Sholto’s arrival changed our sleeping habits but blew out the black hopelessness of the situation. Out of all the disintegration now there was a baby to brighten and distract: I hid myself away, tending to the somnolent dictator. My life had been changed in another way, by the arrival of Julita Arsenio who came to help us, all the way from Manila. Instantly adored by Catriona and the boys, Julita gently took charge, smoothed out our chaos, and became my close friend.
There were other distractions, including our new house in Scotland. Thick brown packages of plans and architects’ drawings arrived periodically for us to linger over. The children fussed over the baby and were happy in school, busy at home with their bikes and toy soldiers, and doing well. Jerusalem had us enthralled, with its irresistible light and beauty, the heady concentration of brilliant people, and the many good friends we had made.
We were all happy. It was just the situation, living alongside two extraordinary peoples who were bent on killing each other. Except they weren’t all. The killing was driven by the few. The baby had been born at a key moment, after a surge in violence and death and during a three-week ceasefire that gave a real chance for peace but which was rocked by the capture of the Karine-A weapons ship, then killed off by the IDF’s assassination of Raed Karmi.
We spent time with other friends, trying to keep the situation a taboo but it only worked so far. On our first outing without the baby we went to Ein Kerem with my friend Alison and her husband, Avi, who told me wicked tales of conferences in the Mediterranean and the passage-creeping antics of the Israeli and Palestinian attendees. Alison was explaining to Andrew that whereas many of the Jewish diaspora were understanding and reasonable, some Jews abroad pushed Israelis to make the Palestinians submit totally, “to hit them harder and harder ‘until they learn.’ ‘You must do this,’ they rant from far away, ‘whatever the costs.’” The costs, she said, “are the lives of my children—not theirs—it’s our children who have to serve as soldiers,” and also Israel’s future security. “Look what happens every time we assassinate one of their leaders—more violence, more suicide bombings.”
Avi broke off listing indiscretions and brought up a recent row when the French ambassador had called Israel “a shitty little country” at a private dinner in London. “You know,” said Avi with his mischievous smile and eyes full of humor, “I called Peres, and said to him, ‘Shimon, what’s this ridiculous story, how can we object to that?’ Peres said, ‘Of course, when it comes to the Palestinians, shitty is exactly how we behave.’ And he’s right. I don’t have a problem with that.”
Val Vester, the much-loved matriarch and owner of the American Colony Hotel, would often take us out of the conflict. On New Year’s Day, 2002, we had headed for her house in Jericho, sitting on the scarp beneath Mount Temptation, overlooking the ancient city. She and her late husband, Horatio, had been going there since long before the occupation began. Now, more often than not, the soldiers refused to let her pass through the Israeli checkpoint that controlled the city; the other roads to Jericho were blocked by concrete cubes and by the trench. This time a UN friend, French and unbreakably cheerful, persuaded the IDF blockade to let us in, with Val in our convoy of three families in three UN cars. The troopers on duty made an effort to question her, but not for long, and we spent a happy day in the golden Jericho light under the male and female mulberry trees of Val’s garden, preparing pitchers of Bloody Mary, eating smoked salmon sandwiches and talking about anything but the situation. While our children, with the two other families, one of four boys and another of four girls, ran round the famous archaeological digs of Kathleen Kenyon—the Walls of Jericho—Val told us about her life as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford, in the 1930s, her aunt Gertrude Bell who had helped map Iraq, and her own drive from London to Jerusalem in a Mini in the 1950s.
Now, in February, we celebrated Val’s 90th birthday: even then the situation broke in. The party was held at her hotel, the American Colony Hotel, described increasingly often in the Israeli press as a haven for foreign journalists who closed their eyes to the Israeli side. The reality was more prosaic. It was a remarkably fine hotel, unique, unpretentious, informal, and people liked to gather there: Israelis, Palestinians, and expatriates. On balmy nights there was an outdoor bar under the hushing palm trees, and when it grew chilly in the autumn, the bar went underground into dark, cushioned alcoves where the tall banged their heads on the low limestone arches and red wine was served in vast glasses to the unsuspecting. And because it was just inside East Jerusalem, many Palestinians felt more comfortable there, and less likely to be harassed for being Palestinian.
Many of the guests at Val’s birthday party were journalists who had stayed at the hotel over the years while covering the conflict, and now watched from afar. These incomers, one of whom had just then been two minutes away from a suicide bombing, were festive enough, but having returned, inevitably they wanted to talk about the situation. They were shocked by the escalation in attacks on Israelis, and how much the Israeli people were having to endure in the post-ceasefire storm of revenge.
They told us that watching from abroad left them vividly aware of the terrible violence inflicted on Israelis. That endured by the Palestinians, on the other hand, was too grinding, too chronic to be covered equally. I had heard this before, and would again.1 Almost without exception, they were saying, an Israeli death at the hands of Palestinians would be reported in the US media, whereas it might take up to ten dead Palestinians to warrant a report of their killing. And then an official Israeli line— “caught in the crossfire,” or “suspected terrorist cell’—would appear in the report, leaving the listener with the impression that every death was “justified.” Even describing the pattern as a “cycle of violence” implied that the sides were equally matched—an impression that helped deflect criticism for disproportionate military actions, and conceal that one side was resisting occupation. The context, they said, was hidden.
Despite my hiding from the situation, I could not avoid seeing that the violence was growing. On the ground the “kill-rate” increased. In two weeks (February 28–March 14, 2002) 2 foreigners, 58 Israelis, and 168 Palestinians, almost all of them civilians, were killed. More suicide bombings and more large-scale military onslaught followed: ground forces, tanks, attack helicopters, naval gunships, F-16s, missiles, and bombs of heavy tonnage used across the West Bank and Gaza, with a number of attacks on humanitarian agencies.
A female suicide bomber struck on February 28 at a checkpoint outside Nablus. Her story was unearthed soon enough: 21 years old, she was a refugee living in Balata camp. One month before she blew herself up, her brother had been killed by the IDF. A week before, the IDF had killed her fiancé.
The IDF struck back in return. Tanks and troops invaded Balata and Jenin camps, home to Palestinians who had lost their lands and houses in 1948 and 1967. I talked to a French friend who had returned from covering the situation in Balata in time to attend the bar mitzvah of the son of a mutual friend. In the marbled rooms of the best West Jerusalem hotel, the King David, a crowd of guests pressed and kissed, seemingly unaware of what was going on just a few miles away. The French journalist was swirled uncomfortably into the warmth and elegance, surrounded by platters of delicious foods, lulled by an orchestra playing South American music. She was at sea. And yet, as she said, the hosts resisted the occupation in their own way, in their own time, and were just trying to be normal for their son’s sake on his big day.
Trying to be normal was one reaction to the powerlessness that many Israelis felt in the face of extremism. Israeli papers were full of foreboding, some warning that Israelis must understand the causes of terror, and that terror came from despair, and of the consequences of the right wing’s agenda.*
Andrew and I went to a Peace Now rally outside the prime minister’s residence. Earlier that evening another Palestinian bomber had exploded himself, this time in Mea Sharim, near a synagogue just as the faithful were leaving after the last Shabbat prayers. Ten Israelis died, including a twelve-month-old baby. In many ways this bombing was even more appalling than the others: picking on worshippers, so many of them children, and the ultra-Orthodox, some of whom for theological reasons were not even supporters of the State of Israel.
I don’t know why we felt it was a good idea to go to the rally—there could so easily have been another bomber out there. We met American, French, and Israeli friends for a drink in a West Jerusalem wine bar, and then went on to join the thousands of Israelis calling for the occupation to end. Once through the police security checks, we milled about, bumping into other friends. At one point there was another loud explosion and a tremor went through the crowd. But it was not a bomb this time, we heard later on that night. Just something that sounded like a bomb.
Andrew said aloud, “How typical of the Palestinians to bomb now—what a sense of timing, with Israeli moderates demonstrating against the occupation.”
“It’s not surprising if it is a bomb,” came the firm response from Simone, art expert and wife of an Israeli government spokesman, “after what they did in Balata refugee camp.”
“Who—” asked Andrew, a little surprised, “the Palestinians?”
“No,” replied Simone, looking at him hard. “The IDF.”
The mood was bewildered, dispirited, funereal. Everyone knew about the bomb that evening, and that there might be another. Everyone felt the hopelessness. Placards waved in the darkness, numbering the dead Israelis and the dead Palestinians. The quietness was almost apologetic. One Israeli woman wandered among the crowd asking for donations of blood. Confused, a French journalist asked her: “Is that for those injured tonight in Mea Sharim?”
“No, there’s enough for them,” came the reply. “This is for the Palestinians injured in the attack on Balata.”
But all the talk of ceasefires, diplomatic initiatives, and imminent envoys—let alone a few demonstrations—was now an irrelevant whisper against the clamor for destruction and revenge. Both peoples were being driven to new levels of vengeance and rage: while Israelis lined up their dead, killed by suicide bombers, Palestinians lined up their own dead, killed by the IDF, and coped with the relentless demolitions, bombings, curfew, closures, raids, settler attacks and shootings.
By March 9, 2002 Israelis and Palestinians were being killed almost every day. Refugee camps were ravaged, Israeli tanks were deep inside Palestinian towns, destroying, shooting, crushing cars, and soldiers were running amok through Palestinian homes and lives. That week the Israeli prime minister had stated: “We must cause them losses, casualties!” shocking many, including commentator Ze’ev Schiff, who feared Sharon’s war-cry would be interpreted “as a call for indiscriminate casualties.” Schiff warned that “if we follow the course now suggested by Sharon, it will guarantee the most possible chaos and perhaps also some massacres.”3
On the night of Schiff’s warning an enormous explosion tore apart a popular Jerusalem bar, Café Moment, hard on the heels of another suicide bombing, in Netanya. In the heart of Jerusalem, Café Moment was feet from the prime ministerial residence where we had demonstrated with Peace Now. We had been to the restaurant from time to time and passed it at least twice each day. Now it was a killing-zone. Twelve people died, the bomber making thirteen. A few days later 39 Palestinians were killed during IDF raids into Jabalya camp in Gaza and Deheisha camp in Bethlehem.
Efrat Ravid was twenty years old when Café Moment was bombed. Human Rights Watch, which condemned suicide bombings as war crimes, reported that her thigh was shattered and she suffered a serious brain hemorrhage. She couldn’t speak for a week, walked only with crutches months afterward and never smiled. In the interview she described her reactions: “My biggest fear was that they would amputate my leg—there were so many people in that hospital with missing limbs. They told me not to worry—they did an artery transplant, and said that even if it got infected later, there’d be enough time to do surgery. I’ve had ten operations since the attack. I also had a nail just a few millimeters from my heart... The friend I had been with was also injured—her intestines spilled right out. We don’t talk any more. It brings up too many bad memories. The girl sitting on the other side of me—I didn’t know her—she was killed. My friends don’t go out any more. They realized when this happened to me, it could have been them.”4
By March 25, IDF military incursions were daily events, leaving 23 Palestinians dead in that week alone, and many more wounded. As Maha and I nursed our babies together in her house one afternoon, the television on as always, she leveled curses at the images we were seeing from the refugee camps. “For the refugees,” she said, “invasions are terrifying events,” in lives already full of terror; families never knew whether the invasion meant they would lose their homes (again) or perhaps their lives. Each time the tanks invaded they demolished yet more homes and even fired into houses and makeshift shelters put up for the newly homeless. The IDF spokesman announced that “one Palestinian was reportedly killed during Israeli army activity in Rafah”: he was describing the death of a four-year-old girl, shot in the head as she sat inside her home.
One Israeli friend told me later how Israeli TV audiences were shocked to see footage of one of the many IDF raids. On their screens a Palestinian mother was hit by shrapnel as the soldiers blasted their way into her home. She bled to death in front of her children—and the Israeli public. Sharon was maddened, accusing the TV station of “serving the interests of our enemy.” Knesset member Ran Cohen defended the media, pointing out that they were only doing their job, and it was the soldiers who were doing these things to Palestinian civilians. Israeli television crews found themselves banned from accompanying the IDF into Palestinian areas.
Then, in the last week of March, the Arab League offered Israel a peace plan. A military solution would not bring peace, the authors said. The Saudi Peace Plan called on Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied since June 1967, achieve a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem, and accept the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return, the Arab League would end the Arab-Israeli conflict and establish normal relations with Israel.
Andrew phoned from Beirut. Beirut is closer to Jerusalem than New York is to Boston, but because of the state of Lebanese-Israeli relations he had to loop through complicated telephonic hoops to speak to me. Through a New York connection that was put through to the UN office in Gaza, and then to me in Jerusalem, he talked about the plan’s great significance. Recognition and normalization: the very things most Israelis longed for. All those debilitating and understandable fears of being surrounded by a sea of Arab aggression—and here was the Arab world offering peace, after decades of war and insecurity. Not only that, but the effective abandonment of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.
“It could be a breakthrough. The question is, which lot of hardliners will screw it up for everyone else first.”
Instead of welcoming the Saudi plan and jumping at the peace Israelis longed for, the government would roll tanks into Ramallah a few hours after the summit ended. The day before, on March 27, 29 Israelis had died at the hands of a suicide bomber sent by Hamas, giving justification for the invasion. The infamous Passover bomb was one of the most atrocious inflicted on Israel. The victims were mostly elderly people sitting in a hotel in Netanya, celebrating the holy feast of Passover. It was a repulsive crime. And it came on the brink of the long-expected military offensive.
Hamas admitted using terror to control events: “Our operation coincided with the Arab summit in Beirut... (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.”5 Likewise Islamic Jihad had aimed to spike General Zinni’s latest mission to establish a ceasefire, admitting, “The Zinni mission [which included the disarmament of groups like Hamas and the arrest of their leaders] was bad for us.”6
One of the hundreds injured in the bombing was Clara Rosenberger. Seventy-six years old, she had survived three and a half years as a prisoner in Auschwitz. She had chosen to celebrate Passover at the Park Hotel because she was afraid of bombings and thought the hotel would be safe, and had gone to the seder with one of her friends. The bomb killed her friend. Shrapnel severed Clara’s spinal cord, leaving her paralyzed. Her daughter told Human Rights Watch that Clara withdrew into her own world: “She was involved in all kinds of senior citizens’ activities... Now she is very dependent. She has no strength to deal with it—it was punishment enough that her life, with its tragedies, was as it was. She can’t sit up because she is paralyzed from the underarms down, so she has no chest muscles. From the first moment we spoke after the attack, she said, ‘What happened to me was the very thing I did not want to happen to me, to be a burden on others.’ She won’t ever be able to return home.”7
Andrew came back from the Arab League summit. I picked him up in Herzliya and we drove back to Jerusalem through the quiet. It was dark when we reached the monastery of Latrun, the last of the plains before the hills rose to Jerusalem. Up the winding Route 1 snaked a convoy of long, low military trailers. Each trailer bore a tank, heavy, vast, impregnable. We passed them silently, our vehicle thin-shelled and feeble. IDF officials were telling diplomats: “We’ve had enough. What we’re about to launch in the territories is something you can’t imagine.” Final preparations were in overdrive, confirmed by the long columns of tanks and armory filling the wide Israeli highway toward the West Bank. Now it felt like war. Ramallah was invaded, and the offensive launched.
Sharon addressed the Israeli nation: “The State of Israel is in a war, a war against terror.” He went on, “Ever since I was elected, the State of Israel has made every effort to reach a ceasefire. Amidst the wave of Palestinian terror, we set before us the goal of doing our utmost to achieve calm and make progress toward political agreements... All we received in return for our efforts was terror, terror and more terror.
“We must,” he said, “wage an uncompromising fight against this terror, uproot these weeds. It is impossible to compromise with someone who is prepared—like the suicide bombers on the streets of Israel’s cities and at the World Trade Center in the US—to die in order to kill innocent civilians, children, women, and infants.”
And, he said, this terror was operated, directed, and initiated by one man—Yasser Arafat. The PA chairman was “an enemy of Israel in particular and the world in general.”8
Thousands of reservists had been called up. It is strange to watch people you see and talk to every day suddenly dragged out of their civilian lives, reclad in uniform, and sent off to war. Sometimes people just disappeared, without warning, like the newsagent from whom I bought Ha’aretz each day. Others had received their orders in advance, like the man in the dry-cleaner’s. He said very little about going, only that he “had to.” There the conversation ended; both of us knew the unspoken—the risk that he might be killed, the reality that he might have to kill—but neither of us wanted to start that debate and find out just what the other thought. Not at this point.
Israelis wanted to hit back, such was their great anguish, magnified so starkly by the Passover bombing. It was not the urgent need to respond but the nature of the response that so many people took issue with.9
We tried to escape again. We left the gathering madness to head for Luxor and the quiet of the Nile for a few days during the school spring break, mainly out of duty to the children. Having planned the trip weeks before, we went despite knowing what was coming—there had been too many, too horrific, Palestinian attacks on Israelis—and now the major offensive, so long on the drawing board,10 was rolling. Getting away usually gave us a break from the constant wearying confrontation, but not this time: sitting on a felucca pretending to be on holiday was a party trick played for the children, who didn’t enjoy it either. It didn’t feel good to be admiring Nefertiti’s newly renovated tomb and the achievements of the builders of Karnak when half a dozen CNN bulletins a day showed the siege and bombardment that friends were suffering. We were glad to get back.
Having watched the onslaught from afar—as town after Palestinian town was invaded—we returned to a wet and somber Jerusalem. Rain and mist blurred the city and the greening hills around us, and the checkpoints became a slurry of mud. News and stories were filtering through from those trapped in the territories: friends, work colleagues, and journalists of all description. One UN friend shook as he told us how the IDF had grabbed his (Palestinian) colleagues, arrested them, and led them off—they wouldn’t tell him where. Jerusalem throbbed with the sound of helicopters and jets overhead, but no information was forthcoming—officially—from the battlefields: the IDF were, alarmingly, determined to do their work unseen.
A colleague from Ramallah, a lecturer in public health at al-Quds University called Raghda, met me in Jerusalem. Wrapped in winter clothes, we sipped mint tea in a café near the Damascus Gate in the Old City. A forthright woman, more at home discussing iodine deficiency than military strategy, Raghda now appeared almost subdued. She and her children had managed to get out of Ramallah on the day the IDF came in, but she had had to leave her husband and extended family behind. “Even when the curfew is lifted,” she said, “the IDF still shoot. There is no burial of the dead. Houses are being demolished. We won’t recognize Ramallah when we get back. When the children and I left there were 700 people trying to get out through Qalandia. Qalandia—a checkpoint between two Palestinian areas! The soldiers were shooting at us and swearing. We tried to explain to the children why they did this, but it is difficult to find a reason.”
It became clear enough, soon enough, that “Operation Defensive Shield” was on a bigger scale than anything in the West Bank since 1967. The media were full of Arafat’s compound being laid to waste during the recapture of Ramallah. The TV images of buildings toppled and crushed, homing in on the one where Arafat was holed up, were like a child’s game: how many buildings can you destroy before the whole thing collapses?
All over the West Bank cities were under total curfew, massive bombardment, and persistent sniper fire. From afar, it looked like war. On site, it must have been infernal.
And yet, close as the two peoples were, there had never been more separation. In our lives there were distant war noises and anguished phone calls from the besieged, but the supermarkets were spilling over with food and policemen were concerned with directing traffic and parking offenses. Unless we listened, we would not hear the destructive misery just over the hill. And it seemed most Israelis were not listening, or were hearing something different. 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 into the next,* searching, arresting, looting, beating, and blasting out again to do the same to the next family, Israelis heard that “terrorist nests” were being rooted out. 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. It wasn’t that our Israeli friends had never had contact with Palestinians—not at all, many had a number of close friends who were Palestinian. Now, though, they no longer saw them: literally and figuratively.
On the other side, the invisible needed to hear from the outside world. They needed to talk to friends who were not living under curfew, running out of water, food, and medicines, and whose streets were not patrolled by army vehicles manned by soldiers who would shoot them if they went out to look for food. A Christian friend in Ramallah told me that for once the bombardment had not been too severe, but that she had nevertheless been up all night calling the hospital. Her mother had a long history of cardiac problems, and her symptoms had started again: shortness of breath, pain down her arm, the usual. Except that the “usual,” in another world, would have been dealt with by calling an ambulance and getting her to the hospital. Instead, she had to make do with a treatment program cobbled together out of the bathroom cabinet directed by a doctor on the end of the phone. The IDF were not allowing ambulances to move. The sick and wounded were scattered around the city without access to medical care. Ambulances were not even allowed to help mothers in labor or kidney patients in need of dialysis. Shots were fired at ambulances that did try to evacuate patients.11
When you say baldly, “Curfew means not getting the sick to the hospital,” you can avoid feeling the fear, the grinding frustration, and the injustice; words, however accurate, are inadequate. It is easier to hear “On Friday, April 5th, tanks moved in to encircle Jenin camp and the hospital” than to imagine just how that feels. Tanks are monsters: heartless, omnipotent, petrifying. They crawl, rumbling ominously, crushing metal and concrete like scraps of waste paper. When one turns its massive gun slowly toward you, you know what impotence is; your quiet flesh against awesome firepower that can pulverize whatever it pleases. From the tanks’ insides, voices over loudspeakers ordered Jenin’s hospital staff and patients to evacuate the top floor, which had views south over the refugee camp. One patient, too slow to obey, was shot in the throat as he looked out of the window.12
Within four days of the invasion of Jenin, the hospital’s mortuary was overwhelmed and the staff had to dig graves in the hospital grounds to bury the dead, including a thirteen-year-old boy shot by an IDF sniper on the first day, a newborn baby, and an old woman who had died for lack of oxygen—the oxygen bottles had been damaged by gunfire two days before. While the hospital staff dug into the earth to create the graves and bury the dead, IDF helicopters circled overhead, firing warning shots.
An Israeli peace activist, Neta Golan, added her voice to the hundreds of Palestinian academics, human rights workers, aid workers, and individuals all begging the international community to do something. One of a group of volunteers providing a human shield inside Arafat’s compound, she wrote: “Inside the pock-marked building surrounded by Israeli tanks and snipers there is one question on everyone’s mind: how many international laws does Israel need to break before the United Nations demands a full and immediate Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank?... Israel has now escalated from interrupting food shipments to shutting off water to the Palestinian city of Ramallah, endangering the lives of 120,000 people. The shelling of Palestinian civilian structures such as power plants, schools and sewage facilities is occurring at an alarming rate. Unarmed civilians are being killed daily.”13
Israelis had just had enough—enough death, enough fear—and now they felt that “at last” they were hitting back. On March 11, right-wing demonstrators in Tel Aviv had chanted, “We want war,” and waved banners that shouted “Arafat is part of the axis of evil,” and “Peres and Beilin are more dangerous than Arafat,” presumably because of their efforts to arrive at a peace. Now they had their war. Sharon’s approval rating rose from 45 percent to 62 percent between March and April.14
Sharon addressed the Knesset on April 8. He spoke of the many victims of the latest suicide bombings in Netanya and Haifa, and of individual acts of great nobility even at moments of the greatest suffering—a bereaved wife, Zahava Wieder, had agreed to donate her husband’s organs to a Palestinian. He spoke of entire families being destroyed in the heat of murderous insanity, and he scorned Arafat’s assumption that he would be able to defeat Israel and break its spirit. In an admission that ran counter to the widely touted claim that Arafat’s plan was still a Palestinian state on the whole of Israel rather than just the Occupied Territories, Sharon declared: “In our sensitivity to the sanctity of human life and in our openness for political debate, he sees basic weakness. By way of blood and horror he wants to force Israel into a unilateral withdrawal to its 1967 borders.”15
I lingered in Salahadin Street, in East Jerusalem. This road was a long curve of stores selling almost everything you could want, including good bread. The baker, who held a degree in economics, always liked to discuss the latest development, military and political. He still did, in contrast to some Israeli friends’ uncharacteristic silence. He said he had been amazed at the ironies of Sharon’s speech— “Thinking he can convince a people to renounce violence by beating them senseless, for a start”—as well as by his condemnation of killing civilians. And, he added, Palestinians didn’t care if the withdrawal was unilateral or not—the ‘67 borders would do just fine.
Sharon’s speech was published on April 9, Holocaust Day. On the same day I read that Peres was worried about the international reaction when the world learned “the details of the tough battle in the Jenin refugee camps, where more than 100 Palestinians have already been killed fighting with IDF forces. In private,” the report said, “Peres is referring to the battle as ‘a massacre.’”16 IDF officers told the reporters that they too were worried by the operation in Jenin. “When the world sees the pictures of what we have done there, it will do us immense damage. However many wanted men we kill in the refugee camp, and however much of the terror infrastructure we expose and destroy there, there is still no justification for causing such great destruction.”17
That day thirteen IDF soldiers were killed in an ambush in Jenin refugee camp, lured into a trap by Palestinian fighters, the terrorists who were being “flushed out.” Israelis were mad with anger at the soldiers’ deaths. The radio, TV, the papers, the conversations on both sides were stiff with fury and the desire for revenge. “No one understands,” one Israeli told me, “what we’ve been through—129 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks in March alone.” Outraged that the world could not see how “moderate” the IDF was being, some said, “If we were a third world country we would have surrounded the camps with artillery and opened fire.” A reservist put it more bluntly: “What are they [the world] talking about... If these were Americans, they would tell everyone to get out, and then they would bomb the place with jets, and whoever didn’t leave, it’s his own problem.”18
Equal wrath was unleashed from the Palestinian side. “They use all those high-tech American weapons to slaughter Palestinians and they’re outraged that we fight back? What are we supposed to do—lie down and let them kill us?” was the greeting that hailed me as I met one woman in the schoolyard. She was normally sanguine, even long-suffering, but this had pushed her over the edge.
On April 10, shortly after Sharon announced that IDF operations had stopped the terrorists in their tracks and had them on the run, there was a suicide bombing near Haifa. Eight people were killed and fourteen injured. The dead included Noa Shlomo. Eighteen years old and a talented ballet dancer, she was the niece of Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Yehuda Lancry. Another suicide bomb followed two days later; six people were killed and 104 wounded by a woman suicide bomber at a bus stop on Jaffa Road at the entrance to Mahane Yehuda market, not far from the school.
In Jenin the fighting, which had paused after the thirteen IDF soldiers were killed, began again. Now the Palestinian fighters—and civilians—were contending with yet more hardware raining down on the camp. Fewer troops coursed through its narrow alleys, searching from house to house, but there were more giant bulldozers and bombardment with tanks and missiles. Israeli media reported estimates of the number of Palestinians killed in Jenin: 150.* The IDF were pounding the Palestinian infrastructure. The Palestinian Preventative Security offices in Ramallah and Hebron had been totally destroyed. And there had been break-ins at the offices of the Palestinian Legislative Council, with reams of files and documents stolen.
Why destroy children’s exam records? people asked. Where does destroying driving license records get the Israelis? And dental records? Even the archaeological center’s incomparable collections were taken. “This is what Sharon did in Lebanon too,” said my colleague Ayesha over the phone. “He’s trying to rob Palestine of its past as well as its future. But he cannot remove our past.”
The IDF had cut off electricity and water days before. The curfew throughout the West Bank and the intensity of the Closure were making a bad situation impossible. Frantic phone calls came through from friends and colleagues in the West Bank: even if people ventured out of their houses when the curfew was lifted for a couple of hours, supplies of food and medicines were not getting through to stock up the shops, and these were being looted by IDF troops. If they could reach the shops and if the supplies had got through and were not looted, then people hadn’t the money to pay for them. On top of this were the fears of being picked off by snipers and of being “visited” by an IDF unit: at any time of the day or night the door would be beaten in, the place ransacked, belongings stolen, televisions smashed, clothes pulled out and ripped up, food supplies that weren’t stolen emptied on to the floor and trodden underfoot, and soldiers shitting on their possessions. And then, after all the destruction, there could be arrest and detention—hundreds held without trial, no one knew where.
Meanwhile the outside world still appeared, to those inside, to be doing nothing about it. This reinforced the Palestinian belief that they did not qualify as human beings in the eyes of foreigners. Ayesha, on the phone again, was distraught at having to watch an old man lying dead in the street outside their house, his daughter bleeding to death beside him, and no one able to help because of the curfew and the likelihood of being shot. “When two statues in Afghanistan are destroyed,” she said, “there is outrage.* When we are destroyed—there is nothing.”
The remaining 29 fighters in Jenin ran out of ammunition and surrendered on April 11. A convoy of international agencies left Jerusalem with humanitarian aid for the besieged town, Andrew included. Many of those in the convoy had met the night before, having congregated at the American Colony bar after a reception given by the British Consul General. The bar had been full, as so often when there was a “big story,” and there was talk among expatriates and Israeli journalists about what was going on, what was going to happen, and what should be done. Soon they would bump into each other again in the field, an altogether different meeting ground.
Andrew phoned to say they were about to enter Jenin camp, but called back a few minutes later to say they had been stopped. Having told the international delegation they would be given access to the camp, within an hour the IDF had changed their mind. The camp, they said, was “full of booby traps” but specialist IDF units would clear the camp of these traps by the following morning. Then the convoy could go in.
In Jerusalem we watched and listened. Journalists were doing what they could to file stories despite the army’s restrictions. Consulates were doing what they could to help employees and nationals stuck under curfew without supplies. I was hearing details of people’s plight elsewhere in the Occupied Territories—one was stuck alone in Ramallah with two very young children and no food left. But after the death of the thirteen Israeli soldiers, Jenin was dominating everything. The international delegation was trying to persuade the IDF to allow humanitarian aid through to where it was needed. The PA was shouting about massacres: their spokesman Saeb Erekat was interviewed, claiming hundreds were dead, from his Jericho base. The IDF announced that two companies of IDF infantry were about to be dispatched to collect bodies, and that terrorists would be buried in the Jordan Valley.19
The delegation split up: Andrew and an ICRC* official went to the Jenin hospital. Andrew talked to the hospital staff while the ICRC official went upstairs to meet the head of the hospital. As the official and the hospital director stood talking three bullets were fired between the two men, who were feet apart, hitting the wall behind them. A retired British colonel, the ICRC official had no doubt about the source of the shots: the building was flying Red Crescent flags (showing that it was a hospital), and the window through which the shots had been fired overlooked the town, which was under full Israeli control. He went downstairs and told Andrew what had happened, looking jaunty enough but saying that he had never been nearer to death in his life. His comment, after the sniper had missed him, on the IDF’s explanation for not allowing relief organizations into the camp—the threat of booby traps—was that this was “spurious crap.”
The ICRC delegation members’ anger at not being allowed to start work mounted. That a government would prevent their relief work—this never happened, however dangerous the setting. Not in Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo, nowhere. War was what they dealt with, they said, the risks were theirs to take on and no one kept them out. The ICRC is usually the first in and the last out of a crisis: when I worked in Kabul its people were busy repairing mine injuries and war injuries with consummate skill and professionalism under terrible conditions. And they do not comment on the political situation, but in this case they did comment, saying they might have expected such treatment from drugged-up kids or warlords in Sierra Leone, but not from a government or its army.
Refused entry to the camp, and thinking the IDF would allow them in early next morning, Andrew and the ICRC team spent the night at the Jenin hospital. We talked by phone at intervals, Andrew concerned that his phone batteries would fail: the power was still cut off. Every now and then he would ask, “Did you hear that?” at the sound in the distance of controlled explosions. Tractors and bulldozers had been busy that afternoon, and continued long into the night, and there were bursts of unopposed fire. The next day the delegation was, again, denied entry to the camp.
One of Andrew’s team joined a ward round in Jenin hospital. When he returned to Jerusalem he told me what he had seen: an 85-year-old man shot in both legs in his home on the second day of the fighting; a 60-year-old man shot in the buttock while he prayed at home; a pregnant woman shot in the leg; an elderly woman shot in the hand as she lay asleep in her house; a 79-year-old man shot in the right hand—he had been told to leave his house at night, which he did, with his hands up, but he was shot anyway.
An IDF surgeon told the ICRC chief the next morning (April 13) that there were no more wounded in the camp. “None of the wounded are alive.” There was still no access to the refugee camp. Peering in from its northern edge, those trying to get in to help could see swathes of destruction, which the IDF were clearing. Refugees were leaning out of houses inside the camp that bordered on the city’s limits, calling out for water and for food. The fighters had surrendered, the negotiators said: what could be the delay? What could be stopping the IDF from allowing the distribution of water? The delegation continued to push. The IDF said they must wait another day. Humanitarian workers were passing in food and water to anyone they could reach. One was a family whose pleas were heard from just inside the camp. The Israeli soldiers on guard let the UN workers drop off supplies that the family could pick up. By morning, the soldiers had been told to stop them.
An American friend contacted me from Chicago to say he’d seen Andrew interviewed from Jenin on Peter Jennings’ ABC primetime news. He looked unshaven, sunburned, angry but composed. He’d been stopped by journalists on the way out and asked for his assessment.
“There are reports of hundreds of dead in the rubble. But we can’t verify this because the IDF won’t let us in,” he’d said.
“Why not?”
“They say it’s for our security.”
“And what do you think?”
There he was cut off, having declined to answer.
At last, on April 15—more than two weeks after the invasion—the ICRC and PRCS (Palestine Red Crescent Society) were allowed into the Jenin refugee camp. The ICRC came out of the camp saying it looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake, with houses destroyed and collapsing into streets filled with rubble. The people were in shock, in urgent need of water and food, and pleading for information about relatives who had disappeared.20 An UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) convoy was standing by, loaded with food and water for civilians inside the camp. The local IDF liaison, IDF Central Command, and a high-level general assured the UN team that the convoy had clearance and that a special liaison officer had been appointed to help them. The trucks advanced toward the camp checkpoint.
Five hours later, the convoy was still trying to persuade the checkpoint soldiers that IDF Central Command really had granted permission for the trucks to enter. Andrew called me during the farce: the cycle of phoning Central Command to reconfirm clearance, then telling the checkpoint soldiers, who refused to let them in. The cycle ended only when the UN military advisor, Mick Humphries, a no-nonsense Australian colonel with a commanding presence, handed his cell phone to the soldiers on the checkpoint so that they could hear, with him watching, the liaison officer saying: “Let the convoy through.”
Then once through, and barely inside the camp, an IDF platoon stopped the convoy again. An hour later the soldiers decided the convoy could unload the supplies where they stood. But, the soldiers added, the curfew was not going to be lifted—on any account—until the following day. The convoy knew what this meant: depositing the rations inside the camp would tempt the refugees to break the curfew, leave their houses, and risk being shot to get water and food. So they turned back, trucks still laden. Along the way children, mothers, and old people leaned out of windows, begging for food. The drivers managed to give out handfuls of supplies. This was four days after the last fighters in the camp had surrendered, and after days of continuous negotiation for humanitarian access. Finally, the following morning, April 16, a couple of trucks were allowed through and were able to distribute water and food.
I was following the saga with a steady simmer of amazement. Then a friend emailed an American article: all the destruction and cruelty, which the children could see and many Israelis said would only create more terrorists, were for our own good: “It’s yet another burden that Israel must carry in its courageous battle to defeat the evil menace of terrorism.”21 I mentioned the article to an Israeli friend. She was not surprised, but I was—by her reaction: “This is nothing new, it’s always been the role given to Jews, to do the West’s dirty work for them.” Israel, she said, was playing proxy to the US administration’s agenda in return for tolerance of the Israeli government’s agenda. “France and Britain used us in ‘56 when they wanted to deal with Nasser, just as kings in medieval Europe used Jewish communities, and the result now, as then, was that the Jews ended up taking the blame and being hated. See the rise in anti-Semitism now?”
She ended with: “Look at the confusion in the US administration; they use us when they need us and condemn us if they think we go too far.” First the world had seen the US President ignored: he had called for the Israelis to withdraw, and when they still hadn’t obeyed three days later, Bush had menaced, “When I say withdraw, I mean it.” But still Sharon did not withdraw. And then a little later, “the day after the refugees were allowed food and water, Bush called Sharon a ‘man of peace.’” She was not alone in noting the inconsistency of US policy.22
On Thursday, April 18, the UN Special Coordinator visited the Jenin refugee camp. Standing in the rubble, a flak jacket on his torso and a smell under his nose, he looked appalled. “No military operation can justify this scale of destruction,” he said. “Whatever the purpose was, the effect is collective punishment of a whole society.” His observations, including that the conditions “were horrific, beyond belief,” and that Israel had “lost the moral high ground,” offended Israelis, and he found himself smeared on an unrelated front: a bizarre allegation of financial impropriety.*
On Israel Radio there was a live interview with a reservist, Colonel Didi Yedidya. The colonel said that the UN representative had been misinformed, that the IDF had not denied entry to rescue teams at all. He said that they had been allowed in during the entire period, subject only to the condition that they pass through an Israeli inspection point so that the Israelis could make certain that wanted terrorists were not smuggled out. Few teams, as he recalled, had accepted these conditions and furthermore, he said, the IDF had found wanted terrorists hiding in evacuation vehicles.23
Three days later Major Dr. David Tzengan gave a briefing on his recollections of Jenin. He described the fear we all felt so often, the panic of knowing that a bomb had gone off near the hospital where he worked in Jerusalem and of not knowing where his children were. He also described the feelings after the Passover Massacre, of wanting to volunteer for “a war for our lives and our children’s lives.” In Jenin, he explained, the IDF took risks to avoid harming civilians, but the camp—home to 13–15,000 people—was not civilian, he insisted, it was a center of terror. The UN accusations were baseless, he said, the hospital in Jenin was not fired on and ambulances were not stopped.24
The army version survived despite the evidence, despite eyewitness accounts, and despite Israelis’ own attempts to hear what happened. The first Israeli eyewitness testimony was an interview with a soldier who drove a D-9 in the Jenin refugee camp, published in Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper. D-9s are armored bulldozers of a scale that makes you, when you see them, feel suddenly shrunken. They are colossal, malevolent, and out of all proportion to the driver, who sits tiny inside a carapace of tonnage, encased in thick steel to withstand rock, concrete, and mines. They are used to break houses, shear orchards, crush greenhouses, crops, workshops, and to terrify.
The soldier, a reservist called Moshe Nissim, described his role in the Jenin refugee camp: “The funny bit is, I didn’t even know how to operate the D-9. But I begged them to give me a chance to learn... The moment I drove the tractor into the camp, something switched in my head. I went mad... I had no problem of fatigue, because I drank whisky all the time... Anyhow I could not leave the tractor. You open the door, and get a bullet. For 75 hours I didn’t think about my life at home, about all the problems... sometimes images of terror attacks in Jerusalem crossed my mind... I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, just so that our soldiers won’t expose themselves to any danger... This is why I didn’t give a damn about demolishing all the houses... I wanted to destroy everything... For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed... They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance; I didn’t wait. I didn’t give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible... I didn’t give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn’t just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders. Many people were inside houses we started to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9, and I didn’t see houses falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses. But it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind about dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried forty or fifty people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down...”25
* Nahum Barnea, chief commentator for Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, advised his readers not to regard terror as a “blight of nature.” “The current escalation in terror began with the government’s decision to ignore the arrest of Minister Ze’evi’s assassins, and to continue to keep Arafat under house arrest in Ramallah,” which he defined as part of the right wing’s intention to humiliate Arafat in front of the Palestinian people. He urged Israelis to recognize that “the terrorism of suicide bombings was born of despair, and there is no military solution to despair,” and that the only one who could radically change the situation was Ariel Sharon. The right wing, he warned, “is pushing him to an all-out war, at the end of which, so hopes the Right, the door will open to the expulsion of millions of Palestinians.”2
* A military practice known as “mouseholing”: using explosives to punch holes between houses to avoid exposing troops to the street.
* The final figures were 54 in Jenin. More than 80 were killed in Nablus. In that city on April 6 the IDF bulldozed a house on top of 10 members of the al-Shu’bi family, killing 8 of them. The dead included three children, their pregnant mother, and their 85-year-old grandfather. Two elderly relatives were found—alive—under the rubble a week later.
* In September 1999, the ruling Taliban regime blew up two giant Buddhas that had been carved into the mountain walls of Bamyan Province 1,700 years before.
* International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Crescent is the Islamic branch of the Red Cross.
* Some years before, the UN representative, Terje Roed-Larsen, and his wife, Mona Juul, had received prizes from the Peres Peace Center. Though straightforward and declared at the time, the subject was brought up again now in an attempt to create a scandal, presenting the award as “evidence” of corruption.