Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (23 page)

The next day I headed to the West Bank, home to about 2.5 million Palestinians and 350,000 Jewish settlers.
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The settlements are considered illegal under most interpretations of international law, but the Israeli government disputes this and gives the settlements its backing.

The Jews who have made their homes here are renowned for being well armed. After all, these communities live under threat from Palestinians who would use deadly force – rightly or wrongly – to shift them off these disputed lands. So I was heading to a military training camp run by Jews that schooled other Jews from around the world in counter-terrorism techniques, hoping to get an insight into some of the armed mentalities that framed this age-old conflict.

The owners of the training camp had called it Calibre 3, and, on arrival, an angry shouting filled the air – the instructors were running a training course. I went around the portable building site huts and peeked through the door. Behind it, a group of pre-teen American Jewish kids were finishing their lesson. The instructor, a towering man, his ripped muscles visible in his neck, was telling them how to stop a terrorist from stabbing you. Beside him a ten-year-old, his mouth full of metal braces, smiled and stabbed his mother with a foam dagger. She laughed and then gave me a fearful look, as this
was not my course, and she did not know me. The enemy was everywhere.

I went outside and picked up a brochure for Calibre 3.

‘Our classic two hour instructor program,’ it read, ‘is designed for tourists of any age who would like to get a taste of Israeli methods of shooting and combat.’ The images on it were of men with shaved heads. They offered training to security personnel and to wide-eyed Jewish tourists out here on a visit to the old country.

Seeing me, Eitan, a short and trim man in military fatigues, came over. He was the head instructor and told me how Jews from ‘all over’ came here. Some stayed for as long as thirty days, he said with a thick Hebrew twang, during which they were taught sniper skills, handgun training, rifle handling. The basic aim was to teach them not to shoot ‘the good guys’, ‘only the bad guys’.

‘Come,’ he said, and we walked around the corner, past a line of high-topped earth mounds covered with camouflage scrub and oil barrels, and out onto a narrow range. On one side were fourteen tourists, all from the US, most in white T-shirts. At the end were paper targets: one of an Israeli soldier, the other of a man with a red keffiyeh, the headdress of the Arabs. Both images showed the men holding semi-automatic rifles, but it was clear which one was the good guy and which was the bad guy.

‘From my angle, weapons are designed for killing,’ shouted the instructor, a brick wall of a man with Thai boxing tattoos across his arms and up his neck.

‘Weapons are not for defending, weapons are for killing. If I want to defend myself, I wear a bulletproof vest, a helmet. But I use this,’ he said, lifting his Uzi sub-machine-gun. ‘This weapon is for killing.’

‘The last time I heard the word “killer”,’ he barked at the tourists, who were staring wide-eyed at this angry man, ‘I heard it with honour.’ I could not see, through his mirror Ray-Bans, if he was joking. I assumed not. ‘Because that killer killed terrorists,’ he said. He was definitely not joking.

The Americans were loving this. An eight-year-old girl in pigtails and a green halter top put up her hand when he asked the group who were the terrorists.

‘Arabs?’ she said.

He ignored her. ‘I am not against Palestinians,’ he shouted. ‘I am against terrorists. All the terrorists here are Palestinians.’

This was a lecture based on fear, however justified. He called his rifle ‘The Devil’, and then pulled out an unloaded pistol and pointed it, with one hand, at a man in the front row. The man shifted a little lower in his seat.

‘If I shoot this pistol now, who will I kill?’

‘Joey!’ shouted the girl. Her hand had come down and was now pointing at her brother.

‘No!’ screamed the man. ‘I won’t! I won’t! I will hit the person next to Joey! See? The pistol kicks to the left when I pull the trigger!’

The person next to Joey looked uncomfortable.

‘But if I stand like this,’ he shouted, holding the pistol in both hands and legs apart, ‘what happens? Who do I shoot?’ The muscles on his forearms were throbbing.

‘Joey!’ shouted the girl again, her pigtails dancing.

‘Yes!’ shouted the instructor. ‘I kill Joey.’

Joey looked upset.

It continued like this for a while. He bellowed about ‘neutralising shots in the face from close distance’ and how one bullet could kill six people, passing through each person in turn. He screamed that he judged people as terrorists by their actions, not what they looked like. Then he shot the target of the guy in the headdress six times, the bullets clustering in the Arab’s forehead. He called terrorists bastards, and you knew he had killed before.

The atmosphere was febrile. Guns only increased the intensity, the madness. They seemed to make dialogue impossible, and, despite whatever the trainer was screaming, guns here seemed to reduce everything to kill or be killed. It was claustrophobic. Another man, one with sad and intense eyes, came up to me. He was Steve Gar, a South African instructor who had made Israel his home and who was infused with love for his new land. Steve metaphorically carried his rifle in one hand and the Torah in the other. He was one exam away from becoming a rabbi and had, it
seemed, spent half his adult life training for a religious life, the other half in the military. He was a man of strong convictions and convincing strength.

He did not like the West Bank being called what it was. ‘Why should I define what is Israel in relation to what is west of Jordan?’ he asked. ‘It’s racism.’

He hated the fact that the place where he lived, deep in internationally recognised Palestinian territory, was called a settlement. And his voice lifted in anger when he spoke about how the Palestinians resented the Jews living in their isolated towns. Beyond us stretched a valley of crumbled rock and clumps of scrub, untouched for millennia, the ground here so dry that it could suck up the blood of a thousand armies, and I looked out at it and wondered what was it about this stony land that inspired such passions.

It was a deadly passion, though. He had told me how, as an anti-terror team leader whose job it was to protect Jews living in the West Bank, he had been in at least six serious incidents involving terrorism. By this I took it that he had killed and killed again, but he refused to tell me if this was true.

‘Our mission is two things. The first is to protect Jewish life. The second is to protect the Jewish way of life. What they have with the Iron Dome means that one in a million rockets will kill someone here,’ he said referring to the air defence system that protects Israel from missiles fired at her territory, ‘so I am not worried about Jewish loss of life. But I am worried about them harming the Jewish way of life, for if we bend to them we let them harm our psyche, our psychology. And I want my children to live . . . I cannot blame the terrorists for killing our children, but I can blame them for turning our children into killers.’

‘We have been running away for thousands of years,’ he said, his eyes moist with emotion. ‘But when you look at Judaism there is one place where we are safe; it was given to us by God as a promise: Israel.’

But many Jews I spoke to were deeply dismayed about such a gung-ho attitude. In 2008 Israeli prosecutors found that of the 515 violent acts committed by Israelis against Palestinians and Israeli
security forces, 502 were by right-wing Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories.
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Perhaps this was Israel’s tragedy. The threat to their culture was arguably not from the guns of the Palestinians but from within. It’s been said that ‘the only democracy in the Middle East has fallen prey to a succession of Right-wing governments, which derive much of their electoral strength from Russian emigres and extremist religious parties’.
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They have reached a situation where the only way to win any argument is thought to be with a gun.

In 2012, a team of Israeli filmmakers made a documentary called
The Gatekeepers
– it was about the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. They managed to interview six of the former heads of the Shin Bet, the national intelligence services. Each described the ruthless policies they had once implemented to maintain Israeli dominance in the region and to crush dissent in the Occupied Territories. And most agreed such repressive tactics had been counter-productive. As one said: ‘We’ve become cruel, to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.’

Democracy can never flourish like this – not at the end of a gun. But Steve was too far down the rabbit hole to see this. Everything here was suffused with an aggressive madness; the gun had become the only way to discuss things.

He summed this up when he told me an anecdote that, in the telling, he had no idea how disturbing it was to hear. He explained how he had placed his own unloaded rifle, and a video camera, in his toddler’s bedroom and filmed the child playing beside the gun for two hours, just to see if the child would touch it. The boy did not, said Steve, and then he told me how he had hugged his son and said how proud he was of him for not touching the gun. And, I thought, as Steve showed me how to kill a terrorist – a long-distance shot to the chest and then a close-up
coup de grâce
to the forehead with a pistol – that for as long as men like this had guns in their hardened hands there would always be a problem here in Israel. Just as there would, probably, always be someone else out there wishing to shoot him.

With that thought, I left to get the other side of the story – I wanted to speak to a Palestinian.

The day before, a group of young Palestinian men, the youngest just fourteen years old, had been throwing rocks at the immobile walls of the West Bank in the town of Bethlehem. One of them, frustrated at the mounting deaths in Gaza 50 miles away, had lit a Molotov cocktail and pushed it through a small gap in a metal gateway. The Israeli military had retaliated with gunfire, and another boy, one who had not thrown the home-made bomb, was hit.

I did not know more than this, and so there I was, making my way with a translator to Al Hussain hospital, a medical centre in Bethlehem, to find out more; to try to understand what impact the snipers of Israel had upon the Palestinians.

Arriving at the modest and faded building, we climbed the stained stairs to the fourth floor, where Qusai Ibrahim Abu Basma, a sixteen-year-old student who longed to become a lawyer one day, was recovering from his gunshot wound.

Qusai was handsome and dark-eyed, like so many boys here. His T-shirt had, in capital letters, ‘BEGINNING’, ‘MIDDLE’ and ‘END’ written on it, and, as he shook my hand, I looked down at the dark patch of blood that seeped through his bound leg and wondered if this was the beginning or the end of something for him.

The bullet had passed right through, ripping ligaments and obliterating his shinbone. His father, a silent man who sat spirit-light in the corner, showed me an X-ray that told a different story to the neatness of the white gauze. It spoke of a likely limp and a near escape from an arterial bleed. The boy’s mother looked on, shrouded in a hijab. I asked Qusai if he regretted protesting, if it was worth getting shot for.

‘We can’t do anything,’ he said, his face framed in the light of the window. ‘They have guns, we just have stones.’ He said he would kill an Israeli but he could not get his hands on a gun. ‘I
was shot because I was the last one there as we left. I was just throwing stones.’

It is hard not to feel something when you meet a child shot for throwing a rock at a wall. And, no matter how much the Israelis speak of bombs and lives lived in terror, you can’t equate that with maiming a boy who weighs 40 kilograms at most.

I wondered what would happen if a British or a French soldier had shot this child in Europe. There would likely be a court martial, a prison sentence, all manner of trouble. But this incident was already a day old, and no paper had reported it.

Then he told me he wasn’t the only person in his class to get shot, and that the other kid had died. So, after a time, we said goodbye and walked back down the stained corridor. Getting back in the car, we drove to meet the father of the boy. We passed the Paradise Hotel and the Herodian Store gift shop, and, smelling the remnants of something foul in the air – the chemicals used by the Israelis to scatter crowds with their stench – I wondered how far from paradise this place had fallen.

We pulled over at a mural that lined the walls. Some graffiti here showed hijab-clad women toting semi-automatic pistols, Bansky style; or glamorous women with martyrdom in their eyes and AK47s in their hands. But this was different.

‘Article 31: That every child has the right to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child,’ read the text next to five crudely painted footballers. It had been done years before to commemorate Palestinian Child Week.