The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Sharon showed no remorse. “The state of Israel,” he told CNN, “cannot afford that an Israeli citizen will not be able to visit part of his country, not to speak for the holiest for the Jewish people all around the world.” He did not, however, explain why he should have chosen this moment—immediately after the collapse of the “peace process”—to undertake such a provocative act. Stone-throwing and shooting spread to the West Bank. Near Qalqiliya, a Palestinian policeman shot dead an Israeli soldier and wounded another—they were apparently part of a joint Israeli–Palestinian patrol originally set up under the terms of the Oslo agreement. “Everything was pre-planned,” Sharon would claim five weeks later. “They took advantage of my visit to the Temple Mount. This was not the first time I’ve been there . . .”

  JUST OUTSIDE JERUSALEM, a Jewish settler from Efrat was screaming abuse at a group of Israeli soldiers. His car had been stoned by Palestinian children on a nearby hill. He demanded military intervention at once. “Are you one of the journalists that lies like CNN?” he rounded on me. “You people should write that a rock is like unto a lethal weapon. It’s the same as a bullet. Someone who throws a rock at a bus is trying to murder fifty people.” It was an instructive little outburst, for it turned the children on the hill behind Beit Jalla into mass murderers, gunmen without guns, worthy of the biblical fury so beautifully captured in that phrase “like unto a lethal weapon.” It was obviously not only Palestinians who believed in “days of rage.” The anger was just as palpable among Israelis this October of 2000, even if the sense of proportion—or lack of it—was profoundly disturbing. Again and again, in Israel, the bestialisation—and fear—of Palestinians betrayed a total inability to grasp reality: you might think that Israel was under Palestinian occupation, that Israelis were being shot down in their dozens by Palestinian “security forces,” that Palestinian tanks and helicopters were blasting away at Israeli towns, that Yassir Arafat had taken time out from diplomacy, something that Barak had publicly declared his intention to do.

  What was going on now in the occupied territories was a form of low-intensity warfare which was, week by week, creeping into an armed conflict between two peoples. The Palestinians now believed they had nothing to lose by fighting the Israelis. Trapped in their autonomous villages, a whole society under town arrest, they no longer had anything to gain by their silence or their acquiescence. A young Palestinian woman who worked for one of Arafat’s security outfits explained it with candour. “Arafat has to go on fighting—he mustn’t give in now. The intifada will force the Israelis to understand that Oslo is dead and that only a total withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem will bring peace.” When I pointed out to her that Arafat was not doing the “fighting”—that it was the Palestinians and their various satellite organisations that opposed Oslo that were providing “Palestine” with its dead—she changed her argument. “We must make sure that the people and the Palestinian Authority are together and united,” she said, “when the real fighting starts.”

  “Real” fighting? What did that mean? Ten years ago, Ariel Sharon—then the outcast ex-defence minister shamed by Sabra and Chatila—said that Israeli tanks might one day have to shell Nablus or Ramallah. How we roared with laughter then. Yet now, a decade later, with Sharon on the verge of returning to the Israeli cabinet, those tanks were indeed shelling Palestinian towns. Tanks fired into Ramallah. Helicopter gunships rocketed Palestinian towns so frequently that their attacks no longer made headlines. And in those towns and in the foetid streets of Gaza, I found not a soul who wanted the new intifada to end. Nor did I find a Palestinian family that did not watch the Lebanese Hizballah’s Manar television station, satellited from Beirut, beaming into the occupied territories a constant message: in Lebanon, Israel was driven from occupied land because its people fought for liberation; they believed in God; they were not afraid to die. And now Lebanon is free. Why not the West Bank and Gaza and Jerusalem?

  This was a powerful but dangerous lesson to send to the Palestinians. For Gaza is not southern Lebanon, and Ramallah and Beit Jalla are not Tyre and Sidon. Jerusalem is not Beirut. But Oslo had proved so great a betrayal for the Palestinians, their trust so perverted by Israel’s continued settlement building and land confiscation and its refusal to allow the Palestinians a capital in part of Jerusalem, that politics was no longer a viable instrument of progress. Faithfully continuing the bankrupt policy of beating the Arabs into submission—the policy that destroyed Israel in Lebanon—the Israelis responded to stones with bullets, to bullets with missiles. But in their hovels, the Palestinians of Gaza could absorb this punishment. They knew that if the Israelis wanted to invade Palestinian land, all of it—an idea floated by the less balanced Jewish settlers but later to be adopted by Sharon himself—then they would have perpetual war.

  Nor was there much doubt that the terrible threats of Islamic Jihad to resume their war of suicide bombs were real. Nabil Arair might have failed to kill any Israelis with a bicycle bomb in Gaza but there were many others ready to take his place. Jerusalem’s buses were already travelling three-quarters empty. The suicide bombers had struck—even before setting off their bombs. Hamas now ruled Gaza. Needless to say, Israel’s once close relations with Hamas were no longer mentioned in news reports from Jerusalem.

  So—and here I use the rubric of the Israelis, faithfully parroted by CNN and the BBC—did Arafat “control his own people”? The question was pointless, for the Palestinians now controlled Arafat. Their despair mirrored his own conviction that Oslo was dead; their fury at the Israeli killing of so many Palestinians paralleled Arafat’s anger at both the Americans and Israelis. Their political explosion occurred—it was a fact—and Arafat could only acknowledge it by repeating the foundation of those talks so long ago in Madrid: that the only just peace lies in the direct and total implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242. He said as much at the end of October 2000. Responding to Barak’s call for a “political separation” between Palestinians and Israelis, Arafat said that he was “for a political separation that is based on the 1967 borders and international resolutions . . . and will lead to the setting up of a Palestinian state.”

  And how did Israelis respond to the Palestinians one month into the new intifada? “Palestinians are racist,” said a letter-writer to the Jerusalem Post, a paper that ran a feature article on child victims with the memorable headline: “Child Sacrifice Is Palestinian Paganism.” Yes, Palestinians are pagans, racists, child-sacrificers, “terrorists,” animals, “serpents”—this from Barak in September 2000. But—a tragedy for both Palestinians and Israelis—they were likely to fight on, even if their Israeli antagonists were armed by the Americans.

  For the Palestinians, this fact was no political point-scoring. Just after dark on 27 October 2000, at least two missiles smashed into the corner of the Ksiyeh family home in Beit Jalla, the first blasting a cavity in the wall, the second flying right through the hole and punching through the corridor floor before exploding in a neighbour’s kitchen. An Israeli helicopter gunship fired both missiles and the evidence was there for all to see. One of the missiles was a Hellfire manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The second was a more modern projectile, carrying the U.S. designation number 93835C4286 and manufactured in June 1988. It wasn’t hard, looking at the metal computer strips with their tell-tale factory markings, to see why the people of Beit Jalla didn’t weep over the seventeen American sailors of the USS Cole, attacked by al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Aden just over two weeks earlier.

  Yet the villagers here—60 per cent of them Christian—were not vengeful people; and the Palestinian gunmen firing across the valley at the Jewish settlement of Gilo were not from Beit Jalla. The Palestinian hamlet with its fine dressed-stone Orthodox churches, frescoes of St. George and the Dragon and massive, thick-furred street cats was not exactly a battlefield, but it now stood on a West Bank front line, regularly punished by Israel for the bullets that smacked through the windows of the Jewish settlers acr
oss the wadi. A week earlier, gunmen—almost certainly a Tanzim militia unit—fired first at the Israelis. In return a Merkava tank—I could see it sleeping under a blue tarpaulin on the opposite hillside—put three shells into one of Beit Jalla’s narrow streets. One blasted into Margot Zidan’s garage, destroying her brand-new VW Golf and crushing the ancient stone gateway above. War and the hand of God exclude insurance payments. Another shell blew a hole in the second floor of Jamil Mislet’s home down the road.

  The Plot—the essential ingredient in any Middle East folly—now engulfed this tourist-pretty village. The local Palestinian version went like this: true, some Tanzim men fired rifles from between the houses, but Israel also sent Palestinian collaborators with guns into the village to fire at the settlement and thus provide the Israelis with an excuse to deploy four Merkava tanks on the other hill. The Israeli version of the Plot was even more ingenious: the Palestinian Authority deliberately provoked Israeli gunfire onto Christian homes in the hope of bringing the Vatican onto the Palestinian side in the new intifada.

  The truth seemed more prosaic. The settlement of Gilo, on the heights above Beit Jalla—Gilo is the Hebrew version of Jalla—is in sight of Jerusalem; and by targeting its houses, the Palestinians were sending a message to the Israeli government: settlements are part of the new war, even colonies which are part of “Jewish” Jerusalem. However, the Christian and Muslim villagers also claimed that the most recent attack—the double missile strike on the Ksiyeh family home—was unprovoked, that there had been no shooting from the town before the assault. Which is why they were taking no chances. Three workmen were building a parapet of concrete blocks around the local telephone switching box at one end of Beit Jalla. Pasted to a telegraph pole next to it was a photograph of thirteen-year-old schoolboy Mrayad Jawaresh, who had died a week earlier while returning home from school to the neighbouring refugee camp. He smiled out of the picture in his school tie, another child “martyr”—killed by gunfire, provenance unknown—to support the Palestinian cause.

  Margot Zidan’s daughter Ghadir made a clucking sound with her tongue as she looked at the portrait. “You people protect the Israelis and blame us for this,” she said. “You say we are responsible for killing our own children. But this is not true. We are one people here. There is no difference between Christian and Muslim.” And the latter was most certainly true. Walking from house to house in Beit Jalla, Christian families took me to Muslim homes, Muslim children to the houses of Christian friends—without prior arrangement or introduction. But did the villagers support the Palestinians who fired into Gilo? They would shrug when I asked this question. “These men have silly little guns and they fire from between our homes,” one said. “What can we do? But how can we stop the Israelis? They know it’s not us that’s shooting at them.”

  Routine. That is what insurrection is about. A routine of violence that continues until it is suddenly and irreversibly detonated to a new and more bloody routine. Ramallah was the scene of what journalists liked to call “clashes.” A “clash,” you see, is an act in which Palestinians can die without anyone being held responsible—as in “Three Palestinians were killed in clashes yesterday.” Perhaps they were killed by their own people—or expired due to over-exertion during protests. When Israelis were killed, the culprits were usually identified as Palestinians. Not so when the victims were themselves Palestinians. So I drove across to Ramallah to watch a “clash” day.

  Clash. How amorphous, dull, indifferent, how very politely neutral the word sounds. But Israelis and Palestinians use it when they speak in English. And the “clash point” was an equally neutral stretch of roadway below the City Inn Hotel, its bedrooms now occupied by Israeli soldiers with sniper rifles. Across the muddy construction site to the north is an unfinished apartment block in which Palestinians also occupy bedrooms, with their own rifles. And up the road, towards the setting afternoon sun, is the day’s “clash.”

  It is called Ayosha junction and it is also the place—if you are a Muslim and if you are religious and if you believe in “martyrdom”—where a live round may just send your soul to paradise. For the Israeli soldiers fire so many rubber-coated steel bullets—as well as live rounds—that they have a fairground’s chance of hitting someone holding a stone. As for the bullets shot across the valley at the Palestinian gunmen, they appear to have little effect. The casualties are usually the stone-throwers.

  It has a choreography all its own. A few burning tyres in the morning to enrage the Israeli soldiers in their clapped-out jeeps. Then two or three or four funerals for the previous day’s Palestinian stone-throwers—capital punishment now being an unquestioned, routine penalty for chucking stones at Israelis—and then another “clash” at Ayosha junction. The tyres were already burning when they freighted Hossam Salem to the cemetery near his home, a cortège of black-dressed women, serious, bespectacled men and cars in which a convoy of trucks had become entangled. There was the old wooden coffin and a squad of men shouting Allahu akbar, then a bright orange lorry bearing the words “Bambini Fruit Juice,” then a group of women carrying green flags which announced that there was no God but God and Mohamed was his Prophet. And, of course, everyone was remembering the unmarried twenty-four-year-old who worked in his father’s grocery store and who—at Ayosha junction, of course—received a bullet full in the face scarcely eighteen hours before.

  “He was religious, he had a big beard when he died and he was with Hamas,” a family friend told me. “He was a supporter of Hamas for a long time, then he became more ‘active’ three months ago. All his family are with Hamas. When the Jerusalem intifada began three weeks ago, his brothers all said he would be a martyr. He also said he would be a martyr. Yesterday, he just said goodbye to his mother and went to Ayosha where there was a clash.” Active? Did Hossam Salem carry a gun? No one knew. But he was throwing stones and his grisly post-death portrait—a massive coloured photograph taken in the morgue—showed that the front of Hossam Salem’s face, much covered with a fluffy beard, had been powerfully stove in below the nose. Did he go to paradise? I asked a middle-aged man with a grey moustache and thin-framed spectacles. “If you are a real believer, then you go to paradise. I believe he went there, inshallah .”

  The mourners drifted away from the little mosque where a group of nineteenth-century buildings of pale grey stone spoke of an earlier, gentle, Ottoman Ramallah. And within an hour, more candidates arrived to take Hossam Salem’s place at the “clash point.” There were at least four hundred young men throwing and catapulting stones down the road—forget the cliché about “rock-throwing,” these were garden-size stones, about five inches wide—and the Israeli soldiers were hiding behind their armoured jeeps and firing tear gas back at the Palestinians in a slow, almost lazy way.

  One of the Israelis sat in the back of his jeep 3 metres from me, pulling on a cold can of Pepsi-Cola. Then he heaved himself from the vehicle, fixed a grenade to his rifle and fired it into the air above the jeep. It soared like a constellation, plummeting 400 metres down in a trail of white smoke to burst amid the crowd. Then his colleague, with an equally casual effort, used the door of the jeep to aim his rifle and fired off a rubber-coated steel bullet that bounced and skipped down the road. The Israelis were on the edge of Oslo’s Area A (total Palestinian occupation) and the Palestinians were in Area C (Israeli control) of the West Bank and the truly ridiculous theatre played out here showed just how insane the Oslo agreement had been. If the Israelis left, the Palestinians would stop throwing stones. If the Palestinians left, the Israelis would drive away. But each side was here because the other side was here—and because Area A and Area C had to be defended.

  Every few seconds, the cartridge case of a rubber-coated bullet would ping at my feet. Then a Molotov cocktail would blaze harmlessly in a rusting telegraph pole, and a rain of stones would patter on the road. At mid-afternoon, an ambulance drove at speed into the centre of the highway to retrieve a stone-thrower who had been hit. And so it went
on, more “clashes” for Clinton to bewail before the microphones in Washington. And I was struck, listening to his words on my radio in Ramallah, by the sheer vacuity—the absolute other-planet irrelevance—of what Clinton said. He wanted the young people of one side to re-establish contact with the young people of the other—as if these “clashes” were taking place in a vacuum, despite the wishes of thousands of young Palestinians and Israelis. The problem was that the soldier drinking Pepsi-Cola and the soldier firing the tear gas and the young man with the Molotov cocktail and Hossam Salem are the young people. Salem didn’t want to join Clinton’s merry reunion of youth. He wanted to go to paradise. And the Israelis were quite prepared to send him there. So, I wrote, let’s keep calling them “clashes,” child’s play, just a little routine violence from which we can all withdraw and jump aboard the Oslo train once it’s been put back on its little toy track. Or from which you can speed your way—if you believe in it—straight to heaven.

  In every village, a tragedy. I drive into Yabad in the West Bank. Who’s ever heard of Yabad? I can’t even find it on a map, a forgotten hamlet south-east of Jenin. But the story is easy to write. They grew up together, they attended the same school together, they slept in the same room together, they became partners in the same village restaurant together. And on 29 October 2000, they were shot dead together by the Israelis and next day, in the small graveyard on the windy hilltop above Yabad, Bilal and Hilal Salah were buried together.