The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.