The Great War for Civilisation (95 page)

If I was to enter Hindawi's mind—I am not sure I want to, and I await more letters from Whitemoor prison on this matter—would I not find the same logic as that employed by Yigal Amir, Rabin's killer, who could quote the Book of Joshua to justify how “if I was conquering the land, I would have to kill babies and children”? Is this not the same rationality—or lack of it—that allows a Palestinian suicide bomber to see his or her victims before the switch is pressed and the explosives detonated? The suicide bomber eliminates his own life but has the fearful privilege of looking at the future dead, the soldiers or—let us speak frankly— the Israeli children in the pizzeria or the girls on the bus who are about to be eliminated from the world. The Israelis and the White House tried to diminish the self-destructive element of suicide bombers by fatuously calling them “homicide bombers,” which is ridiculous; all bombers, suicidal or otherwise, are homicidal. The difference is that the suicide bomber not only takes their own life—and thus becomes a “martyr” for Palestinian groups—but is an executioner. They see those about to die. They hold in their hands, however briefly, the life and death of innocents. Whether they press the button is their choice. Hindawi, of course, was not planning to press any buttons. Anne-Marie Murphy was going to be the button. And history—if we are to believe his letters to me—was the detonator.

I AM STANDING IN THE DUST and rubble of Khan Younis Palestinian refugee camp at the beginning of that year of 2001. April 15, it says in my notebook, along with the words: “In any other place, it would be a scandal, an outrage.” If Palestinians had wilfully destroyed the homes of 200 Israelis, I wrote in my report to
The
Independent
that night, there would be talk of barbarism, of “terrorism,” grave warnings to Arafat from the new American president, George W. Bush, to “curb violence.” But it was the Israelis who destroyed the homes of at least 200 Palestinians in Gaza on that Easter Sunday morning of 2001, bulldozing their furniture, clothes, cookers, carpets and mattresses into the powdered concrete of their hovels until one end of Khan Younis looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake. So of course it was not “terrorism.” It was “security.”

The old sat like statues amid the rubbish tip that the Israelis had made of their houses. Many of them, like seventy-five-year-old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, had been driven from their homes in Palestine—in his case from Beersheba—in 1948; now they were dispossessed by the same people for the second time in fiftythree years, this time courtesy of Ariel Sharon. Maybe it is impossible to shame history. What happened in Khan Younis—however the Israelis dress up their vandalism with talk of “security”—was a disgrace. This was house destruction—no, let us call it “home destruction”—on a hitherto unprecedented scale as a battery of bulldozers was sent to pulverise this part of Khan Younis above the sea from where—according to the Israeli army—shots had been directed at their occupying soldiers. As the machines careered up the road from the coast just after midnight, thousands of Palestinians ran screaming from their huts and concrete shelters.

Many of them fled to the nearest mosque, where they seized the loudspeakers and appealed to their neighbours “to take arms and resist.” To the apparent surprise of the Israeli army, that is just what their neighbours did. As Palestinian rifles were turned on the bulldozers, at least two Israeli tanks raced up the same road and began firing shells into the nearest apartment blocks. An Apache helicopter gunship appeared out of the darkness, launching missiles into the same buildings. And as old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan and his family remember all too clearly, a crane suddenly moved out of the darkness, a platoon of Israeli soldiers in the bucket from where—once the crane's chain had hauled the container to its highest point—the troops opened fire.

The gun battle lasted for four hours and left two Palestinians dead and thirty wounded, twelve of them critically, among them a Reuters camera crew who were filming it when a shell exploded against the wall behind which they were standing. Ariel Sharon, the biggest bulldozer of them all, had taught the Palestinians another lesson. But picking one's way through the muck and dust of thirty-five houses, it didn't take long to realise that the lesson they had grasped was not quite the one Israel had intended. Mariam Abu Radwan, a cousin of old Ahmed, put it eloquently: “We have no life any more. This is the destruction of our life. Let them shoot us—please let them shoot us—and we can die here. And let the Israelis die too. No one is looking after us—no Arab countries, no foreign countries either.”

One of the dead was Riad Elias, a Palestinian security forces officer—who was presumably fighting the Israelis when he died—but the second, Hani Rizk, was identified to me as a cleaner at the local Naser Hospital, the same hospital to which his body was taken before his funeral that Sunday afternoon. Ibrahim Amer, a thirty-five-year-old agricultural worker who says he was hit in the back and side by machine-gun bullets from the helicopter as he ran—he now lay in blood-soaked pain in one of the hospital's beds—saw Rizk running in the street “when a spray of bullets from the helicopter ricocheted against a wall and hit him—he had at least twelve bullets in his body.” Had Palestinians been shooting at the Israelis from these houses? Ask anyone amid the rubble and they would invariably say that they “never saw anyone”; which is not quite the same as saying that no one ever fired from here. But this was more than disproportionate; the Israeli operation was a deliberate attack on civilians.

Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, like many of his cousins, was a Bedouin farmer when the Israelis advanced towards his Beersheba home in 1948 where he lived with his father Hassan, his mother Shema and his four brothers. Since then he has lived in poverty in Khan Younis and was sleeping in his seven-room complex of hovel-huts with his wife Fatma and their twenty-three children and grandchildren when he heard the Israeli bulldozers. “What has happened to me now was what happened to me fifty years ago,” he said. “I feel a kind of madness. Peace now? I don't think so. The Jews gave us many words but they don't keep their word.”

As usual, shots were fired into the air at the two funerals that Sunday afternoon. Just three hours earlier, Wail Hawatir, a Palestinian military doctor, was buried, victim of the previous night's helicopter attack on what the Israelis called a “Palestinian naval base”—the Palestinians, of course, have no navy and no ships— so the day began and ended in familiar Gaza fashion: with funerals. Needless to say, Mr. Bush was silent.

As both he and Clinton were silent while Israel perfected its system of executions against Palestinians deemed worthy of death for their role in Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any other organisation which opposed Israeli occupation of the West Bank or Gaza. There was nothing new in this campaign of extrajudicial executions. When the Israelis came for Arafat's lieutenant, Abu Jihad—Khaled al-Wazzir—in Tunis in 1988, they employed up to 4,000 men for the assassination. There was an AWACS plane over Tunis, two warships in the Mediterranean, a Boeing 707 refuelling aircraft, forty men to go ashore and surround the home of Arafat's PLO deputy commander, and four men and an officer to murder their victim.

Abu Jihad's son Jihad al-Wazzir, now living through the second intifada inside Gaza, recalled for me in detail how his father was executed. “First they killed the bodyguard who was asleep in the car outside—then they killed the gardener and the second bodyguard. My dad was writing in his office and went into the hall with a pistol. He got off one shot before he was hit. My mother remembers how each of the four men would step forward and empty an entire clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad—like it was a kind of ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in the head, just to make sure.”

Now Israel's murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, a splash of infrared on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian's vehicle. It's long-range assassination. It is an internationally illegal war in which the Palestinians have themselves been guilty in the past. Back in the 1970s, Israeli and PLO agents murdered each other in Europe in a policy of retaliation and counter-retaliation that enraged European security forces. In Beirut, two of the Israelis involved in murdering Palestinian leaders were called Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. Shahak would later become Israeli military commander in Lebanon in 1982. It was Barak who, as prime minister, relaunched Israel's murder squads.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad have their own murderers; their suicide bombs slaughter civilians as well as soldiers, hitherto unknown victims rather than individual Israeli intelligence officers. But Israel's killers take innocent lives too. A helicopter attack on a Palestinian militant in 2001 tore two middle-aged Palestinian women to pieces; the Israelis did not apologise. The nephew of a man murdered by the Israelis in Nablus later admitted to the Palestinian Authority that he had given his uncle's location to the Israelis. “They said they were only going to arrest him,” he told his interrogators. “Then they killed him.” When Ariel Sharon ordered the killing of a Hamas official in Gaza, an Israeli jet flattened an apartment block, killing seventeen civilians, including nine children. Sharon regarded the attack as a victory against “terror.”

Al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, believed that people who did not believe themselves to be targets were now finding themselves under attack. “There's a network of Israeli army and air force intelligence and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each other information. They can cross the lines between Area C and Area B in the occupied territories. Usually they carry out operations when IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a ‘spectacular' to show what great ‘warriors' they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because of the second intifada . . . ”

Palestinian security officers in Gaza were intrigued by the logic behind the Israeli killings. “Our guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives,” one of the Palestinian officials tells me. “I tell you this frankly—they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as ruthless. After they targeted Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was coming back from security talks, Dahlan talked to Foreign Minister Peres. ‘Look what you guys are doing to us,' Dahlan told Peres. ‘Don't you realise it was me who took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?' ” Al-Wazzir understands some of the death-squad logic. “It has some effect because we are a paternalistic society. We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't stop. It was affected, but all the political objectives failed. Rather than demoralising the Palestinians, it fuelled the intifada. They say there's now a hundred Palestinians on the murder list. No, I don't think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against Israeli intelligence. An army is an institution, a system; murdering an officer just results in him being replaced . . . ” The murder of political or military opponents was a practice the Israelis honed in Lebanon where Lebanese guerrilla leaders were regularly blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often—as in the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias—after interrogation. And all in the name of “security.”
⁹⁹

I RETURN TO THE AYOSHA JUNCTION and the “clashes.” Stones bang onto the roofs of the Israeli jeeps, skitter over the road, ping off the metal poles of long-collapsed advertisement hoardings. I watch a young soldier open the door of his jeep every minute or so, take careful aim with his rifle, fire, and retreat back inside. He does this for half an hour, then looks back at me. “Where are you from?” he asks. We might have been in a bar, on a beach, coming across each other in someone's office. England. The twenty-one-year-old grins. “I'm from Queens, New York, and now I'm at Ayosha junction, Ramallah—quite a journey! This is more fun than Queens.” Fun? Do I hear him right? Fun? “Well, at least here you don't get shot while waiting at the traffic lights.” He grins. “My name's Ilan.”

The stones keep thundering off the metal roofs of the jeeps. Gas grenades soar through the hot sky towards youths hiding behind the skeleton of a bus, using slingshots—I can see them clearly through the smoke—to give their stones velocity. The Israeli firing—rubber-coated bullets for the most part—makes my ears sing, tinnitus from Iraqi guns mixed with Israeli rifles, louder than any shooting in the Hollywood movies from which Ilan seems to have taken his script. I am taken aback by the line about the traffic lights. Surely there's more chance of getting killed at the lights in the West Bank than in New York.

“Israel is a great place,” Ilan says. But this is not Israel. And it occurs to me, watching these young men in their grimy olive-green fatigues, that their ritual had been practised. Two soldiers twist gas grenades onto their colleagues' rifles. A soldier points out a running youth to a colleague who fires a round in his direction. An ambulance moves towards the youth, lying now on the road. And one of the soldiers claps another on the back. Major Shai arrives in another jeep to watch this miserable spectacle, a thirty-four-year-old accountant from Tel Aviv whose Ray-Banned driver is an insurance agent when he isn't watching stone-throwers in Ramallah. In the back of the jeep, cradling his rifle on his knees, sits a twenty-one-year-old business management student of Moroccan origin, happily arguing politics with Shai, more interested in marrying his girlfriend in six months' time than in the outcome of today's theatre at Ayosha. The arguments are familiar. Shai shakes his head—he actually calls the confrontation “a ritual”—but thinks the Israeli army “couldn't give way.” Give way? But this isn't Israel. I venture a heretical thought, that in ten years Israel will be back behind its 1967 frontiers—I don't believe it now—and, amazingly, Shai agrees. The student in the jeep does not. “If we pull out of here, we show we're weak. Then the Arabs will want all of Israel and they'll be trying to get Haifa and Tel Aviv.”