The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  Whenever they saw a Westerner, a journalist or a “peace activist”—the latter distinguished by lots of earrings, Palestinian scarves and in one case a nose-ring— the Palestinians of Ramallah would creep from their front doors and wave to us and offer us coffee. A child ran across a field, chasing a horse, and an old man drove a mule up a side road with a broad smile. And I realised then, I think, that it was these ordinary people—the families and the old man and the child with the horse—who were the real resistance to the Israelis, those who refuse to be intimidated from their very ordinary lives rather than the poseurs of Fatah and the Al-Aqsa Brigades.

  There came from the Palestinians a litany of evidence of vandalisation and theft by Israeli soldiers. “Baseless incitement whipped up by the Palestinian Authority,” went the Israeli reply, but it was almost all true. Israeli soldiers had defecated over office floors, destroyed thousands of dollars’ worth of fax and photocopying machines in Palestinian ministries and schools and—far more seriously—stolen tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewellery and cash from private Palestinian homes. Ramallah is a middle-class town; and, unfortunately for the Israeli army, many of the Palestinian families whose money was taken also held American citizenship. For reporting this looting by an army that is supposed to believe in “purity of arms,” I was attacked as a “liar” and “anti-Semitic” by Israel’s so-called friends. Yet within days, the Israeli army itself would admit that “there were indeed wide-scale, ugly phenomena of vandalism . . . the extent of the looting was much greater than could have been expected . . . ” In Ramallah, this included the “systematic destruction” of computers. Israeli journalists published similar reports—without enduring racist abuse.

  In the coming few days, Israeli forces would pour into Tulkarem, Nablus and other cities.107 But it was in Jenin that the Israelis met their fiercest resistance and committed what can only be described as individual war crimes. Again, they forbade all journalists to enter Jenin as they smashed their way into the ancient souk and the refugee camp that forms part of the city centre. Palestinian gunmen fought back tenaciously. There was no doubt that Jenin was a centre of suicide bombers— I had several times interviewed their families in the area—and there is equally no doubt that the Israelis met formidable resistance.108 By 9 April, the Israelis had lost twenty-three soldiers in the fighting. And it was they who first gave the impression that there had been a massacre of civilians inside the city.

  The IDF’s official spokesman, Brigadier General Ron Kitrey, said early in the battle that there were “apparently hundreds” of dead. Israeli “military sources”— the anonymous screen behind which Israeli colonels briefed military correspondents of the Israeli press—said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a “special cemetery.” Refrigerated trucks were taken to Jenin. When two Palestinian rights groups appealed to the Israeli High Court to prevent the removal of the bodies because they would be interred in a mass grave in the Jordan Valley which would dishonour the dead, the court issued an interim order supporting the plaintiffs. All this time, journalists were kept out of Jenin, along with humanitarian workers and the International Red Cross.109 At a press conference, an Israeli brigade chief of staff, Major Rafi Lederman, stated that— contrary to newspaper reports—the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from American-made Cobra helicopters. This was totally untrue. The ruins of Jenin, when journalists did eventually enter, were littered with parts of air-to-ground missiles—made in the United States, of course—and Western defence attachés who visited the scene said that the Israelis were not telling the truth about the Cobras. Then, as our Jerusalem correspondent Phil Reeves wrote, “the Palestinian leadership . . . instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in Jenin in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue stories.”

  This then became the all-important theme of Israel’s response to the killings in Jenin. “There was no massacre,” Benjamin Netanyahu shouted at a pro-Israeli rally in Trafalgar Square. And since then, the story of Israel’s massive, brutal incursion into Jenin has focused not upon what actually did happen in that terrible episode of Palestinian and Israeli history but upon the supposed “lie” of the massacre. It was the “lie,” not the facts, that became the story. The journalists had “lied.” I had “lied”—during a lecture series across the United States in the late spring of 2002, I was repeatedly accused of lying about the “massacre” in Jenin— even though I was in Los Angeles at the time, had not witnessed the killings and had never used the word “massacre.” There were enough real massacres attributable to Israel without inventing any more.

  But my Independent colleagues, Justin Huggler and Reeves, carried out their own meticulous investigation of the Jenin killings. They did not describe them as a massacre but they concluded that nearly half of the fifty identified Palestinian dead were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. Individual atrocities occurred, The Independent concluded, atrocities that Israel was trying to hide “by launching a massive propaganda drive”:

  . . . Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani’s screaming and went to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.

  “We were woken at 3:30 in the morning by a big explosion,” she said. “I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere . . . Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, ‘I’m wounded.’ She said, ‘I’m wounded too.’ She had been shot in the side of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart . . . she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times.”

  Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse’s uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were “very near.” As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest . . .

  Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk . . . When Mr. Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal . . .

  In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr. Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.

  Mr. Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr. Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor . . . Mr. Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr. Zughayer’s wheelchair.

  “After 4 pm I pushed him up the street as usual,” said Mr. Hassan. “Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road.” It was not until next morning that Mr. Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, an
d Mr. Zughayer’s mangled body some distance away, in the grass.

  So when does a bloodbath become an atrocity? When does an atrocity become a massacre? How big does a massacre have to be before it qualifies as a genocide? How many dead before a genocide becomes a holocaust? Old questions become new questions at each killing field. The Israeli journalist Arie Caspi wrote a scathing article in late April which caught the hypocritical response to the Jenin killings with painful accuracy:

  Okay, so there wasn’t a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn’t get out in time, used locals as a human shield against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That’s really not a massacre, and there’s really no need for a commission of enquiry . . . whether run by ourselves or sent by the goyim.

  The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals . . . many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells “Holocaust!,” we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?

  These are not idle questions. Nor cynical. Not long after Sharon’s failed attempt to stop the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, on 27 April 2002, Palestinian gunmen broke into an illegal Jewish settlement built on Arab land at Adora on the Palestinian West Bank. Five-year-old Danielle Shefi was shot in her bedroom along with her mother and two brothers. Danielle was killed, her mother survived. Up the road, Katya Greenberg and her husband, Vladimir, were sprayed with bullets as they lay in bed. In the little girl’s bedroom, there were smears of blood and three bullet holes just above Danielle’s bed. Her mother had been shot as she ran to protect her daughter. In all, four Israelis—including two armed settlers who fought back—were dead, and eight wounded.

  One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the terrible fate of Danielle Shefi. She was only five. But if at least two dozen Palestinians dead in Jenin was not a massacre, how should we describe the four Israelis dead at the Adora settlement? Well, the official Israeli army spokesman, Major Avner Foxman, said of the Adora killings: “For me, now I know what is a massacre. This is a massacre.” The Canadian National Post referred to the Palestinian assault as being “barbarous,” a word it never used about the killing of Palestinian civilians. I don’t like the mathematics here. Four dead Israelis, including two armed settlers, is a massacre. I’ll accept this. But twenty-four Palestinian civilians killed, including a nurse and a paraplegic, is not a massacre. (I am obviously leaving aside the thirty or so armed Palestinians who were also killed in Jenin.) What does this mean? What does it tell us about journalism, about my profession? Does the definition of a bloodbath now depend on the religion or the race of the civilian dead to be qualified as a massacre? No, I didn’t call the Jenin killings a massacre. But I should have done.

  Yet our responsibility does not end there. How many of our circumlocutions open the way to these attacks? How many journalists encouraged the Israelis—by their reporting or by their wilfully given, foolish advice—to undertake these brutal assaults on the Palestinians? On 31 March 2002—just three days before the assault on Jenin—Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times that “Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Well, thanks, Tom, I said to myself when I read this piece of lethal journalism a few days later. The Israelis certainly followed Friedman’s advice.

  When Sharon began his operation “Defensive Shield,” the UN Security Council, with the active participation and support of the United States, demanded an immediate end to Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank. President George W. Bush insisted that Sharon should follow the advice of “Israel’s American friends” and—for Tony Blair was with Bush at the time—“Israel’s British friends,” and withdraw. “When I say withdraw, I mean it,” Bush snapped three days later. But he meant nothing of the kind. Instead, he sent Secretary of State Colin Powell off on an “urgent” mission of peace, a journey to Israel and the West Bank that would take an incredible eight days—just enough time, Bush presumably thought, to allow his “friend” Sharon to finish his latest bloody adventure in the West Bank. Supposedly unaware that Israel’s chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz, had told Sharon that he needed at least eight weeks to “finish the job” of crushing the Palestinians, Powell wandered off around the Mediterranean, dawdling in Morocco, Spain, Egypt and Jordan before finally fetching up in Israel. If Washington fire-fighters took that long to reach a blaze, the American capital would long ago have turned to ashes. But of course, the purpose of Powell’s idleness was to allow enough time for Jenin to be turned to ashes. Mission, I suppose, accomplished.

  Once he had at last arrived in Jerusalem, the first thing Powell should have done was to demand a visit to Jenin. But instead, after joshing with Sharon, he played games, demanding that Arafat condemn the latest suicide bombing in Jerusalem in which six Israelis had been killed and sixty-five wounded, while failing to utter more than a word of “concern” about Jenin. Was Powell frightened of the Israelis? Did he really have to debase himself in this way? For this looked like the end-game in the Arab–Israeli dispute, the very final proof that the United States was no longer worthy of being a Middle East peacemaker. But no, that would come in 2004, when Bush would effectively destroy UN Security Council Resolution 242.

  It seemed there were no barriers that could not be broken. If this was a war on terror, I wrote in my paper that awful spring, then Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem. When a group of Palestinian fighters barricaded themselves in the Church of the Nativity, the Israelis laid siege to them and Bethlehem turned into a battlefield. The first to die was an eighty-year-old Palestinian man, whose body never made it to the morgue. Then a woman and her son were critically wounded by Israeli gunfire. A cloud of black smoke swirled up in the tempest winds from the other side of Manger Square, a burning Israeli armoured vehicle, although—running for our lives as bullets crackled around us—we had no time to look at it. Harvey Morris— reincarnated now, not as my foreign news editor but as the Financial Times correspondent, expletives mercifully undeleted—was with me as we pounded through the rain that guttered in waves across the Israeli tanks that were grinding between Ottoman stone houses, smashing into cars and tearing down shop hoardings.

  A “Closed Military Area” had been declared once more by the Israelis. Jesus, we assumed, must have had to deal with a Roman version of closed military areas—but he had God on his side. The people of Bethlehem had no one. They waited for some statement from the Pope, from the Vatican, from the European Union. And what they got was an armoured invasion. “They’ve sent the whole fucking army,” Harvey remarked with commendable exaggeration. All morning, we watched the Merkavas and APCs stealing their way through the ancient streets, searching for the “savages” of “terror” whom Sharon had just told the world about. We sat in the home of a Palestinian Christian woman, Norma Hazboun, watching her television upon which we could see “Palestine” collapsing around us. Palestinian intelligence offices had been attacked in Ramallah. Shells started falling on Deheishi camp. We knew that already—Deheishi was so close that the windows vibrated. Sharon was on the screen, offering to let the Europeans fly Arafat out of Ramallah, provided he never returned to the land he called “Palestine.” Offer refused.

  More shooting now from outside our window. A tank came down the road, its barrel clipping the green awning of a shop and then swaying upwards to point directly at our window. We decamped to the stairwell. Had they seen us watching them? We stood on the cold, damp stairs then peeked around our window. Two Israeli soldiers were running past the house as another tank shuddered up the street, absorbing a little car into its tracks and coughing it out in bits at the back of its armour. We knew all about these tanks, their maximum speed, the voice of their massive engines,
their rate of fire. We respected them and hated them in equal measure. We had spent almost an hour walking the back streets to avoid the “Closed Military Area,” dirty, dank, black streets with angry tanks in the neighbouring highways. One raced across an intersection while we stood, in blue-and-black flak jackets marked with “TV” in huge taped letters, arms spread out like ducks to show we carried no weapons.

  We sat snug now by Norma Hazboun’s gas fire, trapped in the home of the professor of social sciences at Bethlehem University. The newsreader stumbled on his words. Iran and Iraq might stop oil exports to force the Americans to demand an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Harvey and I coughed in simultaneous contempt; Iran and Iraq would do no such thing. Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters was on fire. An Israeli soldier was dead in an APC on the other side of Manger Square, hit by a rocket. That was presumably the burning vehicle we’d seen an hour ago. Colin Powell said that the Americans would still recognise Arafat as Palestinian leader, even if he was in Europe. Harvey burst forth again: “But if he’s in Europe, he won’t be the fucking Palestinian leader, will he?”

  Outside the house, beside a cluster of lemon trees, two Israeli armoured carriers pulled up, their crews desperately trying to pump fuel through a hose from one vehicle to the other before Palestinian snipers picked them off. The bullets snapped around them within seconds and the two frightened soldiers threw themselves off the roofs to the shelter of a shop. Then my mobile rang. An English voice, a lady from Wateringbury in Kent—Peggy and Bill had lived in the next village above East Farleigh, one stop down the Paddock Wood–Maidstone West railway line—but Liz Yates was not in Kent. She was in the Aida refugee camp with nine other Westerners, trying to help the 4,000 Palestinian refugees there by asking their consulates to pressure the Israelis into withdrawing. Some hope. In the end, the consulates had to rescue the Westerners.