April Thursday 12-2001:
In any other place, it would be a scandal, an outrage. If Palestinians had wilfully destroyed the homes of 200 Israelis, there would be talk of barbarism, of "terrorism", grave warnings from George Bush to Mr Arafat to "curb violence". But it was the Israelis who destroyed the homes of at least 200 Palestinians early yesterday morning, bulldozing their furniture, clothes, cookers, carpets and mattresses into the powdered concrete of their hovels until one end of Khan Younis looked as though it had been hit by an earthquake.
So of course, it was not "terrorism". It was "security". The old sat like statues amid the garbage tip that the Israelis had made of their houses. Many of them, like 75-year old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, had been driven from their homes in Palestine in his case from Beersheba in 1948; now they were dispossessed by the same people for the second time in 53 years, courtesy this time of Ariel Sharon.
Maybe it is possible to shame history. But what happened in Khan Younis yesterday, however the Israelis dress up their vandalism with talk of "security", was a disgrace.
It wasn't the first time Israel had destroyed Palestinian homes in Gaza. They learned the principle, if such a word can be used, of collective civilian punishment from the British. In 1993, they blew apart the apartments of more than 100 people because a Hamas gunman had taken cover among the buildings. They were at it again last week.
But yesterday was on a new and unprecedented scale as a battery of bulldozers was sent to pulverise the houses above the sea from where, according to the Israeli army, shots had previously been directed at their occupation soldiers. As the machines careered up the road from the coast just after midnight, thousands of people ran screaming from their huts and concrete shelters.
Many of them fled to the nearest mosque where they seized the loudspeakers and appealed to their neighbours "to take arms and resist". To the apparent surprise of the Israeli army, that is just what their neighbours did.
As Palestinian rifles were turned on the bulldozers, at least two Israeli tanks raced up the same road and began firing shells into the nearest apartment blocks. An Apache helicopter gunship appeared out of the darkness, launching missiles into the same buildings. And as old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan and his family remember all too clearly, a crane suddenly moved out of the darkness, a clutch of Israeli soldiers in the bucket from where, once the crane's chain had hauled the container to its highest point, the troops opened fire.
The firefight lasted for four hours and left two Palestinians dead and 30 wounded, 12 of them critically, among them a Reuters camera crew hit when a shell shattered the wall behind which they were standing.
Ariel Sharon, the biggest bulldozer of them all, had taught the Palestinians another lesson. But picking one's way through the muck and dust of 35 houses, it didn't take long to realise that the lesson they had grasped was not quite the one Israel had intended.
Mariam abu Radwan, a cousin of old Ahmed, put it very eloquently yesterday afternoon. "We have no life anymore," she said. "This is the destruction of our life. Let them shoot us please let them shoot us and we can die here. And let the Israelis die too. No-one is looking after, no Arab countries, no foreign countries also."
One of the dead was Riad Elias, a Palestinian security forces officer, who was presumably fighting the Israelis when he died, but the second, Hani Rizk, was identified to me as a cleaner at the local Naser hospital, the same hospital to which his body was taken before his funeral yesterday afternoon.
Ibrahim Amer, a 35-year old agricultural worker who says he was hit in the back and side by machine-gun bullets from a helicopter as he ran (he lay in bloodsoaked pain in the Naser hospital yesterday afternoon) saw Rizk running in the street "when a spray of bullets from the helicopter ricocheted against a wall and hit him. He had at least 12 bullets in his body." A Jewish settlers' road, forbidden to Arabs, runs along the sea-coast below this end of Khan Younis.
At least one family told me they did not always stay in their home "because of the shooting". Ask anyone amid the rubble yesterday if shots had, in the past, been fired at the Israelis from here and the answer was invariably the same: "I never saw anyone." Which is not quite the same as saying that no-one ever fired. But like the nightly shelling of Beit Jalla village, the Israeli onslaught on Khan Younis was more than disproportionate; it was a deliberate attack on civilians. The only record of the event was made by a Palestinian Reuters camera-crew who were filming one of the Israeli tanks from 50 metres away.
"We were on the second floor of a building and some bullets from a helicopter came into our room," Mohamed Shenaa, the Reuters sound-man, told me from his bed in the Naser Hospital. "We tried to look after the camera and were standing with our backs to a wall when the wall was destroyed and I was thrown six feet into the air." He has wounds in his back, thigh and left arm.
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Independent, 12-4-2001.
April Friday 13-2001:
Death
by remote control as hit squads return
(1)
When the Israelis came for Abu Jihad exactly 13 years ago, they employed up to 4,000 men for his assassination. There was an Awacs plane over Tunis, a squadron of jets to protect the Awacs, two warships in the Mediterranean, a submarine to guard the warships, a 707 refuelling aircraft, 40 men to go ashore and surround the home of Yasser Arafat's PLO deputy commander, and four men and an officer to murder their victim.
Abu Jihad's son Jihad al-Wazzir recalls: "First they killed the bodyguard who was asleep in the car outside. Then they killed the gardener and the second bodyguard ... My dad was writing in his office and went into the hall with a pistol. He got off one shot before he was hit. My mother remembers how each of the four men would step forward and empty an entire clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad like it was a kind of ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in the head, just to make sure."
Today, Israels murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, or even a splash of ultra-violet paint on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache helicopter pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian's vehicle.
It's long-range assassination. But some things don't change. Palestinians have long believed and Jihad al-Wazzir Jnr is convinced that the Israeli who delivered the coup de grâce to his father on 16 April 1988 was an intelligence officer called Moshe Yalon. And today, one of the principal instigators behind the policy of murdering Israels Palestinian military opponents is the deputy chief of staff, a certain major general called Moshe Yalon.
It's a cruel, vicious, internationally illegal war in which the Palestinians have themselves been guilty in the past. Back in the Seventies, Israeli and PLO agents murdered each other in Europe in a policy of retaliation and counter-retaliation that drove European security forces insane with anger. "In the end, these murders led to a ceasefire," Mr al-Wazzir explains. "The whole thing ended."
It continued, however, in Beirut where two of the men involved in murdering PLO leaders were called Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. Shahak would later become the Israeli military commander in Lebanon in 1982. And it was Mr Barak who as Prime Minister last year relaunched Israels murder squads.
Historians will one day debate the worth of such killings.
But Israels killers take innocent lives too. An Apache helicopter attack on a Palestinian militant tore two middle-aged Palestinian women to pieces; the Israelis did not apologise. The nephew of a man murdered by the Israelis in Nablus later admitted to the Palestinian Authority that he had given his uncle's location to the Israelis. He told his interrogators: "They said they were only going to arrest him. Then they killed him."
If it's a dirty war which it is it's also a developing one. Mr al-Wazzir, now an economic analyst in Gaza, explains: "It's small-scale now and in known locations. People who did not think of themselves as targets are killed. There's a network of Israeli army intelligence and air force intelligence, and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each other information.
"They can cross the lines between Area C [under Israeli control] and Area B [shared control] in the occupied territories. They can penetrate these borders. Usually, they carry out operations when the IDF [Israeli Defence Force]* morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a 'spectacular' to show what great warriors they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because of the second intifada."
Palestinian security officers in Gaza have been intrigued at the logic behind the Israeli killings. One of the Palestinian officials says:"Our guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives. I tell you this frankly they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as ruthless.
"After they [the Israelis] targeted Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was coming back from security talks, Dahlan [the head of Palestinian 'preventive security' in Gaza] talked to [the Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon] Peres. 'Look what you guys are doing to us,' Dahlan told Peres. 'Don't you realise it was me who took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?'"
Was this a threat? Mr al-Wazzir understands some of the death squad logic. "It has some effect because we Palestinians are a paternalistic society," he says. "We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't stop. It was affected but all the political objectives failed; rather than demoralising the Palestinians, the assassination fuelled the intifada.
"They say there's a list now of 100 Palestinians on the murder list. No, I don't think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against Israeli intelligence. An army is an institution, a system. Murdering an officer just results in him being replaced."
The Israelis have murdered up to 20 Palestinians they claim to be "terrorists" with no concrete evidence and no court hearings. It's a practice they honed in Lebanon where guerrilla leaders were blown up by hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often as in the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias after interrogation. All this was, and still is, in the name of "security". And that is something the murders have clearly not produced.
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Independent, 13-4-2001.
April Saturday 14-2001:
How
pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them on the road
to vengeance
(1)
"If we can get past the Israeli checkpoint at Kfar Darom, they'll let us through the checkpoint at Gush Katif," Khalil announced to me. I was on my way to Khan Younis from Gaza City, from one end of Yasser Arafat's little garbage tip to the other. And when we joined the end of a mile-long queue of shimmering cars and trucks and buses in the midday heat, Khalil whose yellow Mercedes taxi turned into an oven every time he stopped slapped his right fist into his left hand and uttered a familiar Arab curse. It involves the desire to do something obscene to the sister of one's antagonist.
It is always the same. In an Arab society, man is all-powerful, his potential humiliation not far from death itself. And at an Israeli checkpoint, his gradual descent from potentate to grovelling serf is a terrible thing to observe.
At the back of the queue north of the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom, Khalil was still a "pasha". But thanks to Mr Arafat's acceptance of the now-dead Oslo agreement, Israeli troops have the right to "control" the lateral roads in the Gaza Strip at three separate locations. By means of designated Area A (Palestinian- controlled), Area B (jointly controlled) and Area C (Israeli-controlled), the Israelis can keep the roads open or if someone has fired home-made mortars at their illegal Jewish settlements (built, of course, on land belonging to Khalil and his fellow-Palestinians) they can throttle the roads. Today was a throttling day.
At the back of the queue, Khalil was a nisr, an eagle, threatening eternal damnation on his Israeli tormentors. A few hundred metres later, he was an assad, a lion, demanding to know why the Israelis were ever given the right to occupy his land.
Around us, in taxis and clapped-out family cars, babies screamed and old women sighed and young men glowered and older men the wise and the revered in the Arab family called down the curses of God upon their enemies. It grew warmer. Flies moved slowly through the taxi, sunning themselves on the boiling plastic seats, bathing in our perspiration.
In a fog of exhaust, we crept another hundred metres towards the Israeli checkpoint. "Don't look at the Israelis or they might stop us and ask who you are," Khalil said carefully. Europeans are outnumbered 5,000 to one on the road to Khan Younis. Khalil was no longer an assad. Now he was a hissan, a horse, noble but potentially obedient, ready to be someone else's servant. This is what occupation is about.
I've sat through this outside Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, and through 22 years along all the roads of southern Lebanon, between Beirut and Sidon and Sidon and Tyre and Tyre and Nabatea and between Moukh-tara and Jezzine. Miles and miles and miles of little mobile human bakeries, filled with the smell of hot plastic, sweat and cigrarette smoke, while the occupiers, an Israeli sergeant or corporal or captain, turn a whole male-oriented society on its head.
At a place called Bater Bridge in Lebanon, civilians were kept for two days and nights in the miles of queues, Israels grotesque proxy Lebanese militiamen sometimes propositioning lone females in return for a quicker transit through Israels checkpoints, as they tried to return to their homes.
Far away through the heat haze, I could see an Israeli armoured personnel carrier. The red roofs of Kfar Darom hid behind watchtowers and the stumps of palm trees cut down by the Israelis. Khalil lit a cigarette, moved in his seat, repeatedly cut the engine and restarted it. He was no longer a hissan. Now he was a pseini, a pussy-cat, a quiet, frightened creature awaiting his fate.
The Israelis were now only 50 metres from us. Khalil threw his half-smoked cigarette out the window, then lit another. "Remember what I told you," he said. "Don't look at them." I slid my Arab press card from my shirt pocket and gently replaced it with an Israeli press card, the hannaka candle gleaming at the top left.
Now Khalil was turning we were all turning into those most despised creatures of the Arab world, hamir, donkeys, obedient, ready to be whipped and to obey. Please, please, please, let us through, let us go.
Two bored Israeli soldiers slid up to the left windows, the car bouncing in the dust-bowls of the road. One of them told the truck-driver in front to open the back doors of his lorry. There were large cardboard cartons inside. Crisp packets or rocket-propelled grenades? The Israeli stared, then told the driver to close the doors. Khalil looked straight ahead, unblinking, foot hovering over the gas. Now it was our turn, sarasir, cockroaches, ready to be crushed. The soldiers paid no interest. Khalil gunned the taxi. "Mish mishkl, habibi," he shouted. No problem, my friend. And he reverted to his original curses about the sister of his enemies. He had become a nisr again, an eagle.
So what are these checkpoints for? Why did the people of southern Lebanon have to wait two days in such conditions? A few weeks ago, I was stopped by an Israeli army checkpoint north of Nablus, en route to Jenin. I was the only motorist on the road, driving myself. "You'll have to wait," the sergeant said on that occasion. So like the refugees in Casablanca, I had to wait. And wait. And wait. Palestinian cars queued behind me. After an hour and a half, I played an old Lebanon trick.
The Palestinians stayed where they were but I drove back down the road, found a farm track to an old village and within 10 minutes returned to the highway on the other side of the checkpoint. The Israelis must have known I could do this. So why did they stop me? For "security" reasons? Or because their checkpoints are not about security at all, but about humiliation?
On the way back from Khan Younis, we were pulled up before the Israeli checkpoint at the Gush Katif settlement. It was the end of the day and now the Palestinian men cut each other off to reach the checkpoint, jumping the queue, swerving on to the dust and hedgerows to pass their fellow citizens, cursing not the Israelis now but each other.
That wonderful Israeli journalist Amira Haas may she receive a thousand press awards for her eloquence and moral courage has described this process, the embitterment of a whole people, the humiliation of the Arabs as they watch impotently while ambulances are turned back, expectant mothers ignored or allowed to die, decent people treated like animals.
Khalil stopped for a minute while car-loads of Jewish settler men, kippahs on their heads, rifles poking from the open windows, raced across in front of us to one of their exclusive settlers' roads. Then we growled through. Khalil was not cursing now. He was tight-lipped, aware that his impotence had been made manifest, his patriotism turned to self-loathing, no longer an animal but a thing. And around me, young Palestinian men sat in cars with equal loathing cast like a mask over their faces, humiliated in front of their fathers and mothers and sisters and wives. And it occurred to me that one or two of them would be just angry enough to retrieve their dignity in self-immolation against their tormentors, without discrimin- ation between soldiers and civilians to leave the world of animals to become what the Palestinians call "martyrs". And what the Israelis call "terrorists". That is what occupation is all about.
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Independent, 14-4-2001.