The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem. It’s from an Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro bombing. An American Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me—foreign journalists are being insulted by both sides with ever more violent language—and this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He’s smiling and cheerful and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the phone, he says he’s taking the El Al night flight to New York with his wife. Would I like to drop by for tea?

  He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the King David Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the outside security buzzer, that he’s a rabbi. He’s angry because a neighbour has just let down a friend’s car tyres in the underground parking lot and he’s saying how he felt like smashing the windows of the neighbour’s car. His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies, says that her husband—again, he should remain anonymous—gets angry very quickly. There’s a kind of gentleness about them both—how easy it is to spot couples who are still in love—that is appealing. But when the rabbi starts to talk about the Palestinians, his voice begins to echo through the apartment. He says several times that Sharon is a good friend of his, a fine man, who’s been to visit him in his New York office.

  What we should do is go into those vermin pits and take out the terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said vermin, animals. I tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed from a refugee camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the first twenty houses close to the road. If there’s another stone, another twenty ones. They’d soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell you this. Stones are lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I’ll shoot you. I have the right to shoot you.

  Now the rabbi is a generous man. He’s been in Israel to donate a vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly expensive medical centre to the country. He is well-read. And I liked the fact that—unlike too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a “we-only-want-peace” routine to hide more savage thoughts—he at least spoke his mind. But this is getting out of hand. Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. “If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you.” But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won’t shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. “Then I’d say you’re out of your mind.”

  I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments have just collided. The rabbi’s dad taught him about an eye for an eye—or twenty homes for a stone—whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being “people of the Book,” Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews. The sickening Hamas references to Jews as “the sons of pigs and monkeys” are echoed by Israelis who talk of Palestinians as cockroaches or “vermin,” who tell you—as the rabbi told me—that Islam is a warrior religion, a religion that does not value human life. And I recall several times a Jewish settler who told me back in 1993—in Gaza, just before the Oslo accords were signed—that “we do not recognise their Koran as a valid document.”

  I walk out of The Independent’s office and home in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Tor to find my car surrounded by glass. Now it’s my turn to get angry. The driver’s window has been smashed, the radio torn out. It is plastered with “TV” stickers—in the hope that Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers will not open fire. Abu Tor is mostly Arab, although The Independent’s house is right on the old green line, Arabs to the right of the front door, mostly Jews to the left. I drive down to the Hertz agency, sitting on piles of glass. The girl tells me that to avail myself of Hertz’s insurance, I have to report the robbery to the police. She tells me to go to the Russian Compound.

  Now I know about the Russian Compound from Amnesty’s reports. This is where most of the Israeli torture goes on, the infamous “shaking” of suspected Palestinian “terrorists.” It should be an interesting trip. The moment I park my car, a loudspeaker shrieks at me in Hebrew. A cop tells me that for security reasons I have to park round the corner. No trouble with that. I watch two big police vans with sealed windows pass through the security barrier. I park and return to the door. “Where was your car robbed?” I am asked. Just outside the office, in Abu Tor, I reply. The policewoman shrugs. “Well, what do you expect?” she asks. I understand what she means. Arabs rob, don’t they, they steal car radios as well as blow up pizzerias? I wait for an hour. There is no cop to make out a report, although there are more than 200 policemen surrounding Orient House, a few hundred metres across the city.

  There’s a daily demonstration just down the road from Orient House. The television cameras are there but this doesn’t stop the border police turning on several Palestinian youths. They are beaten in front of the cameras, groined and punched and headlocked by six cops. One is laid in a van where he is held down so that another policeman can stamp on his testicles. A young Israeli security man can’t take his eyes off this vile scene. He is bending down low—right in front of me—to see where the other cop’s boot is landing between the youth’s thighs. How can they do this in front of the cameras? I keep asking myself. And then the dark thought occurs to me: that the Israeli police want the cameras to film this, they want the Palestinians to see what happens to them when they oppose Israel, when they demonstrate, when they object—as one boy does—by holding up a paper Palestinian flag.

  I think it’s the psychological shock of violence that always hits first, the sudden realisation that human beings intend to hurt each other. It afflicts everyone in this conflict. I have been attending the funeral of a Hamas man in Tulkarem and am returning to my taxi which is parked on the Israeli side of the line. On the map of the West Bank and Gaza—a broken window of settler roads and frontiers—Tulkarem is in Palestinian-controlled Area A and my taxi is in Israeli-controlled Area C. When I’d gone from C to A in the morning, the road was a litter of rubbish and stones. But when I return, there is a battle in progress, kids throwing stones at Israeli positions, burning tyres, rubber-coated steel bullets thwacking back through the trees.

  I am tired and hungry and impatient to return to Jerusalem. So I grab the boys beside the burning tyres and tell them I am a journalist, that I have to cross back through the line. I find two more sinister figures lurking in a wrecked bus shelter. I tell them the same. Then I walk between the burning tyres towards the unseen Israelis, slowly, almost a dawdle. Then a stone lands at my feet. Just a very small stone but it lands with a nasty little crack. Then when I turn round, another hisses past my face. One of the Palestinian boys begins to shriek with laughter. Stones. I have never thought of them as enemies before. In a few months’ time, they will hit me, many of them, and almost kill me. But that will be later, after the calendar clicks round to the date that is waiting for us all and that I can only vaguely ascertain now as an “explosion.”

  I keep walking slowly and realise that I will have physically to dodge each well-aimed stone calmly, as if it is perfectly normal for the Independent correspondent to be stoned by Palestinians on a hot summer’s afternoon. The road runs parallel with Area A now, and a teenager with a slingshot comes crashing through the trees—I can hear the whirr of the rope. The stone comes towards me so fast I can’t duck in time but it misses me by about a foot and smashes into the iron wall of an Israeli factory. The crash makes me look round. I am in the middle of an abandoned garden shop, surrounded by pots and cement eagles and deers and giant pots. One of the eagles has lost its head. Three more stones, maybe eight inches long. I realise what has happened. The Palestinians know I am a foreign journalist—I have shown them my Lebanese press card. But the moment I cross the line, I have become an Israeli. The moment they can no longer distinguish my face, they no longer care. I am an Israeli because I am on the Israeli side of the line. And I wonder what my friend the rabbi would have done.

  Back in Jerusalem, I work the phone again, trying to track down that elusive quotation
. If you call people animals, terrorists, vermin, can you be surprised when they behave so violently? Is it any wonder that Arafat is himself tribalising the rubbish dumps he still controls, playing the Musris and Nabulsis of Nablus off against each other, backing the Shakars of Nablus and the Shawars of Gaza, placating Hamas and Islamic Jihad by saying nothing?

  On the way to Jenin, I and a colleague from the Daily Telegraph are stopped by Israeli border guards. On the sweaty road, we call the Israeli army press office for permission to pass. There’s a small Jewish settlement up the hill, all red roofs and luscious foliage. It’s strange how naturally we treat these little land-thefts now. The border guards are bored. One of them switches on the jeep’s loudspeaker and hooks the mike to his mobile phone and begins playing the music “hold” button. Three lines of the 1812 Overture, three lines of Beethoven’s Fifth, three lines of Handel’s Water Music, all squawking out at high decibels, distorted and high-pitched, spilling its high-tech destruction of the world’s greatest composers over the sweltering road with its lizards and bushes and garbage.

  It’s a relief to find sanity. On a flight into Tel Aviv, I find myself sitting next to an Israeli paratroop officer. I give him my own assessment—an intifada that will go on until 2004. He says it will last well into 2006. “And in the end, we’ll be back on the ’sixty-seven border and give them East Jerusalem as their capital.” And then he adds: “But given the way we’re treating them, I’d be surprised if they’d settle for that.” I ask a Palestinian in Rafah what he thinks. “2005, 2006, what difference does it make? But I tell you one thing. After this intifada is over, there will be a revolt against Arafat. How did he ever allow this to happen? How did he ever think he could win?” There will be no revolt, of course. Sharon will trap Arafat in Ramallah. And Arafat will die.

  I am driving again through Gaza. Beside the road, a group of middle-aged men are sitting under a green awning; some have their heads in their hands, others are just looking at the sand. They are mourning Mohamed Abu Arrar, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier while throwing stones. He was thirteen. Every wall has become a mosaic of posters, dead youths, dead old men, dead children, dead women, dead suicide bombers; usually they have a coloured photograph of the Al-Aqsa mosque behind their heads, a building most of them will never have seen.

  Just outside Khan Younis, the Israelis have bulldozed acres of citrus groves and houses—for “security” reasons of course, since there is a Jewish colony in the background—and left yet another bit of “Palestine” looking like the moon. “Well, they say it’s for ‘security,’ ” a European official tells me. “But I have a question. There were three houses standing over there, one of them was finished and lived in, the other two were still just walls and roofs. The Israelis said they could be used for ambushes. So a bulldozer comes and totally demolishes the completed home and then only destroys the staircases of the two unfinished homes. Now, how can that be for ‘security’?”

  Down at Rafah, the truly surreal. A man in his forties steps out of a tent right on the border—the Egyptian flag behind him almost touching the Israeli flag—and asks me if I would like to see the ruins of his toy shop. And there it is, right beside the tent, a tumble of concrete blocks, model telephones, lampshades, clocks, toy helicopters and one large outsize till. “The Israelis destroyed it in May and I stayed until the very last moment, running into that alleyway when the tanks arrived,” he says. Mohamed al-Shaer, it turns out, is a Palestinian with an Egyptian passport. “I’ve got one house over there behind the palm tree”—here he points across the frontier wall—“and I’m here to guard this property.” He’s allowed to pass back and forth like other dual-citizenship Rafah residents because of a 1906 agreement between the Ottoman empire and Britain which he proceeds to explain in complex and unending detail. Behind him, children are flying kites—and each time a kite floats over the frontier wire, an Israeli soldier fires a shot. It cracks across the muck and sand and the children shout with pleasure. “Cra-crack,” it goes again. “They always shoot at the kites or the kids,” Mohamed al-Shaer says. He learned his English as a computer programmer in Cairo and explains fluently that the real reason he stays is that he has a relative whom he distrusts, that the relative lives on the Palestinian side of Rafah and might re-register the land on which the shop was built as his own if Mohamed returned to Egypt.

  Every night, Palestinians shoot from these streets at the Israelis—which is why the Israelis destroyed Mohamed al-Shaer’s shop. “These were the bullet holes from last night,” he says, showing me three fist-size cavities in the wall of the nearest building. “I could hear the bullets going over my tent.” I wonder how I can write the picture caption to the photograph I’ve taken of al-Shaer: “A Palestinian at war with his relative, sitting in a tent next to a demolished toy-shop, watches the Israelis shooting at kites.”

  I call up Eva Stern in New York. Her talent for going through archives convinces me she can find out what Sharon said before the Sabra and Chatila massacre. I give her the date that is going through my head: 15 September 1982. She comes back on the line the same night. “Turn your fax on,” Eva says. “You’re going to want to read this.” The paper starts to crinkle out of the machine. An AP report of 15 September 1982. “Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing [of the Phalangist leader Gemayel] to the PLO, saying ‘it symbolises the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organisations and their supporters.’ ”

  Then, a few hours later, Sharon sent the Phalange gunmen into the Palestinian camps. Reading that fax again and again, I feel a chill coming over me. There are Israelis today with as much rage towards the Palestinians as the Phalange nineteen years ago. And these are the same words I am hearing today, from the same man, about the same people.

  BUT WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? In the taboo-ridden world of Western journalism, every effort continues to be made not only to dehumanise them but to de-culture them, de-nation them, to dis-identify them. A long article by David Margolick in Vanity Fair explains Israel’s policy of “targeted killing”—the murder of Palestinians chosen by the Israelis as “security” threats—although Margolick never mentions the word “murder.” Some of Israel’s “targeted killing” operations, he says, are “dazzling.” Yet nowhere in the article is it explained where the Palestinians come from, why they are occupied—or why Jewish colonies are being built on their land. In the Mail on Sunday, Stewart Steven writes that “there is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There is no specific Palestinian dress. Palestinians are indistinguishable from other Arabs.” Jerusalem, he adds, “was never visited by Mohamed.” Palestinians speak Arabic but with a distinctive Palestinian accent. There is a Palestinian culture of poetry and prose and—among women—of national dress. Physically, many Palestinians are recognisable by their height, the darkness of their skin—if they come from the south— and their facial features. It could equally be said that there is no language known as American, that American culture is of English origin, that there is no specific American dress, that Americans are indistinguishable from other Westerners. Legend has it that Mohamed visited Jerusalem, and the Koran’s reference to the Prophet’s visit to the furthest mosque, “Night Journey,” strongly suggested that he did so. Perhaps he did not. But Christians do not deny the holy nature of the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral just because Christ never visited Italy or England.

  Far more disturbing and vicious paradigms of this contempt for Palestinians regularly appear in Western newspapers. In the Irish Times, for example, Mark Steyn felt able to describe the eminently decent Hanan Ashrawi as one of a number of “bespoke terror apologists.” A visit to the West Bank in 2003, Steyn wrote, “creeped me out.” It was “a wholly diseased environment,” a “culture that glorifies depravity,” which led the author to conclude that “nothing good grows in toxic soil.”

  Once the identity of Palestinians has been removed, once their lands are subject to “dispute” rather than �
�occupation,” once Arafat allowed the Americans and Israelis to relegate Jerusalem, settlements and the “right of return” to “final status” negotiations—and thus not to be mentioned in the meantime, for to do so would “threaten” peace—the mere hint of Palestinian resistance can be defined as “terrorism.” Inside this society there is a sickness—“disease,” “depravity,” “toxic soil.” Buried in Palestinian hearts—in secret—must remain their sense of unresolved anger, frustration and resentment at a multitude of injustices.105

  Within hours of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, Ariel Sharon turned Israel into America’s ally in the “war on terror,” immediately realigning Yassir Arafat as the Palestinian version of bin Laden and the Palestinian suicide bombers as blood brothers of the nineteen Arabs—none of them Palestinian—who hijacked the four American airliners. In the new and vengeful spirit that President Bush encouraged among Americans, Israel’s supporters in the United States now felt free to promote punishments for Israel’s opponents that came close to the advocacy of war crimes. Nathan Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader—and an often-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship—called for the execution of family members of suicide bombers. “If executing some suicide bombers’ families saves the lives of even an equal number of potential civilian victims, the exchange is, I believe, ethically permissible,” he wrote in the journal Sh’ma.