by Robert Fisk
The brothers were hit, according to their family, by 50-calibre bullets as they shouted abuse at an Israeli army unit on the road below their village. “Bilal’s brains spilled out of his head onto the ground just here,” his eldest brother, Zuheir, said on the embankment of rubbish-strewn earth above a Jewish settlers’ road. “We took Bilal to the hospital and it was only then that we realised Hilal was missing. When we got back, we found him lying just ten metres away. He had also been hit in the head. They had died together.” Zuheir insisted that the brothers—Bilal was twenty-one, Hilal two years younger—were doing no more than shouting at the Israeli soldiers on the road beneath them, although one villager said that stones had been thrown at the Israelis by some of the seventeen youths on the embankment. Stone-throwing, as every Palestinian knows, is a capital offence. Hunks of concrete had been laid around the blood-stained earth where the brothers died.
It was the intifada in microcosm, a lunatic mixture of exaggerated Israeli fear and hopeless sorrow. On the road below, Israeli soldiers—perhaps the killers of Bilal and Hilal Salah—had warned me against visiting the village. “I wouldn’t go there,” their officer said bleakly. “There’s a funeral.” But the funeral was long over, and all I found was a circle of middle-aged men weeping in a room full of framed Korans and red plastic flowers, and the brothers’ mother, Sada, sitting on the floor and crying beneath a cheap pink blanket. The two youths were Yabad’s first “martyrs.” “The soldiers guard five Jewish settlements near here and we are exposed to gunfire every day and fifty-calibre bullets are not normal ammunition,” Zuheir Salah said. “Those bullets go right through cinder-blocks and we had to close the school in case bullets came inside.” The family story was as mundane as it was ultimately tragic. Bilal and Hilal Salah had four brothers and five sisters; Zuheir, like their dead father, was a labourer. Only two days before their deaths, they had put up the nameplate on their café, the “Flowered Traffic Circle Restaurant.” The family had already printed up a set of postcard portraits of the dead brothers, their heads surrounded by handwritten Koranic inscriptions and the insignia of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.
Down on that fatal road, the villagers lit tyres in protest at the killings, but by late afternoon the black smoke had drifted off over the stone fields, leaving coils of rusting wire on the burned tarmac. All around Yabad were the same pathetic signs of opposition to Israel’s continued occupation. High up on the hills around the village, the red roofs of Jewish settlements glowed in the afternoon sun, their army-escorted convoys throbbing along the settlers’ roads. Did their inhabitants know that, just across from them, Bilal and Hilal Salah were being lowered into their graves?
Israelis are more introspective about their history than Palestinians; they find it easier to be self-critical, but then that is one of the luxuries of being the winner, the occupier, the master. Halfway to Jerusalem, as our minibus began to climb the hill from the plains east of Tel Aviv, Simon began telling me about his Israeli war service. At seventy-three, his army life was over, but he’d fought in 1967 and 1973 and ended up in Beirut in 1982, landing on the beaches north of Sidon. Mercifully, there was no talk of “terrorists,” only of peace, and when his wife asked why the Palestinians should not have Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of their new state—and this, remember, just four weeks after the death of the Oslo agreement— I wondered if there wasn’t an undiscovered Israel.
The bus was negotiating the sharp curves around Harel and we could see the remains of the 1948 Jewish convoy by the highway, left as a memorial to the struggle of the Jews to keep open the road to Jerusalem more than half a century ago. That was when Simon’s wife announced that everything had gone wrong in 1967. “We got used to the land we had taken then, to being in occupation. That made the Lebanon invasion easier, to be an occupier. We shouldn’t have occupied someone else’s land.” Then she suddenly asked me about Mohamed al-Dura, the twelve-year-old shot dead by Israeli soldiers on 30 September as he cowered in his father’s arms in Gaza. “What was he doing at the time?” she asked sharply. “Why was he on the street?” In fact, he had accompanied his father to buy a car—because the father had to walk to the Gaza border at two each morning for permission to work in Israel—and had been returning home when they were trapped by gunfire.96 But I understood the implication of these questions at once: if Mohamed al-Dura did not have good reason to be on the streets of Gaza at the time—if he had been participating in a demonstration—then maybe the little boy had got what he deserved, another child sacrifice born of “Palestinian paganism.”
This disconnection from reality comes in many forms. After I landed at Ben Gurion Airport in late October 2000, the young female Israeli immigration officer cheerfully asked me to remember that Israel was “a small country threatened by people from outside who want to take it.” I suggested that the Palestinians had been living in “Palestine”—or modern-day Israel—for generations, that they were not “outside” (save those who had been expelled from their lands by Israel) and that UN Security Council Resolution 242 might, in the end, bring real peace. “What is 242?” she wanted to know.
How strange that 242—whose three figures alone are shorthand for any Palestinian who wants to refer to the UN resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal from occupied lands—would mean nothing to a young, educated Israeli immigration officer. Oslo, of course, had a meaning for her, the very word used with such contempt by the Palestinians of the occupied territories. Deir Yassin would not. The same disconnection creeps into the Israeli and Western press.
Israelis are invariably “murdered” or “lynched” by Palestinians—often a perfectly accurate description, especially of the two Israeli reservists butchered in a Ramallah police station and then hurled from a window—but Palestinians were inevitably killed in those “clashes” with which I was so familiar. Reuters dutifully followed this skewed narrative. On 30 October 2000, its report on killings by Israeli troops in the occupied territories referred to Palestinians wounded in “stone-throwing clashes” and “killed in earlier clashes,” adding that the “clashes” began on 28 September, that “the clashes have halted peace talks” and that Israeli Arabs have complained about “the killing of their brethren in clashes.” But when on the same day an Israeli security guard was shot dead, his killer was accurately described by Reuters as a “suspected Palestinian gunman.” On the same day, the Associated Press reported “Palestinian shooting attacks on Jewish settlements” but spoke of a Palestinian who was, of course, merely shot in “clashes.”
This double standard of Israeli and foreign reporting would find its way into the most unexpected of places. Staying at the King David Hotel in Jewish West Jerusalem, I found myself watching the hotel’s home-video history on the television in my room. So what did the video tell about the destruction of the British military headquarters in this very same hotel by Menachem Begin’s bombers, an act which—if committed by Palestinians—would be described by Israelis as an act of bestial terrorism? Well, the video proudly boasted that the King David was “the only hotel in the world that was bombed by a future prime minister” and referred to the perpetrators—whose victims included at least 41 Arabs, 28 British and 17 Jews—as “activists” who were dedicated to their cause.
Ariel Sharon is condemned as a “hawk” in the Israeli press, a “right-winger,” a man who has wilfully sacrificed the lives of Israeli soldiers in war—but not, in Israeli newspapers, as the man chiefly responsible for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. This inversion of moral horror reminded me of the Serbs who loathed Slobodan Milošević for Serbia’s economic collapse and the loss of Kosovo—but not for his ethnic cleansing of half a million Kosovo Albanians—and of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948, most of whom ended up in the muck of Gaza.
Every day now, we reporters would go to watch these fierce battles between stone-throwers and Israeli soldiers—“clashes,” of course—and the Israeli tear-gas grenades were falling li
ke Chinese fireworks one day near the Karni crossroads when my mobile phone rang. There had been a bomb in Jerusalem. One of the Palestinian policemen watching the stone-throwers was listening to my call. “How many dead?” he asked. Two, I said. The man looked disappointed. “Is that all?” he asked. There wasn’t much compassion in Gaza for the enemy who used to be Yassir Arafat’s “partner in peace.”
Gaza is so physically tiny that it has to be a place of contrasts. At midday, I am sitting amid long grass, amid lemon and fig trees, bushes of pomegranates and gardenia, listening to one of Arafat’s most trusted lieutenants telling me of George Tenet’s threats. Indeed, the head of the CIA—so frequent a visitor to Gaza— seemed strangely present, because my host knows the CIA boys well. Then, a couple of hours later, I am back at Karni and I am watching an Israeli soldier run from the border fence and squat in the muddy dunes to take aim at a boy holding a slingshot. There is a high-pitched crack, the thwack of a bullet hitting something and the youth is on the ground, two men running towards him with a stretcher. The rifle cracks again and, just once, I hear the bullet literally whizz through the air to my right. Yes, Arafat’s man had told me in his orchard, the CIA knew that the Israelis were deliberately trying to kill stone-throwers. “We have shown them the statistics and taken them to watch these unequal battles,” he said. “Personally, they agree with us that the Israelis are shooting at the upper part of the body. But the CIA obey their American political masters.”
From the orchard, with its fruit flies and sparrows, to the mud of Karni was possibly 1,500 metres. And it was interesting how the threats and anger of Camp David fitted in so naturally with the blood and tyre-shrieking ambulance down the road. Arafat’s officer did not restrain his words. The story had come to him from Arafat himself, at the very end of the Camp David talks which had brought us all— within weeks—to the catastrophe that now embraced “Palestine.” And, some would say, Israel as well:
Tenet had gone to Arafat with a warning: “We can make new borders, we can make peoples, we can make new regimes.” This is what Tenet told Arafat at Camp David. And when Arafat would not make the capitulation that Clinton and Barak wanted, Tenet threatened Arafat. Tenet said: “So you will go back to the Middle East alone.” He meant that Arafat would not have the support of the CIA. And Arafat replied: “If this is the case, you are most welcome to come to my funeral—but I won’t accept your offers.”
Round us, the flies and birds moved through the hot trees. Arafat’s grey-haired factotum chewed his way through a mandarin, the juice dribbling down his chin, occasionally taking calls on his mobile phone as his two sons picked olives off a tree behind us. “You have to understand that . . . the worst is yet to come,” he said. “We may have a few days of less trouble. But that is all. We know how to start things and we don’t know where it will end. But we believe that if it lasts longer, the results will be better. Nobody knows how the mechanism of war develops.” He felt more comfortable with the “sacred” right of return of refugees—perhaps a symbolic 100,000 in ten years, he suggested—and with the influence of his boss. “At the start, we advised the Israelis that they had no partners for peace except Arafat. Yes, he controls Palestine. But if Barak controls the Israeli army, why doesn’t he control the Jewish settlers who are on the loose with guns?” I mentioned Oslo. “It died with Rabin,” he replied.
At Karni, Arafat’s officer had ordered restraint. A flock of police captains swept their arms in front of the crowd of youths halfway down the road. “Go back up there,” they shouted. There was a momentary movement in the crowd; then the policemen were ignored. About 400 youths stood on the narrow road and advanced together in a mass, shoulder to shoulder, almost falling off the edge of the track, offering the Israelis a target they could not miss, seeking that very “martyrdom” that the Israelis—and most of us—could not understand. It was an extraordinary scene. A group had unified without a word of command for a commonly understood goal. They wanted to be targets. The Israelis obliged. A cluster of tear-gas canisters failed to shift the crowd; a single live round fired into the pack of people did the trick. There were shouts and a stretcher bobbing through the screaming youths and an ambulance driving through the dust for the Shifa hospital.
Yet behind us, at the top of the road, a man was selling orange ices and bread filled with thyme for the tired stone-throwers and black-uniformed policemen. The television crews were standing there in their spaceman blue flak jackets and helmets, along with ambulance crews and truck-drivers and families from the concrete hovels across the highway. Anyone can turn up in Gaza to watch tragedy and farce. This is Shakespeare, Scott Fitzgerald and pantomime rolled into one, revenge and vaudeville. No wonder, I think as I drive back to Jerusalem, that Palestinian poetry is so bitter. “All I possess in the presence of death/Is pride and fury,” wrote Mahmoud Darwish.
No one understands this better than Hanan Ashrawi. She bursts into her Ramallah home with an energy born of total exhaustion, jet-lagged, angry, scornful of Israel and Western journalists in about equal measure, complaining of toothache, wolfing through chicken, potatoes and hot peppers, her white cat Labneh watching aloofly from the carpet. The future will be difficult. “It’s not just ‘the dark night of the soul’ when you have the resurgence of hostilities and a loss of faith in the ‘peace process,’ ” she says. Oslo is dead. That is what she means. Only UN resolutions are left.
Palestine’s most famous woman—with the exception of Yassir Arafat, Palestine’s most famous citizen—has just returned from lecturing American universities on the catastrophe now befalling her people, trying to persuade the Gore and Bush foreign policy teams in this American election month to comprehend the realities of the Middle East, condemning the powerful American press for its biased reporting of the new Israeli–Palestinian conflict. A member of the original 1991 Madrid Palestinian team, Ashrawi’s job as an English literature don allows her to speak with unique eloquence and contempt. Outside, a November gale buffets her villa, the wind moving the trees in the small back garden.
When I ask if it’s all over for Oslo, she nods. When I ask if the UN’s Security Council Resolution 242 is now the only possible peace, she nods twice more, between gulps of tabouleh and rice. When I ask if that means the closing down of all Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land and the return of East Jerusalem, her voice sharpens. “All the settlements will have to go—the moment you accept otherwise, you have legitimised the acquisition of territory by force. The basis of Oslo was 242 . . . but Oslo violated that. It reinterpreted 242. The Israelis never respected any of the Oslo withdrawal timetable. What is happening now is a result of Oslo. We’ve been saying this would happen, we’ve been warning this would happen, that there would be an implosion or explosion. And now we’re proven right, it’s too late and there’s a tragic loss of life.”
To listen now to Hanan Ashrawi—a voice of moderation and humanity—is to experience the historical shock of what has happened in the Middle East these past six weeks. “The Palestinian people feel victimised by this ‘peace process,’ ” she says angrily. “The ‘process’ is reinvented all the time to suit Israel. And America thinks all the time that as long as there is a ‘process,’ God is in his heaven. Now the Americans are indulging in crisis management and individual legacies—the people involved in Washington have come to the end of their careers.”97
It’s also clear that Ashrawi would like the careers of several reporters to come to an end. “When I visited The Washington Post, I asked them what had happened to the idea of journalistic integrity. There’s now a total disjunction between the pictures of what is happening—the Palestinian casualties—and the language; this is the product of America’s processed language and the Israeli spin machine.” Ashrawi leans back on the sofa in exhaustion. “Now we are all being fed well-worn phrases: ‘peace process,’ ‘back on track,’ ‘ceasefire,’ ‘time out,’ ‘put an end to violence,’ ‘Arafat to restrain/control his people,’ ‘do we have the right peace par
tner?’ This is a racist way of looking at the Palestinians and it obscures the fact that we’ve suffered an Israeli occupation all along. When newspapers ask if Palestinians deliberately sacrifice their children, it’s an incredibly racist thing to do. They are dehumanising the Palestinians. The press and the Israelis have rid us of the most elemental human feelings in a very cynical, racist discourse that blames the victims. Of course we love our children. Even animals care about their children.”
The phone rings—it’s like a clock chime in the Ashrawi home in Ramallah, the chirruping of the mobile, the repeated, tiring explanation of why Oslo does not work—and only after a minute of silence can she continue. “I always said Oslo could lead to a disaster or a state. It’s not an agreement, remember. It says specifically that it is a ‘declaration of principles.’ The danger was always that the ‘peace of the brave’ could turn into the ‘peace of the grave.’ ” The new intifada will continue—“in different shapes, different forms”—Ashrawi says. “We are not fond of mass suicide, but we want the right to resist occupation and injustice. Then the moment we say ‘resist,’ the Israelis pull out the word ‘terrorist’—so a child with a stone becomes the ‘legitimate’ target for Israeli sniper fire and a high-velocity bullet.”
On the floor, Labneh is purring. The food is gone. Ashrawi has almost fallen asleep. The television news announces two more Palestinians killed by Israeli bullets. In the first month of the new intifada, a hundred Palestinians, including twenty-seven children, were killed by Israeli soldiers and border police. But the most alarming statistic is the contrast between the losses of the two sides. By 2002, 1,450 Palestinians will have been killed in the al-Aqsa intifada. Israel will have lost 525 lives, just over a third of the Palestinian death toll. And the Palestinians are the aggressors.
