by Iain Overton
‘The last time I heard the word “killer”,’ he barked at the tourists, who were staring wide-eyed at this angry man, ‘I heard it with honour.’ I could not see, through his mirror Ray-Bans, if he was joking. I assumed not. ‘Because that killer killed terrorists,’ he said. He was definitely not joking.
The Americans were loving this. An eight-year-old girl in pigtails and a green halter top put up her hand when he asked the group who were the terrorists.
‘Arabs?’ she said.
He ignored her. ‘I am not against Palestinians,’ he shouted. ‘I am against terrorists. All the terrorists here are Palestinians.’
This was a lecture based on fear, however justified. He called his rifle ‘The Devil’, and then pulled out an unloaded pistol and pointed it, with one hand, at a man in the front row. The man shifted a little lower in his seat.
‘If I shoot this pistol now, who will I kill?’
‘Joey!’ shouted the girl. Her hand had come down and was now pointing at her brother.
‘No!’ screamed the man. ‘I won’t! I won’t! I will hit the person next to Joey! See? The pistol kicks to the left when I pull the trigger!’
The person next to Joey looked uncomfortable.
‘But if I stand like this,’ he shouted, holding the pistol in both hands and legs apart, ‘what happens? Who do I shoot?’ The muscles on his forearms were throbbing.
‘Joey!’ shouted the girl again, her pigtails dancing.
‘Yes!’ shouted the instructor. ‘I kill Joey.’
Joey looked upset.
It continued like this for a while. He bellowed about ‘neutralising shots in the face from close distance’ and how one bullet could kill six people, passing through each person in turn. He screamed that he judged people as terrorists by their actions, not what they looked like. Then he shot the target of the guy in the headdress six times, the bullets clustering in the Arab’s forehead. He called terrorists bastards, and you knew he had killed before.
The atmosphere was febrile. Guns only increased the intensity, the madness. They seemed to make dialogue impossible, and, despite whatever the trainer was screaming, guns here seemed to reduce everything to kill or be killed. It was claustrophobic. Another man, one with sad and intense eyes, came up to me. He was Steve Gar, a South African instructor who had made Israel his home and who was infused with love for his new land. Steve metaphorically carried his rifle in one hand and the Torah in the other. He was one exam away from becoming a rabbi and had, it seemed, spent half his adult life training for a religious life, the other half in the military. He was a man of strong convictions and convincing strength.
He did not like the West Bank being called what it was. ‘Why should I define what is Israel in relation to what is west of Jordan?’ he asked. ‘It’s racism.’
He hated the fact that the place where he lived, deep in internationally recognised Palestinian territory, was called a settlement. And his voice lifted in anger when he spoke about how the Palestinians resented the Jews living in their isolated towns. Beyond us stretched a valley of crumbled rock and clumps of scrub, untouched for millennia, the ground here so dry that it could suck up the blood of a thousand armies, and I looked out at it and wondered what was it about this stony land that inspired such passions.
It was a deadly passion, though. He had told me how, as an anti-terror team leader whose job it was to protect Jews living in the West Bank, he had been in at least six serious incidents involving terrorism. By this I took it that he had killed and killed again, but he refused to tell me if this was true.
‘Our mission is two things. The first is to protect Jewish life. The second is to protect the Jewish way of life. What they have with the Iron Dome means that one in a million rockets will kill someone here,’ he said referring to the air defence system that protects Israel from missiles fired at her territory, ‘so I am not worried about Jewish loss of life. But I am worried about them harming the Jewish way of life, for if we bend to them we let them harm our psyche, our psychology. And I want my children to live . . . I cannot blame the terrorists for killing our children, but I can blame them for turning our children into killers.’
‘We have been running away for thousands of years,’ he said, his eyes moist with emotion. ‘But when you look at Judaism there is one place where we are safe; it was given to us by God as a promise: Israel.’
But many Jews I spoke to were deeply dismayed about such a gung-ho attitude. In 2008 Israeli prosecutors found that of the 515 violent acts committed by Israelis against Palestinians and Israeli security forces, 502 were by right-wing Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories.34
Perhaps this was Israel’s tragedy. The threat to their culture was arguably not from the guns of the Palestinians but from within. It’s been said that ‘the only democracy in the Middle East has fallen prey to a succession of Right-wing governments, which derive much of their electoral strength from Russian emigres and extremist religious parties’.35 They have reached a situation where the only way to win any argument is thought to be with a gun.
In 2012, a team of Israeli filmmakers made a documentary called The Gatekeepers – it was about the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. They managed to interview six of the former heads of the Shin Bet, the national intelligence services. Each described the ruthless policies they had once implemented to maintain Israeli dominance in the region and to crush dissent in the Occupied Territories. And most agreed such repressive tactics had been counter-productive. As one said: ‘We’ve become cruel, to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.’
Democracy can never flourish like this – not at the end of a gun. But Steve was too far down the rabbit hole to see this. Everything here was suffused with an aggressive madness; the gun had become the only way to discuss things.
He summed this up when he told me an anecdote that, in the telling, he had no idea how disturbing it was to hear. He explained how he had placed his own unloaded rifle, and a video camera, in his toddler’s bedroom and filmed the child playing beside the gun for two hours, just to see if the child would touch it. The boy did not, said Steve, and then he told me how he had hugged his son and said how proud he was of him for not touching the gun. And, I thought, as Steve showed me how to kill a terrorist – a long-distance shot to the chest and then a close-up coup de grâce to the forehead with a pistol – that for as long as men like this had guns in their hardened hands there would always be a problem here in Israel. Just as there would, probably, always be someone else out there wishing to shoot him.
With that thought, I left to get the other side of the story – I wanted to speak to a Palestinian.
The day before, a group of young Palestinian men, the youngest just fourteen years old, had been throwing rocks at the immobile walls of the West Bank in the town of Bethlehem. One of them, frustrated at the mounting deaths in Gaza 50 miles away, had lit a Molotov cocktail and pushed it through a small gap in a metal gateway. The Israeli military had retaliated with gunfire, and another boy, one who had not thrown the home-made bomb, was hit.
I did not know more than this, and so there I was, making my way with a translator to Al Hussain hospital, a medical centre in Bethlehem, to find out more; to try to understand what impact the snipers of Israel had upon the Palestinians.
Arriving at the modest and faded building, we climbed the stained stairs to the fourth floor, where Qusai Ibrahim Abu Basma, a sixteen-year-old student who longed to become a lawyer one day, was recovering from his gunshot wound.
Qusai was handsome and dark-eyed, like so many boys here. His T-shirt had, in capital letters, ‘BEGINNING’, ‘MIDDLE’ and ‘END’ written on it, and, as he shook my hand, I looked down at the dark patch of blood that seeped through his bound leg and wondered if this was the beginning or the end of something for him.
The bullet had passed right through, ripping ligaments and obliterating his shinbone. His father, a silent man who s
at spirit-light in the corner, showed me an X-ray that told a different story to the neatness of the white gauze. It spoke of a likely limp and a near escape from an arterial bleed. The boy’s mother looked on, shrouded in a hijab. I asked Qusai if he regretted protesting, if it was worth getting shot for.
‘We can’t do anything,’ he said, his face framed in the light of the window. ‘They have guns, we just have stones.’ He said he would kill an Israeli but he could not get his hands on a gun. ‘I was shot because I was the last one there as we left. I was just throwing stones.’
It is hard not to feel something when you meet a child shot for throwing a rock at a wall. And, no matter how much the Israelis speak of bombs and lives lived in terror, you can’t equate that with maiming a boy who weighs 40 kilograms at most.
I wondered what would happen if a British or a French soldier had shot this child in Europe. There would likely be a court martial, a prison sentence, all manner of trouble. But this incident was already a day old, and no paper had reported it.
Then he told me he wasn’t the only person in his class to get shot, and that the other kid had died. So, after a time, we said goodbye and walked back down the stained corridor. Getting back in the car, we drove to meet the father of the boy. We passed the Paradise Hotel and the Herodian Store gift shop, and, smelling the remnants of something foul in the air – the chemicals used by the Israelis to scatter crowds with their stench – I wondered how far from paradise this place had fallen.
We pulled over at a mural that lined the walls. Some graffiti here showed hijab-clad women toting semi-automatic pistols, Bansky style; or glamorous women with martyrdom in their eyes and AK47s in their hands. But this was different.
‘Article 31: That every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child,’ read the text next to five crudely painted footballers. It had been done years before to commemorate Palestinian Child Week.
A short distance from here, eighteen months ago, a boy had been travelling to football practice when a ‘disturbance’ happened. Perhaps he was throwing rocks, perhaps worse. In any event, an Israeli sniper shot him in front of this mural that spoke of a boy’s rights to play, and, without there being an Israeli military inquiry into his death, that is all we will ever know.
A human rights group listed the boy as just one of fifty-four minors under the age of eighteen who had been killed between 2012 and mid 2014 in the Occupied Territories. This did not include the deaths of children in Gaza from Israeli air strikes and bombs.36 The date of his death was 23 January 2013, and his name was Saleh Ahmad Suliman al-’Amarin. He was fifteen.
The house where Saleh lived before a sniper bullet shattered the lives of his family was in the long-established al-’Aza refugee camp. Outside the house were pictures of the boy. The community had embraced his death as that of a martyr, a shaheed. ‘If you live, live free, or die like the trees standing up,’ read an old Arabic proverb across one banner.
My translator rang the buzzer, and, after a time, the boy’s father, a thin man with a cracked face, greeted us. He invited us in, leading us to a quiet room at the top of the stairs, lined with baroque, sapphire-hued sofas and memorials to his son.
‘He was everything to me,’ he said, sitting down on one of the heavy brocaded chairs. ‘The promise, the happiness of this house. You cannot imagine. He was the only child I had and now he is dead.’ Above him an image of his child looked down.
He stopped and allowed composure to come back. He spoke of the intimate details of Saleh’s life. How he excelled at football and was being considered for an academy slot in an Italian club. How his son was so popular that when he died the father had been humbled by how many others had known and loved the boy.
He then said how his only child had been shot in the head, and that it took him four days to die. ‘I wish . . . I wish he had a machine-gun,’ the father said. ‘All of Palestine will take revenge some day.’
Perhaps sensing my twitched response to these apocalyptic words, his tone changed. ‘We don’t think all Israelis are criminal. If someone is in Tel Aviv, and another Jew here in Bethlehem shoots my son, then that is a different person. I cannot want that Jew in Tel Aviv dead. We are not against Israelis. We are against the occupation here, the Zionists. They take our land, our freedom, our joy.’
I listened to his anguish, and after half an hour we had to go because his grief was washing over him again, and there is not much more you can ask a man who has lost his heart. You can only record.
It was clear that guns, both in this room and in Palestine as a whole, had only wrought the agonies of torment. A thousand sons’ lives gone and a thousand fathers’ happiness ended: a sorrow repeated endlessly.
Even Israel, where fathers have to leave rifles on their sons’ beds to see if they will touch them, lives under the gun’s tyranny; where snipers wear T-shirts of pregnant women in the crosshairs; where children are taught to shoot terrorists in the forehead.
These were hard truths. For me, the most militarised nation in the world had so much potential and talent and warmth. Like when, during one air raid warning, a shop owner in one of Tel Aviv’s markets beckoned me inside with offers of lemon cake and iced water, apologising for the overhead bombs – as if it were her own fault. Such moments offered small insights into the nature of the Israeli character, and into the eternally complex relationship they have with their country and the violence that besets it.
But it was also the craziest and the saddest nation with the bleakest of all futures that I had ever visited. And I couldn’t shake the thought that guns had played the greatest part of all in its endless tragedy.
War and tragedy are ugly twins – co-joined and grotesque. In a way a journalist’s life is marked by them – as if drawn towards them like a tourist queuing for a freakshow. And it is never more grotesque than when that show involves children. While I had seen guns aplenty, been shot at, met snipers and victims and seen the ugly face of defence and attack up close, there was one aspect of militaries and guns that upset me more than most. And that was those times when I had met with child soldiers.
One such occasion was the summer of 2012. I had come to West Africa and was travelling on the main road that connects Liberia’s capital of Monrovia with the plantation lands of Bomi county. I was there to see, as part of the rehabilitation programmes that the organisation I work for, Action on Armed Violence, carries out in West Africa, what guns had done to children here.
A decade before, this densely tree-lined road was witness to the sort of vicious fighting that so often defines conflict in Africa: young kids with big guns. At its end lived communities of ex-child combatants who, having put down their weapons, were being trained by us in agricultural work – a useful skill for men and women hardened by years of violence.
The potholes dotting the dirt track caused the car to lurch. Over the noise of crunching gears, my driver, Moses, was shouting at me about the best Liberian food to eat for breakfast. He strongly recommended hot pepper soup as a solid start to the day. It was quick and easy to make and left your mouth smarting long enough to stop hunger until lunch. It was a conversation best understood in light of the fact that Moses had, for years, lived with the terrible famine the Liberian civil war had brought to the land.
After two hours of driving, moving under a thick blanketing cloud of ochre-white, the road split, and we took the reddened earthen path up into a plantation. As we left the road, the greenery changed into a broken land of upturned trees, splintered branches and beaten soil. The forest was being tamed. Men stood in the near shadows, swinging machetes at the remaining shoots that had not been knocked down by Chinese-made bulldozers. This jungle was tenacious.
Our car pushed up a hill, a gap in the trees looked down onto a slick of silver – a thin river with five naked boys splashing in the shallows. Then, a glimpse of white ahead, a house deep in the bush. It was the beginning of a village, a loose col
lection of low-slung huts around shady trees. Corpulent women sat on the narrow porches that fronted their two-room bungalows, slipping food into blackened, bubbling pots. Slim strips of dark wood were being slowly fed into the flames beneath.
As I stepped from the car, a young child broke into deep sobs. The others laughed. ‘He’s scared of you, white man,’ said one. And they laughed again as he dissolved further into a mess of wide-eyed fear and pearly speckled snot.
Settling down, the interviews started slowly. ‘Say what the European expects you to say,’ I thought. Their answers were short, guarded. Why would they be anything but? But then, as time passed, the conversation relaxed.
Food arrived – bony fish in a brown sauce, served up in a white pot with lilacs etched on the side. Those talking to me – five onetime child soldiers who had grown up to become rubber plantation workers – focused on eating. They dipped their spoons into the mush and ate with fierce concentration, the burned flecks of rice catching the sides of their mouths, more falling onto the ground, where chickens hovered. Behind us, a group of children gathered, one of them holding a slim stick. He began hacking at the forest edge, and the others joined in. Swish, swish, swish; small boys, sharp sticks, milky teeth.
Then, as the food hit their bellies, the four men and one woman who had sat with me in the shade of a sheltering tree began to talk about the war. What war it was – the reason for the fighting – in a sense was unimportant. What was important to me was an attempt to understand what happened when you put guns in the hands of children.
Then the woman among us started talking, and the tone of the meeting changed. Slim, about twenty-five, she had a white scar the size of a tangerine on her right shin. She got this wound the day the rebels arrived in her village and started shooting. A bullet had passed through her leg as she lay on the floor of her hut, cowering from their wicked firepower.
Her father had picked her up and carried her into the thorny bush, but the rebels had stopped them before the green had enveloped them, and they had turned on her father, accusing him of fighting for their enemies. The men with the guns had pushed her down and, instead of letting them flee, allowed their own perversions to run wild. They forced her father to carry an impossible weight on his head. But he couldn’t lift the bags of weapons they wanted him to porter, so they shot him in front of his bleeding daughter. An AK47 round to the back of his head. Then the rebels took her. She didn’t say what happened after that.
