The Great War for Civilisation (103 page)

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.

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?”