four brothers. Since then he has lived in poverty in Khan Younis and was sleeping in his seven-room complex of hovel-huts with his wife Fatma and their twenty-three children and grandchildren when he heard the Israeli bulldozers. “What has happened to me now was what happened to me fifty years ago,” he said. “I feel a kind of madness. Peace now? I don’t think so. The Jews gave us many words but they don’t keep their word.”
As usual, shots were fired into the air at the two funerals that Sunday afternoon. Just three hours earlier, Wail Hawatir, a Palestinian military doctor, was buried, victim of the previous night’s helicopter attack on what the Israelis called a “Palestinian naval base”—the Palestinians, of course, have no navy and no ships— so the day began and ended in familiar Gaza fashion: with funerals. Needless to say, Mr. Bush was silent.
As both he and Clinton were silent while Israel perfected its system of executions against Palestinians deemed worthy of death for their role in Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any other organisation which opposed Israeli occupation of the West Bank or Gaza. There was nothing new in this campaign of extrajudicial executions. When the Israelis came for Arafat’s lieutenant, Abu Jihad—Khaled al-Wazzir—in Tunis in 1988, they employed up to 4,000 men for the assassination. There was an AWACS plane over Tunis, two warships in the Mediterranean, a Boeing 707 refuelling aircraft, forty men to go ashore and surround the home of Arafat’s PLO deputy commander, and four men and an officer to murder their victim.
Abu Jihad’s son Jihad al-Wazzir, now living through the second intifada inside Gaza, recalled for me in detail how his father was executed. “First they killed the bodyguard who was asleep in the car outside—then they killed the gardener and the second bodyguard. My dad was writing in his office and went into the hall with a pistol. He got off one shot before he was hit. My mother remembers how each of the four men would step forward and empty an entire clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad—like it was a kind of ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in the head, just to make sure.”
Now Israel’s murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, a splash of infrared on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian’s vehicle. It’s long-range assassination. It is an internationally illegal war in which the Palestinians have themselves been guilty in the past. Back in the 1970s, Israeli and PLO agents murdered each other in Europe in a policy of retaliation and counter-retaliation that enraged European security forces. In Beirut, two of the Israelis involved in murdering Palestinian leaders were called Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. Shahak would later become Israeli military commander in Lebanon in 1982. It was Barak who, as prime minister, relaunched Israel’s murder squads.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have their own murderers; their suicide bombs slaughter civilians as well as soldiers, hitherto unknown victims rather than individual Israeli intelligence officers. But Israel’s killers take innocent lives too. A helicopter attack on a Palestinian militant in 2001 tore two middle-aged Palestinian women to pieces; the Israelis did not apologise. The nephew of a man murdered by the Israelis in Nablus later admitted to the Palestinian Authority that he had given his uncle’s location to the Israelis. “They said they were only going to arrest him,” he told his interrogators. “Then they killed him.” When Ariel Sharon ordered the killing of a Hamas official in Gaza, an Israeli jet flattened an apartment block, killing seventeen civilians, including nine children. Sharon regarded the attack as a victory against “terror.”
Al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, believed that people who did not believe themselves to be targets were now finding themselves under attack. “There’s a network of Israeli army and air force intelligence and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each other information. They can cross the lines between Area C and Area B in the occupied territories. Usually they carry out operations when IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a ‘spectacular’ to show what great ‘warriors’ they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because of the second intifada . . . ”
Palestinian security officers in Gaza were intrigued by the logic behind the Israeli killings. “Our guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives,” one of the Palestinian officials tells me. “I tell you this frankly—they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as ruthless. After they targeted Mohamed Dahlan’s convoy when he was coming back from security talks, Dahlan talked to Foreign Minister Peres. ‘Look what you guys are doing to us,’ Dahlan told Peres. ‘Don’t you realise it was me who took Sharon’s son to meet Arafat?’ ” Al-Wazzir understands some of the death-squad logic. “It has some effect because we are a paternalistic society. We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they assassinated my dad, the intifada didn’t stop. It was affected, but all the political objectives failed. Rather than demoralising the Palestinians, it fuelled the intifada. They say there’s now a hundred Palestinians on the murder list. No, I don’t think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against Israeli intelligence. An army is an institution, a system; murdering an officer just results in him being replaced . . . ” The murder of political or military opponents was a practice the Israelis honed in Lebanon where Lebanese guerrilla leaders were regularly blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often—as in the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias—after interrogation. And all in the name of “security.”99
I RETURN TO THE AYOSHA JUNCTION and the “clashes.” Stones bang onto the roofs of the Israeli jeeps, skitter over the road, ping off the metal poles of long-collapsed advertisement hoardings. I watch a young soldier open the door of his jeep every minute or so, take careful aim with his rifle, fire, and retreat back inside. He does this for half an hour, then looks back at me. “Where are you from?” he asks. We might have been in a bar, on a beach, coming across each other in someone’s office. England. The twenty-one-year-old grins. “I’m from Queens, New York, and now I’m at Ayosha junction, Ramallah—quite a journey! This is more fun than Queens.” Fun? Do I hear him right? Fun? “Well, at least here you don’t get shot while waiting at the traffic lights.” He grins. “My name’s Ilan.”
The stones keep thundering off the metal roofs of the jeeps. Gas grenades soar through the hot sky towards youths hiding behind the skeleton of a bus, using slingshots—I can see them clearly through the smoke—to give their stones velocity. The Israeli firing—rubber-coated bullets for the most part—makes my ears sing, tinnitus from Iraqi guns mixed with Israeli rifles, louder than any shooting in the Hollywood movies from which Ilan seems to have taken his script. I am taken aback by the line about the traffic lights. Surely there’s more chance of getting killed at the lights in the West Bank than in New York.
“Israel is a great place,” Ilan says. But this is not Israel. And it occurs to me, watching these young men in their grimy olive-green fatigues, that their ritual had been practised. Two soldiers twist gas grenades onto their colleagues’ rifles. A soldier points out a running youth to a colleague who fires a round in his direction. An ambulance moves towards the youth, lying now on the road. And one of the soldiers claps another on the back. Major Shai arrives in another jeep to watch this miserable spectacle, a thirty-four-year-old accountant from Tel Aviv whose Ray-Banned driver is an insurance agent when he isn’t watching stone-throwers in Ramallah. In the back of the jeep, cradling his rifle on his knees, sits a twenty-one-year-old business management student of Moroccan origin, happily arguing politics with Shai, more interested in marrying his girlfriend in six months’ time than in the outcome of today’s theatre at Ayosha. The arguments are familiar. Shai shakes his head—he actually calls the confrontation “a ritual”—but thinks the Israeli army “couldn’t give way.” Give way? But this isn’t Israel. I venture a heretical thought, that in ten years Israel will be back behind its 1967 frontiers—I don’t believe it now—and, amazingly, Shai agrees. The student in the jeep does not. “If we pull out of here, we show we’re weak. Then the Arabs will want all of Israel and they’ll be trying to get Haifa and Tel Aviv.”
It’s the same weary argument I used to hear from Israeli soldiers in Lebanon. If we stay, we’re strong. If we leave, we’re weak. The Arabs only understand strength. At one point, Shai nods towards the stone-throwers and says: “They are animals.” Why? I ask. “You saw what they did to our two soldiers in Ramallah police station.” Yes, every Israeli has that image engraved in his mind. Not the destroyed children, not Mohamed el-Dura collapsing dead under a hail of Israeli bullets, but the savage murder of the two Israeli reservists. Photographs of their grotesquely mutilated faces are widely available on the Internet. Many soldiers have seen them. “You media are partly responsible for the image we have,” Shai says. “You make this place out to be a war zone with nothing but stones and shooting.” But it was Sharon, I say, who did that. It was Sharon who kept telling the world that Israel was “under siege,” that Israel was being assaulted by “international terror.”
Shai takes a call on his mobile from his family. “They’re on the beach,” he says. “And that’s where we should be.” And it dawned on me that these soldiers had an alternative in life. Shai could be on the beach. The soldier in the back could be with his girlfriend. But the Palestinians on the other side of the firing line couldn’t go anywhere. They were locked in, trapped, under real siege. The degradation of life has been an incremental process, just as the war has moved incrementally from pain to bloodbath.
Wasn’t this just what happened in the 1954–62 Algerian war? It began as a nuisance—trees cut down to block roads, railways sabotaged, Algerian crowds hurling stones at French troops—and ended in a welter of bombs and village massacres. There was plenty of torture, too, personally conducted by senior French officers. And plenty of drumhead executions of Algerians by Algerians. So, too, the Palestinian intifada descends into anarchy. From stone-throwing to suicide bombing, from snipers to bomber pilots. Palestinians are daily tortured by Israeli officers in the Russian compound in Jerusalem. Palestinians are regularly— and publicly—shot for collaboration.
In late July 2000, the Israelis fire a missile into the office of a Hamas official in Nablus. The rocket, American-made, of course, killed two small Palestinian children. A hundred thousand mourners call for retaliation. An Israeli bus-driver called Menashe Nuriel, en route from Jerusalem to Kiryat Shmona, stops to pick up a seventeen-year-old Palestinian. He thinks the man looks suspicious, notices wires coming from a bag in his hand and wrestles him off the bus while forty-six passengers look on in astonishment. The bag contains three 81-mm mortar shells and explosives that would have killed every passenger on the bus. “If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow,” the Israeli policeman outside the Damascus gate tells me. But if Palestinian retaliation is such a certainty, I ask the man, why kill the Hamas official in Nablus? He shrugs. “It is a war and we know what war is. You don’t need to worry. This is safer than London.” But it’s not.
Jerusalem is a city of illusions. Here Ariel Sharon promises his people “security” and brings them war. On the main road to Ma’ale Adumim, inside Israel’s illegal “municipal boundaries,” Israelis drive at over 100 mph. In the Old City, Israeli troops and Palestinian civilians curse each other before the few astonished Christian tourists. Loving Jesus doesn’t help to make sense of the Arab–Israeli conflict. Gideon Samet got it right in Ha’aretz. “Jerusalem looks like a Bosnia about to be born. Main thoroughfares inside the Green Line . . . have become mortally perilous . . . The capital’s suburbs are exposed as Ramat Rachel was during the war of independence . . . ” Samet is pushing it a bit. Life is more dangerous for Palestinians than for Israelis. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. “I suggest that we repeat to ourselves every day and throughout the day,” Sharon tells us, “that there will be no negotiations with the Palestinians until there is a total cessation of terrorism, violence and incitement.”
But this does not mean, of course, that Israel’s death squads have to stop murdering with their usual impunity or that Israeli settlers must stop shooting Palestinian civilians. Only that Palestinian suicide bombers must stop killing innocent Israelis. A Palestinian lawyer waves a copy of The Wall Street Journal in front of my face. “Your newspapers lay the groundwork of our suffering,” he shouts at me. I want to disown all possible connection with the paper of Manhattan’s ultra-right but its editorial fills me with dismay. It praises Sharon’s “subtlety” because “suddenly, enemy terrorists” are “being brought down en route to their mischief . . . this is war waged in twilight . . . subtle, but not less deadly.” Enemy? Brought down? No reference in The Wall Street Journal to the two children “brought down” in the attack on the Hamas office.
First come the changes in air pressure, then the drumroll of tank fire. I look out of the window, across the Kidron Valley to the Dome of the Rock shimmering in floodlights above the old city. It is long past dark but the Israeli–Palestinian war has now become a familiar sound in Jerusalem as the tanks fire on Beit Jalla. Only hours earlier, the Israelis had tried to murder Marwan Dirya, a member of Force 17 in Ramallah. They fired two ground-to-ground missiles at his car in a bougainvillea-smothered street, missed with the first shot—giving Dirya just enough time to hurl himself from the vehicle—and hitting the car with the second. Dirya was immediately called a “leading terrorist” by the Israelis. Had the Dirya murder attempt prompted the resumption of Palestinian attacks from Beit Jalla? And if so, what was the Israeli helicopter attack on a Palestinian police station in the Gaza town of Rafah meant to be?
No sooner have I arrived to look at the cinders of Dirya’s car in Ramallah—the Israelis had a clear shot from a big military encampment and an illegal settlement on a neighbouring hilltop—than a Palestinian struck back. A member of Hamas? Islamic Jihad? A young man driving a black car speeds past one of Tel Aviv’s main army bases and sprays with bullets a group of soldiers who are leaving for lunch. He, like the Israelis, is trying to murder his enemies. He wounds ten men before an Israeli shoots the gunman in the head and he crashes into a lamp-post. The first shooting assassination attempt by Palestinians inside Israel in twelve months is another lightning new statistic to add to the war.
A day later, I am driving at speed north up the Tel Aviv highway, the fastest way to reach Tulkarem if I don’t want to get snarled up in the Israeli checkpoints outside Ramallah. “If you turn right, walk three hundred metres, then turn left,” the Israeli soldier tells me on the border of the West Bank, “you’ll find the son-of-a-bitch at the checkpoint.” But the son-of-a-bitch isn’t there. The Palestinian policeman at the Tulkarem junction didn’t want to die in any more “mistaken” Israeli ambushes, and the road is just a sultry, midday pageant of tyres, stones, empty Israeli cartridges and rotting sandbags. A torn Palestinian flag hangs over the empty checkpoint. But not far beyond lies anger as hot as the sun. It is 6 August 2001. They are preparing to bury Amr Hassan Khudeiri and they are looking for the man who betrayed him.
Amr Khudeiri was the young Hamas “activist”—for which read “guerrilla”/ “terrorist”/“extremist”/“militant” or whatever—who was burned alive when an Israeli pilot in an American-made Apache maintained Israel’s policy of state murder by firing three American-made missiles into Khudeiri’s car. The manufacturer of the missile was not in doubt. But was it Khudeiri’s car? The Fatah security man standing outside the row of Ottoman-built shops is more interested in the car than the missile.
“There was nothing left of him—atomised, burned alive,” he says. “He was just ashes. But we have the information that there was some kind of strange paint on the roof of the car.” He says this with his eyebrows raised, as if it was a question rather than a small but critical piece of intelligence. I ask about the missile. The Fatah guy opens his car door, takes something from the back seat and hands me a hunk of iron—perhaps six inches long—with two metal tubes attached to it and a code number which reads: 18876-13411923-14064. I have seen this shaped missile engine part and numeral configuration in Lebanon. Always it belongs to Lockheed missiles fired from Apaches. So Lockheed had a role in Khudeiri’s death, although that doesn’t interest the Fatah man.
“Khudeiri wasn’t driving his own car,” he says. “He had borrowed it. And the owner took the car to Israel last week. He is missing now. We are trying to find him.100 The helicopter came over the bridge outside the town and fired the three missiles. We think there was some infrared paint on the roof.” The message is easy: Fatah thinks Khudeiri was betrayed by a collaborator, probably the owner of the car, who had allowed the Israelis to splash some infrared on the roof to guide the missile. “Or maybe there was a ‘bleeper’ of some kind, a computer code.”
This same afternoon, the Israeli police announce that they have arrested a Palestinian who was preparing to be a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv. All he needed were the explosives that were supposed to have been brought by Amr Hassan Khudeiri. Or so they say. Israeli “security” stories often turn out to be economical with the truth. But in Tulkarem, there are quite a few truths lying about. The first is that there was more than one body. The corpse I see taken from the smaller mosque bound in a Palestinian flag, a cloth round its head, revealing only a mouth and a moustache, turns out to be not Khudeiri but Mohamed Meziad, a twenty-year-old Fatah man shot dead by the Israelis—but totally unreported—just twenty-four hours ago. I watch the mouth and the moustache bobbing off between the crowds to the second mosque where Khudeiri’s somewhat humbler remains are also awaiting burial. When four Hamas members—cloaked head to foot in green gowns with eye-slits and “martyrdom” swords strapped to their backs—walk from the mosque with a wooden stretcher, the green shroud upon it seems to protect very little of substance.
Sitting on the pavement is a middle-aged man, shaking and perspiring. “He saw what happened to his friend yesterday—he saw him turning into ashes,” his cousin tells me. It’s the usual funeral. There are 10,000 mourners, a loudspeaker screaming Allahu akbar, and ferocious bursts of automatic gunfire from young men, often shooting rifles and pistols at the same time. They make their way through the delicate, decaying houses of Tulkarem, past the market whose vendors and donkeys are squeezed between trayloads of plums, lettuce, cauliflowers, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, pears, apples and watermelons. Life amid death.
There is more shooting at the graveside where Khudeiri’s father, Mansour, a dignified figure with short grey hair who is a senior teacher at Tulkarem College, embraces hundreds of mourners. So does his equally unsmiling but unweeping son, Amr’s brother, a green ribbon draped round his neck as he puts his arms across the shoulders of old men, teenagers and gunmen. The body is lowered into the grave and Abbas Zeyid, the local Hamas leader, makes a short but very revealing speech. “Our dear son and brother Amr loved his parents,” he says. “Just five minutes before he left home for the last time, Amr said to them: ‘My dear mother and father, if I die, you must not cry for me.’ ” The thousands round the grave lift their eyes at this and murmur Allahu akbar again. Prescience? Or was Amr Khudeiri on a mission from which he did not expect to return, a mission he undertook—fatally—in someone else’s car?
The crack of the explosion comes as a shock from over a kilometre away. I am eating in a bar in West Jerusalem and I turn to the Israeli waitress and say the two words “suicide bomber” and she nods and her right hand moves involuntarily to her mouth. I give her more shekels than the meal can be worth and set off running up Jaffa Street, towards a great dirty smudge of brown and grey smoke that is streaming upwards. I get there just as police and soldiers pour out of jeeps and cars. Outside the Sbarro restaurant, there lies a plump lady with her brains bursting through her head. A child—perhaps three, perhaps five—is so mutilated that its eyes have been blasted out of its face. It is the atrocity every Israeli has been waiting for. A Palestinian suicide bomber, a crowded, air-conditioned pizzeria just before two on an ovenlike West Jerusalem afternoon. There is blood and glass all over the street, on the stretchers of the Magen David ambulances, on the faces of those who have survived. I count two dead until I see another woman with a table leg sticking out of her stomach. Three dead. Then five. Jens Palme, a German Stern magazine photographer, counts ten corpses in two minutes. Yehuda, a Jewish holidaymaker from Barcelona—first-name anonymity is one of the few things Israelis and Arabs wish to share here—saw “a soldier flying through the air, right up in the air, disintegrating” and “body parts flying around in the smoke.” Many of the corpses are very small. More than half the dead are Israeli children. “Unforgivable” is the word that comes to mind. What did the child with no eyes do to the Palestinians?
My mobile starts to ring. Mobiles are ringing all over the street, on the belts of the cops and soldiers, in the hands of crying shop assistants, on the pavements, on the still intact corpses, harsh shrilling tones and merry jingles and mockeries of Beethoven. Radio Belfast is talking to me. Belfast? I ask myself amid this butchery. Belfast. One bomb alley calling another bomb alley. A girl with an Ulster accent tells me that Islamic Jihad have claimed the bombing. There is a fire engine crunching through the glass and I’m too overwhelmed to take in the irony that someone in Northern Ireland is telling me who blew up the café next to me in Jerusalem. Islamic Jihad made a phone call to the Agence France-Presse in Amman. I talk into the phone, the sound of alarm bells and shouting forcing me to raise my voice in the live interview as I recount what I’ve seen and I notice some of the Israelis beside the road listening to me with growing anger.
The corner of Jaffa Street and King George’s Street is not the place to argue the causes of this horror. A reminder of the two Palestinian children who died in the helicopter missile attack in Nablus—one aged two, the other five—or of the dozens of Palestinian child stone-throwers shot dead by Israeli troops, or of the youngest victim of this war, a Palestinian baby murdered by Jewish settlers— would be setting fire to anger. For the Israeli crowd now gathered outside the boutiques and shoe shops of Jaffa Street, this is further—perhaps final—evidence that the “terrorist” Arafat wants them all dead, burned alive, liquidated.
High above us, two tiny white Israeli helicopters chunter through the hot air and a group of whey-faced youths are pushed into a police van. Arrested? Or was it for the Arabs’ own protection? On Jaffa Street, I can hear the authentic voice of Jewish West Jerusalem, enraged, shocked, explicit. “I saw a two-year-old on the floor, in bits,” a young man shouts. Alexander, he says his name is, a Jewish estate agent who spends half the year in Antwerp. “This was a little baby. What did he know of life? He knew nothing. He was in pieces. It was unbelievable.” A number of Orthodox Jews gather round Alexander, black hats, white shirts, ringlets, nodding their heads vigorously. “When one or two Palestinians die, you press people say it’s the end of the world. But the Palestinians terrorise our whole country. If we are going to have a war, so—we have a war. What more do the Palestinians want? When we offer them a finger, they want the whole hand. We offered them ninety-eight per cent of their land.” I note the word “their.” It’s not 98 per cent. But why not 100 per cent? At this moment, it’s an obscene thought.
David, a Jerusalem businessman, talks about “barbarism” and plays the role of catalyst to a crowd of furious shopkeepers crushed around him. “If Arafat can’t control his people, then we have to go in there and take the place and sterilise it . . . The party’s over and maybe they’ll have to be put back under occupation. We’re refighting the war of ’forty-seven. The Arabs think they have limited liability. But if they lose, they go crying to the world for help.” I don’t want to think what “sterilise” means. Up the street, the police ribbons are fluttering in the warm breeze like cordons round a fairground, the sun splashing over a million shards of glass, cops in flak jackets looking for the ultimate point of fear of all ordnance officers: the second bomb. But suicide bombers carry only one charge, round their waist. By now, the Palestinian Authority reacts and its inevitably incompetent— and incomprehensible—spokesmen are trying to remind the world of Palestine’s casualties, of a “warmongerer” [sic] called Sharon “who wanted only war, not peace.” They are saying this at the wrong time, in the wrong place.
Then comes the day of lamentation. Even before the fourteen funerals begin, Israelis know the dead as if they are their own families—as, in a sense, they are. Long before five members of the Schijveschuurdr family are buried at the Givat Shaul cemetery outside Jerusalem—the same Givat Shaul that is, or was, Deir Yassin—Israelis have all seen the snapshot in the morning papers, a photograph of a bar mitzvah ceremony with two small girls in white and a middle-aged man wearing spectacles. Their father, Mordechai, and mother, Tzirli, both came from families of Holocaust survivors, families who had lived through the Nazi horrors only for a son and daughter to be torn apart by a Palestinian suicide bomber in West Jerusalem.
Outside the Sbarro pizzeria, Israelis light hundreds of candles. There is much talk of revenge—as there is at the funerals—and a growing anger that Sharon’s overnight seizure of Palestinian offices in Jerusalem and the bombing of the Ramallah police headquarters falls far short of the retaliation Israelis expect. Fuelling this bitterness are reports on Israeli television of Palestinians celebrating the massacre on the streets of Ramallah. The reports are all true. Among the hovels of the Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon, Palestinians even dance the traditional dabkeh in their satisfaction at the killings.
The Schijveschuurdrs’ badly wounded ten-year-old daughter Leah attends the burials of five members of her family. Determined to see them lowered into their grave, she arrives on a stretcher, staring at the bright midday sky, a nurse monitoring her intravenous drip, more than two thousand Israelis standing around her. Mordechai and Tzirli and their children, two-year-old Chemda, Avraham, who was four, and Raya, fourteen, were all killed by the nail-studded bomb. Leah’s surviving sister Hamda was also badly hurt in the explosion. The dead also included Judith Shoshana Greenbaum from New York, who was four months pregnant, ten-year-old Yocheved Shoshan, eight-year-old Tamara Shimshawily, and her mother, Lily. The oldest victim was Freida Mendelson, who was sixty-two.
When in the early hours of that morning the Israeli army had stormed into the Jerusalem Palestinian offices at Orient House and raised the Israeli flag on the roof of the venerable old mansion with its tracery windows and pitched roof, they did more than occupy the very symbol of the original “peace process,” the building from which the Palestinians set out for the 1991 Madrid peace conference. Inside the Israelis found filing cabinets of documents and maps, the very archives of the “final status” negotiations that were supposed to bring eternal peace to the Middle East. Thus did a dream die when the soldiers broke through the front door.
Faced with the real threat of the suicide bomber, Sharon’s men then squandered the world’s sympathy by claiming that Orient House—with its elderly, pontificating officials, its “peace process” archives and its constant trail of foreign diplomatic visitors—was, in the words of Dore Gold, the Israeli government’s official spokesman, “a virtual hub and nerve centre of terrorists.” Even Gold’s revealing insertion of the word “virtual” did not fool Israelis who asked—not unreasonably—why, if Orient House was such a “terror centre,” it had not been raided, trashed, closed down, occupied or destroyed years ago. “We can hunt down their terrorists in the back streets of Ramallah, but we didn’t know until now that ‘terrorist HQ’ was just a stone’s throw from shabbak [Israeli secret service] offices,” an Israeli journalist remarked sarcastically to me. “What are we supposed to believe next?” The headquarters of Shin Bet in the Russian compound in Jerusalem stands about a thousand metres from Orient House. If Gold was to be believed—and he was not—Israel’s cops, who have stood outside the building for eight years, must have been breathtakingly inefficient to have allowed all those “terrorists” to pop in and out of their “nerve centre” for almost a decade.
The usual sense of disproportion set in. Two Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza on the day after the Sbarro bombing were buried amid scenes of grief and anger. Most Israelis were unaware of their deaths. Yet while many Western newspapers were urging the Sharon government on to bloody revenge, it was an Israeli journalist who provided the most generous and thoughtful response to the massacre of Israelis. Gideon Levy asked in Ha’aretz:
What should the residents of the village of Aanin feel about the killing of Mustafa Yassin, a village resident, right in front of his wife and infant daughter? And what should the family of Majad Jalad, a five-year-old boy who is hovering between life and death, think after soldiers shot him in the stomach? . . . And what about the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose lives have become hell because of the closure and the siege? What feelings are being implanted in them and what buds of calamity will they produce?
Levy wrote that it was “time to tell the truth: the victims of this intifada are victims of the settlement enterprise . . . ”
How many more Palestinian suicide bombers were waiting to die? After Sbarro—and the earlier annihilation of twenty-one young Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub—every Israeli was asking this question. On 12 August 2001, Mohamed Nasr climbed from a taxi and walked towards the terrasse bar of the Wall Street Café at Kiryat Motzkin north of Haifa and blew himself up, wounding twenty Israeli teenagers. Aharon Roseman, the café owner, said he saw Nasr walking towards the palm-tree-lined terrasse. “He approached a waitress, pulled up his shirt to reveal the explosives attached to his belt and asked the woman: ‘Do you know what this is?’ She screamed one word—‘Terrorist!’ I grabbed a chair and threw it at him and ran behind a wall—that’s what saved me.” In the exaggerated but frightening language of Islamic Jihad, Sheikh Abdullah Shami, one of its officials, stated that Nasr had been “able to penetrate into the heart of Zionism with all its security measures—we will continue our fight, our struggle, our operations, until we reach our goal of complete freedom.”
The implications are awesome. Not only did Nasr kill himself just after Arafat had ostentatiously arrested four “activists”; Nasr’s father, Mahmoud, revealed at his West Bank home of Qabatya that his son had been working for Arafat’s own security services until just six weeks ago. Qabatya. I spend almost a quarter of an hour trying to find the village on a map—so many little dirt towns are now marked red on my “bomber’s map”—and eventually discover the name close to Jenin. The sun burns the road to Qabatya; three youths and a mangy dog watch me suspiciously when I park on the corner of a rubbish-clothed hill. “The house of the martyr?” one of the boys asks before I have said a word. And his hand points to a single-storey hut with bare concrete walls.
I’ve sat in these rooms before, the broken fathers always trying to show pride in the death of the young men whose portraits stare down from the glossy posters on the wall, but who set off to kill the innocent, the relatives anxious to add their twopence of praise. “Chivalrous” is the word they keep using about Mohamed Nasr. When I ask his father what he believes his son was thinking as he walked towards the Wall Street Café and touched the detonator on his waist, he just raises his arms in a helpless way. “I don’t know,” he replies. They all say that. The family agrees that the saddest thing about his death was the time of his birth. “He was the first boy to be born after seven girls,” his cousin Siham says. “Think of it. Seven girls and then Mohamed arrived and now he has gone.”
Old Haj Mahmoud Nasr sits cross-legged on the floor wearing a white headdress, elbows resting on a patterned cushion. He acknowledges his son was a ninth-grade drop-out; he was kind, he says, he kept some sheep but had no money to marry. “All I knew was that he was active in the first intifada.” But Mohamed Nasr’s life and death contain a lesson for both Palestinians and Israelis. A thin, long-faced youth with a short beard, he was born into occupation and despair, shot through the thigh when he was fifteen after throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in 1988. Qabatya is a rocky village, its old stone houses as hard as its people. When the men there found a collaborator among them, they burned his house and hanged him from an electricity pole. Nasr drifted into a job with the Palestinian Authority—with Moussa Arafat’s military intelligence services—as a prison guard, watching over Islamic Jihad and Hamas men whom Moussa’s cousin Yassir Arafat had locked up in Jenin on Israel’s orders.
One of them was Iyad Hardan, an intelligent, tough Jihad member whom Israel’s death squads wanted to kill. He was studying at an open university and would regularly be freed from jail to attend classes. On 5 July he went to make a call from a pay phone in Jenin. The moment he lifted the receiver, it blew his head off. It was a turning point in Mohamed Nasr’s life. He liked the prisoners he guarded. “He had come to admire Hardan,” another cousin—also Mohamed— recalls. “He was sad for days afterwards. He was angry like everyone else. I remember him saying that ‘We are from God and we go back to God.’ Then he started talking to us about how he wanted to be a martyr.” Other members of the family remember darker words. “Damn those who are behind this,” Mohamed Nasr said. A few days later, in mid-July, he threw in his job, complaining that he hadn’t been paid for a month. It must have been then that he first took up with Islamic Jihad. He was, as they say, “chosen,” prepared for the “martyrdom” he claimed to seek, told how to strap explosives round his waist. His family insist they had no idea of this. That, too, is what they all say.
Perhaps it is the truth, although Jenin’s school for suiciders seems to have been a sloppy affair, its Islamic Jihad cells containing at least one mole. A collaborator had prepared Hardan’s murder and at least one of the men Islamic Jihad sent to die had already changed his mind and given himself up to the Israelis. Not Mohamed Nasr. “On the Sunday morning, he didn’t have breakfast but he attended noon prayers,” Siham says. “He took a bath, changed his clothes and said to his father: ‘Do you want anything from me?’ Then he asked to see his nephew, little Islam.”
Islam is only four months old. Was Mohamed Nasr seeking some love of life in the child, having already abandoned his own? “He liked children.” It is Siham talking again. “He liked playing with them. He took coffee but didn’t shave that day. He was wearing a beige shirt, white trousers and black boots. He didn’t say where he was going. Yes, he had a mobile phone. He took it with him.”
Not long after three that afternoon, Nasr picked up a taxi near Haifa. The Israelis had already set up roadblocks in the city—another collaborator appears to have warned them that a suicider was on his way—but they never found Nasr. The driver was to recall later how Nasr had been uncertain of his destination. “Three times, he made calls on his mobile and said ‘I can’t find the place,’ ” the taximan said afterwards.
When he was asked about the taxi fare, Nasr said he didn’t care how much it cost. Which made the driver even more suspicious as he dropped him off close to the Wall Street Café. Was he reflecting in those last seconds that the Israelis he was trying to kill might have included children, perhaps as young as four-month-old Islam? Did he question the morality of trying to erase the lives of innocents? That his twenty-eight years on earth were about to end? His cousin Mohamed has pondered this question. “There would have been no thought about himself,” he says. “He would think of many things except himself—he couldn’t think about himself because he wanted to die. Any person who has accepted this form of sacrifice doesn’t think about himself.”
The Israelis took their revenge by raiding Jenin two days later and destroying its police station, unaware—or failing to comprehend—that it was their own murder of Hardan that sent Mohamed Nasr on his frightening mission. The killing of Hardan—intended to strike fear into Islamic Jihad—had the opposite effect. It turned Mohamed Nasr into a suicide bomber.
I once asked the head of the Lebanese Hizballah movement if he could explain to me how the mind of a suicide bomber works. It was his first Western television interview. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah was dressed in his black turban and robes. He had formerly been the Hizballah’s military commander in southern Lebanon and from his legions had emerged the first Arab suicide bombers who would— after more than a decade and a half—sap the morale of Israel’s retreating army of occupation. Explain to me as a Westerner, I asked him, how a man can immolate himself.
There are qualities which our fighters have. He who drives his truck into the enemy’s military base to blow himself up and to become a martyr, he drives in with a hopeful heart, smiling and happy because he knows he is going to another place. Death, according to our belief, is not oblivion. It is not the end. It is the beginning of a true life.
The best metaphor for a Westerner to try to understand this truth is to think of a person being in a sauna bath for a long time. He is very thirsty and tired and hot and he is suffering from the effects of the high temperature. Then he is told that if he opens the door, he can go into a quiet, comfortable room, drink a nice cocktail and hear classical music. Then he will open the door and go through without hesitation, knowing that what he leaves behind is not a high price to pay, and what awaits him is of much greater value. I cannot think of another example to explain this idea to a Westerner.
Nasrallah enjoyed metaphors, similes, like the Hizballah’s “martyr” posters which so often show the dead in paradise, surrounded by rivers and tulips and weeping willows. Is that where the suicide bombers really believe they are going? To the rivers and the honey and the trees and—yes, of course—the virgins? Or the quiet, comfortable room with a cocktail and classical music?
The idea that sacrifice is a noble ideal—and let us, for a moment, put aside the iniquity of murdering children in a Jerusalem pizzeria—is common to Western as well as Eastern society. Our First World War calvaries in France are covered with commemorations to men—Bill Fisk’s dead comrades—who supposedly “laid down their lives” or “gave their lives” for their country—even though most died in appalling agony, praying only that they would live. When, years after our conversation, Nasrallah’s own son was killed in a suicidal assault on an Israeli army position in southern Lebanon, the Hizballah leader insisted that he receive not condolences but congratulations. Nasrallah appeared on Lebanese television, laughing and smiling, beaming with delight as he spoke to well-wishers on the phone. His son’s young fiancée also expressed her pride in her dead husband-to-be. But she did not smile.
If the idea of self-sacrifice is thus explicable, it is clearly not a natural phenomenon. In a normal society, in a community whose people feel they are treated equally and with justice, we regard suicide as a tragic aberration, a death produced—in the coroner’s eloquent lexicon—when “the balance of the mind is disturbed.” But what happens when the balance of a whole society’s mind has been disturbed? Walking with a friend through the wreckage of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp in Beirut in the year 2000, I could only wonder at the stability of the survivors who still lived there amid the concrete huts and the football-sized rats. They have been homeless, many of them, since their original dispossession fiftytwo years ago. If I lived there, I tell my friend, I would commit suicide. And that is the point.
When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the “enemy” is all-powerful, when one’s own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, “two-legged beasts,” then the mind moves beyond reason. It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time—not entirely with my tongue in my cheek—that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds. This, I am sure, was the suicide bomber to whom Nasrallah was referring, the one who drives into the military base “smiling and happy.” I later interviewed one of the few surviving American marines to have seen the bomber. “All I can remember,” he told me, “was that the guy was smiling.”
I spent months studying the suiciders of Lebanon. They were mostly single men, occasionally women, often the victims of Israeli torture or the relatives of family members who had been killed in battle with Israel. They might receive their orders while at prayer in the masjid or mosque in their south Lebanese villages. The imam would be told to use a certain phrase in his sermon—a reference to roses or gardens or water or a kind of tree. The cleric would not understand the purpose of these words, but in his congregation a young man would know that his day of “martyrdom” had arrived.
In Gaza, even before the Oslo agreement, I discovered an almost identical pattern. As in Lebanon, the would-be “martyr” would spend his last night reading the Koran. He would never say a formal goodbye to his parents. But he would embrace his mother and father and tell them not to cry if he were one day to die. Then he would set off to collect his explosives. Just as Mohamed Nasr had done in Qabatya.101
Yet there is a terrible difference with the suicide bombers of Palestine. However terrifying, the Japanese kamikaze—“divine wind”—pilots of the Second World War attacked battleships and aircraft carriers, not hospitals. The Lebanese largely followed this priority: they usually went for military targets. I was puzzled why the Lebanese should have been queuing to watch Pearl Harbor when it opened in Beirut in July 2001—until I saw the young men studying the cinema stills of equally young Japanese pilots tying their “martyrdom” bandanas around their foreheads. In similar fashion, often with headbands containing a Koranic quotation, the Hizballah targeted the Israeli army and its militia allies. They blew up entire barracks and killed soldiers by the score. The Palestinians learned from all this. But more and more, their suicide bombers—including the women bombers who emerged in more recent years—have targeted Israeli civilians. A battleship or an Israeli tank is one thing; a three-year-old waiting for his young mother to cut his pizza for him quite another.102
Amnesty International devoted a whole report to the targeting of civilians by Palestinian suicide bombers. Between September 2000 and July 2002, at least 350 civilians, most of them Israeli, had been killed in over 128 attacks by Palestinian armed groups or individuals. “Civilians should never be the focus of attacks, not in the name of security and not in the name of liberty,” Amnesty said. “We call on the leadership of all Palestinian armed groups to cease attacking civilians, immediately and unconditionally.” The oldest victim of a suicide attack, according to Amnesty, was Chanagh Rogan, killed in a Passover bombing at a Netanya hotel on 27 March 2002. She was ninety years old.103
I called a Palestinian friend in Ramallah to ask about this, to ask how young Palestinians could rejoice in the streets at the pizzeria massacre. She expressed her abhorrence at what happened—she was genuine in this—but tried to explain that Palestinians had suffered so many civilian casualties since the first intifada began that they found joy in any suffering inflicted on their enemy. There was a feeling, she said, that “they should suffer too”; which, of course—and the principle applies, though not the historical parallel—is exactly how Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s area bombing of German civilians was explained in Britain. They should suffer too. And save for a few souls like the bishop of Chichester, blitzed Britons supported Harris all the way. But I go back to my own reaction when I reached the blitzed Sbarro pizza house. Unforgivable. I ask again: What did that eyeless, dead Israeli child ever do to the Palestinians? Could not the Palestinian bomber, in his last moments on earth, recognise this child as his daughter, his baby sister, his youngest cousin? Alas, no. He was too far down the road to his own death, too buried in his own people’s tragedy. His was not an act of “mindless terror,” the words Israeli spokesmen use as they try to deceive both the world and their own people. He was the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, cheated, tortured and killed in terrible numbers. The pressure cooker of the West Bank was his sauna. And he passed through the door.104
If only—how often we use that phrase about the Middle East—if only the United States administration had seriously addressed the Arab–Israeli dispute in 2001, instead of wasting its energies in the creation of another war in the region, how much might have been gained, how much suffering alleviated, how much the pain of future history might have been spared us. In February 2001, Palestinians and Israelis were fighting a civil war. And what did the United States do? It bombed Iraq. What did the new secretary of state Colin Powell do? He arrived in the Middle East not to confront the furnace of the war in Israel and “Palestine,” but to “re-energise” sanctions against Iraq and reforge the anti-Iraqi Arab coalition that ceased to exist more than a decade before. There’s a story—probably apocryphal—that as the Red Army stormed into Berlin in 1945, German civil servants were still trying to calculate the Third Reich’s paperclip ration for 1946. Powell was now the paperclip man.
Already he had sent instructions to U.S. embassies in the region that they were no longer to refer to the occupied Palestinian territories as “occupied.” They were henceforth to be referred to as “disputed.” And immediately the American media—and quite a number of British newspapers—fell into line. I recall a phone interview with the BBC World Service in early 2001—they had called me on my mobile while I was sitting in a traffic jam in East Beirut—in which I was “twinned” with an Israeli government spokesman in Jerusalem. And the moment I referred to the “Israeli-occupied territories,” an Israeli voice boomed back: “But Mr. Fisk, the territories are not occupied by Israel!” I waited for a second. Aha, I countered, so you mean that the soldiers who stopped me on the road between Ramallah and Jenin last week were Swiss! Or were they Burmese? But this was no laughing matter. An occupied territory might generate violent resistance which could demand international legitimacy. But violence used over a “dispute”—a real estate problem, something that might be settled in the courts—was obviously illegitimate, criminal, mindless; indeed, it could be portrayed as the product of that well-worn libel, “mindless violence.” Powell—and the Israelis, of course—wanted to delegitimise the intifada.
All of this, however, obscured a momentous change within Arab society: the one great transition I have witnessed in almost thirty years reporting the Middle East. When I first visited the West Bank scarcely nine years after the 1967 war, there was in the occupied territories an Israeli-controlled Palestinian police militia, an army of collaborators—they even wore black berets—who “controlled” a supine and humiliated Palestinian people. North of the Israeli border, a Lebanese population lived in fear of Israeli military invasion. Israeli troops had only to cross the frontier to send a quarter of a million Lebanese civilians fleeing in panic to Beirut. To the east, millions of Iraqis lived in grovelling obedience to the Baath party.
Today, the Arabs are no longer afraid. The regimes are as timid as ever, loyal and supposedly “moderate” allies obeying Washington’s orders, taking their massive subventions from the United States, holding their preposterous elections, shaking in fear lest their people at last decide that “regime change”—from within their societies, not the Western version imposed by invasion—is overdue. It is the Arabs as a people—brutalised and crushed for decades by corrupt dictators—who are no longer running away. The Lebanese in Beirut, under siege by Israel, learned to refuse to obey the invader’s orders. The Hizballah proved that the mighty Israeli army could be humbled. The two Palestinian intifadas showed that Israel could no longer impose its will on an occupied land without paying a terrible price. The Iraqis first rose up against Saddam and then, after the Anglo-American invasion, against the occupation armies. No longer did the Arabs run away. The old Sharon policy into which the American neo-conservatives so fatally bought before the 2003 invasion of Iraq—of beating the Arabs till they come to heel or until they “behave” or until an Arab leader can be found “to control his own people”—is now as bankrupt as the Arab regimes that continue to work for the world’s only superpower.
This is not to recommend the social and military “people’s” revolutions which have occurred in the Middle East. But in Lebanon, “Palestine” and Iraq, the suicide bomber has become the symbol of this new fearlessness. Once an occupied people have lost their fear of death, the occupier is doomed. Once a man or woman stops being afraid, he or she cannot be made to fear again. Fear is not a product that can be re-injected into a population through re-invasion or harsher treatment or air attacks or walls or torture.
As the wreckage of the Oslo agreement rusted away, the once viable alternatives were also being slowly dismissed. For years, critics of the Oslo agreement pointed to the vital, undeniable UN Security Council Resolution 242. But now even this alternative is losing its appeal. More and more among Palestinians I hear the words that so frighten Israelis: that they must have “all” of Palestine, not just the lands taken by Israel in 1967. In Gaza in the autumn of 2000, I actually encountered this transition in progress. A Palestinian computer trainee began by telling me that UN Resolution 242 was the only path to real compromise and peace. But by the end of his increasingly bitter peroration, he began talking about Haifa and Acre and Ashkelon, cities which are in Israel, not in the nation of “Palestine” that Arafat was prepared to accept.
And all the while, reading back through my own reports as I write this book, I come across frightening little portents. “Do the Americans realise the catastrophe that is about to overwhelm the region?” I find myself asking in a feature filed to The Independent on 25 February 2001. “Have they any idea of the elemental forces that may be unleashed in the coming months?” Again, I ask myself why I wrote these words. Less than six and a half months before those elemental forces did explode, what did I expect? And I remember that friend of mine in Ramallah, the one who tried to explain the Palestinian reaction to suicide bombers by saying that Palestinians felt that their enemies “should suffer too.”
And so, as I pull my files from the shelves, my notebooks from Beirut and Israel and “Palestine,” I hear the clock ticking towards 11 September 2001, the calendar spitting out the dates. I have a hard copy of a long report filed from Jerusalem on 28 August 2001. There are just two weeks left to go.
THERE ISN’T A SCRAP OF INAS Abu Zeid left. She was only seven and the “martyrs” posters already going up around Khan Younis show her to have been a delicate-featured girl. But there isn’t a trace of her amid the fragments of corrugated iron and plastic, nor in the soft brown Gaza sand. Inas had been atomised, turned to dust in a millisecond. “I will show you where the missile came from,” a boy tells me, pointing far across the sand to where a few miserable concrete huts, with rag windows and flapping, sand-caked washing, stand near the horizon. “The Israelis fired from behind those houses. It was a tank.”
Was it so? I say this to myself, not as a question but as another of those remarks you find yourself making in Gaza. Lie? Truth? They matter when a war has grown so brutal, so cruel as this. Inas’s father, Sulieman, died with her. So did his six-year-old son, also named Sulieman. I don’t think I’ve come across a war in which children are killed so quickly. If it’s not an Israeli baby in a Palestinian sniper’s crosshairs, it’s two pesky Palestinian kids stupid enough to stand outside a Hamas office when the Israelis have chosen to blow the place away, or schoolkids who decide to take an early afternoon pizza, or Inas and Sulieman junior who got in the way or—if Hamas was lying and the Israelis are telling the truth—were turned to wet dust by their father’s bomb.
The Palestinian Authority has made a clean sweep of the Abu Zeids’ backyard. If he was making a bomb, it has disappeared, like Inas. I poke around amid the desert trash. How could an Israeli missile fly over the other huts, turn the corner outside the Abu Zeids’ backyard, pass over the yard walls and then dip below the plastic roof to blast the family apart? But who would make a bomb with his two tiny children standing next to him? Or maybe there was a bomb hidden at the back of the yard and Inas or Sulieman Junior touched it.
A crowd has gathered around us, unsmiling, suspicious. It’s not so easy now to investigate these deaths. “I’m Norwegian but Palestinians have started to look at me in the street and talk about me as if I’m an American,” a smiling aid worker says to me. “They blame the Americans for what the Israelis do. And now they blame the Europeans because we do nothing to help them.” Which is exactly what happened in Lebanon. The Norwegian lady is right. I was watched as I walked through the street in Gaza City, scrutinised by youths in Rafah. At Kalandia—just outside Jerusalem, on the road to Ramallah—a Palestinian boy of perhaps twelve looks at my car’s Israeli registration plates, picks up an iron bar and smashes it as hard as he can onto the back mudguard. Two men in a truck—we are all waiting at one of Israel’s humiliating checkpoints—jeer at me.
Everywhere, you notice the signs of collapse, of incipient anarchy. The Gaza wall murals used to depict Yassir Arafat’s beaming, ugly mug and pictures of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Now they are filled with exploding buses and dead children and Israeli soldiers on their backs with blood squirting from their heads. “They don’t even talk about Arafat any more,” a Palestinian café owner says to me as three horse-drawn water carts clop lazily past us. “There’s only one joke going the rounds about him. Arafat is at Camp David and the Israelis are demanding that he ‘ends the violence.’ And Arafat replies: ‘I can’t end the violence until I can stop my lips from trembling.’ ” Arafat’s growing senility is a source of deepening concern. Not far from Hebron, I meet a prominent Palestinian figure, important enough to require anonymity, who shakes his head in despair. “What can Arafat do now? His marriage is in bits—he’s only seen his wife for three minutes in the past ten months. His child needs a father and he’s not there. And he’s allowing the whole place to tribalise and disintegrate. There is complete disintegration here.”
It’s true. On the road south of Nablus, a yellow Palestinian taxi is hit by a stone—apparently thrown by an Israeli driver in an oncoming car, or that’s what the Israeli cops thought—and careers off the road. Its driver, Kemal Mosalem, is killed outright. But when his body arrives at the Rafidiyeh hospital, his family believe he has been killed by a rival Palestinian clan led by Ali Frej. The Frej family then ambush the grieving Mosalems with Kalashnikov rifles. Among the four Palestinian dead is Ali Frej and a Fatah official who had been part of Jibril Rajoub’s local “preventive security” unit. Six others are wounded. These are Arafat’s people. They are killing each other. And Arafat remains silent.
Yet here’s the thing. Ariel Sharon keeps saying that Arafat is a murderer, a super-terrorist, the leader of “international terror,” linked to Osama bin Laden, a man who gives orders for the murder of kids in pizza parlours. And the Israeli public are buying this, their journalists front-paging it, their people repeating it, over and over. Talking to Israelis—in taxis, on aeroplanes, in cafés—I keep hearing the same stuff. Terror, murder, filth. Like a cassette. Where have I heard this before?
In Gaza, I cannot fail to remember Beirut in 1982. Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege, struck by F-16s and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often powerless—there are now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza—it’s as if Arafat and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon. Sharon used to call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It’s important not to become obsessed during wars. But Sharon’s words were like an old, miserable film I had seen before. Every morning in Jerusalem, I pick up the Jerusalem Post. And there on the front page, as usual, will be another Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers. Palestinian Authority terror. Murderous terrorists.
Each day I travel to the scene of new Israeli incursions. The Israelis bomb Palestinian police stations, Palestinian security annexes, Palestinian police checkpoints. Why the police? I drive round the Gaza Strip with an old friend from the Beirut war, a European aid worker who still bears the webbed scar of a Lebanese bullet in his arm and stomach—the round punctured his spleen and liver. “Now if you look to your right, Bob, there’s the police station that the Israelis bombed two weeks ago,” he says. There’s a mass of burned-out rooms and a crumpled office. “And just round the corner here is the police post the Israelis hit last week.” More trashed buildings. “And down that road you can just see the Palestinian offices that were hit in July.” After the early raids, the Palestinians would do a quick rebuilding and repainting job. Now they no longer bother. But how can Arafat “arrest the murderers” if the Israelis are going to destroy all his police stations?
There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon’s responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists” who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians. But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel’s death. It might seem odd in this new war to be dwelling about that earlier atrocity. I am fascinated by the language. Murderers, terrorists. That’s what Sharon said then, and it’s what he says now. Did he really make that statement in 1982? I begin to work the phone from Jerusalem, calling up Associated Press bureaus that might still have their files from nineteen years ago. He would have made that speech—if indeed he used those words— some time on 15 September 1982.
One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem. It’s from an Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro bombing. An American Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me—foreign journalists are being insulted by both sides with ever more violent language—and this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He’s smiling and cheerful and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the phone, he says he’s taking the El Al night flight to New York with his wife. Would I like to drop by for tea?
He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the King David Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the outside security buzzer, that he’s a rabbi. He’s angry because a neighbour has just let down a friend’s car tyres in the underground parking lot and he’s saying how he felt like smashing the windows of the neighbour’s car. His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies, says that her husband—again, he should remain anonymous—gets angry very quickly. There’s a kind of gentleness about them both—how easy it is to spot couples who are still in love—that is appealing. But when the rabbi starts to talk about the Palestinians, his voice begins to echo through the apartment. He says several times that Sharon is a good friend of his, a fine man, who’s been to visit him in his New York office.
What we should do is go into those vermin pits and take out the terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said vermin, animals. I tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed from a refugee camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the first twenty houses close to the road. If there’s another stone, another twenty ones. They’d soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell you this. Stones are lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I’ll shoot you. I have the right to shoot you.
Now the rabbi is a generous man. He’s been in Israel to donate a vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly expensive medical centre to the country. He is well-read. And I liked the fact that—unlike too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a “we-only-want-peace” routine to hide more savage thoughts—he at least spoke his mind. But this is getting out of hand. Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. “If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you.” But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won’t shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. “Then I’d say you’re out of your mind.”
I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments have just collided. The rabbi’s dad taught him about an eye for an eye—or twenty homes for a stone—whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being “people of the Book,” Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews. The sickening Hamas references to Jews as “the sons of pigs and monkeys” are echoed by Israelis who talk of Palestinians as cockroaches or “vermin,” who tell you—as the rabbi told me—that Islam is a warrior religion, a religion that does not value human life. And I recall several times a Jewish settler who told me back in 1993—in Gaza, just before the Oslo accords were signed—that “we do not recognise their Koran as a valid document.”
I walk out of The Independent’s office and home in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Tor to find my car surrounded by glass. Now it’s my turn to get angry. The driver’s window has been smashed, the radio torn out. It is plastered with “TV” stickers—in the hope that Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers will not open fire. Abu Tor is mostly Arab, although The Independent’s house is right on the old green line, Arabs to the right of the front door, mostly Jews to the left. I drive down to the Hertz agency, sitting on piles of glass. The girl tells me that to avail myself of Hertz’s insurance, I have to report the robbery to the police. She tells me to go to the Russian Compound.
Now I know about the Russian Compound from Amnesty’s reports. This is where most of the Israeli torture goes on, the infamous “shaking” of suspected Palestinian “terrorists.” It should be an interesting trip. The moment I park my car, a loudspeaker shrieks at me in Hebrew. A cop tells me that for security reasons I have to park round the corner. No trouble with that. I watch two big police vans with sealed windows pass through the security barrier. I park and return to the door. “Where was your car robbed?” I am asked. Just outside the office, in Abu Tor, I reply. The policewoman shrugs. “Well, what do you expect?” she asks. I understand what she means. Arabs rob, don’t they, they steal car radios as well as blow up pizzerias? I wait for an hour. There is no cop to make out a report, although there are more than 200 policemen surrounding Orient House, a few hundred metres across the city.
There’s a daily demonstration just down the road from Orient House. The television cameras are there but this doesn’t stop the border police turning on several Palestinian youths. They are beaten in front of the cameras, groined and punched and headlocked by six cops. One is laid in a van where he is held down so that another policeman can stamp on his testicles. A young Israeli security man can’t take his eyes off this vile scene. He is bending down low—right in front of me—to see where the other cop’s boot is landing between the youth’s thighs. How can they do this in front of the cameras? I keep asking myself. And then the dark thought occurs to me: that the Israeli police want the cameras to film this, they want the Palestinians to see what happens to them when they oppose Israel, when they demonstrate, when they object—as one boy does—by holding up a paper Palestinian flag.
I think it’s the psychological shock of violence that always hits first, the sudden realisation that human beings intend to hurt each other. It afflicts everyone in this conflict. I have been attending the funeral of a Hamas man in Tulkarem and am returning to my taxi which is parked on the Israeli side of the line. On the map of the West Bank and Gaza—a broken window of settler roads and frontiers—Tulkarem is in Palestinian-controlled Area A and my taxi is in Israeli-controlled Area C. When I’d gone from C to A in the morning, the road was a litter of rubbish and stones. But when I return, there is a battle in progress, kids throwing stones at Israeli positions, burning tyres, rubber-coated steel bullets thwacking back through the trees.
I am tired and hungry and impatient to return to Jerusalem. So I grab the boys beside the burning tyres and tell them I am a journalist, that I have to cross back through the line. I find two more sinister figures lurking in a wrecked bus shelter. I tell them the same. Then I walk between the burning tyres towards the unseen Israelis, slowly, almost a dawdle. Then a stone lands at my feet. Just a very small stone but it lands with a nasty little crack. Then when I turn round, another hisses past my face. One of the Palestinian boys begins to shriek with laughter. Stones. I have never thought of them as enemies before. In a few months’ time, they will hit me, many of them, and almost kill me. But that will be later, after the calendar clicks round to the date that is waiting for us all and that I can only vaguely ascertain now as an “explosion.”
I keep walking slowly and realise that I will have physically to dodge each well-aimed stone calmly, as if it is perfectly normal for the Independent correspondent to be stoned by Palestinians on a hot summer’s afternoon. The road runs parallel with Area A now, and a teenager with a slingshot comes crashing through the trees—I can hear the whirr of the rope. The stone comes towards me so fast I can’t duck in time but it misses me by about a foot and smashes into the iron wall of an Israeli factory. The crash makes me look round. I am in the middle of an abandoned garden shop, surrounded by pots and cement eagles and deers and giant pots. One of the eagles has lost its head. Three more stones, maybe eight inches long. I realise what has happened. The Palestinians know I am a foreign journalist—I have shown them my Lebanese press card. But the moment I cross the line, I have become an Israeli. The moment they can no longer distinguish my face, they no longer care. I am an Israeli because I am on the Israeli side of the line. And I wonder what my friend the rabbi would have done.
Back in Jerusalem, I work the phone again, trying to track down that elusive quotation. If you call people animals, terrorists, vermin, can you be surprised when they behave so violently? Is it any wonder that Arafat is himself tribalising the rubbish dumps he still controls, playing the Musris and Nabulsis of Nablus off against each other, backing the Shakars of Nablus and the Shawars of Gaza, placating Hamas and Islamic Jihad by saying nothing?
On the way to Jenin, I and a colleague from the Daily Telegraph are stopped by Israeli border guards. On the sweaty road, we call the Israeli army press office for permission to pass. There’s a small Jewish settlement up the hill, all red roofs and luscious foliage. It’s strange how naturally we treat these little land-thefts now. The border guards are bored. One of them switches on the jeep’s loudspeaker and hooks the mike to his mobile phone and begins playing the music “hold” button. Three lines of the 1812 Overture, three lines of Beethoven’s Fifth, three lines of Handel’s Water Music, all squawking out at high decibels, distorted and high-pitched, spilling its high-tech destruction of the world’s greatest composers over the sweltering road with its lizards and bushes and garbage.
It’s a relief to find sanity. On a flight into Tel Aviv, I find myself sitting next to an Israeli paratroop officer. I give him my own assessment—an intifada that will go on until 2004. He says it will last well into 2006. “And in the end, we’ll be back on the ’sixty-seven border and give them East Jerusalem as their capital.” And then he adds: “But given the way we’re treating them, I’d be surprised if they’d settle for that.” I ask a Palestinian in Rafah what he thinks. “2005, 2006, what difference does it make? But I tell you one thing. After this intifada is over, there will be a revolt against Arafat. How did he ever allow this to happen? How did he ever think he could win?” There will be no revolt, of course. Sharon will trap Arafat in Ramallah. And Arafat will die.
I am driving again through Gaza. Beside the road, a group of middle-aged men are sitting under a green awning; some have their heads in their hands, others are just looking at the sand. They are mourning Mohamed Abu Arrar, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while throwing stones. He was thirteen. Every wall has become a mosaic of posters, dead youths, dead old men, dead children, dead women, dead suicide bombers; usually they have a coloured photograph of the Al-Aqsa mosque behind their heads, a building most of them will never have seen.
Just outside Khan Younis, the Israelis have bulldozed acres of citrus groves and houses—for “security” reasons of course, since there is a Jewish colony in the background—and left yet another bit of “Palestine” looking like the moon. “Well, they say it’s for ‘security,’ ” a European official tells me. “But I have a question. There were three houses standing over there, one of them was finished and lived in, the other two were still just walls and roofs. The Israelis said they could be used for ambushes. So a bulldozer comes and totally demolishes the completed home and then only destroys the staircases of the two unfinished homes. Now, how can that be for ‘security’?”
Down at Rafah, the truly surreal. A man in his forties steps out of a tent right on the border—the Egyptian flag behind him almost touching the Israeli flag—and asks me if I would like to see the ruins of his toy shop. And there it is, right beside the tent, a tumble of concrete blocks, model telephones, lampshades, clocks, toy helicopters and one large outsize till. “The Israelis destroyed it in May and I stayed until the very last moment, running into that alleyway when the tanks arrived,” he says. Mohamed al-Shaer, it turns out, is a Palestinian with an Egyptian passport. “I’ve got one house over there behind the palm tree”—here he points across the frontier wall—“and I’m here to guard this property.” He’s allowed to pass back and forth like other dual-citizenship Rafah residents because of a 1906 agreement between the Ottoman empire and Britain which he proceeds to explain in complex and unending detail. Behind him, children are flying kites—and each time a kite floats over the frontier wire, an Israeli soldier fires a shot. It cracks across the muck and sand and the children shout with pleasure. “Cra-crack,” it goes again. “They always shoot at the kites or the kids,” Mohamed al-Shaer says. He learned his English as a computer programmer in Cairo and explains fluently that the real reason he stays is that he has a relative whom he distrusts, that the relative lives on the Palestinian side of Rafah and might re-register the land on which the shop was built as his own if Mohamed returned to Egypt.
Every night, Palestinians shoot from these streets at the Israelis—which is why the Israelis destroyed Mohamed al-Shaer’s shop. “These were the bullet holes from last night,” he says, showing me three fist-size cavities in the wall of the nearest building. “I could hear the bullets going over my tent.” I wonder how I can write the picture caption to the photograph I’ve taken of al-Shaer: “A Palestinian at war with his relative, sitting in a tent next to a demolished toy-shop, watches the Israelis shooting at kites.”
I call up Eva Stern in New York. Her talent for going through archives convinces me she can find out what Sharon said before the Sabra and Chatila massacre. I give her the date that is going through my head: 15 September 1982. She comes back on the line the same night. “Turn your fax on,” Eva says. “You’re going to want to read this.” The paper starts to crinkle out of the machine. An AP report of 15 September 1982. “Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying ‘it symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters.’ ”
Then, a few hours later, Sharon sent the Phalange gunmen into the Palestinian camps. Reading that fax again and again, I feel a chill coming over me. There are Israelis today with as much rage towards the Palestinians as the Phalange nineteen years ago. And these are the same words I am hearing today, from the same man, about the same people.
BUT WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? In the taboo-ridden world of Western journalism, every effort continues to be made not only to dehumanise them but to de-culture them, de-nation them, to dis-identify them. A long article by David Margolick in Vanity Fairexplains Israel’s policy of “targeted killing”—the murder of Palestinians chosen by the Israelis as “security” threats—although Margolick never mentions the word “murder.” Some of Israel’s “targeted killing” operations, he says, are “dazzling.” Yet nowhere in the article is it explained where the Palestinians come from, why they are occupied—or why Jewish colonies are being built on their land. In the Mail on Sunday, Stewart Steven writes that “there is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There is no specific Palestinian dress. Palestinians are indistinguishable from other Arabs.” Jerusalem, he adds, “was never visited by Mohamed.” Palestinians speak Arabic but with a distinctive Palestinian accent. There is a Palestinian culture of poetry and prose and—among women—of national dress. Physically, many Palestinians are recognisable by their height, the darkness of their skin—if they come from the south— and their facial features. It could equally be said that there is no language known as American, that American culture is of English origin, that there is no specific American dress, that Americans are indistinguishable from other Westerners. Legend has it that Mohamed visited Jerusalem, and the Koran’s reference to the Prophet’s visit to the furthest mosque, “Night Journey,” strongly suggested that he did so. Perhaps he did not. But Christians do not deny the holy nature of the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral just because Christ never visited Italy or England.
Far more disturbing and vicious paradigms of this contempt for Palestinians regularly appear in Western newspapers. In the Irish Times, for example, Mark Steyn felt able to describe the eminently decent Hanan Ashrawi as one of a number of “bespoke terror apologists.” A visit to the West Bank in 2003, Steyn wrote, “creeped me out.” It was “a wholly diseased environment,” a “culture that glorifies depravity,” which led the author to conclude that “nothing good grows in toxic soil.”
Once the identity of Palestinians has been removed, once their lands are subject to “dispute” rather than “occupation,” once Arafat allowed the Americans and Israelis to relegate Jerusalem, settlements and the “right of return” to “final status” negotiations—and thus not to be mentioned in the meantime, for to do so would “threaten” peace—the mere hint of Palestinian resistance can be defined as “terrorism.” Inside this society there is a sickness—“disease,” “depravity,” “toxic soil.” Buried in Palestinian hearts—in secret—must remain their sense of unresolved anger, frustration and resentment at a multitude of injustices.105
Within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, Ariel Sharon turned Israel into America’s ally in the “war on terror,” immediately realigning Yassir Arafat as the Palestinian version of bin Laden and the Palestinian suicide bombers as blood brothers of the nineteen Arabs—none of them Palestinian—who hijacked the four American airliners. In the new and vengeful spirit that President Bush encouraged among Americans, Israel’s supporters in the United States now felt free to promote punishments for Israel’s opponents that came close to the advocacy of war crimes. Nathan Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader—and an often-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship—called for the execution of family members of suicide bombers. “If executing some suicide bombers’ families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible,” he wrote in the journal Sh’ma.
One could only wonder how Lewin’s plan could be put into practice. Would the suicide bomber’s wife—or husband—be put to death first? Or the first-born? Or the youngest son? Or perhaps granny would be hauled from her armchair and done away with while the rest of the family looked on. Lewin’s argument, predictably, rested on scripture. “The biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek served as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that were ‘ordinarily unacceptable’ in the face of a mortal threat.” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who favoured the limited use of torture to extract information, said that Lewin’s proposal was a legitimate if flawed attempt to strike a balance between preventing “terrorism” and preserving democracy. Other American Jewish leaders forcefully condemned Lewin’s opinion as reprehensible and pointed out that scholars had ruled that the lessons of Amalek could not be applied to contemporary events lest the arguments “go all the way and suggest that the Palestinian nation as a whole has earned the fate of Amalek.”
Not that the Palestinians themselves were averse to death sentences for their own people, albeit that the targets were Israel’s collaborators. On 9 August 2000, for instance, it took just twenty minutes for Judge Fathi Abu Srur to decide that Munzer Hafnawi should be executed. At 10 o’clock he sat in his plastic chair, hands clasped between his knees, his gaze moving steadily over the seething crowd in the Nablus Palestinian courtroom, his solemn brown eyes avoiding the mother of the young Palestinian whose murder by the Israelis he had allegedly arranged. His lawyer, Samir Abu Audi—appointed by the Palestinian Authority— sat meekly below the bench, head bowed, in silence. By 10:20, Judge Abu Srur had ordered the execution of the accused and Hafnawi was crouching like an animal at the feet of his prison guards.
This wasn’t rough justice. It wasn’t even tragic farce. It was a drumhead court which allowed the public to scream and wolf-whistle at the grey-bearded, forty-three-year-old defendant the moment the judge announced that, according to Jordanian Criminal Article 111 of 1960—a nice judicial Hashemite touch, this—his sentence was “to execute the criminal.” As the guards dragged Hafnawi towards the court door, several men leaned over the barrier to beat their fists on his head. “Your excellency the President,” the crowd bayed—the president being Arafat— “execute the spy at once!” No one in the Nablus court was likely to forget the smiles on the faces of the men when “death by bullets” was demanded by the prosecution, and the hoots of derision towards the doglike, humiliated creature in the open-neck white shirt and beige trousers who clung to the legs of his jailers.
The evidence, on the face of it, seemed damning. Hafnawi, the court was told, had graduated through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, through Fatah and then into Hamas solely to betray his comrades to Israeli killers. He had admitted in a signed confession that he had worked for the Israelis since 1979, but it was the murder of twenty-five-year-old Hamas member Mahmoud Madani on 19 February 2000 that did for him. Hafnawi owned a clothing store and employed Madani, who had been shot dead on his way to Hafnawi’s shop from the mosque; the judge referred to an eleven-page “confession”—one could imagine the immutable fairness with which this was obtained—and to Hafnawi’s acknowledgement that the Israelis had asked him to collect information on Madani; Hafnawi had told interrogators that he “didn’t know the Israelis were going to execute Madani.”
The defendant began to perspire. Beads of sweat began to appear around the corners of his eyes. Then a stream of perspiration ran from behind his ears and poured down his neck. Two policemen linked their arms with his. He was a dead man. Without the help of the defendant, the judge solemnly announced, Madani could not have been murdered by the Israelis. “It is illogical to say he was not responsible because he was not at the scene of the crime,” the judge told the angry crowd of spectators and Madani’s mother. “He played a major role in committing the crime because of his links with the Israelis . . . ” There were eyewitness statements and security force evidence—Hafnawi had ordered his wife to delete the called numbers on his mobile phone when the police came for him a few hours after the killing—and this was the third and final sitting of the court.
As the moment of sentencing approached, the crowd were like stones. “This defendant, who was a citizen of the homeland but whose loyalty was not to the homeland, sold himself—his eyes and ears—to the usurpers of his homeland.” Judge Abu Srur paused in these words. “What sort of man is he? Didn’t he think about his roots?” There was no decorum about it. No “silence in court” when the judge and his two colleagues—one an army colonel, the other a captain—left the room. In the bright midday sun outside, Madani’s mother, Nihad, told me she was “very happy” at the sentence, but wanted it carried out at once. “My son was a hero,” she said. “He arranged two acts of martyrdom in Tel Aviv and he was planning another six attacks. He was a captain in the Hamas Ezzedine Brigade. I bless God. My heart is at ease now.” A neighbour interrupted to abuse the convicted murderer. “Let him die slowly,” he cursed. Mrs. Madani turned upon him. “I prefer to kill him myself,” she said. Hafnawi and Madani, it transpired, had been imprisoned together by the Israelis. Stool-pigeon. Collaborator. Traitor. Hafnawi’s family, as they say, was not in court. But these legal theatres would not last. It was the Palestinian mob who would ultimately decide on “justice,” once the last shreds of the Oslo agreement had been blown away.
Hebron, four months later. I drive there on a settlers’ road—Israeli registration plates, of course—then clamber over an abandoned Israeli checkpoint and just walk after all the other Palestinian men, women and children who are moving like a tide into the city. The first body is hanging upside down, one grey left foot tied to the electricity pylon with wire, his right leg hanging at an obscene angle, his head lolling below what remains of a black shirt. This was Moussa Arjoub of Doura village. The second body is infinitely more terrible, a butcher’s carcass, again hanging by a left leg, but this time his almost naked torso riven with stab marks into which Palestinian boys of ten or twelve, whooping with glee, are stubbing cigarettes. This was Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. His head is almost severed from his remains, moving slightly in the wind, bearded, face distorted with terror.
He reminds me of those fearsome portraits of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and open wounds. But Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb is reviled, not honoured, screaming children and middle-aged Palestinian men roaring with delight when stones thump off the collaborator’s bloody corpse. “This is a lesson to all here.” I turn around to find a portly man with a big brown beard, gesturing towards another revolting bag of flesh behind me. “This was Mohamed Debebsi. This is a lesson for the people. Everyone should see this.” As I watch, a group of youths with grinning faces hurls the corpse into a rubbish truck.
What do you do when a people go mad with joy at such savagery? At first, I cannot write the description of what I see into my reporter’s notebook and instead draw sketches to remind me of what I am seeing. Allahu akbar, roars that awful crowd. There are girls on rooftops, young men in suits and ties staring at the corpses from only 3 metres away, boys throwing stones to finish the decapitation of Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. And the street where this—let us call it by its name and say, this pornography—is taking place? ShariaSalam. The Street of Peace.
The three men had been imprisoned in the local jail—sentenced so long ago that many of the crowd could not remember the date—for collaborating with Israel’s occupation forces. Did they guess their fate, a few hours earlier, when they heard an Israeli Apache helicopter firing its four missiles, the power of the explosions audible in their Palestinian Authority prison a few hundred metres away?
The Israelis had sent a helicopter death squad to eliminate Marwan Zalum, one of the heads of the Al-Aqsa Brigades in Hebron, the four missiles—another gift from Lockheed Martin of Florida, according to the bits I found—turning his Mitsubishi car into a fireball. Zalum, who was forty-three and married, with a little girl called Saja, died at once—to a chorus of delight from the Israeli army. He was, they said, “the equivalent of an entire armed militia”—a ridiculous exaggeration— and they referred to suicide bombings arranged by his men and the “hundreds of shooting attacks,” including the deaths of Shalhevat Pas, a Jewish infant murdered by a Palestinian sniper in March 2001, and of an Israeli civilian—a settler—killed three months later. Three times, the Israeli army’s death squad admission talked of “Jewish communities” when it meant Jewish settlements on Arab land. And true to the morality of such statements, it failed to mention that Samir abu-Rajab, a friend of Zalum, was also killed with him by Israel’s American-made missiles.
No matter. By 9:30, the Al-Aqsa Brigades and probably Hamas and no doubt a vast rabble of Palestinian corner-boys decided to revenge themselves by slaughtering Israel’s three Palestinian collaborators who sat, helpless, in the local jail. A civil engineer watching the crowds told me that they were dragged to the scene of the car explosion, beaten insensible by the mob and then shot by gunmen.
So the people of the Hebron suburb of Ein Sara arrived to celebrate this revolting scene. A few touched the corpses, others stood by the roadside to throw stones. It was a meat shop, the kids climbing the electricity pylons to pose beside this butcher’s work for friends with camcorders. And how they cheered when the refuse truck moved through the crowds in front of a German-donated fire engine. After Debebsi’s bloody remains were flung into the back, the lorry moved to the pylon where Mukhtaseb was hanging. His head almost parted from his body as it was thrown into the grey-painted vehicle to another cry of satisfaction from the crowd.
So the citizens of the nascent Palestinian nation behaved in anger and fury and terrible pleasure at their revenge on Israel for the killing of Zalum and abu-Rajab. And on the way back to Jerusalem, of course, one could well imagine the reaction of the inhabitants of those illegal Jewish settlements of Efrat and Neve Daniel and Gush Etzion with their neat red roofs and water sprinklers. Savagery, barbarism, beasts acting like beasts. And one knew what the Palestinians thought. Those three men worked for Israel, for the country which has occupied their land for thirty-five years. “They probably did it for money,” a Palestinian driver mumbled at me. All three collaborators were married men. It was said in Hebron that they would be refused a Muslim grave. And one wondered how brutalised the Palestinians must become before they inherit a state.
But what state was there to inherit? On 29 March 2002, the Israelis launched an attack on the West Bank which, for the press, they called “Operation Defensive Shield.”106 Two days earlier, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya and blown up a roomful of people celebrating the Jewish Passover, killing twenty-eight civilians, most of them elderly, some of them survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. It was the worst mass killing of its kind of Israeli civilians since the start of the intifada. In all, between 1 March and 1 April 2002, forty Israeli civilians were slaughtered. So the stated purpose of this Israeli assault, according to the Israeli army, was to eradicate the infrastructure of “terrorism.” Inevitably, their first strike was against Arafat himself, marooned in his old British fortress in the centre of Ramallah. Unable to bamboozle my way through the Israeli roadblocks on the highway from Jerusalem, I drove up to the illegal Israeli colony of Psagot, from where I had an Israeli-eye view of this new battle to destroy the Palestinian Authority. It was the looking-glass again. March the thirty-first, 2002, and here I was, amid a heavily armed settlement crammed with troops—friendly, offering to share their food with me—looking down on the start of “Palestine” ’s latest tragedy. Grey smoke rose in a curtain over Arafat’s headquarters, drifting high above two minarets and then smudging the skyline south of Ramallah.
“I guess he’s blown himself up,” an Israeli paratrooper said with contempt. “That guy is finished.” We stood on the edge of the settlement—just 400 metres from the first houses of the newly reoccupied Palestinian city—surrounded by Merkava tanks, Magah armoured vehicles and jeeps and trucks and hundreds of reservists tugging blankets and mattresses and guns from the backs of lorries. “It’s only just beginning, you know that?” the paratrooper asked. “They are idiots down there. They should know their terrorism is over. We’re never going back to the ’67 borders. Anyway, they want Tel Aviv.” A clap of sound punched our ears, a shell exploding on the other side of the hill upon which Ramallah lies. I wandered closer to the city, through a garden of daffodils and dark purple flowers, to where an Israeli boy soldier was standing.
“I want to go home,” he said blankly. I said that twenty seemed to be too young to be a soldier. “That’s what my mother says.” He was eating matzo bread with salami, staring at the empty streets of Ramallah. “They’ve locked themselves in their homes,” he said. “Do you blame them?” I didn’t. But it was a strange morning, sitting with the Israeli soldiers above Ramallah, a bit like those awful viewing platforms that generals would arrange for their guests in the Napoleonic wars, where food and wine might be served while they watched the progress of the battle. There was even a settler couple, cheerfully serving hot food and coffee to the reservists. The woman held out a bowl of vegetables and cheese for me. “My daughter’s at Cambridge University,” she said gaily. “She’s studying the history of the Crusades.” A bloody business, I remarked, and her companion happily agreed. Religious wars are like that. That’s when I saw the four Palestinians.
Just below us, next to the garden with the daffodils and the purple flowers, three of them were kneeling on the grass in front of a group of Israeli officers. All were blindfolded, their hands tied behind them with plastic and steel handcuffs, one of them with his jacket pulled down over his back so that he could not even move his shoulders. The Israelis were talking to them quietly, one of them on one knee as if before an altar rather than a prisoner. Then I saw the fourth man, middle-aged, trussed up like a chicken, stretched across the grass with his blindfolded face lying amid a bunch of flowers. The paratrooper shrugged. “They all say they’ve done nothing, that they’re innocent, that we just came into their homes and took them without reason. Well, that’s what they say.”
I mentioned the prisoners to the two friendly settlers. They nodded, as if it was quite normal to discover four men bound and blindfolded in the garden. When I asked the twenty-year-old about them, he shrugged like the paratrooper. “They’re not my prisoners,” he said, and I thought of Amira Hass and her contempt for those whom she saw “looking from the side.” I walked round the corner of the building to the lawn upon which the Palestinians were being questioned. Another prisoner was repeatedly bowing his head before a door and his shoulders moved as if he was weeping.
None of it worried the soldiers. In their own unique “war on terror,” these prisoners were “terrorists.” Another soldier eating a plate of greens said that he thought “all the people down there” were “terrorists.” Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In front of us a Merkava passed, roaring down the hill below in a fog of blue smoke, its barrel gently dipping up and down above its hull. More troops arrived in more trucks, assault rifles in their hands. Radio shacks were being erected, armoured vehicles positioned above Ramallah. On the road back to Jerusalem, I pass a rusting old bus opposite Ma’ale Adumim, its windows covered in wire. Hands were gripping the wire and behind them, twenty or thirty faces could be seen through the mesh. The Palestinian prisoners were silent, looking out of the windows at the massive Jewish colony, watching me, dark faces in shadow, guarded by a jeepload of Israeli troops.
A few minutes later, I stop to buy bread and chocolate at a Palestinian grocery store in East Jerusalem. The shoppers—men for the most part, with just two veiled women—are standing below the store’s television set, plastic bags of food hanging from their hands. Israeli television does not flinch from telling the truth about its casualties. “The toll so far appears to be fourteen dead,” the commentator announces. The Palestinians of Jerusalem understand Hebrew. A camera aboard a helicopter is scanning the roof of a Haifa restaurant, peeled back like a sardine can by a Hamas suicide bomber’s explosives. A boy shakes his head but an elderly man turns on him. “No,” he says, pointing at the screen. “That’s the way to do it.”
And I think of the girl in Cambridge who is studying the Crusades, and what a bloody business we agreed it was. And how religious wars tend to be the bloodiest of all.
Whenever the Israeli army wants to stop us seeing what they’re up to, out comes that most preposterous exercise in military law-on-the-hoof: the “Closed Military Area.” As in Lebanon in 1982, as in Gaza in 1993, as in all Israel’s campaigns of occupation—so in 2002; and, as usual, the best reaction was to go and look at what the Israelis didn’t want us to see. In Ramallah, I could see why they didn’t want reporters around. A slog down a gravel-covered hillside not far from an Israeli checkpoint, a clamber over rocks and mud and a hitched ride to the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Amari on the edge of Ramallah told a story of terrified civilians and roaring tanks and kids throwing stones at Israeli jeeps, just as they did before Oslo and all the other false hopes that the Americans and Israelis and Arafat brought to the region.
It was a grey, cold, wet day for Sharon’s war on terror, and it was a doctor who gave me a lift in his ambulance to the centre of Ramallah, driving slowly down side roads, skidding to a halt when we caught sight of a tank barrel poking from behind apartment blocks, for ever looking upwards at the wasplike Apaches that flew in pairs over the city. The centre was a canyon of fast-moving tanks, armoured personnel carriers with their hatches down and wild shooting from both Israelis and Palestinians. While the bullets crackled across the streets, the Israeli army drove its APCs and Merkavas—and a few old British Centurions, unless my eyes deceived me—around the roads at such high speed that they could scarcely have seen a “terrorist” if he’d waved at them from the steps of the local supermarket. Oslo had come to this.
Whenever they saw a Westerner, a journalist or a “peace activist”—the latter distinguished by lots of earrings, Palestinian scarves and in one case a nose-ring— the Palestinians of Ramallah would creep from their front doors and wave to us and offer us coffee. A child ran across a field, chasing a horse, and an old man drove a mule up a side road with a broad smile. And I realised then, I think, that it was these ordinary people—the families and the old man and the child with the horse—who were the real resistance to the Israelis, those who refuse to be intimidated from their very ordinary lives rather than the poseurs of Fatah and the Al-Aqsa Brigades.
There came from the Palestinians a litany of evidence of vandalisation and theft by Israeli soldiers. “Baseless incitement whipped up by the Palestinian Authority,” went the Israeli reply, but it was almost all true. Israeli soldiers had defecated over office floors, destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of fax and photocopying machines in Palestinian ministries and schools and—far more seriously—stolen tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewellery and cash from private Palestinian homes. Ramallah is a middle-class town; and, unfortunately for the Israeli army, many of the Palestinian families whose money was taken also held American citizenship. For reporting this looting by an army that is supposed to believe in “purity of arms,” I was attacked as a “liar” and “anti-Semitic” by Israel’s so-called friends. Yet within days, the Israeli army itself would admit that “there were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena of vandalism . . . the extent of the looting was much greater than could have been expected . . . ” In Ramallah, this included the “systematic destruction” of computers. Israeli journalists published similar reports—without enduring racist abuse.
In the coming few days, Israeli forces would pour into Tulkarem, Nablus and other cities.107 But it was in Jenin that the Israelis met their fiercest resistance and committed what can only be described as individual war crimes. Again, they forbade all journalists to enter Jenin as they smashed their way into the ancient souk and the refugee camp that forms part of the city centre. Palestinian gunmen fought back tenaciously. There was no doubt that Jenin was a centre of suicide bombers— I had several times interviewed their families in the area—and there is equally no doubt that the Israelis met formidable resistance.108 By 9 April, the Israelis had lost twenty-three soldiers in the fighting. And it was they who first gave the impression that there had been a massacre of civilians inside the city.
The IDF’s official spokesman, Brigadier General Ron Kitrey, said early in the battle that there were “apparently hundreds” of dead. Israeli “military sources”— the anonymous screen behind which Israeli colonels briefed military correspondents of the Israeli press—said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a “special cemetery.” Refrigerated trucks were taken to Jenin. When two Palestinian rights groups appealed to the Israeli High Court to prevent the removal of the bodies because they would be interred in a mass grave in the Jordan Valley which would dishonour the dead, the court issued an interim order supporting the plaintiffs. All this time, journalists were kept out of Jenin, along with humanitarian workers and the International Red Cross.109At a press conference, an Israeli brigade chief of staff, Major Rafi Lederman, stated that— contrary to newspaper reports—the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from American-made Cobra helicopters. This was totally untrue. The ruins of Jenin, when journalists did eventually enter, were littered with parts of air-to-ground missiles—made in the United States, of course—and Western defence attachés who visited the scene said that the Israelis were not telling the truth about the Cobras. Then, as our Jerusalem correspondent Phil Reeves wrote, “the Palestinian leadership . . . instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in Jenin in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue stories.”
This then became the all-important theme of Israel’s response to the killings in Jenin. “There was no massacre,” Benjamin Netanyahu shouted at a pro-Israeli rally in Trafalgar Square. And since then, the story of Israel’s massive, brutal incursion into Jenin has focused not upon what actually did happen in that terrible episode of Palestinian and Israeli history but upon the supposed “lie” of the massacre. It was the “lie,” not the facts, that became the story. The journalists had “lied.” I had “lied”—during a lecture series across the United States in the late spring of 2002, I was repeatedly accused of lying about the “massacre” in Jenin— even though I was in Los Angeles at the time, had not witnessed the killings and had never used the word “massacre.” There were enough real massacres attributable to Israel without inventing any more.
But my Independent colleagues, Justin Huggler and Reeves, carried out their own meticulous investigation of the Jenin killings. They did not describe them as a massacre but they concluded that nearly half of the fifty identified Palestinian dead were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. Individual atrocities occurred, The Independent concluded, atrocities that Israel was trying to hide “by launching a massive propaganda drive”:
. . . Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani’s screaming and went to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.
“We were woken at 3:30 in the morning by a big explosion,” she said. “I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere . . . Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, ‘I’m wounded.’ She said, ‘I’m wounded too.’ She had been shot in the side of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart . . . she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times.”
Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse’s uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were “very near.” As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest . . .
Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk . . . When Mr. Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal . . .
In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr. Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.
Mr. Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr. Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor . . . Mr. Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr. Zughayer’s wheelchair.
“After 4 pm I pushed him up the street as usual,” said Mr. Hassan. “Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road.” It was not until next morning that Mr. Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr. Zughayer’s mangled body some distance away, in the grass.
So when does a bloodbath become an atrocity? When does an atrocity become a massacre? How big does a massacre have to be before it qualifies as a genocide? How many dead before a genocide becomes a holocaust? Old questions become new questions at each killing field. The Israeli journalist Arie Caspi wrote a scathing article in late April which caught the hypocritical response to the Jenin killings with painful accuracy:
Okay, so there wasn’t a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn’t get out in time, used locals as a human shield against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That’s really not a massacre, and there’s really no need for a commission of enquiry . . . whether run by ourselves or sent by the goyim.
The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals . . . many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells “Holocaust!,” we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?
These are not idle questions. Nor cynical. Not long after Sharon’s failed attempt to stop the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on 27 April 2002, Palestinian gunmen broke into an illegal Jewish settlement built on Arab land at Adora on the Palestinian West Bank. Five-year-old Danielle Shefi was shot in her bedroom along with her mother and two brothers. Danielle was killed, her mother survived. Up the road, Katya Greenberg and her husband, Vladimir, were sprayed with bullets as they lay in bed. In the little girl’s bedroom, there were smears of blood and three bullet holes just above Danielle’s bed. Her mother had been shot as she ran to protect her daughter. In all, four Israelis—including two armed settlers who fought back—were dead, and eight wounded.
One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the terrible fate of Danielle Shefi. She was only five. But if at least two dozen Palestinians dead in Jenin was not a massacre, how should we describe the four Israelis dead at the Adora settlement? Well, the official Israeli army spokesman, Major Avner Foxman, said of the Adora killings: “For me, now I know what is a massacre. This is a massacre.” The Canadian National Post referred to the Palestinian assault as being “barbarous,” a word it never used about the killing of Palestinian civilians. I don’t like the mathematics here. Four dead Israelis, including two armed settlers, is a massacre. I’ll accept this. But twenty-four Palestinian civilians killed, including a nurse and a paraplegic, is not a massacre. (I am obviously leaving aside the thirty or so armed Palestinians who were also killed in Jenin.) What does this mean? What does it tell us about journalism, about my profession? Does the definition of a bloodbath now depend on the religion or the race of the civilian dead to be qualified as a massacre? No, I didn’t call the Jenin killings a massacre. But I should have done.
Yet our responsibility does not end there. How many of our circumlocutions open the way to these attacks? How many journalists encouraged the Israelis—by their reporting or by their wilfully given, foolish advice—to undertake these brutal assaults on the Palestinians? On 31 March 2002—just three days before the assault on Jenin—Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times that “Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Well, thanks, Tom, I said to myself when I read this piece of lethal journalism a few days later. The Israelis certainly followed Friedman’s advice.
When Sharon began his operation “Defensive Shield,” the UN Security Council, with the active participation and support of the United States, demanded an immediate end to Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank. President George W. Bush insisted that Sharon should follow the advice of “Israel’s American friends” and—for Tony Blair was with Bush at the time—“Israel’s British friends,” and withdraw. “When I say withdraw, I mean it,” Bush snapped three days later. But he meant nothing of the kind. Instead, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell off on an “urgent” mission of peace, a journey to Israel and the West Bank that would take an incredible eight days—just enough time, Bush presumably thought, to allow his “friend” Sharon to finish his latest bloody adventure in the West Bank. Supposedly unaware that Israel’s chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, had told Sharon that he needed at least eight weeks to “finish the job” of crushing the Palestinians, Powell wandered off around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco, Spain, Egypt and Jordan before finally fetching up in Israel. If Washington fire-fighters took that long to reach a blaze, the American capital would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course, the purpose of Powell’s idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin to be turned to ashes. Mission, I suppose, accomplished.
Once he had at last arrived in Jerusalem, the first thing Powell should have done was to demand a visit to Jenin. But instead, after joshing with Sharon, he played games, demanding that Arafat condemn the latest suicide bombing in Jerusalem in which six Israelis had been killed and sixty-five wounded, while failing to utter more than a word of “concern” about Jenin. Was Powell frightened of the Israelis? Did he really have to debase himself in this way? For this looked like the end-game in the Arab–Israeli dispute, the very final proof that the United States was no longer worthy of being a Middle East peacemaker. But no, that would come in 2004, when Bush would effectively destroy UN Security Council Resolution 242.
It seemed there were no barriers that could not be broken. If this was a war on terror, I wrote in my paper that awful spring, then Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem. When a group of Palestinian fighters barricaded themselves in the Church of the Nativity, the Israelis laid siege to them and Bethlehem turned into a battlefield. The first to die was an eighty-year-old Palestinian man, whose body never made it to the morgue. Then a woman and her son were critically wounded by Israeli gunfire. A cloud of black smoke swirled up in the tempest winds from the other side of Manger Square, a burning Israeli armoured vehicle, although—running for our lives as bullets crackled around us—we had no time to look at it. Harvey Morris— reincarnated now, not as my foreign news editor but as theFinancial Times correspondent, expletives mercifully undeleted—was with me as we pounded through the rain that guttered in waves across the Israeli tanks that were grinding between Ottoman stone houses, smashing into cars and tearing down shop hoardings.
A “Closed Military Area” had been declared once more by the Israelis. Jesus, we assumed, must have had to deal with a Roman version of closed military areas—but he had God on his side. The people of Bethlehem had no one. They waited for some statement from the Pope, from the Vatican, from the European Union. And what they got was an armoured invasion. “They’ve sent the whole fucking army,” Harvey remarked with commendable exaggeration. All morning, we watched the Merkavas and APCs stealing their way through the ancient streets, searching for the “savages” of “terror” whom Sharon had just told the world about. We sat in the home of a Palestinian Christian woman, Norma Hazboun, watching her television upon which we could see “Palestine” collapsing around us. Palestinian intelligence offices had been attacked in Ramallah. Shells started falling on Deheishi camp. We knew that already—Deheishi was so close that the windows vibrated. Sharon was on the screen, offering to let the Europeans fly Arafat out of Ramallah, provided he never returned to the land he called “Palestine.” Offer refused.
More shooting now from outside our window. A tank came down the road, its barrel clipping the green awning of a shop and then swaying upwards to point directly at our window. We decamped to the stairwell. Had they seen us watching them? We stood on the cold, damp stairs then peeked around our window. Two Israeli soldiers were running past the house as another tank shuddered up the street, absorbing a little car into its tracks and coughing it out in bits at the back of its armour. We knew all about these tanks, their maximum speed, the voice of their massive engines, their rate of fire. We respected them and hated them in equal measure. We had spent almost an hour walking the back streets to avoid the “Closed Military Area,” dirty, dank, black streets with angry tanks in the neighbouring highways. One raced across an intersection while we stood, in blue-and-black flak jackets marked with “TV” in huge taped letters, arms spread out like ducks to show we carried no weapons.
We sat snug now by Norma Hazboun’s gas fire, trapped in the home of the professor of social sciences at Bethlehem University. The newsreader stumbled on his words. Iran and Iraq might stop oil exports to force the Americans to demand an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Harvey and I coughed in simultaneous contempt; Iran and Iraq would do no such thing. Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters was on fire. An Israeli soldier was dead in an APC on the other side of Manger Square, hit by a rocket. That was presumably the burning vehicle we’d seen an hour ago. Colin Powell said that the Americans would still recognise Arafat as Palestinian leader, even if he was in Europe. Harvey burst forth again: “But if he’s in Europe, he won’t be the fucking Palestinian leader, will he?”
Outside the house, beside a cluster of lemon trees, two Israeli armoured carriers pulled up, their crews desperately trying to pump fuel through a hose from one vehicle to the other before Palestinian snipers picked them off. The bullets snapped around them within seconds and the two frightened soldiers threw themselves off the roofs to the shelter of a shop. Then my mobile rang. An English voice, a lady from Wateringbury in Kent—Peggy and Bill had lived in the next village above East Farleigh, one stop down the Paddock Wood–Maidstone West railway line—but Liz Yates was not in Kent. She was in the Aida refugee camp with nine other Westerners, trying to help the 4,000 Palestinian refugees there by asking their consulates to pressure the Israelis into withdrawing. Some hope. In the end, the consulates had to rescue the Westerners.
At least a hundred Palestinian civilians were now seeking sanctuary with the twenty gunmen in the Church of the Nativity.110 I took another call, this time from Sami Abda. On Tuesday, he told me, Israeli soldiers had come to his house in the centre of Bethlehem and—though warned by a neighbour that his home was filled with women and children—the Israelis claimed that “terrorists” were in the building and opened fire on the Abda household. Sami Abda was crying as he spoke to me and these are his exact words:
They fired eighteen bullets through our front door. They hit my mother Sumaya and my brother Yacoub. My mother was sixty-four, my brother was thirty-seven. They both fell to the floor. I called everyone I could to take them to the hospital. But there was no one to help us. They were dying. When an ambulance came, an Israeli officer refused permission for it to enter our street. So for thirty hours we have lived with their bodies. We put the children into the bathroom so they could not see the corpses. Help us, please.
That insistent question—What is sacred?—could be asked by anyone in the Holy Land that spring of 2002. And by anyone who read the Jerusalem Post: it printed a whole page of tiny photographs of the dozens of Israeli civilians torn to bits by Palestinian suicide bombers in just one month. One teenage Israeli girl was the same age as the Palestinian girl who destroyed her life. It was a page of horror and misery. Yes, the Palestinians’ suicide campaign was immoral, unforgivable— the word that came to me outside the Jerusalem pizzeria—insupportable. One day, the Arabs—never ones to look too closely in the mirror when it comes to their own crimes—will have to acknowledge the sheer cruelty of their tactics. But since the Israelis never attempted to confront the immorality of shooting to death child stone-throwers or the evil of their reckless death squads who went around murdering Palestinians on their wanted list—along with the usual bunch of women and kids who get in the way—is this any wonder?
And so I am back in Gaza, sitting in another of those mourning tents, this time for two fourteen-year-old schoolboys and their fifteen-year-old friend, Internet surfers in the local cyber café, one of them idling his hours away drawing children’s cartoons, all of them football enthusiasts. Hours after they had been shot dead by the Israeli army near the Jewish colony of Netzarim, their fathers received back the three young bodies. All had been shot. And all, they said, had been driven over by an armoured vehicle which—in Ismail Abu-Nadi’s case—had cut his corpse in half.
Knife-wielding suicide bombers approaching the Jewish settlement, according to the Israeli army and—of course—The New York Times . But even Hamas, creator of the unscrupulous campaign of suicide bombing, admits that the three schoolchildren—all ninth-graders in the Salahedin School in Gaza City—had naively planned to attack the settlement of their own accord and with, at most, knives. It urged preachers and schoolteachers to tell children that they should never embark on such wild schemes again.
And when the three fathers talked to me, they told a story of waste and tragedy and childhood anger at Israel’s bloody invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. “I spent all last night asking myself why my son did this,” Mohamed Abu-Nadi told me as we sat among the mourners outside his middle-class home. “Did Ismail need money? No. Did he fail at school? No. He was first in his class. Were there problems with his family or friends? No. I asked myself the same question over and over. Why? Can you tell me?”
A painful question to be asked by a distraught father. Did Ismail want to die? His father said this would have been impossible until “three or four months ago.” That was when the schoolboy, born in Abu Dhabi and a fluent English-speaker, began to ask his father why the Palestinians were given no outside help in their struggle for a state. “He asked me: ‘Why is it that only the Palestinians cannot have a state? Why doesn’t America help? Why don’t the other Arab states help?’ ” Bassem Zaqout, the father of fifteen-year-old Yussef—none of the fathers had met, though their sons all attended the same school—also thought the Jenin bloodshed influenced his son. “He used to draw pictures and cartoons and wrote Arabic calligraphy. I never thought this could happen. But we watched all the news programmes about Israel’s reoccupation—Palestinian television, Al-Jazeera from Qatar, CNN—and maybe he saw something . . . When I came back from evening prayers on Tuesday, he had left the house. I had no idea why. Now I think the boys were walking towards the Jewish settlement with some kind of idea of attacking the Israelis there. But he never touched a weapon. When we got his body back yesterday, it was in a terrible state. Dogs had been at it in the night and his face was unrecognisable because it had been crushed by a heavy vehicle driving over it.”
Adel Hamdona’s fourteen-year-old son Anwar was returned to him in the same condition. The father’s description was cold, emotionless. “He didn’t have a face. His legs had been severed. He had been driven over several times and had been pretty well disembowelled.” Anwar’s body, too, had been gnawed by dogs. “He was just a boy, a child. I am a teacher at his school. At five in the evening, he told his mother he was going to an internet café to surf the net. When he hadn’t come home by nine, I felt something was wrong. Then we heard shooting from Netzarim . . . ”
And there’s a clue as to why Adel Hamdona felt that “something was wrong.” For Anwar had begun talking to his family about “martyrdom.” “The events here had an effect on the boy. He was always talking about the suicide operations, about martyrs and the concept of martyrdom. He used to want to become a martyr. I had a suspicion that a few years later, when he grew up, he might do this—but not now.” Ismail Abu-Nadi, it turns out, left what appears to be a goodbye note to his parents. “One of his friends brought me a paper he had written,” his father acknowledged. “On the paper, Ismail had said: ‘My father, my mother, please try to pray to God and to ask for me to succeed to enter Netzarim and to kill the Israeli soldiers and to drive them from our land.’ I could not believe this. At his age, any other boy—and I’ve been to England, the United States, India, Pakistan—yes, any other boy just wants to be educated, to be happy. To earn money, to be at peace. But our children here cannot find peace.”
As for the condition of the bodies, none of the fathers wanted to speculate on the reasons. Would the Israelis deliberately mutilate them? It seems unlikely. Or did they, after shooting the three schoolboys, avoid the risk that one might still be alive—and with a bomb waiting to go off—by driving over their remains? And when their bodies were crushed, were they all dead? Ismail Abu-Nadi’s father drew a simple message—meaningless to Tom Friedman, I guess—about their deaths: “If there is no future, there is no hope. So what do you expect a boy to do?”
But even Abdul-Aziz Rantissi, the Hamas leader in Gaza, was anxious to dissociate his movement from the boys’ death, although his words were not without a disturbing message of their own. “I think the crimes of the Israelis pushed the boys to pursue acts of revenge without awareness. They were so young in age, they did not realise they could not do anything at the settlement . . . I’ve made a call to preachers in the mosques and to teachers to explain to the children that their role in all this has not yet come . . . ”
Rantissi keeps touching his beard. I used to talk to him in the Field of Flowers in southern Lebanon but now he is on the run from Israel’s killer squads, constantly interrupted by the phone as he sits in a Gaza office, his young bodyguard, Kalashnikov nursed upside down on his knee, handing him a big military two-way radio receiver. I think—but I do not say so—that this is to protect the Hamas leader. Mobile phones are traceable to within a few feet. Israel’s death squads are masters of analogue and digital technology. Am I watching for an Apache helicopter? Do Israel’s victims ever see the missiles streaking towards them?
Not that Rantissi has any illusions. “It’s something to be expected so far as we are concerned. But the one thing I can say is something that can only be understood by someone who holds the Islamic faith the way I do. We believe that our lifetime is always predicted and that our death has already been determined by God, and this cannot change. There are many different reasons that could lead to the end of a person’s life—a car accident, cancer, a heart attack—so I’m not saying I’m making a choice to shorten my life. But the preferred way of ending my life would be martyrdom.” Rantissi would get his wish.
My eyes glance again towards the window. Of his fifty-five years, Rantissi has spent twenty-six in prison or in exile on the Lebanese mountainside. In those days, he was still trying to learn how to run Hamas. Now he talks coolly—coldly, frighteningly—about suicide bombers and death. Hamas has its own death squads. They kill soldiers, but women and children too, and the old and the sick. “Up till now, in these two intifadas, the Israelis have killed more than two thousand Palestinians. Following the killings in Nablus and Jenin, the number of children killed has passed the three hundred and fifty mark. This proves that the Israeli side is intentionally committing massacres against civilians.” I have been down this path before. Every time you ask a Hamas leader to confront the wickedness of suicide-bombing civilians, you are taken down the statistics trail. What about the kids in the pizza parlour, the old folk at the Passover dinner?
“We are fighting people who violated our land,” he replies, very quickly. “They are all soldiers or reserve soldiers. It was reserve soldiers in Jenin who killed civilians—these are people who in ordinary life are Israeli doctors and lawyers. They were civilians just hours before they went into Jenin. But of course, our fighters have orders not to kill civilians, especially the children.”
Orders to avoid killing children? Or is this just a numbers game? The military phone pips again and Rantissi talks for several minutes. Is he in touch with Hamas leaders in the West Bank? He smiles bleakly. “There is some communication on a political level with leaders in the West Bank, yes. But they are wanted men and besieged and underground.” This, I note in the margin of my notebook, is the first time Hamas has acknowledged the effects of the Israeli reoccupation. “You take Hassan Youssef, a political leader in Ramallah—he is calling me for information about what is going on. But ultimately Sharon will not be able to put an end to resistance. When the Israelis deported four hundred and sixty of us in 1993 and arrested another fifteen hundred Hamas members the same day, they said they had ‘put an end’ to resistance and to Hamas. After that, Yahyia Ayash”—the Hamas bomb-maker later assassinated by the Israelis—“escalated the resistance.”
Marj al-Zahour, the Field of Flowers, the University of Islam, seems a long way away. Rantissi disagrees. “It was a stage that changed the Palestinian struggle. It changed the history of Hamas for ever. Before that, it was a local movement. After our exile on the hillsides of Lebanon, it became an international organisation known all over the world. We received the benefits of Israel’s mistakes.” Rantissi speaks with considerable self-confidence. And there is no doubt who his chief enemy is. “Sharon wanted to rip up the Oslo papers. He is exercising his power over the Palestinian people—destroying or wilfully killing them—in order to compel them to leave. He wants to break our will so that we will accept his humiliating conditions. He also wants to create a conflict between the Palestinian Authority and the people.” And Gaza? Rantissi laughs. “I want to remind you of something Rabin once said—that he longs to wake up one day to find Gaza swallowed up by the sea.”
It is strange how often Arafat’s opponents speak of Rabin—with whom Arafat thought he had signed the “peace of the brave”—and Arafat’s nemesis Sharon in the same sentence. Rabin was commander of the Israeli units that captured Lod (Lydda) and Ramleh in July 1948 and who gave the order for the expulsion of up to 60,000 Palestinian Arabs, most of them women and children, an unknown number of whom died during their flight. Rabin’s published memoirs were to recall the Israeli conquest of Lod:
We walked outside. Ben Gurion [the Israeli prime minister, appointed two months earlier] accompanying us. [Haganah commander Yigal] Allon repeated his question “What is to be done with the population?” B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said “Drive them out!”
Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot towards the Bet Horon road, assuming that the [Arab] Legion would be obliged to look after them, thereby shouldering logistic difficulties which would burden its fighting capacity, making things easier for us . . . The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the Legion.
Certainly Rantissi assessed Sharon’s contempt for Oslo correctly, though he might have looked more closely at Sharon’s record. Ever since he was elected in 2001, Sharon’s supporters in the West have tried to turn him into a pragmatist, another de Gaulle; the same theme was replayed when he suggested in 2004 that Israel should abandon the Jewish settlements in Gaza, a step which his own spokesman revealingly admitted would put any plans for a Palestinian state into “formaldehyde.” In truth, Sharon is more like the French putschist generals in Algeria. They, too, used torture and massacred their Arab opponents. His career spells anything but peace. Sharon voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel’s participating in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel’s retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002 alone, Sharon had built thirty-four new Jewish colonies on Palestinian land.
Sharon’s involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres continues to fester around the man who, according to Israel’s 1993 Kahan commission report, bore “personal responsibility” for the Phalangist slaughter. So fearful were the Israeli authorities that their leaders would be charged with war crimes that they drew up a list of countries where they might have to stand trial—and which they should henceforth avoid—now that European nations were expanding their laws to include foreign nationals who had committed crimes abroad. Belgian judges were already considering a complaint by survivors of Sabra and Chatila—one of them a female rape victim—while a campaign had been mounted abroad against other Israeli figures associated with the atrocities. Eva Stern was one of those who tried to prevent Brigadier General Amos Yaron being appointed Israeli defence attaché in Washington because he had allowed the Lebanese Phalange militia to enter the camps on 16 September 1982, and knew—according to the Kahan commission report—that women and children were being murdered. He only ended the killings two days later. Canada declined to accept Yaron as defence attaché. Stern, who compiled a legal file on Yaron, later vainly campaigned with human rights groups to annul his appointment—by Prime Minister Ehud Barak—as director general of the Israeli defence ministry.111 The Belgian government changed their law—and dropped potential charges against Sharon—after a visit to Brussels by U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who famously referred on 6 August 2002 to Israelis’ control over “the so-called occupied area which was the result of a war, which they won.” Rumsfeld had threatened that NATO headquarters might be withdrawn from Belgian soil if the Belgians didn’t drop the charges against Sharon.
Yet all the while, we were supposed to believe that it was the corrupt, Parkinson’s-haunted Yassir Arafat who was to blame for the new war. He was chastised by George Bush while the Palestinian people continued to be bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred to Palestinians as “cockroaches in a glass jar.” Menachem Begin called them “two-legged beasts.” The Shas party leader who suggested that God should send the Palestinian “ants” to hell, also called them “serpents.” In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation” and equated the military action in the occupied territories with “chemotherapy.” In March 2001, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a “scorpion.” Sharon repeatedly called Arafat a “murderer” and compared him to bin Laden. He contributed to the image of Palestinian inhumanity in an interview in 1995, when he stated that Fatah sometimes punished Palestinians by “chopping off limbs of seven–eight year old children in front of their parents as a form of punishment.” However brutal Fatah may be, there is no record of any such atrocity being committed by them. But if enough people can be persuaded to believe this nonsense, then the use of Israeli death squads against such Palestinians becomes natural rather than illegal.112
Largely forgotten amid Sharon’s hatred for “terrorism” was his outspoken criticism of NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999, when he was Israeli foreign minister. Eleven years earlier he had sympathised with the political objective of Slobodan Milošević: to prevent the establishment of an Albanian state in Kosovo. This, he said, would lead to “Greater Albania” and provide a haven for—readers must here hold their breath—“Islamic terror.” In a Belgrade newspaper interview, Sharon said that “we stand together with you against the Islamic terror.” Once NATO’s bombing of Serbia was under way, however, Sharon’s real reason for supporting the Serbs became apparent. “It’s wrong for Israel to provide legitimacy to this forceful sort of intervention which the NATO countries are deploying . . . in an attempt to impose a solution on regional disputes,” he said. “The moment Israel expresses support for the sort of model of action we’re seeing in Kosovo, it’s likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian Authority . . . ” NATO’s bombing, Sharon said, was “brutal interventionism.” The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who seized on this extraordinary piece of duplicity, said that “Islamic terror” in Kosovo could only exist in “Sharon’s racist imagination.” Avnery was far bolder in translating what lay behind Sharon’s antipathy towards NATO action than Sharon himself. “If the Americans and the Europeans interfere today in the matter of Kosovo, what is to prevent them from doing the same tomorrow in the matter of Palestine? Sharon has made it crystal-clear to the world that there is a similarity and perhaps even identity between Milosevic’s attitude towards Kosovo and the attitude of Netanyahu and Sharon towards the Palestinians.” Besides, for a man whose own “brutal interventionism” in Lebanon in 1982 led to a Middle East blood-bath of unprecedented proportions, Sharon’s remarks were, to say the least, hypocritical.113
As Sharon sent an armoured column to reinvade Nablus, still ignoring Bush’s demand to withdraw his troops from the West Bank, Colin Powell turned on Arafat, warning him that it was his “last chance” to show his leadership. There was no mention of the illegal Jewish settlements. There was to be no “last chance” threat for Sharon. The Americans even allowed him to refuse a UN fact-finding team in the occupied territories. Sharon was meeting with President George W. Bush in Washington when a suicide bomber killed at least fifteen Israeli civilians in a Tel Aviv nightclub; he broke off his visit and returned at once to Israel. Prominent American Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz, immediately called upon the White House not to put pressure on Sharon to join new Middle East peace talks. “This is a tough time,” Wiesel announced. “This is not a time to pressure Israel. Any prime minister would do what Sharon is doing. He is doing his best. They should trust him.” Wiesel need hardly have worried. Only a month earlier, the Americans rolled out their first S-70A-55 troop-carrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the Israelis. Israel had purchased twenty-four of the new machines, costing $211 million—most of which would be paid for by the United States—even though it had twenty-four earlier-model Black Hawks. The logbook of the first of the new helicopters was ceremonially handed over to the director general of the Israeli defence ministry, the notorious Amos Yaron, by none other than Alexander Haig—the man who gave Begin the green light to invade Lebanon in 1982.
Perhaps the only man who now had the time to work out the logic of this appalling conflict was the Palestinian leader sitting now in his surrounded, broken, ill-lit and unhealthy office block in Ramallah. The one characteristic Arafat shared with Sharon—apart from old age and decrepitude—was his refusal to plan ahead. What he said, what he did, what he proposed, was decided only at the moment he was forced to act. This was partly his old guerrilla training, a characteristic shared by Saddam. If you don’t know what you are going to do tomorrow, you can be sure that your enemies don’t know either. Sharon took the same view.
As they took over the offices of the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli army looted its equipment and archives. Ha’aretz reported that soldiers were “fighting for the spoils” of their West Bank operations after seizing dozens of British-made Land Rovers; the vehicles were passed on to the Israeli army’s logistics division on orders from the chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz. It was unclear whether the vehicles were paid for with EU money. The Israelis also got their hands on thousands of documents which showed just how far Arafat had lost control of the guerrilla organisations flourishing amid the Palestinians on the West Bank. But the Israelis then went public with translations and accounts of their contents which were deliberately misleading and, in one case, untrue. Journalists dutifully reprinted the Israeli version of the archives—that they showed Arafat’s hand in “terror” and his use of EU money to fund “terrorism”—but when The Independent undertook a thorough translation of the papers, it became clear that the Israelis had presented a fraudulent account of their contents.114 Next day, however, Sharon ostentatiously presented the “Arafat terror file” to Bush in front of the cameras at the White House—and was gratefully thanked for this “evidence” by the American president.
Amid what the Palestinian writer Jean Makdisi has accurately called “terrorology”—Edward Said’s sister was referring to the “twisted version of Middle East reality” that right-wing academics like Stanley Kurtz wished to impose on U.S. universities—it was no surprise to learn that an Israeli officer had been advising his men, prior to the reoccupation of the West Bank, to study the military tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, the officer said that “if our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even—shocking though this might appear—to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.”
What on earth did this mean? Did this account for the numbers marked by Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners in early March 2002? Did it mean that an Israeli soldier was now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans—which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943? Did the Americans have any thoughts about all this? Who were the forces of “terror” in Warsaw sixty-two years ago? The Jews fighting for their lives, or Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop’s SS troops?
In all, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem estimated that between 1987 The Girl and the Child and Love 511 and May 2003, a total of 3,650 Palestinians and 1,142 Israelis were killed, an overall death toll of 4,792. But statistics alone cannot do justice to the suffering of children. By 1993, 232 Palestinian children, aged sixteen and under, had been killed by Israeli soldiers during the first intifada. However, in just twelve months ending on 30 September 2002, at least 250 Palestinian children and 72 Israeli children had been killed. In one of its most shocking reports on the Israeli–Palestinian war, Amnesty International condemned both sides for their “utter disregard” for the lives of children. The solemn list that Amnesty amassed showed just how ingrained child-killing had become. There was Sami Jazzar, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier on the eve of his twelfth birthday in Gaza, eleven-year-old Khalil Mughrabi, killed by an Israeli sniper in Gaza—one of his friends survived after being shot in the testicles by a high-velocity round—and there was ten-year-old Riham al-Ward, killed in her Jenin schoolyard by an Israeli tank shell. Then there were Raaya and Hemda—fourteen and two years old—killed with their parents by the Palestinian suicide bomber who attacked the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, Shalhevet Pas—she was just ten months old—shot by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron, and Avia Malka, killed by Palestinians who shot and threw grenades at cars in Netanya. She was nine months old.
The most terrible incident—praised by Sharon at the time as a “great success”—was the attack by Israel on Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader, which slaughtered nine children along with eight adults. Their names gave a frightful reality to this child carnage: eighteen-month-old Ayman Matar, three-year-old Mohamed Matar, five-year-old Diana Matar, four-year-old Sobhi Hweiti, six-year-old Mohamed Hweiti, ten-year-old Ala Matar, fifteen-year-old Iman Shehada, seventeen-year-old Maryam Matar. And Dina Matar. She was two months old. An Israeli air force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on their homes from an American-made F-16 aircraft on 22 July 2002.115
What war did Sharon think he was fighting? And what was he fighting for? Throughout the latest bloodletting, the one distinctive feature of the conflict—the illegal and continuing colonisation of occupied Arab land—was yet again a taboo subject, to be ignored, or mentioned in passing only when Jewish settlers were killed. That this was the world’s last colonial conflict, in which the colonisers were supported by the United States, was undiscussable, a prohibited subject, something quite outside the brutality between Palestinians and Israelis which was, so we had to remember, now part of America’s “war on terror.” This is what Sharon had dishonestly claimed since 11 September 2001. The truth, however, became clear in a revealing interview Sharon gave to a French magazine in December of that year, in which he recalled a telephone conversation with Jacques Chirac. Sharon said he told the French president that:
I was at that time reading a terrible book about the Algerian war. It’s a book whose title reads in Hebrew: The Savage War of Peace. I know that President Chirac fought as an officer during this conflict and that he had himself been decorated for his courage. So, in a very friendly way, I told him: “Mr. President, you have to understand us, here, it’s as if we are in Algeria. We have no place to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.”