The Great War for Civilisation (102 page)

None of it worried the soldiers. In their own unique “war on terror,” these prisoners were “terrorists.” Another soldier eating a plate of greens said that he thought “all the people down there” were “terrorists.” Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In front of us a Merkava passed, roaring down the hill below in a fog of blue smoke, its barrel gently dipping up and down above its hull. More troops arrived in more trucks, assault rifles in their hands. Radio shacks were being erected, armoured vehicles positioned above Ramallah. On the road back to Jerusalem, I pass a rusting old bus opposite Ma'ale Adumim, its windows covered in wire. Hands were gripping the wire and behind them, twenty or thirty faces could be seen through the mesh. The Palestinian prisoners were silent, looking out of the windows at the massive Jewish colony, watching me, dark faces in shadow, guarded by a jeepload of Israeli troops.

A few minutes later, I stop to buy bread and chocolate at a Palestinian grocery store in East Jerusalem. The shoppers—men for the most part, with just two veiled women—are standing below the store's television set, plastic bags of food hanging from their hands. Israeli television does not flinch from telling the truth about its casualties. “The toll so far appears to be fourteen dead,” the commentator announces. The Palestinians of Jerusalem understand Hebrew. A camera aboard a helicopter is scanning the roof of a Haifa restaurant, peeled back like a sardine can by a Hamas suicide bomber's explosives. A boy shakes his head but an elderly man turns on him. “No,” he says, pointing at the screen. “That's the way to do it.”

And I think of the girl in Cambridge who is studying the Crusades, and what a bloody business we agreed it was. And how religious wars tend to be the bloodiest of all.

Whenever the Israeli army wants to stop us seeing what they're up to, out comes that most preposterous exercise in military law-on-the-hoof: the “Closed Military Area.” As in Lebanon in 1982, as in Gaza in 1993, as in all Israel's campaigns of occupation—so in 2002; and, as usual, the best reaction was to go and look at what the Israelis didn't want us to see. In Ramallah, I could see why they didn't want reporters around. A slog down a gravel-covered hillside not far from an Israeli checkpoint, a clamber over rocks and mud and a hitched ride to the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Amari on the edge of Ramallah told a story of terrified civilians and roaring tanks and kids throwing stones at Israeli jeeps, just as they did before Oslo and all the other false hopes that the Americans and Israelis and Arafat brought to the region.

It was a grey, cold, wet day for Sharon's war on terror, and it was a doctor who gave me a lift in his ambulance to the centre of Ramallah, driving slowly down side roads, skidding to a halt when we caught sight of a tank barrel poking from behind apartment blocks, for ever looking upwards at the wasplike Apaches that flew in pairs over the city. The centre was a canyon of fast-moving tanks, armoured personnel carriers with their hatches down and wild shooting from both Israelis and Palestinians. While the bullets crackled across the streets, the Israeli army drove its APCs and Merkavas—and a few old British Centurions, unless my eyes deceived me—around the roads at such high speed that they could scarcely have seen a “terrorist” if he'd waved at them from the steps of the local supermarket. Oslo had come to this.

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, and 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.