The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  At least a hundred Palestinian civilians were now seeking sanctuary with the twenty gunmen in the Church of the Nativity.110 I took another call, this time from Sami Abda. On Tuesday, he told me, Israeli soldiers had come to his house in the centre of Bethlehem and—though warned by a neighbour that his home was filled with women and children—the Israelis claimed that “terrorists” were in the building and opened fire on the Abda household. Sami Abda was crying as he spoke to me and these are his exact words:

  They fired eighteen bullets through our front door. They hit my mother Sumaya and my brother Yacoub. My mother was sixty-four, my brother was thirty-seven. They both fell to the floor. I called everyone I could to take them to the hospital. But there was no one to help us. They were dying. When an ambulance came, an Israeli officer refused permission for it to enter our street. So for thirty hours we have lived with their bodies. We put the children into the bathroom so they could not see the corpses. Help us, please.

  That insistent question—What is sacred?—could be asked by anyone in the Holy Land that spring of 2002. And by anyone who read the Jerusalem Post: it printed a whole page of tiny photographs of the dozens of Israeli civilians torn to bits by Palestinian suicide bombers in just one month. One teenage Israeli girl was the same age as the Palestinian girl who destroyed her life. It was a page of horror and misery. Yes, the Palestinians’ suicide campaign was immoral, unforgivable— the word that came to me outside the Jerusalem pizzeria—insupportable. One day, the Arabs—never ones to look too closely in the mirror when it comes to their own crimes—will have to acknowledge the sheer cruelty of their tactics. But since the Israelis never attempted to confront the immorality of shooting to death child stone-throwers or the evil of their reckless death squads who went around murdering Palestinians on their wanted list—along with the usual bunch of women and kids who get in the way—is this any wonder?

  And so I am back in Gaza, sitting in another of those mourning tents, this time for two fourteen-year-old schoolboys and their fifteen-year-old friend, Internet surfers in the local cyber café, one of them idling his hours away drawing children’s cartoons, all of them football enthusiasts. Hours after they had been shot dead by the Israeli army near the Jewish colony of Netzarim, their fathers received back the three young bodies. All had been shot. And all, they said, had been driven over by an armoured vehicle which—in Ismail Abu-Nadi’s case—had cut his corpse in half.

  Knife-wielding suicide bombers approaching the Jewish settlement, according to the Israeli army and—of course—The New York Times . But even Hamas, creator of the unscrupulous campaign of suicide bombing, admits that the three schoolchildren—all ninth-graders in the Salahedin School in Gaza City—had naively planned to attack the settlement of their own accord and with, at most, knives. It urged preachers and schoolteachers to tell children that they should never embark on such wild schemes again.

  And when the three fathers talked to me, they told a story of waste and tragedy and childhood anger at Israel’s bloody invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. “I spent all last night asking myself why my son did this,” Mohamed Abu-Nadi told me as we sat among the mourners outside his middle-class home. “Did Ismail need money? No. Did he fail at school? No. He was first in his class. Were there problems with his family or friends? No. I asked myself the same question over and over. Why? Can you tell me?”

  A painful question to be asked by a distraught father. Did Ismail want to die? His father said this would have been impossible until “three or four months ago.” That was when the schoolboy, born in Abu Dhabi and a fluent English-speaker, began to ask his father why the Palestinians were given no outside help in their struggle for a state. “He asked me: ‘Why is it that only the Palestinians cannot have a state? Why doesn’t America help? Why don’t the other Arab states help?’ ” Bassem Zaqout, the father of fifteen-year-old Yussef—none of the fathers had met, though their sons all attended the same school—also thought the Jenin bloodshed influenced his son. “He used to draw pictures and cartoons and wrote Arabic calligraphy. I never thought this could happen. But we watched all the news programmes about Israel’s reoccupation—Palestinian television, Al-Jazeera from Qatar, CNN—and maybe he saw something . . . When I came back from evening prayers on Tuesday, he had left the house. I had no idea why. Now I think the boys were walking towards the Jewish settlement with some kind of idea of attacking the Israelis there. But he never touched a weapon. When we got his body back yesterday, it was in a terrible state. Dogs had been at it in the night and his face was unrecognisable because it had been crushed by a heavy vehicle driving over it.”

  Adel Hamdona’s fourteen-year-old son Anwar was returned to him in the same condition. The father’s description was cold, emotionless. “He didn’t have a face. His legs had been severed. He had been driven over several times and had been pretty well disembowelled.” Anwar’s body, too, had been gnawed by dogs. “He was just a boy, a child. I am a teacher at his school. At five in the evening, he told his mother he was going to an internet café to surf the net. When he hadn’t come home by nine, I felt something was wrong. Then we heard shooting from Netzarim . . . ”

  And there’s a clue as to why Adel Hamdona felt that “something was wrong.” For Anwar had begun talking to his family about “martyrdom.” “The events here had an effect on the boy. He was always talking about the suicide operations, about martyrs and the concept of martyrdom. He used to want to become a martyr. I had a suspicion that a few years later, when he grew up, he might do this—but not now.” Ismail Abu-Nadi, it turns out, left what appears to be a goodbye note to his parents. “One of his friends brought me a paper he had written,” his father acknowledged. “On the paper, Ismail had said: ‘My father, my mother, please try to pray to God and to ask for me to succeed to enter Netzarim and to kill the Israeli soldiers and to drive them from our land.’ I could not believe this. At his age, any other boy—and I’ve been to England, the United States, India, Pakistan—yes, any other boy just wants to be educated, to be happy. To earn money, to be at peace. But our children here cannot find peace.”

  As for the condition of the bodies, none of the fathers wanted to speculate on the reasons. Would the Israelis deliberately mutilate them? It seems unlikely. Or did they, after shooting the three schoolboys, avoid the risk that one might still be alive—and with a bomb waiting to go off—by driving over their remains? And when their bodies were crushed, were they all dead? Ismail Abu-Nadi’s father drew a simple message—meaningless to Tom Friedman, I guess—about their deaths: “If there is no future, there is no hope. So what do you expect a boy to do?”

  But even Abdul-Aziz Rantissi, the Hamas leader in Gaza, was anxious to dissociate his movement from the boys’ death, although his words were not without a disturbing message of their own. “I think the crimes of the Israelis pushed the boys to pursue acts of revenge without awareness. They were so young in age, they did not realise they could not do anything at the settlement . . . I’ve made a call to preachers in the mosques and to teachers to explain to the children that their role in all this has not yet come . . . ”

  Rantissi keeps touching his beard. I used to talk to him in the Field of Flowers in southern Lebanon but now he is on the run from Israel’s killer squads, constantly interrupted by the phone as he sits in a Gaza office, his young bodyguard, Kalashnikov nursed upside down on his knee, handing him a big military two-way radio receiver. I think—but I do not say so—that this is to protect the Hamas leader. Mobile phones are traceable to within a few feet. Israel’s death squads are masters of analogue and digital technology. Am I watching for an Apache helicopter? Do Israel’s victims ever see the missiles streaking towards them?

  Not that Rantissi has any illusions. “It’s something to be expected so far as we are concerned. But the one thing I can say is something that can only be understood by someone who holds the Islamic faith the way I do. We believe that our lifetime is always predicted and that our death has already been determ
ined by God, and this cannot change. There are many different reasons that could lead to the end of a person’s life—a car accident, cancer, a heart attack—so I’m not saying I’m making a choice to shorten my life. But the preferred way of ending my life would be martyrdom.” Rantissi would get his wish.

  My eyes glance again towards the window. Of his fifty-five years, Rantissi has spent twenty-six in prison or in exile on the Lebanese mountainside. In those days, he was still trying to learn how to run Hamas. Now he talks coolly—coldly, frighteningly—about suicide bombers and death. Hamas has its own death squads. They kill soldiers, but women and children too, and the old and the sick. “Up till now, in these two intifadas, the Israelis have killed more than two thousand Palestinians. Following the killings in Nablus and Jenin, the number of children killed has passed the three hundred and fifty mark. This proves that the Israeli side is intentionally committing massacres against civilians.” I have been down this path before. Every time you ask a Hamas leader to confront the wickedness of suicide-bombing civilians, you are taken down the statistics trail. What about the kids in the pizza parlour, the old folk at the Passover dinner?

  “We are fighting people who violated our land,” he replies, very quickly. “They are all soldiers or reserve soldiers. It was reserve soldiers in Jenin who killed civilians—these are people who in ordinary life are Israeli doctors and lawyers. They were civilians just hours before they went into Jenin. But of course, our fighters have orders not to kill civilians, especially the children.”

  Orders to avoid killing children? Or is this just a numbers game? The military phone pips again and Rantissi talks for several minutes. Is he in touch with Hamas leaders in the West Bank? He smiles bleakly. “There is some communication on a political level with leaders in the West Bank, yes. But they are wanted men and besieged and underground.” This, I note in the margin of my notebook, is the first time Hamas has acknowledged the effects of the Israeli reoccupation. “You take Hassan Youssef, a political leader in Ramallah—he is calling me for information about what is going on. But ultimately Sharon will not be able to put an end to resistance. When the Israelis deported four hundred and sixty of us in 1993 and arrested another fifteen hundred Hamas members the same day, they said they had ‘put an end’ to resistance and to Hamas. After that, Yahyia Ayash”—the Hamas bomb-maker later assassinated by the Israelis—“escalated the resistance.”

  Marj al-Zahour, the Field of Flowers, the University of Islam, seems a long way away. Rantissi disagrees. “It was a stage that changed the Palestinian struggle. It changed the history of Hamas for ever. Before that, it was a local movement. After our exile on the hillsides of Lebanon, it became an international organisation known all over the world. We received the benefits of Israel’s mistakes.” Rantissi speaks with considerable self-confidence. And there is no doubt who his chief enemy is. “Sharon wanted to rip up the Oslo papers. He is exercising his power over the Palestinian people—destroying or wilfully killing them—in order to compel them to leave. He wants to break our will so that we will accept his humiliating conditions. He also wants to create a conflict between the Palestinian Authority and the people.” And Gaza? Rantissi laughs. “I want to remind you of something Rabin once said—that he longs to wake up one day to find Gaza swallowed up by the sea.”

  It is strange how often Arafat’s opponents speak of Rabin—with whom Arafat thought he had signed the “peace of the brave”—and Arafat’s nemesis Sharon in the same sentence. Rabin was commander of the Israeli units that captured Lod (Lydda) and Ramleh in July 1948 and who gave the order for the expulsion of up to 60,000 Palestinian Arabs, most of them women and children, an unknown number of whom died during their flight. Rabin’s published memoirs were to recall the Israeli conquest of Lod:

  We walked outside. Ben Gurion [the Israeli prime minister, appointed two months earlier] accompanying us. [Haganah commander Yigal] Allon repeated his question “What is to be done with the population?” B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said “Drive them out!”

  Allon and I held a consultation. I agreed that it was essential to drive the inhabitants out. We took them on foot towards the Bet Horon road, assuming that the [Arab] Legion would be obliged to look after them, thereby shouldering logistic difficulties which would burden its fighting capacity, making things easier for us . . . The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the 10 to 15 miles to the point where they met up with the Legion.

  Certainly Rantissi assessed Sharon’s contempt for Oslo correctly, though he might have looked more closely at Sharon’s record. Ever since he was elected in 2001, Sharon’s supporters in the West have tried to turn him into a pragmatist, another de Gaulle; the same theme was replayed when he suggested in 2004 that Israel should abandon the Jewish settlements in Gaza, a step which his own spokesman revealingly admitted would put any plans for a Palestinian state into “formaldehyde.” In truth, Sharon is more like the French putschist generals in Algeria. They, too, used torture and massacred their Arab opponents. His career spells anything but peace. Sharon voted against the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel’s participating in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel’s retreat from Lebanon in 2000. By 2002 alone, Sharon had built thirty-four new Jewish colonies on Palestinian land.

  Sharon’s involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres continues to fester around the man who, according to Israel’s 1993 Kahan commission report, bore “personal responsibility” for the Phalangist slaughter. So fearful were the Israeli authorities that their leaders would be charged with war crimes that they drew up a list of countries where they might have to stand trial—and which they should henceforth avoid—now that European nations were expanding their laws to include foreign nationals who had committed crimes abroad. Belgian judges were already considering a complaint by survivors of Sabra and Chatila—one of them a female rape victim—while a campaign had been mounted abroad against other Israeli figures associated with the atrocities. Eva Stern was one of those who tried to prevent Brigadier General Amos Yaron being appointed Israeli defence attaché in Washington because he had allowed the Lebanese Phalange militia to enter the camps on 16 September 1982, and knew—according to the Kahan commission report—that women and children were being murdered. He only ended the killings two days later. Canada declined to accept Yaron as defence attaché. Stern, who compiled a legal file on Yaron, later vainly campaigned with human rights groups to annul his appointment—by Prime Minister Ehud Barak—as director general of the Israeli defence ministry.111 The Belgian government changed their law—and dropped potential charges against Sharon—after a visit to Brussels by U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who famously referred on 6 August 2002 to Israelis’ control over “the so-called occupied area which was the result of a war, which they won.” Rumsfeld had threatened that NATO headquarters might be withdrawn from Belgian soil if the Belgians didn’t drop the charges against Sharon.

  Yet all the while, we were supposed to believe that it was the corrupt, Parkinson’s-haunted Yassir Arafat who was to blame for the new war. He was chastised by George Bush while the Palestinian people continued to be bestialised by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, had referred to Palestinians as “cockroaches in a glass jar.” Menachem Begin called them “two-legged beasts.” The Shas party leader who suggested that God should send the Palestinian “ants” to hell, also called them “serpents.” In August 2000, Barak called them crocodiles. Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yalon described the Palestinians as a “cancerous manifestation” and equated the military action in the occupied territories with “chemotherapy.” In March 2001, the Is
raeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a “scorpion.” Sharon repeatedly called Arafat a “murderer” and compared him to bin Laden. He contributed to the image of Palestinian inhumanity in an interview in 1995, when he stated that Fatah sometimes punished Palestinians by “chopping off limbs of seven–eight year old children in front of their parents as a form of punishment.” However brutal Fatah may be, there is no record of any such atrocity being committed by them. But if enough people can be persuaded to believe this nonsense, then the use of Israeli death squads against such Palestinians becomes natural rather than illegal.112

  Largely forgotten amid Sharon’s hatred for “terrorism” was his outspoken criticism of NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999, when he was Israeli foreign minister. Eleven years earlier he had sympathised with the political objective of Slobodan Milošević: to prevent the establishment of an Albanian state in Kosovo. This, he said, would lead to “Greater Albania” and provide a haven for—readers must here hold their breath—“Islamic terror.” In a Belgrade newspaper interview, Sharon said that “we stand together with you against the Islamic terror.” Once NATO’s bombing of Serbia was under way, however, Sharon’s real reason for supporting the Serbs became apparent. “It’s wrong for Israel to provide legitimacy to this forceful sort of intervention which the NATO countries are deploying . . . in an attempt to impose a solution on regional disputes,” he said. “The moment Israel expresses support for the sort of model of action we’re seeing in Kosovo, it’s likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian Authority . . . ” NATO’s bombing, Sharon said, was “brutal interventionism.” The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery, who seized on this extraordinary piece of duplicity, said that “Islamic terror” in Kosovo could only exist in “Sharon’s racist imagination.” Avnery was far bolder in translating what lay behind Sharon’s antipathy towards NATO action than Sharon himself. “If the Americans and the Europeans interfere today in the matter of Kosovo, what is to prevent them from doing the same tomorrow in the matter of Palestine? Sharon has made it crystal-clear to the world that there is a similarity and perhaps even identity between Milosevic’s attitude towards Kosovo and the attitude of Netanyahu and Sharon towards the Palestinians.” Besides, for a man whose own “brutal interventionism” in Lebanon in 1982 led to a Middle East blood-bath of unprecedented proportions, Sharon’s remarks were, to say the least, hypocritical.113