After thanking Abu Anis and his wife for dinner on our first night in Jerusalem, Andrew and I stood outside our new home in the balmy evening air and looked across the Kidron Valley to the Old City beyond. Andrew, a political officer for the UN office dealing with the Middle East peace process, had warned me on the journey from the airport the night before: “I don’t want to alarm you, but tensions are so high among the Palestinians over what they didn’t get at Camp David that they could explode at any moment. The fuse could be lit by any little thing.”
I was not alarmed. I didn’t believe him. Breathing in the jasmine, we talked about the enchantment of our new life in Jerusalem, and then we talked about the situation: Israel had just withdrawn its troops and ended its occupation of Southern Lebanon. This, carried out in conjunction with the UN, was a success and Prime Minister Ehud Barak was exultant at pulling off such a political coup. Many saw it as a brave and important step that might lead to a wider peace.
Negotiations with Syria to end another occupation—that of the Golan Heights—failed. Barak turned instead to the issue of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When those negotiations—at Camp David in July 2000—ended in failure, with Arafat blamed by Barak and Clinton, Israel and the Palestinians went back to the table. Negotiations continued, but now in an atmosphere of desperation—despite the seven-year peace process, the occupation had worsened for the Palestinians—spiced with some hope, since Barak appeared to be serious about reaching a solution.
For us, four weeks in, everything changed. One minute we were seeing two peoples make a reasonable effort to get along in very difficult circumstances. The next minute there was unrepressed violence and mutual distrust, with no sign at all of a terrible beauty being born. Hate and fear had been unleashed and would spread unrestrained.
On Thursday, September 28, 2000, opposition Member of the Knesset (MK) Ariel Sharon took a walk on Temple Mount. Sharon knew—everyone knew—that this was a supremely provocative act: provocative to the Palestinians and provocative to Israel’s Labor government and Prime Minister. Sharon read the situation masterfully. It was not just Palestinians’ loathing toward him, based on his past treatment of them,* that made his walk incendiary. It was also timing. The negotiations at Camp David had been supposed to complete the Oslo peace process, which many had believed would end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Instead, Camp David showed how far the occupation had deepened and how distant real peace remained. For Sharon, his walk was a winner either way: if he was allowed through he could guarantee Palestinian outrage and out-hardline his rival for the right-wing Likud party, the former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If he was not allowed through, Sharon could claim that Barak had lost Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount. On top of preying on Israelis’ fear of losing Judaism’s most sacred site, Sharon could prick their horror at the division of Jerusalem (East for the Palestinians, and West for the Israelis). He sensed Barak’s vulnerability and, at over 70 years old, he was in a hurry to have the premiership for himself.*
Meanwhile, I had parked on Ethiopia Street and walked off through the bone-dry heat to pick up the boys from school. On our way back, the boss of the car-rental company appeared. One of his employees had passed my car, seen its livery and noticed that the rear window had been smashed. He had called his boss. Boss and I now approached the car and the group of men surrounding it. Their postures spoke aggression: stiff and animal, more rooster than pitbull, but unmistakable.
The men surrounding the car saw me, a foreign woman, approaching. “Is this your car?” they said. “Do you know this man?” pointing to someone in the driver’s seat, the car company employee.
I said “No,” as I couldn’t really see him and didn’t immediately recognize what I could see.
For them this was confirmation. “He’s trying to steal your car.” They were sure. “We’ve been watching him for an hour.” The men had been working in a building next to the car and had dropped a piece of masonry from the upper floor, smashing the rear window. They were fully insured and ready to give all the necessary details, but they had no idea who the man in the driving seat was, and they took him for a thief. He had tried to explain who he was, but he fit the “thief” bill, and they were sticking with it.
The truth was easily explained, and immediately, sensibly, everyone was smiles and handshakes, exchanging insurance details and no hard feelings, even friendly slaps on the back. The builders who had broken the window were Israeli, and the car-company employees were Palestinian. After the repercussions of Ariel Sharon’s Temple Mount stunt that day, such a misunderstanding would no longer end with Israelis and Palestinians shaking hands and slapping each other on the back.
Sharon’s short stroll, accompanied by more than a thousand heavily armed Israeli police, was fine footage for the world’s media that night. Everyone’s news carried images of the portly Sharon jostled in the throng of protective police power, and of the inevitable scuffles with resentful Palestinians that ensued. The following day was Friday, the Muslim holy day, when believers must pray at the mosque. The headlines in the Jerusalem Post that morning were of stone-throwing Palestinians, duly provoked by Sharon’s visit. More anger was likely. Even so, there was no notion of what was to come. I had no idea at all.
During Friday’s midday prayers an army of Israeli police waited just outside the Maghrabi Gate, the route for non-Muslims on to Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif. Goaded by the words of the imam and by Sharon’s affront to Palestinian pride, worshippers came out of the mosque and began throwing stones. The police charged and, within minutes, began to shoot the Palestinians with rubber-covered bullets. I soon learned that these are not the rarely lethal “rubber bullets”: they are steel bullets with a veneer of rubber and frequently fatal. The details of the day began to spin about, and be spun, my first taste of the importance of “version.” The Israeli police fired on the Palestinians to protect Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall; yet the Jewish worshippers had been evacuated within minutes of the first stone being thrown.1
The first I knew of the rioting was seeing ambulances, sirens blaring, speeding around the walls of the Old City to pick up the wounded. Phalanxes of heavily protected professional police had used gunfire against rioters throwing stones. And then I heard that people were being killed. Not trampled underfoot or crushed against a barrier, but shot by police snipers.
People were muttering that this could only be bad, even ominous, for everyone. There was immediately an argument between waiting parents in the schoolyard. “How typical,” one parent said, “of the Palestinians to be violent. Force is the only way to deal with them.” Another was even angrier: “Force?” he was saying, “in any normal country of course riots mean force, yes—police in riot gear, tear gas, water cannon, baton charges. But what kind of control is this? Who controls a riot with snipers?”
I gathered the children and hurried home to wait. The electronic news was telling us that hundreds had been injured and that four people were dead. My neighbors’ televisions were alive. Conversations huddled around them, and newcomers gathered. They saw me and let me in. “So now you see,” said one. “They know that there are no armed people on al-Haram al-Sharif, but they are shooting us with their guns.”
“This is not the first time,” said another, grimly. ‘Only four years ago they killed three Palestinians for throwing stones on al- Haram al-Sharif. They do whatever they want.”
“But snipers? Shooting rioters?”
“Yes, even snipers. Welcome to Jerusalem. What we can do?” said his wife.
Seventy policemen had been lightly injured by stones; one was moderately injured. Many of the dead and wounded Muslim worshippers had been shot in the upper body and head. Journalists had also been shot, others were beaten up by police; some were beaten up and shot.2 Medical crews were fired on and onlookers hit.3 Many of the ambulances I had seen heading for the Old City were held up by Israeli forces not allowing them to pick up the dead and wounded. Some policemen helped medics to move the injured. Other policemen not only made it difficult for anyone to help the wounded, they fired on them while the wounded were being evacuated.
Friday: disbelief at the killings. Saturday: eruption. Since there was no school we stayed at home. With unarmed stone-throwers gunned down the day before, and apparently only hopelessness to look forward to, the Occupied Territories exploded. Ordinary Palestinians, bitter with their leadership, bitter with the occupiers, rioted everywhere—Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza—and more stone-throwers were killed, shot dead by Israeli forces.
There were riots in our street. It’s a very long street, winding through the forest, so the rioters and the police were a long way from us, but we heard gunshots and explosions and I went out on to the terrace, leaving the children inside. In the distance, mirroring the TV screen, were crowds of people running down the road on the hill opposite, away from plumes of smoke and the soldiers, their jeeps, and their weapons. The herd of goats in the valley between us and the turmoil carried on grazing, their bells jangling.
Then news came through that during fighting between IDF soldiers and Palestinians near an illegal settlement in Gaza, a Palestinian boy had been shot dead by the IDF. If we didn’t believe it we could watch it on television, again and again: the terrified boy scrabbling to shelter under his father’s arm, a jerk of the camera and dust swirling, then clearing to show the boy slumped on the ground, the father’s head sagging, bouncing inhumanly, both shot. And the ambulance driver who tried to help them also shot: dead.
Death on TV, caught by a France 2 camera crew. The death of Mohammed al-Dura mobilized an outcry on every Arab street, including the “Israeli Arab” street. It mobilized friends around the world—Jewish, Zionist, American, European—calling to ask what the hell was going on. Boris Johnson rang from his office at the Spectator: “Terrible things going on, terrible. Can’t believe what I’m seeing—is it really that bad your end? We could do with a piece—what it’s like to be there—working-mother stuff, kids and all that. Have you thought of writing? Could you? 1,200 words? By Monday? Terrific.” And with that I began writing, every now and then, about the situation.
Spurred on by the rolling scene of the Palestinian boy dying, outrage spilled over the Occupied Territories and into Israel itself. Israel’s Palestinian community, one fifth of the Israeli population, rolled out on the streets, demonstrating against their country’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. Journalists came back from covering the boy’s death and talked at length about the details they had witnessed, the examination of the bullet holes in the wall behind the boy that showed the trajectories pointing straight back to an Israeli position.
On Sunday the church bells murmured across our valley, familiar sounds of England and childhood and long walks to church on chilly mornings. There was an unfamiliar murmur mingled with the bells: songs of mourning for the Palestinian dead. Sixteen killed the day before, and hundreds injured. People were counting, wondering: stones and bullets. I couldn’t, didn’t, say that I was happy to see pale-blue UN flak jackets in the back of Andrew’s vehicle as he went out for meeting after meeting, to Gaza and Ramallah, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, phone to ear, like everyone else, all agencies, diplomats, players, angling for some impact on the chaos of events. Journalists were sleepless, dusty. Flak jackets meant proximity to danger as much as protection from it.
Dina called to say that she was very sorry but she was confined to her house by the IDF and therefore could not get to work. In the village conversations were about the rising numbers of dead and about events: a journalist beaten up by the Israeli police in Jebel Mukaber, our area; a secretary working at al-Makassed Hospital who had come out of her office on the first day and seen Palestinians shot in the eyes. The days’ violence, deaths, and mourning had taken on a rhythm: shooting, killing, funerals, demonstrations, more shooting, killing... The sequence scarcely varied. The intensity grew.
A New Zealander from the UN saw me walking in the Forest of Peace and stopped his car. He stuck his head out of the window and grinned, saying our shipment from New York had finally docked—we’d been waiting over a month—and was through customs. “But,” he added, “do you really want to unpack it—why not send it straight back to where it came from?”
“Of course I want to unpack it. This can’t go on.”
But the anger wasn’t tailing off and control was not about to be restored. I didn’t get it at all: the hate. After dropping off the boys inside the well-protected walled compound of the lycée, I stopped to buy groceries. The kindly storekeeper who had patiently helped me tell yogurt from cream cheese was different. We talked as normal but when I asked him to translate the headlines in the Hebrew press he pointed to the picture of the (dead) boy and said, “He threw stones; he gets shot. So?”
Despite Dina’s incarceration, her sister, Muna, had somehow managed to get to our house. Israeli soldiers had stormed her home to take up positions on the roof, from where they shot at boys throwing stones. She had been terrified by the soldiers, her elderly mother even more so, they cowered together as the soldiers rushed in, but Muna was strangely unsurprised by the soldiers firing on boys throwing stones.
Since she had made it to work, I was able to go to the Old City by way of the Dung Gate, the exit for centuries of Jerusalem’s garbage. The sudden open space of the Wailing Wall Plaza was a massing military parade: armored vehicles over the flagstones, troops in all directions. The Israeli soldier who screened me asked, “Do you have any weapons?”
“No.”
“Any knives?”
“No.”
“No? Guns, slings, grenades... bombs?” He was smiling. “Why not?” he added.
Perhaps the level of the escalation, and its implications, had escaped him. Perhaps I didn’t understand survival humor. I walked through the Jewish Quarter; everything was open, as though all was well. Signs alerted passersby to a “Pre-Third Temple Sale—buy now before the Third Temple is built and the prices go up.” The Cardo, the Roman thoroughfare that is hard to visualize now—cut up, chunks buried, renovated, patched over the years—was trading. Groups of tourists listened to their guide recommending a museum of Jewish life in 19th-century Jerusalem.
The Muslim Quarter was closed by a general strike to protest the killings at the al-Aqsa Mosque. A few people milled about but the ancient covered market, the cotton souk, was almost abandoned. A week ago I had ordered mint tea and watched the sun slide in through Mamluk windows in the vaulted roof. Leaving the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif I had ventured down the 14th-century steps, under the pink and black interlocking stones of the entrance, into a 300-foot corridor of ancient shops and hammam—baths—busy with 21st-century life and colors. Now it was closed and silent, the dust playing unstirred in the shafts of light.
I picked up the boys, trying not to hear the schoolyard discussions of the situation. People I had begun to know were starting both to lose control and to be strangely accepting. Israelis were not horrified by their forces’ killings or by the likelihood of this provoking more bloodshed; they were horrified by the stone-throwing Palestinians. Palestinians were not surprised by Israeli actions, but no Palestinian voices called for the street to quiet down—neither to save the rioters’ lives, nor to save the political situation. Everyone was reacting to each event as it occurred, soaking up the version of events given by their own side.
I had avoided it at school, but the situation returned once I reached the house. Muna’s husband had called her to say, “Come home, the fighting is very bad,” and her anxiety showed. We arranged to meet her husband at the new checkpoint on a back route to Bethlehem to avoid the worst of the fighting. The Israeli checkpoint soldiers saw us approach and moved toward us. They waved their weapons and made throat-slitting gestures to encourage me to stop. Tire-slashers were ranged across the road between the barricades, armored vehicles stood about, and a camouflaged lookout hid more soldiers, their helmets moving. Muna muttered, “Please, don’t go yet. If you could wait until I reach the other side. My husband is waiting there. See?” I switched the engine off. Her hand shook as it moved slowly to unlatch the handle of the car door. She got out, still slowly, her head low, walking with careful steps toward the troops. I watched as the soldiers circled and interrogated her, guns at hip. After a long few minutes, they let her through. Her husband also watched, from his distance, unable to help her. Her walk over, she sank into his car and they turned around and left.
Maha was standing in the compound yard when I drove home up the little hill. “Strange people have been walking around here,” she said. “We don’t know them.” Unlike mine, her children had not been able to get to school, and none of the adults had been able to get to work. The children were not playing in the fields and trees; they stayed hidden inside the houses. Maha was afraid, full of unease, unsure of who would protect them if trouble came. Palestinian fears were replacing their rage, but many were still angry at the accusation that it was their own fault they were being killed. One friend had been asked why the Palestinians had overreacted to Sharon’s visit. “Surely,” it was put to her, “you’d have been wiser to let Sharon’s visit go—without the effect he was looking for?”
“They don’t understand the significance of Sharon,” she told me. “Any other politician would have been different, but this man has the blood of thousands of Palestinians on his hands. Qibya, Gaza, the massacres of Sabra and Shatila—we could not ignore his provocation. So we’re provoked, and we react by throwing stones, and they shoot people dead...?”
There was a need for someone to blame. Shlomo Ben Ami, said some—blame him, he’s the Minister for Public Security, and he’s the one who gave permission for Sharon’s visit. He said he’d had no choice. The government had been warned not to let Sharon parade on the Temple Mount by its own security forces and by Yasser Arafat.* Later on, the international commission looking into the causes of the al-Aqsa Intifada, led by former US Senator George Mitchell,5 concluded that Sharon’s visit was a mistake, but “more significant were the events that followed: the decision of the Israeli police on September 29 to use lethal force against the Palestinian demonstrators.”6
I thought the situation would simmer down; it never did. The Jerusalem Post fundraiser for the widow of the Palestinian Israeli hero of the Sea of Galilee continued, despite some letters calling for it to be stopped. Regardless of the recent events, the public’s overwhelming opinion was that the campaign should continue. But the IDF were rolling military hardware into Jerusalem, and helicopter gunships fired missiles at apartment blocks in Gaza. Pleas for sense and calm were being ignored. “Can you beat this?” asked one of the long-time observers, “Arafat’s appealing to the IDF to use restraint against the stone-throwers, and Israel’s appealing to the Palestinians to use restraint against the snipers, tanks, and helicopter gunships!”
In Jerusalem we had helicopters spinning over us to monitor what was happening on the ground, but in Gaza helicopters were shooting missiles, not pictures. Andrew called me as he left Gaza by car.
“I should be home in an hour and a half, but if there’s trouble at Erez I may have to turn back.”
I said nothing.
“Don’t worry,” he added, “most of the fighting is supposed to be in the other direction.”
I sat in front of the computer, writing my worry into a Word document. It seemed better that way, better than waiting dumbly to hear whether or not he was through Erez. People hated Erez, the main checkpoint in the fence enclosing the Gaza Strip. Not just because of the waiting and checking and interminable delays, nor because of the cattle lines to one side where thousands of Palestinians crushed each morning before dawn, waiting to be let through to their jobs in Israel. Erez was frightening: a gauntlet, hundreds of meters long, walled in concrete, with IDF soldiers sitting in bunkers but no cover for travelers if the shooting started. It was a frequent shooting gallery. Andrew turned back and tried again the next morning.
The Palestinian street was mobilizing. By the third day the Palestinians had added rifles to their stones. “This is the Intifada with guns,” said one Palestinian in the village. “First we had only stones, but if they keep killing our children, of course we’ll use our guns. What do you expect?” The protests were full of young men and boys throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. After the death of Mohammed al-Dura the protests grew into a civil revolt, attacking the most detested IDF military bases in the Occupied Territories, at Netzarim, which split the Gaza Strip north from south, and at Joseph’s Tomb in the middle of Nablus. After nine days, with six Palestinians and one Israeli soldier dead, the IDF withdrew from the post that had turned Joseph’s Tomb into a military stronghold, and the Palestinians took over, burning and pillaging.* After forcing the IDF to withdraw here, the Palestinians attacked other settlements, wanting to push out the army elsewhere and jolt awake their leaders, the Palestinian Authority (PA), telling them no more selling out in negotiations. In doing so the Palestinians were painting themselves into their TV stereotype: looting holy sites, giving way to uncontrolled rage.
I kept waiting for someone to calm things down. On the eighth day the Israeli Prime Minister gave the Palestinians an ultimatum: stop demonstrating or the IDF will clamp down for real. Hate was taking over. In the village and beyond, Palestinians’ hatred of being occupied, controlled, and repressed was written on so many faces. A surge of Arab hatred of Israel was vivid on the streets of cities across the Arab world. And there was the hatred Israelis had for the Palestinians, not just against the demonstrators, but within Israel, against their own Arab citizens. Israelis knew that, thanks to television, the world was seeing the brutality meted out by their forces on the demonstrating Palestinians. This stoked increasingly bitter claims that they were acting only in self-defense.
I was also witnessing an urge to punish. The rioters shot down daily was one thing, but there was also the Israeli policy of Closure. I had been aware that life in the West Bank was hobbled by checkpoints: even going to Bethlehem and within Jerusalem, at a-Ram where we had rented the car. But now closures were clamped down like leg irons on the entire populace. It was a medieval siege and could only add to the anger: days of total, 24-hour curfew, a physical blockade to cripple the Palestinian economy, and the IDF smashing olive groves, fruit orchards, businesses, and buildings.
Half our new friends were stuck, immobilized, and humiliated in the Occupied Territories. The scene that I had begun to tap into was suddenly frozen; Palestinians were being killed in significant numbers. And the rest had lost any freedom of movement. Fellow parents at the lycée had to move to relatives’ houses on the right side of the checkpoints or their children would go without schooling. Getting to work was fraught and socializing was out of the question.
While the army used tanks and helicopter gunships, mobs went after Palestinian communities inside Israel and in Jerusalem. Palestinian friends living near the seam of East and West Jerusalem were terrorized by crowds chanting “death to the Arabs.” One of them called Andrew in tears, asking for his help. “Israeli settlers are attacking us Palestinians,” she said. He could hear shouting in the background. “What can I do?” he asked me. Call the police? That was no good; in some places violent settlers were not only ignored but even aided by the security forces, especially in Hebron.7 It wasn’t just that the Israeli government couldn’t stop the Palestinian uprising; it appeared to be unable to control their own settlers.
For Israeli friends, what was most shocking was not that the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were rising up against the occupation, but that the Palestinian citizens of Israel were in revolt too. Their own police force was opening fire with live ammunition on Israeli citizens. On October 1, in the Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm the police had killed three Israeli Palestinians and wounded many others. Putting down riots with live gunfire continued across Israel wherever there were Palestinian communities. When President Moshe Katsav announced that he was pleased that the “riots have brought Israelis closer,”8 he did not have Palestinian Israelis in mind. Thirteen of them were shot dead by the police.
Ten days into the Intifada 95 people were dead: 5 Jewish Israelis killed by Palestinians and 90 Palestinians killed by Israelis. Eighteen of the dead Palestinians were children. About 2,500 Palestinians had been injured, over a third of them children.9 Like everyone else, I wanted to disbelieve the figures, but there they were. And yet there were voices—in the playground, in the papers—telling us that the high casualty rate was the Palestinians’ own fault: Arafat planned the Intifada, and worse, the Palestinians push their children to the front line, they deliberately send their children to their deaths.
When I worked in a hospital in Afghanistan some years back, there was often hard-hearted talk among expats about life for “these people” being cheap, and how they didn’t give a damn about their daughters: “You know, they don’t even count the girls if you ask how many children they have—they just count the sons.” Then one day I was in the casualty unit when a girl of about eight was brought in. She had been hit by a car and she was dead. Her father, his head wrapped in a turban that fit our image of the mujahedin, cradled her small broken form. He was rocking back and forth, tears slipping down his darkened face, muffled animal cries of pain escaping from deep inside his body. He didn’t fit the image. And now here there was more hard-hearted talk about Palestinian parents.
Journalists—foreign, Israeli, Palestinian—were all over the claim: “This story of Palestinians deliberately pushing their kids to the front line is fantastic,” said one journalist as he grabbed a moment to walk his dog on the promenade one evening. “Can you imagine a scoop like that? We’ve all looked for these parents. They don’t exist.”
Image was all-important. This was the TV Intifada: recorded, propagated. Palestinians, locked inside their homes, watched all day every day. Each house in the village centered more than ever on the television. I watched with Mohammed and Maha; Mohammed was angry and silent. For all of us the news spewed out from media and mouth, but most bloodily from the television. The new Arabic satellite channels were beaming the full color of the repression.
After the funeral of one victim in Ramallah, on October 12, Palestinian anger boiled over. Two Israeli soldiers seen in the town were captured by Palestinians, bundled out of their car and taken to the central police station. A mob of youths followed, storming their way into the police station, and up the stairs to kick, club, and beat the soldiers to death: thirteen Palestinian policemen were hospitalized trying to protect them. The world recoiled at the sight of the two Israeli soldiers’ lynched bodies tipped out of the upper window, and Palestinian hands held aloft, stained with the dead soldiers’ blood.
Too late, my boys had seen it. I turned round to find them standing behind me. Normally they ignored the news, or could be deflected; this time I was too slow and they saw. They wanted me to explain this. The IDF said the soldiers were reservists who had lost their way; the Palestinians said they were members of the hated undercover mistaravim units of the IDF, notorious for their brutal methods. Whichever, their killing was horrifying, as was the lawlessness, the Palestinian police outmanned and injured in their efforts to hold back the vengeful crowd.
Israeli anger was blind, white anger, like that of the Ramallah Palestinians. But with the Israeli rage was also something less definable, something delicate, fragile. Even as the nine waves of Apache helicopters set off to destroy the police station, the PA’s TV and radio stations, Arafat’s Force 17 headquarters, his residence and PA installations in Nablus, Hebron, and Jericho, there was the sense that something had been broken. Possibilities shattered.
Andrew was at work; I was alone with the children, horrified by the lynching, horrified that they had seen it. And then the telephone rang: Andrew in Gaza.
“I’m stuck. There are helicopter gunships hovering just out at sea, and they’re going to strike. We just got a call from Barak’s office saying get out of the Territories now.”
“And?”
Brushed aside. “You’ve seen what happened in Ramallah. The IDF are wild. They want revenge. They want the UN out of the way.”
“Isn’t your office next to Arafat’s?”
“Yes. Not far. Some of the team here want to get out. But we can’t leave, we can’t just abandon all the Gaza staff. We should go to see Arafat. That’s where we should go, to try to talk some sense into the man. I’ll call again soon.”
The TV news soon showed the attacks: Ramallah, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus. And Gaza. Awesome military supremacy was raining down in waves of bitter anger.
Another call.
“Where are you?”
“We’re on the way to Arafat’s office, and for some reason I can’t get through to the IDF to tell them we’re going there—I’ll call you back. Don’t worry.” Steady voice.
Ten minutes later: “We’re in Arafat’s office.”
“But...”
“The helicopters are still hovering out there, but the IDF know we’re here. I got through to them. They won’t bomb us.”
Had to take his word for it and suspend time, waiting by the phone, writing.
They did bomb: the next-door building, not the one containing Arafat. Andrew came home. Calm was imposed momentarily— Clinton, Mubarak, Annan, Solana, King Abdullah all pressurizing. There were promises of a conference, one in Sharm el-Sheikh and another in Paris. Arab leaders were organizing their own, caught between their angry street, the fear of regional war, and American pressure. The US was in the final countdown to the presidential election, its leaders caught up in domestic politics.*
Arafat appeared on TV visiting the wounded lying in Gaza hospitals—a sickening sight, knowing that whatever he felt for their suffering, he also found it useful. Both sides manipulated their suffering; victimhood was at a premium. While Palestinian mothers and fathers were trying to stop their children going to demonstrations, the PA was not doing what it could to keep children away from confrontations, even when it was obvious that children were being killed. I met one mother who had sent her teenage sons abroad to keep them off the barricades, and alive. Few Palestinian families had that option.
“Of course the Palestinians will try to manipulate the propaganda stakes,” said one foreign journalist who left soon afterward. We were sitting at the bar of the American Colony Hotel. He went on, “Their gunmen know full well that the IDF are going to fire back with everything they’ve got. They know it looks bad for Israel to be seen using live ammunition against stone-throwing kids.”
“Not every funeral is real, and not every ‘martyr’ is civilian,” said another journalist. “They’re happy to parade dead gunmen as dead civilians for the propaganda benefit.”
“But this isn’t the point.” Another interruption.
The point, said the new speaker, an American writer who had watched the situation for many years, was that all the accusations and counter-accusations, all the hatred and manipulations, were silencing the real debate.
“Let’s not forget that the Palestinians are resisting a military occupation. You’ll hear every excuse under the sun to prove it isn’t one. But they’ve had more than 30 years of oppression—and they’re in revolt.” He went on: Palestinians had been forced to live under two separate systems of law—one for them and one for the settlers. Many had been driven off their land and made to live in camps. They’d had to watch their land given away to settlers, and their freedoms shrink. They’ve been granted a pretense of self-rule but seen their leaders lose out—sell out—and cream off millions in corruption while they “ran” their lives in brutal fashion, leaving the occupiers to say “look, they can’t govern themselves.” They live with expropriations, closures, curfews, and having their homes demolished, with humiliation that we, he said, could not begin to imagine. “And all of that was during the peace process. It’s not surprising they’re resisting, using whatever means they can. Vile, vicious, yes, all of that.”
He rolled the base of his bottle of beer around the rings of water on the tile-topped table. “And if you were the average Israeli you wouldn’t be doubting the IDF right now. Israelis are afraid, and so would you be.
“They’ve no idea if the IDF’s actions make sense, to them it’s self-defense, and the world condemns them for it. They’ve been told over and over that the occupation is not the issue—that anyway the territories are essential for Israel’s security—and that the ‘Arabs’ attack out of hate and Islamic zeal, nothing more. So of course they’re terrified. They don’t think this is a war to hold on to an occupation—they’re fighting for Israel’s security. To most of them, Arafat is out to destroy Israel.”
Palestinians heard only hate and rebellion, Israelis only fear and terrorism. In 1993 Rabin had told Israelis that Arafat was Israel’s “partner for peace”; now Barak told Israelis Rabin was wrong: that there was “no partner for peace.” Claims about the Palestinians—like the claim that their uprising had been planned—took on the status of received truth, undeniable, irrefutable. In Shonka Restaurant one evening with a group of Israelis and foreign journalists, an Israeli diplomat about to take up a distant posting became very angry, saying his government had absolute proof, there was not the slightest doubt that “Arafat started the violence; it was all planned. The man does not want peace.” Anyone who questioned that theory was silenced by an outpouring of resentment and accusation.*
While I had the occasional worry about Andrew at Erez or under fire in Arafat’s Gaza compound, journalists’ wives and husbands were living out their individual “spouse under fire” stories every day. Flak jackets had become de rigueur. Cars were covered—back, sides, and windshield—with tape spelling “TV” and “press”: more important to be identified as journalists than to be able to see out properly. Some media agencies had armored vehicles: ITN was one. The correspondent’s toddler son had a plastic pedal car emblazoned with the same letters as his father’s Land Rover, unaware that the letters meant Daddy had a better chance of coming home each night. Journalists were moving in pairs and groups in case something should go wrong.
And things were going wrong. Journalists were not complaining, but they were worried. Their spouses waiting at home were especially worried. By early November, thirteen journalists had been shot while covering the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, ten by the IDF and three not proven. A number had been harassed by Palestinian demonstrators and local authorities: at least three journalists were attacked by Palestinians in Ramallah after the lynching of the two soldiers. Three others had been badly beaten up by Israeli forces, and two had been arrested on the basis of their coverage. Palestinian police detained the publisher of a local Hebron newspaper because it had carried commentary criticizing the Palestinian Authority. CNN’s Cairo bureau chief, Ben Wedeman, was shot in the back and badly wounded by Israeli forces at the Karni border crossing between Gaza and Israel. An official at CNN said there was “no reason to believe whoever fired upon Wedeman knew he was a journalist.”11 Wedeman was dismantling his tripod at the time.
The casualty rate was high but journalists did not say they were being targeted systematically. Nevertheless, the Committee to Protect Journalists was alarmed for their safety and for their freedom to work. Journalists did complain when the Israeli Ministry of Defense ordered a ban on issuing press credentials to Palestinians working with Western news organizations. The reason given was that they were said to be biased. Without press cards, getting through Israeli checkpoints would be much harder. The Israeli authorities also cancelled the travel permits that Palestinian journalists needed to enter Israeli-controlled areas.
Dina was suffering. Usually she couldn’t get to work at all, and when she did she was fearful, nervous. Her nights were filled with the sounds of gunfire, and when they were not, she waited for the gunfire—or the raids. Before long, she gave up trying to think her life could be normal, stopped work, and concentrated on trying to emigrate. She was joining the trail of silent transfer. The situation had its own vocabulary: a word like “transfer” disguised the reality—ethnic cleansing, itself another euphemism. What pushed Dina was a sudden cranking up of military firepower, from a level already high enough to shock, to the use of aerial and sea attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. Her friends in Deheisha, one of Bethlehem’s refugee camps, talked of wanting to put an end to their misery, even if that meant an IDF bomb landing on their camp. Bethlehem was almost entirely sealed off, and there was no electric power to see or cook by because the IDF had bombed the electricity substation and shot at the firemen who tried to put out the resulting blaze.
Palestinian gunmen would fire at the settlement of Gilo across the valley from Bethlehem. A single bullet would bring down half an hour of IDF tank-fire on the Palestinians. Night after night there was shooting and bombing, no sleep, no respite from the terror the locals all felt. Dina had tried to soothe one friend who was pregnant and whose little child sobbed desperately, asking to run away, terrified that his mother was going to die when she had the baby. “What can I say that will help here?” asked Dina. “None of the children can sleep because of the shooting and explosions, and if they do sleep their nightmares wake them. And in the morning there’s no school to give them something to do. They have to stay at home, waiting for the next shooting.”
Our neighbors were getting on with their lives as best they could. Those with jobs in the West Bank could either no longer work or rely on getting through checkpoints to reach work. Those who had jobs in Israel were lucky: their salaries kept the families going. Their children were also stuck without school, bored and frightened at the same time. The women donned working veils, wrapped tight under the chin rather than draped decorously over their heads, and leaned ladders up against the trees to harvest the olives. It was a family affair. Sheets were spread out under the trees, and the boys competed in daring to go higher along the thinning branches. During harvests as a child in England I would take sandwiches and lemon barley water to my father and brothers in the fields, the combine harvester and corn-carting would stop and we would sit on bales and talk. Here the talk was of another reality: the farmers attacked by settlers. One, picking olives near Nablus, was shot dead by two settlers from Itamar in full view of the rest of his village. The Palestinian police gathered the forensic evidence and eyewitness reports, and gave these to the Israeli police. But the Israeli police set free the two settlers—who had confessed to the killing, claiming they had killed the farmer in self-defense—on the basis that there was “insufficient evidence” to prove that a murder had taken place. My neighbors were bitter, but not surprised.
There was brutality everywhere. There was the brutality of the Ramallah lynchings and Palestinian attacks on settlers. There was the slow brutality of the occupation—houses demolished, land seized, orchards razed, the closures, the curfews and the death, from a ruptured appendix, of a little girl held up at a checkpoint. There was the brutality of the settlers, killing Palestinians, stealing their harvests and land, poisoning wells, and the Palestinians with no recourse to law. And on top of the daily death toll there was the enhanced brutality of the new repression. One Tel Aviv University professor who studied the issue described the method some IDF sharpshooters used to harm children: “A common practice is shooting a rubber-coated metal bullet straight in the eye—a little game of well-trained soldiers, which requires maximum precision.”12
On October 19, 2000, Archie, our oldest child, turned seven. We had gathered presents and cake and tried to organize a birthday party, but his new school friends said they could not come. Their parents were uncomfortable with the location of our home. Only two months before, the Forest of Peace had been a quiet patch of Jerusalem with an incomparable view. Now we found we lived on the “seam.” The dividing line was between “us” and “them,” between the safety of West Jerusalem, where there were norms and predictability, policemen who directed traffic and pedestrians who worried about what to cook for dinner that night, and the otherness of East Jerusalem, where there were not only policemen who directed traffic and pedestrians who worried about what to cook for dinner that night, but also Palestinians battling Israeli forces in the streets and at barricades. Many of the parents were journalists, whose professional lives took them across the seam but whose family duty was to keep their children this side of the seam, out of danger. One explained: “You just happen to live on the wrong side of the reality.”
On the day of Archie’s party two of the parents changed their minds and let their children come to play. That day there was a firefight near Nablus between Israeli settlers and Fatah activists; each side lost one man. Archie had started to ask how many people died each day, and how old they were. That weekend another twenty Palestinians were killed; seven of them less than sixteen years old.
Many Israelis were telling me to watch out for Palestinian retaliation to all the deaths. One month after the Intifada began, on October 27, a cyclist with a satchel on his back blew himself up at an army post in Gaza. He was a secretary in a nursery school, and in killing himself he wounded an Israeli soldier. Islamic Jihad, a small Iranian-backed group, said it was responsible for the attack, adding: “This suicide bomber is not the first and will not be the last. The oppressors of today will get their punishment.”
Soon enough, as the Israelis had predicted, the attacks crossed over the seam into Israel. On November 2, two Israelis were killed and ten injured by a car bomb near Mahane Yehuda market in West Jerusalem. Islamic Jihad again claimed responsibility. This, the first attack of the Intifada in West Jerusalem, came two days after an attack in East Jerusalem, which had left one Israeli guard dead and another wounded. The PA, holding that attacks in occupied territory were legitimate resistance, condemned the attack in the Israeli West but not the one in the occupied East. Two weeks later, a roadside bomb exploded beside a bus taking children to school from a Gaza settlement. Two adult settlers were killed and nine others, five of them children, were injured. Three of the children lost a leg or an arm or both. Two days later, two more Israelis were killed and sixty wounded by a car bomb blown up alongside a bus in Hadera, an Israeli town. The area was packed with shoppers and commuters driving home from work.
Israelis in Jerusalem suddenly felt an old fear alongside their anger: the fear of civilians inside Israel being killed. For two years there had been no bombs at all. Now, after a month of death for those in the Occupied Territories, the fear of attacks in Israel itself returned. It distilled in every Israeli: radical, moderate, secular, religious, military, civilian. And we felt it too: the unpredictability, the senselessness, and the impotence that made the fear all the worse. With no way of knowing where a bomb might strike, no power to prevent and no chance to appeal, the only defense was to stay at home, out of danger. But that was no life.
Seeing the dramatic images of the Intifada, people abroad called about our safety. One American friend wondered, “Are you getting the hell out any time soon or are you going to be all British about being under attack?” I found myself saying that Andrew was sometimes in danger of being caught in the crossfire, but that we were not— “Wait a minute—what do you mean under attack?”
“Look, Israel is under attack,” the friend replied. “That could mean you too, you know, the terrorists don’t know any different.” We had a long exchange, in which he patiently explained the situation to me. He was aware that there were by now scores of Palestinian dead, and he understood that the IDF was one of the world’s most powerful armies pitted against stone-throwers, civilians, and poorly armed insurgents. Yet he believed the Palestinians were the aggressors, their dead were all “terrorists,” the two forces were equally matched, “and what’s more they’re agents of Islam, out to destroy the West, and they’re starting with Israel.”
The war my friend was reading about was not the war we were seeing. “But I’ve read it right here in Time,” he said—all about the Palestinian violence on Temple Mount, how Israeli “troops faced widespread gunfire from Palestinian police and militia,” and how the Palestinian casualties that day were “sustained in riots.” Nothing would convince him that the Palestinians on the Temple Mount were not armed: Time had said they were armed, so it must be true. Nor did he find it strange to shoot unarmed demonstrators dead. Nothing would convince him that there could be any motive for Palestinian violence other than an overpowering hatred of Jews and Israel. For him Palestinians were not living under a repressive military occupation—that was “a red herring,” he said. It was all about Palestinian “bestiality” and Israeli “victimhood.” “And these people—mothers even—push their kids out into the front line. What kind of animal does that?” We became accustomed to the dehumanization, and the Orwellian switch— occupier as victim.
“They’re all terrorists,” was the view my American friend clung to. A smokescreen hid the realities of the occupation, and it would be made thicker and blacker by Palestinian suicide bombings. We were to see this smokescreen thicken so much that Palestinians’ rights could be ignored and the retaliation to their resistance justified as “self-inflicted.” The denial of reality was brought home by news of Hillary Clinton, a one-time advocate for Palestinian rights, making her bid to become senator from our old home, New York. A local community leader pointed out that international law supported the right to resist an occupation: Mrs. Clinton said this statement was “offensive and outrageous.”13
How much more fair and frank, I was finding, were many Israeli commentators. Difficult as it was, they confronted the reality and declared the need to see events in context. “Since 1967,” wrote Israeli professor Baruch Kimmerling, “millions of Palestinians have been under a military occupation, without any civil rights, and most lacking even the most basic human rights. The continuing circumstances of occupation and repression give them, by any measure, the right to resist that occupation with any means at their disposal and to rise up against that occupation. This is a moral right inherent to natural law and international law.”14
* For example, Qibya, a West Bank village, 1953: in a reprisal raid, Sharon’s Unit 101 blew up 45 houses with the occupants inside, killing 67 people. The twelve-month “Pacification of Gaza,” 1971: a harsh policy of repression, blowing up houses, bulldozing large tracts of refugee camps, severe collective punishments, imprisoning hundreds of young Palestinians, with numerous civilians killed or imprisoned, and many others transported into the Sinai desert, Jordan, or Lebanon. Sabra and Shatila, refugee camps in Lebanon, 1982: during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the IDF allowed far-right Christian Phalangists to enter the camps and hundreds of Palestinian civilians were massacred. The ensuing Kahan commission recommended the removal of Sharon as Minister of Defense.
* Of the two main Israeli political parties, Labor was in power until 1977. Likud, which originated from several right-wing nationalist parties, has held power for much of the time since then. When Likud is in power, Labor tends to adopt a more moderate policy toward the Palestinians. Labor has served in Likud-led coalitions.
* The Israeli security forces had predicted that a visit by Ariel Sharon, “with all he represents to the inhabitants of the territories, would ignite the Palestinian street. Arafat and the security forces called on Barak not to permit the visit, but he closed his ears.”Arafat had contacted Prime Minister Barak the evening before to plead with him not to allow the visit, asking “Why would Sharon visit the Holy Mosque now when he did not do so when Begin... was his prime minister or even when he was the triumphant general of war?” Palestinian feelings, warned Arafat, were boiling with discontent.4
* The site was later restored by the Palestinian Authority.
* Bill Clinton had been deeply involved in trying to settle the conflict and had famously detailed knowledge of it. When George W. Bush succeeded him as President, US policy on the Israel-Palestine issue became more disengaged. This had the effect, officials admitted, of allowing a freer hand to the stronger party.
* In June 2004 this view was revised when Military Intelligence (MI) director Major General Amos Malka and other senior intelligence officials asserted that General Amos Gilad, head of MI research division at the start of the Intifada, had persuaded the cabinet to accept an “erroneous” view of the cause of the violence, and hence the “mistaken conclusion” that there was no Palestinian partner for peace. Malka and other senior intelligence officials disputed Gilad’s analysis because it was not supported by a single document produced by any of Israel’s intelligence agencies.10