The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  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.