22

2000–2002

‘The culture of peace, nurtured over the previous decade, is being shattered. In its place there is a growing sense of futility and despair, and a growing resort to violence.’

Mitchell Report1

‘LET THE IDF WIN’

Ariel Sharon’s election victory in February 2001 was understood – by Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs and the wider world – to be a fateful moment. Sharon’s campaign ads presented him as a benign figure, playing with with his grandchildren or the goats on his Negev ranch, but his clearest message was: ‘Let the IDF win.’ He played on his reputation for being tough and decisive. ‘I know the Arabs, and the Arabs know me,’ Sharon repeatedly declared. ‘They know my word is my word, my yes is my yes and my no is my no. They know I mean what I say and I say what I think.’²

Sharon took 62 per cent of the popular vote; Ehud Barak, a humiliating 38 per cent. Scare tactics by the Barak camp failed dismally: one stunt involved sending thousands of fake call-up papers in IDF-issue brown envelopes ordering reservists to report to their units the day after the election. The message was that a vote for Sharon was a vote for war. But after four months of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, increasingly spilling across the green line, Israelis had lost faith not only in Barak but in seven years of negotiations since Oslo. ‘The despair and anxiety that possessed the Israeli public – and the total lack of awareness of Palestinian pain and suffering – are what has put Sharon in power’, commented the dovish novelist David Grossman, admitting that he feared the worst for the future. ‘It is one thing to report on a train running off the tracks from a vantage point to the side. It is another thing entirely to report it from inside the train.’3 Yet no one was surprised at the outcome. ‘The most visible effect of the peace process was the constant drift to the right of the Israeli electorate’, Shlomo Ben-Ami reflected. ‘Arafat was the sin. Ariel Sharon is the punishment.’⁴

Palestinians were understandably apprehensive. Yasser Abed-Rabbo, the PA information minister, called Sharon a ‘rabid and dangerous’ man with ‘hostile intentions to reopen a wider conflict’. Sharon’s notoriety went before him, from the Qibya raid in the 1950s through the Beirut massacres in 1982 and his relentless promotion of settlements to the recent provocative visit to the Haram al-Sharif. ‘Sharon has chosen war against the Palestinians, and it is easier for the Palestinian people to make war against Sharon than against Ehud Barak,’ declared Hussein Sheikh, a Fatah commander in Ramallah. ‘The policies of Sharon show that the peace process is gone with the wind. We think he wants the occupation to go on forever, but under another name.’⁵

The atmosphere was febrile and tense. In the week after the election, the Israelis assassinated one of Arafat’s bodyguards in Gaza. The next day a Gazan driver for the Egged bus company mowed down eight civilians at a bus stop near Tel Aviv. The perpetrator of this ‘lone-wolf’ attack was portrayed as a Palestinian everyman with no political affiliation who had snapped because of the intolerable pressure of Israel’s blockade, which especially affected breadwinners who were unable to provide for their children; he was also said to be suffering from depression – yet another example of the mentally ill on both sides invariably targeting the enemy. Shortly afterwards a Hamas suicide bomber killed three Israelis in Netanya. If war weariness was growing, the killings continued, attacks triggering retaliation, protests at funerals and further attacks in a seemingly unending cycle.

In Hebron, a ten-month-old baby girl, the child of Jewish settlers, was killed by a Palestinian sniper as she sat in her pushchair. The chubby little face of Shalhevet Pass briefly challenged the terrified features of Mohammed al-Durrah for the most iconic image of suffering children. By the six-month point of the intifada, seventy Israelis had been killed and hundreds injured. The Palestinian toll in the same period was 350 killed and thousands injured. Suicide bombings, shootings and helicopter-launched rocket attacks became routine. Still, Sharon’s orders for punitive action failed to quell criticism from the right: settlers dumped a bullet-riddled car outside his office to goad him into taking an even harder line.

Sharon reflected the sense of a national emergency by putting together a national unity coalition with unusual speed, with Labour’s Shimon Peres and Binyamin ‘Fuad’ Ben-Eliezer as foreign and defence ministers respectively. The far right was represented by the leader of the anti-Arab Moledet party, Rehavam Zeevi, whose innocuous job title as minister of tourism belied his political significance. Israelis had not fallen in love with Sharon but a majority did back him: ‘They have confidence in him only in the way a cancer patient would have confidence in the only available doctor’, one leading commentator remarked.6 The new prime minister had vowed not to talk to Arafat, but he sent his son Omri to see him in Gaza with an offer of a ‘temporary’ Palestinian state – on 42 per cent of the West Bank – and a ceasefire. Israeli intelligence reported in mid-February 2001 that the PLO leader had secretly given the go-ahead for a wave of suicide bombings.⁷ Arafat insisted in a rare interview that he had ‘not given any order to open fire’ while at the same time hinting that he could stop attacks.⁸ Later comments by officials who were close to him attested to a ‘double discourse’ at this time. ‘Arafat would condemn operations by day while at night he would do honourable things’, recalled Mohammed Dahlan.⁹

In April 2001, Sharon ordered tanks into Gaza, sparking international condemnation and alarm at the apparent final collapse of Oslo. In May the international Commission of Inquiry led by George Mitchell issued its findings. It rejected both the Palestinian assertion that Sharon’s Temple Mount walkabout had caused the intifada and the Israeli accusation that Arafat had instigated and masterminded the unrest, though it did note that the PA had done little to reduce violence. Israel also came under fire for overreacting to it. The more nuanced Israeli and American view was that the PLO leader sought to exploit the violence – the continuation of a pattern that had been visible a year earlier before Clinton issued the invitation to the Camp David summit. Ami Ayalon, the former Shin Bet chief, argued that ‘once the tiger of Palestinian violence was out of its cage Arafat rode it, did little to moderate it, and in fact fed it to improve his own legitimacy’.10 For the Palestinian analyst Yezid Sayigh, the spontaneous reactions triggered by Sharon had provided Arafat, weak and bereft of any serious strategy, ‘with an escape from his predicament’.¹¹ The Mitchell Report provided a succinct though bland summary of the state of the conflict at a critical juncture:

Despite their long history and close proximity, some Israelis and Palestinians seem not to fully appreciate each other’s problems and concerns. Some Israelis appear not to comprehend the humiliation and frustration that Palestinians must endure every day as a result of living with the continuing effects of occupation, sustained by the presence of Israeli military forces and settlements in their midst, or the determination of the Palestinians to achieve independence and genuine self-determination. Some Palestinians appear not to comprehend the extent to which terrorism creates fear among the Israeli people and undermines their belief in the possibility of co-existence, or the determination of the GOI [government of Israel] to do whatever is necessary to protect its people. Fear, hate, anger, and frustration have risen on both sides. The greatest danger of all is that the culture of peace, nurtured over the previous decade, is being shattered. In its place there is a growing sense of futility and despair, and a growing resort to violence.¹²

Mitchell urged both sides to de-escalate tensions and return to security co-ordination, and the Israelis to freeze settlement activities. Sharon, described by a leading Palestinian as appearing ‘superficially reasonable while setting impossible conditions’, demanded a period of seven days’ tranquillity before implementation, while the PA admitted it had no control over ‘the armed factions responsible for individual incidents’.¹³ Neither of Mitchell’s calls was heeded.

ARMING THE INTIFADA

Each side experienced the war very differently. Only small numbers of Palestinians were actively involved, unlike in the first intifada. But weapons, many held by PA forces under the Oslo arrangements, were used on a far larger scale. And many more non-combatants faced prolonged curfews and closures which disrupted normal life and caused severe hardship, especially in areas close to Israeli settlements and army positions. Of all Israel’s measures, none was so frustrating and wearing as the checkpoints and blocked roads that turned forty-minute journeys into agonizing odysseys by taxi, foot and even donkey, accompanied by frayed nerves and edgy soldiers. Palestinians needed special permits to use some 450 miles of West Bank roads.14 Others were completely prohibited. ‘Checkpoints did not stop suicide bombings but they did close down lives’, noted a foreigner who commuted between Jerusalem and the West Bank, braced for random car searches. ‘The worst soldiers to deal with are the new immigrants – Russians, Ethiopians,’ complained Dr Samir Khalil, a Ramallah neurologist queuing to cross the teeming Qalandiya checkpoint to reach an East Jerusalem hospital. ‘Can you imagine someone who has been in this country for one year, telling me I don’t have the proper papers to get to work?’¹⁵ Boredom was as much a hazard as danger. Trying to maintain everyday routines and simply ‘getting by’ in the face of insurmountable obstacles and time-wasting bureaucracy was an expression of sumoud (steadfastness).¹⁶ Conditions in Gaza were especially harsh, with unemployment at nearly 50 per cent and thousands surviving only with food aid from UNRWA. Offshore fishing was banned for long periods, and orchards were uprooted and houses bulldozed when the Israelis said they were being used for cover by gunmen. There was international criticism and debate in Israel over the demolition of buildings in the Rafah refugee camp following one attack. Israel also withheld tax revenues due to the PA – a pressure tactic that was used many times.

In June 2001 there came a new horror, with the suicide bombing of a beachfront disco called the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv which killed twenty-one teenagers, mostly Russian immigrant girls. Hamas claimed responsibility. The twenty-two-year-old bomber was from a refugee family living in Qalqilya, where he was hailed as a martyr. Arafat publicly condemned the attack and announced a ceasefire, while the US despatched the CIA director, George Tenet, to broker confidence-building measures and a longer truce: it was breached almost as soon as it was agreed. Tenet, who suffered from chronic back pain, surprised his interlocutors by lying on the floor during talks in Arafat’s office.17 Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians in drive-by shootings, while collaborators were blamed when Jamal Mansour and another Hamas leader – as well as two children – were killed in Nablus in an Apache attack that clearly required precise intelligence. The raid was preceded by a phone call to Mansour by someone claiming, falsely, to be from the BBC.¹⁸ Marwan Barghouti, the Tanzim leader, who was being closely monitored by the Shin Bet,¹⁹ narrowly escaped when a missile hit a car he had been supposed to be travelling in. ‘An increasing number of the Palestinian population discovered that in the bombing of restaurants, cafes, buses, nightclubs and shopping malls in Israel they possessed a weapon that seemed to balance Israel’s overwhelming military supremacy’, Ahmed Qurei recalled.²⁰ In August another fifteen Israelis, including seven children, died in a suicide attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in central Jerusalem. Five victims were members of one family. Hamas claimed that attack and named the bomber as Izzedin al-Masri, twenty-three, from near Jenin, issuing a picture of him holding an M16 rifle in one hand and a Quran in the other with an explosive belt round his waist. There was a ghoulish footnote when Islamic Jihad claimed the same bombing but named a different perpetrator and then admitted it was mistaken and had inadvertently blown the cover of one of its own men: he was also en route to a suicide mission when the first explosion occurred.

Israeli F16 warplanes then bombed a police barracks in Ramallah while Orient House, the de facto PLO headquarters in East Jerusalem, was shut down. Tanks and armoured bulldozers went into Jenin, which had acquired a dark reputation in Israel as a breeding ground for Islamist bombers. The PA police fled, but men from Hamas, Islamic Jihad – as well as Fatah – stood their ground and opened fire at the Israelis. Abu Ali Mustafa, the West Bank leader of the PFLP, died at the end of August when laser-guided missiles fired from helicopters went through the window of his Ramallah office as he took a phone call that was made to locate him. The attack was so precise that it left the window frame intact. In Gaza a popular preacher, Sheikh Ibrahim Maadi, praised ‘the people who strap bombs onto their bodies or those of their sons’ and called for bombings in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. ‘The Jews have bared their teeth. They have said what they have said and done what they have done. And they will not be deterred except by the colour of the blood of their filthy people. They will not be deterred unless we willingly and voluntarily blow ourselves up among them.’21

Fatah adopted a policy of ‘mass protest accompanied by controlled violence’ – the line pursued by Marwan Barghouti, who argued that Palestinians had a duty to defend themselves:

If the Israelis continue to attack our lives, killing people on the ground, day by day, attacking with tanks and aircraft, why should the people of Tel Aviv be allowed to live a secure life? You do not respect our ‘A’ areas, we do not respect your ‘A’ areas. If you come into my home and do as you please, why should I be polite in your home?²²

A few days later a bomber disguised as an Orthodox Jew blew himself up on a Jerusalem street lined with schools, restaurants and a hospital. The bomber’s severed head landed in the yard of the city’s French Lycée, where the pupils were lining up for the beginning of the school day and ‘the new headmaster … laid a cloth over the head and shreds of body to shield the children from the sight and the horror’.²³ The next suicide attack was carried out by an Israeli-Arab citizen from Galilee in the northern town of Nahariya – another grim first. On that day, 10 September 2001, seven other people were killed in three separate attacks within the space of five hours, a rapid-fire sequence of events even by the standards of the second intifada. Yet these were soon overshadowed by much bigger and less familiar news from far away.

‘ARAFAT IS OUR BIN LADEN’

Osama Bin Laden’s attacks on America on 11 September 2001 did nothing for the Palestinian cause. Brief celebrations in East Jerusalem – children handing out sweets to passers-by to celebrate a painful blow to Israel’s staunchest ally and weapons supplier, a lone gunman firing celebratory rounds in the Jenin refugee camp – attracted disproportionate media attention that was exploited by Israel to conflate global jihad with Palestinian resistance to occupation. ‘Everyone has his own Bin Laden,’ Sharon told Colin Powell, the US secretary of state. ‘Arafat is our Bin Laden.’ Arafat had, in fact, been quick to offer his condolences to President Bush and posed for the TV cameras while donating blood in a Gaza hospital for those injured in New York. ‘The vast majority of the Palestinian people stood firmly to condemn this act,’ insisted Saeb Erakat, the PLO’s chief negotiator. ‘It is a very very unfair and despicable act of the Israelis to try to find a linkage to undermine the Palestinians still further. The Israelis are trying to link their military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with the horrible carnage in New York and Washington.’

Still, Arafat clearly understood the risks of a backlash against the Palestinians as the US worked to restore calm in the occupied territories as it considered its response to 9/11. He and Shimon Peres held an awkward encounter at the end of September on the first anniversary of the uprising, but a ceasefire agreed with CIA help survived only days in the face of opposition by Palestinians (including PA police in Gaza), who demanded to continue fighting Israel. Sharon, under pressure from the right of his coalition, renounced the truce a week later – and also denounced a call by Bush for the creation of a Palestinian state, which the White House insisted had been in the works before the Twin Towers attack. ‘Don’t repeat the terrible mistake of 1938 when the enlightened democracies of Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution,’ a furious Sharon told the US. ‘Do not try to placate the Arabs at our expense.’ The White House called the statement ‘unacceptable’ – a rare public rebuke.

Shortly after the start of the US invasion of Afghanistan in response to the September attacks, Arafat’s PA police fired on Hamas demonstrators in Gaza who praised Bin Laden – and then faced demands from Israel to hand over the killers of Rehavam Zeevi, who was assassinated in a Jerusalem hotel in mid-October. Palestinians said the far-right minister had been singled out because he was an enthusiastic supporter of ‘targeted’ killings. The PFLP claimed responsibility, vengeance for the assassination of its West Bank leader. Renewed ceasefire efforts were joined by the US Marine general Anthony Zinni, but he struggled in the face of continuing violence and Israeli warnings that he did not understand the ‘Palestinian mentality’.24 The assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud near Nablus in November was widely interpreted as an Israeli ploy to sabotage truce efforts.²⁵ In mid-December Arafat went on Palestinian TV and radio to warn that the PA would punish anyone who violated his orders and planned suicide bombings and the firing of mortars. This led to a period of quiet which lasted for about three weeks. But then Raed Karmi, a Tanzim leader who was wanted by the Israelis, and who the PA had claimed falsely was in prison, was killed in a carefully planned operation by a bomb detonated by a surveillance drone. Karmi was said to be responsible for financing arms purchases.²⁶ The assassination was opposed by the IDF on the grounds that it would endanger the truce. Alarmed former Shin Bet chiefs had warned the incumbent, Avi Dichter, that he should not simply do Sharon’s bidding.²⁷ ‘This event radicalised Fatah’s attitude … and had far-reaching consequences for the continuation of the conflict and its escalation’, an Israeli study concluded later. ‘It was a watershed in the attitude of … Fatah and the various “Fronts”, which now also began to carry out suicide bombings.’²⁸ Thousands turned out for Karmi’s funeral in Tulkarem calling for revenge. And a few days later a young Palestinian walked into a bar mitzvah celebration in Hadera, just across the green line from Jenin, and shot dead six people before being killed himself. He was a friend of Karmi.²⁹ Fatah’s involvement in suicide bombings put Arafat under renewed pressure.³⁰

Palestinians invariably referred not to suicide but to ‘martyrdom operations’, and interpreted the phenomenon as a manifestation of despair and hopelessness. ‘In the last uprising, children used to play a game called “intifada” ’, explained the Gaza psychiatrist Eyad El Sarraj.

It was a cowboys-and-Indians-type game – more specifically, Israeli soldier versus Palestinian stone thrower, with the kids trading off between the role of the soldiers armed with sticks to represent guns and the Palestinians with keffiyehs and stones. Many of the children at the time preferred to play the Jew … because the Jew with the guns represented power. This game has entirely disappeared. Today, the symbol of power is the martyr. If you ask a child in Gaza today what he wants to be when he grows up, he doesn’t say that he wants to be a doctor or a soldier or an engineer. He says he wants to be a martyr.31

The bloodshed continued. Five Palestinian schoolboys were killed by an explosive device planted by the IDF to trap fighters in Khan Yunis. Ten Israelis were killed by a car bomb on Ben-Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem. ‘I saw people without arms,’ one eyewitness said. ‘I saw a person with their stomach hanging open. I saw a ten-year-old boy breathe his last breath.’ The next day fifteen more people died in a Hamas bus bombing in Haifa. The driver remembered afterwards that a Palestinian passenger had paid his fare with a large-denomination banknote and not waited for his change before moving to the rear of the vehicle to detonate his device – a chilling detail from what was becoming a frighteningly familiar phenomenon. (Police were reportedly investigating a gambling ring that was taking bets on the location of the next suicide attack.) Hamas said the Haifa attack was revenge for the assassination of its West Bank military commander. The bomber was identified as Maher Hubashi, who had sworn revenge after seeing the dismembered corpses of two Hamas leaders who had been killed in Nablus in July. Hubashi had posted photographs of Palestinian children killed by the Israelis on his bedroom wall.³² Israeli bulldozers ploughed up the runways at Gaza airport, while Arafat’s two presidential helicopters were destroyed.

‘DEFENSIVE SHIELD’

The al-Aqsa intifada reached its bloody peak in spring 2002. In January the Israelis pulled off a propaganda coup when naval commandos captured the Karine A, a freighter carrying $50 millions’ worth of weapons from Iran to Gaza via the Suez Canal. Arafat denied that the shipment had anything to do with the PLO. That was unconvincing given the key role played by a senior Fatah official, though there was also evidence of links to Hizbullah.³³ Sharon said in an interview that he wished Israel had liquidated Arafat before the evacuation from Beirut in 1982. In early March a lone Palestinian sniper managed to kill ten Israeli soldiers and settlers at a checkpoint near Ofra, outside Ramallah, hiding under an olive tree and firing an old rifle for twenty-five minutes. The story evoked nostalgic comparisons with the ‘great rebellion’ and fanciful suggestions that the sniper was a veteran mujahid who had remained in hiding since 1939 – like Japanese soldiers in south-east Asian jungles decades after the Second World War.34 By 7 March 2002, the death toll since the uprising began was 1,068 Palestinians and 319 Israelis. On 8 March alone, forty Palestinians were killed by the IDF. The next day’s suicide bombing of a popular West Jerusalem cafe – across the road from the prime minister’s residence on Balfour Street – prompted bleak reflections about the end of normality for Israelis, including diehard peaceniks who loathed Sharon and were horrified by his policies.³⁵ And an appalling month culminated on the 27th when a Hamas bomber killed twenty-nine elderly Israelis who were celebrating the Passover festival in a Netanya hotel.

The Netanya bombing coincided with an Arab League summit conference in Beirut. Little of substance usually took place at these ritualistic diplomatic events, and Arafat had failed to persuade the Israelis to allow him to leave his headquarters in the Muqataa to attend. But this was the occasion for a highly significant announcement of a new Arab peace initiative that was proposed by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: it declared that the Arab states would recognize Israel in its 1967 borders if there was a just solution to the Palestinian issue. It was a statement of historic importance – in principle binding all twenty-one members of the League – though how it could be translated into reality was unknown. It was in effect a reversal of the famous ‘three noes’ of the Khartoum summit that had been held just after the Six Days war. Now was not a time for diplomacy, however. ‘Our operation coincided with the Arab summit in Beirut,’ Hamas declared. ‘It is a clear message to our Arab rulers that our struggling people have chosen their road and know how to regain lands and rights in full, depending only on God.’³⁶

The Netanya bombing was the trigger for the long-prepared ‘Operation Defensive Shield’, the biggest Israeli operation in the West Bank since 1967. Within hours the IDF issued emergency call-up orders for 20,000 men. Nablus and all major towns except Jericho were reoccupied in a throwback to the pre-Oslo years. Thousands of Palestinians were arrested. In Nablus bodies lay rotting in the streets and under rubble, fed on by dogs. The IDF spent three weeks ‘either destroying, gutting, or looting virtually every national Palestinian institution, public and nongovernmental, security and civilian, that had been built in the last eight years’.37 In Ramallah Israeli troops exchanged fire with Arafat’s bodyguards, surrounded his HQ with tanks and bulldozers and cut off phone lines and power; a week later it resembled a scene from a Mad Max movie, a visitor reported.³⁸ The IDF advances met little resistance, with one notable exception. Eight days of intensive house-to-house fighting in the densely populated Jenin refugee camp, home to 13,000 people, generated headlines around the world, though Palestinian claims of a massacre were not substantiated. The UN found that twenty-three Israeli soldiers and fifty-two Palestinians were killed, of whom up to forty-seven were fighters and up to twenty-two civilians, according to different estimates. Both sides were accused of endangering civilian lives and the IDF was censured for the destruction of hundreds of houses, many of them by giant D9 armoured bulldozers. ‘Filmed from above – a place the size of several football pitches where over 100 houses once stood – is rendered a blank and texture-less expanse’, reported one journalist.

Tangled mounds of concrete and reinforcing rods climb up a gentle slope. The eye alights on a shoe here, the leg of a doll, bedding, pages from the Koran, pictures and shards of broken mirror. It is, somehow, most shocking at the very edges of the devastation where the destruction is partial. Here whole walls of buildings have been peeled off to reveal the still occupied homes inside – pictures, beds and bathrooms – daily life stripped bare.³⁹

PA ministries and offices, and roads, water pipes and other Palestinian infrastructure were severely damaged or destroyed to the tune of $360 million, according to the World Bank.⁴⁰ Computers and other records were systematically targeted. Casualty figures ranged from 250–500, the majority of them PA security forces, Tanzim and other groups. Arafat later referred to it as ‘Jeningrad’.

‘Operation Defensive Shield’ lasted just over a month. Troops pulled out of West Bank cities but continued to encircle them, mounting regular incursions and paralysing traffic and commerce. In May the IDF seemed poised to invade Gaza, but held off. EU diplomats brokered the evacuation of thirteen wanted Palestinian fighters to Cyprus and the Gaza Strip, ending a tense six-week Israeli siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In early June an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives next to a bus at Megiddo junction – site of the biblical Armageddon – killing seventeen soldiers and civilians. Two weeks later nineteen more Israelis died on a Jerusalem bus that was targeted by a Hamas suicide bomber. Sharon ordered another, smaller IDF operation – ‘Operation Determined Path’ – involving new incursions that met minimal resistance but pushed the PA to near irrelevance. President Bush’s call for Arafat to go, in a speech on 24 June, seemed to many on both sides to have been scripted in Sharon’s office rather than the White House. On the eve of the speech, Sharon’s envoy had presented the White House with Israeli intelligence evidence of Arafat’s support for terrorism.41 Bush also spoke for the first time about what he called a ‘Road Map for peace’ – a phased plan, essentially based on the Mitchell Report, for reaching Palestinian statehood. The PLO leader responded by announcing new elections.

In July an Israeli jet bombed the Gaza home of the Qassam Brigades’ commander Salah Shehadeh, killing him and fourteen others, including nine children. Sharon hailed the raid and ignored international condemnation. The commander of the Israeli air force dismissively described the sensation of a ‘slight bump’ when a one-ton bomb was released from an F16 fighter; a subsequent inquiry found intelligence failures in targeting a densely populated area but no ‘premeditated intention’ to kill civilians. Shehadeh’s killing came against a background of talks on a ceasefire between the Tanzim and Hamas and it fuelled familiar speculation about an Israeli effort to sabotage an agreement.⁴² Shortly afterwards Marwan Barghouti, the Tanzim leader, went on trial in Tel Aviv, charged with planning attacks that killed five Israelis. Barghouti, brandishing his handcuffs and speaking the Hebrew he had learned in prison, told the court that Israel would only have security when it withdrew from Palestinian lands. ‘I have charges against the Israeli government!’ he declared. ‘I have a charge sheet with 50 clauses against Israel for the bloodshed of both peoples!’43 Barghouti was eventually sentenced to five consecutive life sentences.

BLINDING VIOLENCE

The al-Aqsa intifada’s violence took a dreadful toll on mutual empathy and understanding – always in short supply – between Palestinians and Israelis. If the dominant image of the first intifada was Palestinian children throwing stones, the symbol of the second was the suicide bomber. ‘Israeli Jews see the phenomenon as the ultimate proof of the cruel, zealous and primitive Palestinian nature and conclude that it is impossible to engage in reasonable negotiations with people who send their children to kill both themselves and innocent people’, wrote the left-wing Israeli academic Baruch Kimmerling.

This lack of understanding has blinded most of the Israeli population to the poverty, the lifelong harassment and humiliation, the hopelessness, and the perpetual violence and killing that blight so many Palestinian lives and lead so many young Palestinians to such desperate acts – acts that are not dissimilar to the kind the Bible ascribes to Samson after he was captured by the Philistines. The same lack of empathy has also blinded Palestinians to Jewish grief and anger when suicide bombers massacre innocent civilians, emotions that are intensified when many Palestinians publicly express their happiness after every successful operation.⁴⁴

That disconnect was striking to outsiders who were in contact with both sides and sharply aware of how language was distorted by bitter enmity. ‘Where we heard descriptions of families cowering in one room, their homes blasted into by squads of combat troops bursting through the walls of one house to the next, searching, arresting, looting, beating and blasting out again … Israelis heard that “terrorist nests” were being rooted out’, wrote Emma Williams, a British doctor living in Jerusalem.

Where we heard friends in Ramallah or Nablus tell of their dread of the nightly pounding from aircraft, tanks and helicopters, a behemoth hauled out and wielded against a civilian population, Israelis heard that the IDF were fighting ‘a tough and hardened enemy’, bringing security to the Israeli people by crushing other people, something malevolent.45

Public debate in Israel, fuelled by fear and mistrust, focused on the need to defeat terrorism. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, spoke for many when he referred to ‘that dog Arafat’ and urged Sharon to bomb PA headquarters. Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party called for the PLO leader to be tried for mass murder, and talked of the ‘transfer’ – the old euphemism for mass expulsion – of Palestinians. Zeev Schiff, the respected Haaretz military commentator, warned: ‘The day is approaching in the terrible war that is developing here when anyone who comes to destroy Israeli families, including children and babies, will have to consider that Israel will harm his family, and not only his property.’⁴⁶ The peace camp was discredited and largely silenced.

In this charged and dangerous atmosphere, the underlying causes of the crisis were too often overlooked. Israelis who lamented the loss of their normal lives often failed to recognize that that had been caused by ‘Israel’s transformation of the West Bank and Gaza into one large arena of confinement’, argued the Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari.⁴⁷ Still, influential Palestinian intellectuals did warn that suicide bombings, as a form of ‘resistance communication’, were ‘not effective in delivering the intended message because they are isolated from a strategic reading of Israeli society’s reaction to and understanding of the uprising and of Palestinian resistance in general’.⁴⁸ Controversy erupted over a similar appeal in an advert, paid for by the EU, when the signatories were accused of being motivated by self-interest – because they were employed by PA institutions or had links with international NGOs – rather than genuine alarm that the armed intifada was proving catastrophic. In late 2002, polling showed that 51 per cent of Palestinians rejected military operations ‘as harmful to the Palestinian national interest’.⁴⁹ The critical mood was reflected in a new Arabic term that was coined to describe Palestinian reality – intifawda: it combined the word intifada with fawda, meaning ‘chaos’.

SEPARATION BY WALL

Hardly surprisingly, in these highly polarized circumstances, security became the dominant theme of Israeli discourse. Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak had both considered building a barrier between Israel and the West Bank, consistent with the old idea of separation between the country’s neighbours and enemies, but nothing had come of it. ‘Us here, them there’, as Rabin had once tersely put it. Barak had famously described Israel as ‘a villa in the jungle’ – a revealing phrase that was at best arrogant, at worst racist. Unilateral separation, disconnected from any wider strategy, was an old idea whose time had come. ‘Within Israeli thinking’, noted one observer, ‘the construction of the fence is really political code for shutting up shop, locking the door – and acceptance of the fact that, in the short- to medium-term, Jew and Arab simply cannot live together.’50

Fences and barriers could clearly work, up to a point, though only to the benefit of one side – as demonstrated by the one that had surrounded the Gaza Strip since 1996. Sharon was initially opposed to parallel action on the West Bank because it would have divided ‘indivisible’ Jerusalem and left Israeli settlements unprotected. But something was changing: in June 2002 the cabinet voted to begin constructing a new ‘separation fence’. Polling showed massive popular support. It was in fact part fence and part concrete wall up to twenty-four feet high, and comprised barbed wire, sensors, cameras and watchtowers. Initially it was planned to run for seventy miles, on or close to the green line, but it also cut eastward beyond it to take in Jewish settlements. The first section was completed by summer 2003 and was presented by the government as an anti-terrorist measure without political implications, though it was an obvious example of creating facts on the ground.

Palestinians protested from the start, dubbing it the ‘apartheid wall’ – part of an increasingly frequent comparison being made between Israel and white-ruled South Africa, including by a former Israeli attorney-general, Michael Ben-Yair.⁵¹ If it was only about security, they argued, it would have followed the green line, which was why some called it the ‘annexation wall’.⁵² In fact, according to the UN, only 15 per cent of the wall followed the green line, while the remaining 85 per cent cut up to eleven miles into the West Bank, leaving some 25,000 Palestinians isolated from the rest of the territory.53 It cut off Palestinians from land and jobs, creating severe practical and financial hardships, while Jewish settlers enjoyed unimpeded access on dedicated bypass roads that were closed to their neighbours. ‘This stupid wall has nothing to do with Israel’s security,’ protested a Ramallah resident. ‘It does not separate Israel from Palestine, it separates Palestinians from Palestine.’⁵⁴ The economist Leila Farsakh described a process of ‘Bantustanization’ by which the occupied territories had been transformed into a population reserve serving the Israeli economy but unable to access it or evolve into a sovereign independent entity.⁵⁵ Between 2001 and 2002 the Palestinian economy shrunk by 40 per cent, as measured by GDP per capita.⁵⁶

Preventing suicide bombings trumped all other arguments. ‘Nearly all Israelis like the promise of this fence,’ noted a Jewish activist who did not. ‘They have, and seek, no idea of its human cost and no understanding of its deeper purpose. They also probably have no particular compunction about taking a little more land.’⁵⁷ Voices on the left and centre protested at the government’s lack of vision but there was still massive public support for an effective security response, however narrow that was. ‘Israel is caught in a trap, and military operations cannot free it from this bind’, warned Sharon’s biographer, Uzi Benziman. ‘The choice being offered by its current government is acquiescence in abominable terror, or a corrupting conquest. Nobody in the political leadership is offering a different route – separating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.’⁵⁸ Right-wingers opposed anything that smacked of concessions in the face of Palestinian violence, or of drawing a new border across the heart of Eretz-Yisrael. Now Sharon endorsed what one opponent called ‘a pharaonic project of concrete, a Chinese wall hundreds of kilometres long to keep at bay the new barbarians’.⁵⁹ The decision marked another significant step along the path of unilateral action that he was now pursuing.⁶⁰ Israel was again in effective control of the West Bank; Gaza was encircled; while the PA had all but ceased functioning. Oslo, to all intents and purposes, was dead. But it was not yet buried.