by Robert Fisk
As Sharon sent an armoured column to reinvade Nablus, still ignoring Bush’s demand to withdraw his troops from the West Bank, Colin Powell turned on Arafat, warning him that it was his “last chance” to show his leadership. There was no mention of the illegal Jewish settlements. There was to be no “last chance” threat for Sharon. The Americans even allowed him to refuse a UN fact-finding team in the occupied territories. Sharon was meeting with President George W. Bush in Washington when a suicide bomber killed at least fifteen Israeli civilians in a Tel Aviv nightclub; he broke off his visit and returned at once to Israel. Prominent American Jewish leaders, including Elie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz, immediately called upon the White House not to put pressure on Sharon to join new Middle East peace talks. “This is a tough time,” Wiesel announced. “This is not a time to pressure Israel. Any prime minister would do what Sharon is doing. He is doing his best. They should trust him.” Wiesel need hardly have worried. Only a month earlier, the Americans rolled out their first S-70A-55 troop-carrying Black Hawk helicopter to be sold to the Israelis. Israel had purchased twenty-four of the new machines, costing $211 million—most of which would be paid for by the United States—even though it had twenty-four earlier-model Black Hawks. The logbook of the first of the new helicopters was ceremonially handed over to the director general of the Israeli defence ministry, the notorious Amos Yaron, by none other than Alexander Haig—the man who gave Begin the green light to invade Lebanon in 1982.
Perhaps the only man who now had the time to work out the logic of this appalling conflict was the Palestinian leader sitting now in his surrounded, broken, ill-lit and unhealthy office block in Ramallah. The one characteristic Arafat shared with Sharon—apart from old age and decrepitude—was his refusal to plan ahead. What he said, what he did, what he proposed, was decided only at the moment he was forced to act. This was partly his old guerrilla training, a characteristic shared by Saddam. If you don’t know what you are going to do tomorrow, you can be sure that your enemies don’t know either. Sharon took the same view.
As they took over the offices of the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli army looted its equipment and archives. Ha’aretz reported that soldiers were “fighting for the spoils” of their West Bank operations after seizing dozens of British-made Land Rovers; the vehicles were passed on to the Israeli army’s logistics division on orders from the chief of staff, Shoal Mofaz. It was unclear whether the vehicles were paid for with EU money. The Israelis also got their hands on thousands of documents which showed just how far Arafat had lost control of the guerrilla organisations flourishing amid the Palestinians on the West Bank. But the Israelis then went public with translations and accounts of their contents which were deliberately misleading and, in one case, untrue. Journalists dutifully reprinted the Israeli version of the archives—that they showed Arafat’s hand in “terror” and his use of EU money to fund “terrorism”—but when The Independent undertook a thorough translation of the papers, it became clear that the Israelis had presented a fraudulent account of their contents.114 Next day, however, Sharon ostentatiously presented the “Arafat terror file” to Bush in front of the cameras at the White House—and was gratefully thanked for this “evidence” by the American president.
Amid what the Palestinian writer Jean Makdisi has accurately called “terrorology”—Edward Said’s sister was referring to the “twisted version of Middle East reality” that right-wing academics like Stanley Kurtz wished to impose on U.S. universities—it was no surprise to learn that an Israeli officer had been advising his men, prior to the reoccupation of the West Bank, to study the military tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War. According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, the officer said that “if our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus casbah, and if this job is given to an [Israeli] officer to carry out without casualties on both sides, he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even—shocking though this might appear—to analyse how the German army operated in the Warsaw ghetto.”
What on earth did this mean? Did this account for the numbers marked by Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners in early March 2002? Did it mean that an Israeli soldier was now to regard the Palestinians as subhumans—which is exactly how the Nazis regarded the trapped and desperate Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943? Did the Americans have any thoughts about all this? Who were the forces of “terror” in Warsaw sixty-two years ago? The Jews fighting for their lives, or Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop’s SS troops?
In all, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem estimated that between 1987 The Girl and the Child and Love 511 and May 2003, a total of 3,650 Palestinians and 1,142 Israelis were killed, an overall death toll of 4,792. But statistics alone cannot do justice to the suffering of children. By 1993, 232 Palestinian children, aged sixteen and under, had been killed by Israeli soldiers during the first intifada. However, in just twelve months ending on 30 September 2002, at least 250 Palestinian children and 72 Israeli children had been killed. In one of its most shocking reports on the Israeli–Palestinian war, Amnesty International condemned both sides for their “utter disregard” for the lives of children. The solemn list that Amnesty amassed showed just how ingrained child-killing had become. There was Sami Jazzar, shot in the head by an Israeli soldier on the eve of his twelfth birthday in Gaza, eleven-year-old Khalil Mughrabi, killed by an Israeli sniper in Gaza—one of his friends survived after being shot in the testicles by a high-velocity round—and there was ten-year-old Riham al-Ward, killed in her Jenin schoolyard by an Israeli tank shell. Then there were Raaya and Hemda—fourteen and two years old—killed with their parents by the Palestinian suicide bomber who attacked the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem, Shalhevet Pas—she was just ten months old—shot by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron, and Avia Malka, killed by Palestinians who shot and threw grenades at cars in Netanya. She was nine months old.
The most terrible incident—praised by Sharon at the time as a “great success”—was the attack by Israel on Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader, which slaughtered nine children along with eight adults. Their names gave a frightful reality to this child carnage: eighteen-month-old Ayman Matar, three-year-old Mohamed Matar, five-year-old Diana Matar, four-year-old Sobhi Hweiti, six-year-old Mohamed Hweiti, ten-year-old Ala Matar, fifteen-year-old Iman Shehada, seventeen-year-old Maryam Matar. And Dina Matar. She was two months old. An Israeli air force pilot dropped a one-ton bomb on their homes from an American-made F-16 aircraft on 22 July 2002.115
What war did Sharon think he was fighting? And what was he fighting for? Throughout the latest bloodletting, the one distinctive feature of the conflict—the illegal and continuing colonisation of occupied Arab land—was yet again a taboo subject, to be ignored, or mentioned in passing only when Jewish settlers were killed. That this was the world’s last colonial conflict, in which the colonisers were supported by the United States, was undiscussable, a prohibited subject, something quite outside the brutality between Palestinians and Israelis which was, so we had to remember, now part of America’s “war on terror.” This is what Sharon had dishonestly claimed since 11 September 2001. The truth, however, became clear in a revealing interview Sharon gave to a French magazine in December of that year, in which he recalled a telephone conversation with Jacques Chirac. Sharon said he told the French president that:
I was at that time reading a terrible book about the Algerian war. It’s a book whose title reads in Hebrew: The Savage War of Peace. I know that President Chirac fought as an officer during this conflict and that he had himself been decorated for his courage. So, in a very friendly way, I told him: “Mr. President, you have to understand us, here, it’s as if we are in Algeria. We have no place to go. And besides, we have no intention of leaving.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Anything to Wipe Out a Devil . . . ”
This thief who slinks along walls in the night to go home, he’s the one. This father
who warns his children not to talk about the wicked job he does, he’s the one.
This evil citizen who hangs about in courtrooms, waiting for judgement, he’s the one. This individual caught in a neighbourhood raid, whom a rifle butt pushes to the back of the truck, he’s the one. He’s the one who goes out of his house in the morning unsure whether he’ll make it to the office. And he’s the one who leaves work in the evening, uncertain he’ll arrive home.
. . . This man who makes a wish not to die with his throat cut, he’s the one. This body on which they sew back a severed head, he’s the one. He’s the one whose hands know no other skill, only his meagre writing . . .
He is all of these, and a journalist only.
—Saïd Mekbel, “The Rusty Nail,” Le Matin, 1994
ROGER TARTOUCHE GRINS at visitors from beneath his steel French army helmet, head turned slightly to the left, his battledress buttoned up to the neck. “Died for France, December 4th, 1960,” it says above his grave. The photograph printed onto the marble headstone shows such a confident young man, aware at the moment of his death, no doubt, that in just five days Charles de Gaulle would arrive in Algiers to assure the future of Algérie française. “Me today, you tomorrow” is inscribed over the iron gates of the old French cemetery at St. Eugène. Algerians outside the graveyard wall would do well to visit this monument to pride and tragedy. So might other Arabs—and the Jews of Israel.
They are all here, the Spahis and Zouaves, the forgotten cavalry of la grande armée, the schoolteachers and engineers who believed Algeria was for ever French, professors and civil servants along with their matronly wives from Metz, Lille and Rouen, their portraits—in some they smile, in others they think of mortality—pathetic in the most literal sense of the word; dead rulers in their Sunday best. Still untouched by vandals who might soon have good cause to desecrate his eternal resting place, Colonel d’État-Major Alexandre Edouard Constant Fourchauld (born Orléans, 19 August 1817) lies beneath a heavy marble stone commemorating his subjugation of the Muslims who dared to oppose French rule. His bronze bust depicts a frightening, high-cheekboned man with a bushy moustache,
a military képi pushed rakishly to the side of his head, his campaigns listed beneath: “Grand Kabyle 1854, Djudjura 1857, Marocco 1859, Alma Palestro 1871, El Amra 1876 . . . ” Hero of Sevastopol and the Franco-Prussian War, he died in his country, France, in a city called Algiers.
From this same city, Fourchauld’s fellow countrymen went to die on other French soil. René and Edgar Guidicelli were both cut down on the Western Front, René while charging German trenches on the Marne on 25 September 1915, Edgar by shellfire on the same battlefield almost exactly three years later. Both men stare shyly from their photographs, both in dress uniform, “for ever remembered by their mother and father.” The French embassy pays for a gardien at St. Eugène, just as it does for the neighbouring non-Christian cemetery, for the graves not of Muslims but of thousands of French citizens of the Jewish faith who also believed that Algeria belonged to France, their memorials—in Hebrew as well as French—still undamaged and protected in this Arab, Muslim, capital.
How many catastrophes lie in this little plot of land? William Lévy “died for France, June 16th, 1940, at Arpajon (Seine-et-Oise) at the age of 30,” presumably facing Hitler’s last assault on the wreckage of the French army. He has humorous eyes in his photograph, the confident expression of a man who thought he would live into old age. A tiny synagogue “dedicated by the Israelite community of Algiers to their children who died on the field of honour” contains dozens of photographs of desperately young men in French uniform, most of them killed before they knew how disgracefully their country would treat their fellow Jews.
Down a narrow path, history comes closer to the visitor. “Here lies Jules Roger Lévy, victim of terrorism, June 3rd, 1957, aged 34” . . . “here lies Albert Sarfati, victim of terrorism, February 20th, 1962, at the age of 42 . . . ” Most poignant of all, “here lies Josette Smaja, aged 24, near her fiancé Paul Perez, knifed to death [assassiné par arme blanche], June 9th, 1957.” Citizens of la France d’Outre-Mer, they counted themselves among the pieds noirs.116 It is a cold, blustery January in 1992. Their graves are a terrible warning for the Algeria whose authorities and army officers are as adamant now in opposing an Islamic republic as were the French in opposing a liberated Algeria.
The gaunt nineteenth-century Eglise de Notre Dame de la Mer stands on a hill above the cemeteries, its bronze statue of Christ—Christus Resurgens—torn down and smashed before Christmas 1991. On the mosaic above the altar is written a revealing, quasi-colonial prayer. “Our Lady of Africa, pray for us and the Muslims.” A French priest from Montpellier ministers to the three hundred or so ancient Catholic pieds noirs who never left. At the tiny chapel of Ste. Thérèse in the Bab el-Oued district of Algiers, fifteen of them gather each Saturday, receiving communion, assuring each other that they will never leave.
A woman of sixty-nine from Saumur—“because I live here, you must not know my name”—accepts history with fatalism. She is small, with a round face and fluffy, curly white hair. “De Gaulle was not a bad man,” she says. “He first of all said he ‘understood’ us and I think he meant that Algeria would stay French. But when he toured the area and saw the situation with his own eyes, he realised France could not stay here. He did not betray us. He just changed his mind. My husband and I stayed because it was our home. He died three years after independence but Algiers was still my home, its harbour and sea and hills which I love. My daughter Josette married an Algerian and converted to Islam. Now she has a Muslim name, Zaiya. Yes, I am happy in my old age. I have many friends, even in the Islamic Salvation Front I have friends.” She smiles warmly, without the anxiety or fear which I now catch on Algerian faces. Then she says, very gently: “To each person, their destiny.” This is a woman who is living on the cusp of a fearful tragedy. An orgy of throat-cutting and terror, a civil war that will cull 150,000 lives, is waiting for her and every foreigner in Algeria and then every journalist, every government official, every Islamist, every policeman, every shopkeeper, every husband, wife and child.
The lady from Saumur lived through the last years of France’s colonial dream-turned-nightmare, though the dream lasted well over a hundred years. It lives on, even now, in the antiquarian bookshops of Paris. Here you can buy postcards of nineteenth-century Algeria in which French bungalows nestle behind beech trees on streets filled with French girls in long dresses and young Frenchmen in straw hats. A coloured card shows an épicerie in the town of Souk-Ahras where French citizens stroll in the rue Victor Hugo. There are dull and overbearing French churches in tiny towns and square stone fountains and pretty French trains gliding into ornate French railway stations. In many of the cards, the little French towns of Algeria appear empty, their chapels and mairies and offices part of a stage-set in which the actors have yet to appear. When Algerians are in the photograph, they usually stand or sit to the side of the camera lens, long-bearded or wearing headscarves, a romantic part of the scenery, like the palm trees and the usually distant mosques. A magnificent photograph taken in Oran in 1910 shows more than a hundred French men, women and children sitting and standing on the terrasse of the “Grand Café Continental”; only one figure—apparently a tea-boy on the far left of the picture—might be Algerian. In that year, Algeria’s population included 400,000 French, 200,000 other foreigners (most of them Spanish, Maltese and Italians) and 4,500,000 Algerian Muslims. On each postcard, there is a fivecentime French stamp bearing the image of Marianne, that governessy old mother of the French nation.
In Paris today, you can buy a glossy monthly magazine produced for the pieds noirs and their families—originally founded with the support of the putschist French general Edmond Jouhaud and that eloquent proponent of Algérie française, Jacques Soustelle—whose pages are filled with photographs of the neat, orderly cities the French built across the tenth-largest country in the world which they believed to be part of
France. The magazine is dedicated to the “pieds noirs of yesterday and today” and to “the Harkis and their friends.”117 Flicking through page after melancholy page, it is not difficult to grasp the schizophrenic nature of French Algeria. In Sidi Bel Abbès, for example, the quarters of the city included Alexandre Dumas, Bonnier, Les Trembles, Deligny and Boulet—but also Oued Imbert, Oued Sefioun, Tessalah and Sidi Yacoub. In Biskra, a vast statue of Monseigneur Charles Lavigerie stood in the city centre in honour of the bishop of Algiers who tried to evangelise Algeria and founded the order of the Pères Blancs. For although France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830 was intended to distract attention from the domestic problems of the Bourbons and avenge a slight to the French consul—the reigning Dey of Algiers struck him in the face with a fly-whisk and called him “a wicked, faithless, idol-worshipping rascal”—it quickly became a Christian crusade.
