A crane lifts reinforced concrete slabs, each the size of a door, and stacks them upright, side by side, until they form a long wall along the southwestern edge of Gilo, a middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood. A few Jewish residents from Gilo mill around the men at work to catch one last glimpse of the hills and Palestinian villages across the valley before the wall obstructs their view.
“It’s more psychological than anything,” said Galina Shifrin, out with her husband to inspect the new wall. “The bullets can fly over this easily.”
During the past three weeks, the apartment blocks of Gilo, a neighborhood built on Israeli-occupied land, have come under Palestinian gunfire at least a dozen times. Though the shots fired from Beit Jala, a mostly Christian village just across the valley and only minutes from biblical Bethlehem, haven’t killed anyone so far, they did leave one policeman severely wounded 10 days ago, and they continue to terrorize Gilo’s inhabitants.
“It’s a very bad situation,” said Shifrin, a 50-year-old Jewish woman who immigrated from Moscow 20 years ago. “It’s very dangerous because they are our neighbors, they’re very close. There are Arabs on our left and on our right.”
The same day the Israeli policeman was shot in Gilo, Israelis and Palestinians agreed at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to try to implement a cease-fire. But the goodwill was shorter lived than the participants’ tans and was followed by intense violence and verbal threats, further entrenching deep resentment and conflicting positions on both sides.
Sunday, fresh violence in a Palestinian town near Bethlehem brought about a heavy-handed reaction from the Israeli army. Two tanks stationed on the edge of Gilo sprayed Beit Jala with machine-gun fire and shot a tank shell into a nearby field while helicopter gunships fired missiles into the village, punching through the walls of several houses, striking a marble factory and disrupting the town’s electricity.
“The sound of the bombing was very loud,” said Rose Saqa, a 26-year-old Palestinian from Beit Jala. “You cannot figure out where it will fall next.” Saqa said her home, a 200-year-old stone house built atop a hill directly across from Gilo, doesn’t feel safe anymore. “Wherever you are, you can see my house. It’s easy to bomb.”
The next day, again, the Saqas and the Shifrins, on either side of the valley, could barely sleep, ducking instinctively, deserting the most exposed rooms, and feeling under siege, as organized Palestinian gunmen and Israeli Defense Forces exchanged lead over their rooftops.
“The Palestinians go ‘Tuk. Tuk.’ But then the Israelis respond ‘Trrrrr-trrrrrr-trrrrrrrrr.’ There’s no comparison between the two,” said Saqa, a travel agent in peaceful times who has now learned to distinguish between the sound of rifles and heavy machine guns.
“You cannot compare the violence of an occupying army with the violence of those resisting it,” Phyllis Bennis, a Middle East expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, told CNN recently. But you can compare the feelings on both sides and, surprisingly, at a time when everything else separates them, the feelings on the Israeli and the Palestinian side are often the same: Both sides are terrified; they feel besieged.
The circumstances of the siege are different for the Israelis and the Palestinians, but a similar pressure-cooker atmosphere accounts for much of the thirst for cathartic violence on both sides. Nowhere was that more clear than in Nazareth, where on Yom Kippur several hundred armed Israeli Jews descended on their Israeli Arab neighbors, smashing property and firing shots while the police mostly stood by, in scenes witnesses likened to pogroms.
The outburst of rage came “after 10 days during which the city was blocked,” explained Edna Rodrig, the deputy mayor of Upper Nazareth, the mainly Jewish part of town. “People felt trapped without the possibility to go where they needed.”
Upper Nazareth, built in 1956 in an effort to settle Jews in the mostly Arab region of the Galilee, is surrounded by Arab villages and lies cheek-to-cheek with the larger Arab population of historical Nazareth, Jesus’ boyhood home. When Arab-Israelis started rioting at the beginning of October in solidarity with Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, the stones and Molotov cocktails they threw at policemen during street clashes made many roads around Upper Nazareth unsafe for travel, and many were closed.
“People outside the city couldn’t come to school or work. There was a lot of frustration,” recalled Rodrig. “If the violence of our Arab neighbors had not happened for 10 days, nothing would have happened [on Yom Kippur].”
If a 10-day siege could make Jews from Upper Nazareth lose their sanity, it is easy to understand the depth of Palestinian rage after seven years of confinement. Indeed, since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Palestinians have been subjected to a number of vexing travel restrictions.
When Israeli troops partially pulled out of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, they also fenced off Gaza, allowing only carefully screened Palestinians with special work permits to enter Israel and established checkpoints outside West Bank Palestinian areas. The Israeli government required Palestinians to hold a special pass to visit Jerusalem. And Israeli conscripts, barely out of school, frequently questioned and turned back Palestinian adults, humiliating them in front of their children or ruining family outings. In practice, many West Bank Palestinians drove around the checkpoints, taking dangerous side roads and risking arrest along the way. But the feeling of claustrophobia could not be dodged as easily as Israeli checkpoints.
After three weeks of violence, that sense of imprisonment has grown even more acute for the 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. To punish the Palestinians economically and prevent terrorists from infiltrating its cities, Israel has imposed a tight blockade (called “closure” in Israeli-speak) on the Palestinian territories, preventing most of the roughly 120,000 Palestinian workers from reaching their day jobs in Israel. With the exception of a few VIP passes, all travel permits have been suspended. And in some areas, Israeli forces have moved in with tanks and concrete boulders to surround individual “trouble spot” villages like El Khader, a small hamlet next to Beit Jala. (Under the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement, Israel was supposed to gradually lift the closure of the West Bank and Gaza. But since the ceasefire was never applied, Israel did not feel compelled to loosen its grip on Palestinian territories.)
“People are unable to get food. They’re living off the supplies they’ve stocked,” said Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees. “More importantly, medical teams are not allowed to move freely.” Wounded Palestinians have died because ambulances could not reach them or were delayed too long at Israeli checkpoints, he said.
“We live in a big zoo, but we are not even kept safe in that zoo,” said Saqa, the woman from Beit Jala. “As soon as it gets dark, nobody goes out.” Saqa moved temporarily into her brother’s house in search of a safe haven during the past few nights. But the Israelis “shoot randomly,” she said. “Not only at houses near the edge of Beit Jala but in the middle of town.”
Most believe the shooting from Beit Jala originated with members of the paramilitary group Tanzim and other Palestinian organizations who move between houses at night and take aim at nearby Gilo. In retaliation, however, civilian homes in Beit Jala have come under massive Israeli attack.
Although the Israeli army has advised residents of the village to evacuate their houses to avoid getting struck or killed by tracer bullets or tank shells, very few Palestinians feel they can leave their homes. Saqa’s great-grandfather fled Jerusalem during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, lost his house and became a refugee in Beit Jala. As a result, she is now suspicious of the Israeli army’s motives. “They’re doing the same [as in 1948]. They think people will leave so they can take our land. But it won’t happen. People today are not so naive. They’re not as afraid as our ancestors.”
Then, in a sentence weighted with all the pathos and tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saqa added: “We don’t have a choice. Where would we go?” Certainly not to Arab countries, she said. “They have no solidarity. All they are willing to give us is money.”
Barely a mile across the valley, a Jewish resident of Gilo mulled over the same dogged perception. “Arabs have millions of lands but they want to take ours,” said a distressed Ariela Waknim, 17. “We only have this little piece of land and we believe what the Bible says. This is our land.”
When Palestinian gunfire recently hit a street where Waknim was babysitting, the young woman had to lie flat on the floor with the children for several minutes before the violence finally stopped. “It’s not normal that we can’t live peacefully here without huge security,” Waknim said, pointing her finger at the two Israeli tanks that are now part of the neighborhood’s landscape. “We want a peaceful life, but the Arabs just want to kill us.”
Since Egypt first signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, followed by Jordan and the Palestinians in the 1990s, the sentiment of being surrounded by hostile Arab nations bent on wiping Israel from the face of the Earth has gradually receded in Israeli minds. But the past three weeks’ scenes of virulent anti-Israeli protests and anti-Jewish acts all over the world have resurrected old, existential fears.
Soldiers and settlers living on outposts of land occupied by Israel since 1967′s Six Day War are primary targets of the Palestinians’ anger and fire. Responding to the recent wave of violence, the Israeli government has asked settlers to restrict their movements and to travel in convoys with bulletproof vehicles, if possible. But all Israelis feel more or less under threat. The Israelis also believe Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has released dozens of terrorists who are now plotting attacks in crowded places around the county. “The whole country right now is held hostage to terrorism, ” said Yehudit Tayar, a spokeswoman for the settler movement.
“For the Palestinians, there are settlers also in Tel Aviv,” Tayar said, implying that Palestinians will not stop at liberating the occupied territories, but will instead continue to push on until there is no Jew left in Israel. The problem is, the Israelis have nowhere else to go. Like Saqa’s Palestinian ancestor who was kicked out of Jerusalem by Israeli forces in 1948 and became a refugee in Beit Jala, many Jews who came to Israel were refugees from Holocaust-era Europe and other countries in the Middle East. Both sides see Israel/Palestine as their end station, a land they will not flee.
“The battle now is for the independence and survival of Israel,” said Tayar. Certainly that is the view of most American Jews who have showed overwhelming support for Israel in the recent clashes. Last week, a high-powered delegation of American Jews visiting Gilo announced, “Yes, Americans believe Israel is under siege.” The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations and other Jewish organizations are also organizing a solidarity trip next week because, their press release states, “We cannot allow Israel to be isolated from the rest of the world and its people forgotten. We cannot allow violence and terrorism to have a stranglehold on Israel and her economy.”
Meanwhile, Israeli forces pummel mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians with the latest high-tech weaponry and, according to a United Nations report, the Palestinian economy is losing approximately $9.8 million each day the Israelis continue their military-imposed closures of areas run by the Palestinian Authority. But Israel has shown no willingness to call off its troops. “For the time being, we don’t want to see Palestinians in Israel,” said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the federal office that coordinates Israeli and Palestinian activities in the occupied territories.
On the contrary, talk of permanent unilateral separation from the Palestinians is in fashion again as Israelis contemplate ways to minimize their security risks by removing Palestinians from their sight. (“Us here, them there,” after all, was a campaign slogan used by Ehud Barak in his bid to become Israeli prime minister.) On the Palestinian side, there have been calls for a boycott of Israeli goods until Israel ends its occupation of the entire West Bank and Gaza.
Given the level of economic and physical interdependence binding Israelis and Palestinians, both measures are impractical. Israel is not yet prepared to import hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to replace the cheap Palestinian laborers it would lose. And given the absence of an independent Palestinian economy, Palestinians “don’t have anything to replace Israeli products,” said Saqa.
“There are no alternatives unless we return to how we used to live, with chicken and sheep in the backyard.”
Three weeks into a cycle of violence that has already left 135 people dead — the lion’s share of the victims Palestinians — Israel and its Arab neighbors continue to show no signs of conciliation.
Arab leaders meeting in Cairo, Egypt, this weekend for an emergency summit slammed Israel as “barbaric,” and accused the Jewish state of massacring Palestinian civilians. In view of the Arab summit’s relatively hostile outcome, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak announced Sunday an open-ended “timeout” from peacemaking with the Palestinians.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat then captured headlines with his defiant statement that anyone standing in the path of a Palestinian independent state with Jerusalem as its capital should simply “go to hell.” The message was apparently intended for Barak.
Playground rhetoric? Perhaps. But with a mounting death toll and the Israelis firing missiles for the first time into Beit Jala, a Palestinian village close to biblical Bethlehem, in retaliation for Palestinian gunfire directed at a Jerusalem neighborhood, and the sickening spectacle of daily funerals, the Holy Land seems to be slouching closer toward Hades than Eden.
This weekend’s verbal and gunfire exchanges showed just how difficult it will be to calm the feverish tempers on all sides and get Palestinians and Israelis talking doveishly again. The continuing clashes suggest that the hostility could last much longer than either party expected when violence first flared up on Sept. 28. They also offer substance to the voices calling for a new type of Palestinian-Israeli relationship — one based not on trust and partnership, but on maximum security and separation.
For now at least, dialogue between the two parties is on hold. A timeout is needed “because we cannot carry on the peace process as if nothing happened,” said Barak. The purpose of the pause is “to reassess the political process from the beginning in light of the events of the past weeks,” he said during a cabinet meeting Sunday. Still, Barak insisted that a timeout was different from a formal suspension of the peace process and should not be interpreted as such.
Barak’s mixed message was greeted with consternation by some of his pro-peace cabinet members. “Israel cannot operate without a clear diplomatic policy. Life does not take a timeout,” said Acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami. “The decision is impractical,” added Justice Minister and key negotiator Yossi Beilin. “From a diplomatic point of view, it will cause severe damage to our international standing because Israel will take on to itself the responsibility for stopping the [peace] process.”
In domestic terms, however, Barak’s “timeout” makes a lot of sense. Barak’s coalition has been in tatters since this summer, and he faces a harsh battle for his political survival when the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, reconvenes next week after a long holiday recess.
More importantly, the quasi-suspension of diplomatic talks lifts one of the major hurdles preventing right-wing leader Ariel Sharon from joining Barak in a national unity government. The 72-year-old hawk, courted by Barak since the beginning of the crisis, has refused until now to join a government intent on pursuing the peace process as outlined in Oslo seven years ago. Sharon’s possible appointment is seen as a “death kiss” to peace by Palestinians, who consider him a war criminal because of his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees in 1982. But the practical move could save Barak from early elections, which could have become a referendum on the peace process itself. The details of Sharon’s participation in Barak’s government have yet to be finalized.
Domestic considerations also influenced the language of the resolutions adopted at the Arab summit this weekend, as states sought to placate the bellicose mood on the streets while protecting their national interests. The Arab leaders blasted Israel for the bloodshed; called for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal to investigate Israel’s use of force in handling the riots; and announced the creation of two funds worth $1 billion to help the families of Palestinians killed or wounded in the current bloodshed and preserve “the Arab and Islamic character” of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.
But the summit stopped short of adopting any concrete measures against Israel. Tunisia announced it would cut off its low-level relations with Israel. Economic cooperation and political exchanges between neighboring Middle East nations and Israel — implemented following the 1991 Madrid peace conference — were also halted. However, Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania, three Arab countries which have signed peace treaties with Israel in the past, were not asked to sever their diplomatic ties. Indeed, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak reaffirmed his commitment to peace with Israel, and emphasized that the most important thing was to “reestablish stability and calm in the region.”
The summit’s moderate outcome was a letdown for Palestinians who had hoped that Arab solidarity would help tip the conflict in their favor. But analysts here say the measured tone of the summit was entirely predictable.
“They may pay lip service to the Palestinian cause, but the Arabs have never gone to war for the Palestinians,” noted Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
The situation is politically difficult for Egypt and Jordan, whose leaders are caught between the outrage of people on the streets — who demand war or, at least, practical steps to rescue their Palestinian brethren — and the strategic and economic ties their countries share with the United States and Israel, its regional protigi. In Jordan, a country on the verge of signing a free-trade agreement with the United States, that balancing act is particularly crucial because 60 percent of the kingdom’s population is Palestinian. “Jordan wants to localize the conflict before it destabilizes the Hashemite dynasty,” said Inbar.
“Where are the Arabs? Where are the millions?” asks a popular intifada song broadcast night and day on Palestinian radio, but the call for jihad — or holy war — let out by demonstrators around the Arab world and countries like Iraq and Libya will probably go unanswered. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the absence of full-fledged war does not guarantee peace either. The most likely scenario is a simmering of the present violence, with peaks of bloodshed and disasters, but no clear-cut military resolution.
In this context of neither war nor peace, both sides are considering drastic unilateral actions that would produce results without requiring diplomatic compromises. Arafat threatens to declare an independent Palestinian state on Nov. 15 and fight to establish sovereignty over every inch of Arab territory occupied by Israel since the Six Day War of 1967. At the same time, Barak has ordered top officials to consider the practical impact of “unilateral separation,” an often-discussed plan designed to ensure maximum security for Israelis by removing Palestinians from their reach and sight.
Already in 1992, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s election slogan was to “Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv.” Since then, the mostly Palestinian-ruled and miserable Gaza Strip has indeed been separated from the cosmopolitan riches of Tel Aviv. Until the current clashes, however, more than 120,000 Palestinian workers commuted to day jobs in Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. Now Israelis are talking about entirely “sealing off” the Palestinian territories, to prevent terrorists from entering Jewish cities.
On the face of it, abruptly ending the 33-year-old Israeli occupation of parts of the West Bank and Gaza sounds like a good idea, since that occupation is the main object of Palestinian grievances. But Israel would not withdraw from areas it believes are key to its security and religious identity like the Jordan valley and the Old City of Jerusalem. And erecting watertight borders would effectively place a stranglehold on the Palestinian economy
Many analysts believe full separation is not really an option. The unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon last May, “cannot be repeated in the Palestinian territories,” wrote Zvi Barel in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Unlike the West Bank and Gaza where 200,000 Israeli settlers now live, Lebanon was “devoid of settlements and not economically dependent on Israel. Israel and the Palestinians have to live in a state of separated coexistence, a situation that can only exist with a peace agreement.”
Najah il-Khatib, in a traditional Palestinian dress covered with golden embroidery, stands by the hospital bed of her wounded son, Zahran, 15. Her face, framed by the white lace of an Islamic veil, exudes calm and pride. Zahran, who winces with pain as his mother speaks, did the right thing, according to Khatib, when he ran out of the house at lunchtime, threw stones at Israeli soldiers and got shot in the chest.
“I am honored that my son got shot in a demonstration,” says Khatib, caressing Zahran’s curly brown hair.
Doctors say Zahran’s life was spared only because the high-velocity bullet fired by an Israeli soldier hit a rock before penetrating his chest and abdomen. Zahran’s aunt, a stern figure sitting on the other side of the bed, seems to regret this stroke of luck, having hoped that the boy might become a martyr.
“Three days before the demonstration, Zahran was asking to die for [Palestinian] liberation,” she points out. “We can’t live like this any longer. Either we set ourselves free or we die trying.”
In the violent clashes that have pitted Palestinian stone-throwers and scattered gunmen against well-armed Israeli soldiers and settlers for the past two and a half weeks, more than 100 people — most of them Palestinian — have been killed. Of those killed, 30 were children. According to UNICEF, children also make up a third of the more than 3,500 people wounded so far.
Are Palestinian children dying because their mothers are prepared to put their children’s lives on the line? “They are our children but they’re also Palestinian,” says Khatib, 42, the wife of a construction worker and the mother of 10. “They’re here for this particular reason, to defend the land.
“God gives them, God takes them,” she adds with a bittersweet smile.
From the Israeli point of view, Khatib’s seemingly detached attitude is typical of all Palestinian mothers — and is shocking in its apparent coldness. Stories circulate here about Palestinian families literally selling their children to the cause: Rumors say Palestinian parents receive hundreds of dollars from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to send their sons into the street to throw stones — and thousands of dollars if they die. The stories are not based on any evidence, but the pernicious, racist message is there: Palestinians love their children less, therefore they are less human than Israelis.
By contrast, the Israelis see themselves as much more sensitive to the deaths of their children. In particular, Jewish mothers loom large in the collective imagination as tenderhearted women whose grief is a centerpiece in the national drama of soldiers’ funerals. When the Israeli army finally pulled out of southern Lebanon in May, the retreat was described in the media as a victory of Israeli mothers who had become less and less tolerant of the loss of their sons’ lives.
When the world’s televisions showed images of Mohammed al-Dirrah, a 12-year-old Palestinian from Gaza caught in a heavy exchange of gunfire and shot to death by Israeli soldiers under his father’s helpless eyes, international public opinion registered a surge of sympathy for the Palestinians.
In Israel, however, the blame was placed squarely on Mohammed’s parents. “The father should have lain down on his boy to protect him,” criticized a left-wing Israeli acquaintance, before concluding: “Arabs do not attach the same importance to human life [as Westerners do].”
The Israeli media reported that Mohammed and his father, Jamal, were at the dangerous Netzarim Junction in Gaza specifically to throw stones at Israeli soldiers when the army outpost was being attacked by Palestinian snipers. Palestinian media said that the two were caught in the crossfire after running an errand. The TV footage, which shows the father waving his hands and shouting “There’s a child! Don’t shoot!” while trying to protect his son with his arm and back, would suggest that Jamal was extremely worried about Mohammed, but ultimately unable to save his life.
In a public statement, the Israel Defense Forces expressed sorrow at the child’s death but emphasized that “the Palestinians make cynical use of children’s lives by sending them to throw stones under the cover of Palestinian fire that endangers their lives.”
Yet, in talking to the Palestinian mothers whose sons risk death in the streets as the grim conflict grinds on, a different picture emerges: not of coldness, but of love — mixed with belligerent despair.
Khatib is a good example of those mixed feelings. When her son Zahran ran out to join the riots in Hizma, a small village outside Jerusalem, Khatib’s first instinct was to run after him. “I tried to catch him because I knew something would happen, but I was too late. Next thing I heard, he was wounded,” she says.
At the same time, she says, “I have no problem with him going out to demonstrate. If I could, I would go too.”
Women have played a relatively small part in the current round of violence, in contrast with the days of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising that rocked the West Bank and Gaza between 1987 and 1993. Women then were a staple of mass demonstrations against Israeli occupation. A woman and an 18-month-old girl are the only female casualties so far in the current conflict. Here and there, young Palestinian women run with buckets of stones to help the boys on the “front line” or distribute masks and onions to try to fight off the effects of tear gas. But by and large, the riots have been an all-male affair.
The reasons are mainly cultural: First, because lethal weapons are being used on both sides, the riots are considered unsafe for women. Secondly, unlike in the past intifada, in which protests spread from street to street involving anyone who happened to walk by, the areas of confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians have been more limited this time. Indeed in the past seven years, Israeli troops have withdrawn from the heart of most Palestinian cities. Israeli soldiers are posted on the outskirts of town where “proper” women have no business going in times of war. The resurgence of Islam, which frowns on mixed male and female gatherings, also is a factor. Khatib, an observant Muslim, says she would never allow her daughters to go out and riot “because they are girls.”
Women, however, are “the unknown soldiers, the ones holding the fort in every Palestinian household,” wrote Muna Muhaisen, a Palestinian-American journalist, who has been keeping a war diary since the violence erupted two weeks ago. “They’re the ones calming their kids and tending to them while keeping their eyes glued on their TV screens. I don’t know a single woman in Dheisheh [a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank] who isn’t closely following every single development. Even my 77-year-old mother-in-law sits in her room with the radio close to her ear.”
A gynecologist who sees many Palestinian women in clinics around the West Bank says her patients are under huge stress these days: “Having a child is not easy, so losing one is awful,” says Dr. Ghada Shomali.
Shomali hasn’t seen Amir, her 19-year-old son, in days, because a tight Israeli military siege is barring the short road between Jerusalem, where Amir studies, and Bethlehem, where the family lives. “I can’t tell him not to participate in the demonstrations,” she says. “One, because he wouldn’t listen. Two, because it’s his right to protest. This isn’t a life we have. You can’t just sit there and say ‘I want life to be better and the occupation to end.’ It will never end that way. All I ask is for Amir to call once a day to tell me he’s alive.”
Many women are torn between their nationalism and their motherly instincts. Khatib wished Zahran safe at home the day he was shot, but also believed he was old enough to fight. “When Israeli soldiers attack the village, they don’t make any distinctions between 15-year-olds and 25-year-olds,” she says. “They will shoot to kill no matter what the boy’s age is. We have to protect our village no matter what the price is. If we want to complain, we complain to God. This is our destiny.”
Yet, one floor below Khatib in the same Jerusalem hospital, a mother sitting with her 13-year-old boy in an intensive care unit feels differently. Her son Mohammed, who is hooked to a respirator, has been paralyzed on his right side since a rubber-coated metal bullet fired by Israeli police penetrated his skull.
Mariam Jodah, 34, still can’t believe her son escaped her watchful gaze, slipped out of the house on Oct. 6 and joined the Friday prayers at al-Aksa mosque in Jerusalem. The day had been declared a “day of rage” by Muslim clerics and radical Islamic groups. Violence was foretold and she had strictly forbidden her son from taking part in it.
Mohammed, who looks much younger than his age, went to the mosque with an older cousin, probably out of curiosity. “It’s a fun trip to go down to al-Aksa mosque and see things along the way,” Jodah explains. A Norwegian news correspondent who was at the mosque at the time Mohammed was wounded said the police first shot in the air to disperse rioters, but Mohammed, who could not run fast enough, trailed behind and was shot in the head.
“I want to ask what harm a kid Mohammed’s age can cause a well-armed soldier? Their aim is to kill young children. It’s not the children’s destiny. It’s the way soldiers act in demonstrations. Sometimes I think God chose him,” says Jodah, her small face knit with sorrow under a Muslim veil. “But I don’t think it was Mohammed’s destiny to end up like this.”
“I think Israel offered him to God. [His mother] didn’t offer him herself,” suggests Raeda, a nurse at the unusually busy hospital.
Dozens of human rights groups, as well as the United Nations, have condemned Israel for excessive use of force in dealing with the riots. One of the key issues at the regional summit hosted in Egypt and mediated by the United States on Monday is the Palestinian demand for an international investigative commission that would look into the methods used by Israeli forces to put down civilian protests. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, however, is opposed.
Israel blames incendiary broadcasts on Palestinian television and radio, which call day and night for people to give their blood to fight the Israeli occupation or simply “kill Jews,” for the feverish violence on the streets. Israelis also accuse the Palestinians of using child warriors to win support in the international media by forcing Israel to pour innocent blood. One Israeli journalist quoted Israel’s late Prime Minister Golda Meir as saying in 1972: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
Certainly Jodah did not force Israeli troops to paralyze her son. And even Khatib, in her own way, would rather her son, now in 10th grade, lead a healthy, happy life. Neither woman says she feels she has had the freedom to shelter her children. Still they maintain completely different points of view about whether their sons should have been on the street. Their philosophical differences refute the generalizations applied to Palestinian mothers, who, like everyone in the conflict, are individuals with distinct feelings.
“The question should be: ‘What’s the alternative?’ When you’re struggling for liberation, you fight with what you have — and we have nothing else but ourselves,” argues Muhaisen. “If it weren’t the sons going in the streets, it would be the daughters; if not the daughters, then the mothers.”
As negotiators in the Middle East work furiously to broker a cease-fire agreement to end the violence that has cost nearly 100 lives, the man many Palestinians blame for inciting the riots looms ominously in the background.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has threatened to bring Ariel Sharon, Israel’s famed and feared old warrior, into a national unity government if the U.S.-brokered summit in Egypt fails or the violence continues. The move would be a response to the scare tactics drummed up by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose own inflammatory actions during the past two weeks included releasing dozens of terrorists belonging to the Hamas organization from Palestinian jails.
If Sharon enters Barak’s government, “our deterrence will be better,” believes Efraim Inbar, director of the Besa Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “In this region there’s an advantage to being feared.”
On paper, references to Sharon swallow up gallons of type in the indexes of even the most basic books on the Middle East: Sharon and the War of Independence; Sharon and the Six Day War; Sharon and the Yom Kippur War — Sharon and every single Israeli-Arab conflict for that matter, up to the present deadly clashes. Sharon as agriculture minister; defense minister; housing minister; industry and trade minister; infrastructure minister; foreign minister. Sharon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees were slaughtered in cold blood by Lebanese militiamen while the Israeli army — under his leadership — stood by and did nothing.
So when Sharon set foot on the white pavement of the Noble Sanctuary, the airy, tree-lined esplanade of Jerusalem’s most precious mosques, for an early morning stroll two weeks ago, his visit could hardly have gone by unnoticed. Had Sharon not announced his visit days in advance, summoned the world’s TV cameras and mobilized hundreds of policemen in riot gear, the sound of his footstep may still have sent shock waves crashing across the Middle East.
By now, his name has been bellowed and spat in heavy Arabic accents by hundreds of thousands of protesters in Israel and the Palestinian territories; in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt; from Morocco, on the Atlantic coast, to the gulf shores of Iraq. Even the U.N. Security Council, from its Olympian cloud in New York, berated Sharon for his provocative behavior, albeit without explicitly naming him, in a resolution 10 days ago.
Whether his visit alone unleashed the torrent of stone-throwing, death and anger that is sweeping the region is questionable. Many claim the Palestinians were looking for a pretext to drop out of a dead-end diplomatic peace process and seized the prospect of war, unleashed by Sharon’s visit, to advance their political struggle.
Others, including Sharon himself, admit the point of the visit was to make a bold, political statement: What Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical first and second temples. As such, it is Jewish property, and a walk on the Mount is every Jew’s God-given right. (Granted, most rabbis rule that Jews should not set foot on the Mount, precisely because of its sanctity — but Sharon is a big-picture man.)
By affirming Israel’s exclusive sovereignty over the most coveted piece of real estate in the annals of Palestinian-Israeli history, Sharon was asking for trouble. But like a tragic hero, it was almost inevitable he would choose to do so.
Since he entered politics a quarter-century ago, banking on his reputation as a brilliant warrior, Sharon’s actions have been motivated by one principle: seizing the offense by creating what Israelis call “facts on the ground.”
In the occupied territories, that has meant building fortified settlements perched on hills like medieval city-states that dominate Palestinian towns and give the Israeli heartland more security depth. Or buying property, smack in the middle of the Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter, to assert the right of Jews to live wherever they please. No matter that U.N. Resolution 242 calls for the withdrawal of Israel’s troops from the territories it captured in 1967, namely the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza and the Golan Heights. The idea is to push forward, without bothering with the legalese, until the reality of Jewish life in the biblical land of Judea and Samaria is too strong to dislodge.
More than any other politician, Sharon has been the engine behind Israel’s thinly disguised annexation policy. Whatever ministerial portfolio fell into his hands, Sharon made sure to direct massive state funds toward building houses, roads and water pipes that would consolidate Israel’s grip in the occupied territories. Not for nothing have Israelis nicknamed Sharon “the bulldozer.”
No wonder, then, that Palestinians see red when Sharon’s name crops up. Thanks to Sharon’s legendary drive, roughly 200,000 Israelis now live in strategically key areas of the West Bank and Gaza, protected by military outposts and connected to Israel proper with bypass roads. This heavy infrastructure has reduced the Palestinian territorial gains, stipulated by the 1993 Oslo accords, to isolated islands of small Bantustans, throttled by military checkpoints.
Israel’s insistence on keeping most of these settlements intact in any final peace deal explains, in part, the Palestinian distaste for the diplomatic game at hand. Settlements and the various security zones Israel has designed to virtually strangle Palestinian towns also explain why there are so many sites of Palestinian-Israeli violence in the current clashes. Around settlements in Gaza, Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah, the Israeli army is still a visible occupying force, an irritating fish bone stuck, seemingly forever, in Palestinian throats.
It would be unfair, however, to pin the whole mess on Sharon. Settlement expansion has been an Israeli policy under both dovish and hawkish governments, from Menachem Begin’s right-wing premiership to Barak’s left-wing tenure.
Although many consider Sharon a sort of gladiator for a “Greater Israel,” some observers insist the man is not an ideologue, but a pragmatist whose real aim is to increase his own power. They point to the fact that Sharon has been in a handful of different political parties; and it was Sharon who ordered the evacuation of the Sinai settlement of Yamit when Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt after the 1979 peace treaty.
“Sharon has a record of relative moderation when he has power, and of extreme belligerence in the opposition,” notes Yaron Ezrahi, an Israeli political scientist.
“No matter what happens, he needs to be at the center of it,” says Zeev Chafets, a columnist at the New York Daily News who has known Sharon for 30 years. “He doesn’t care so much about the shape of things. He wants to be shaping things.”
And, for most of his 72 years, Sharon has. In addition to shaping the map of an embryonic Palestine to suit Israeli interests, Sharon also shaped today’s political landscape by creating the Likud, one of Israel’s two main parties. He helped elect the first right-wing government in 1977, and helped the baby-faced hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu come to power in 1996. Most significantly, he literally saved Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, by audaciously leading his outnumbered troops across the Suez Canal and attacking the Egyptians from the rear.
The legendary warrior was born in 1928 on a rough farm cooperative near what is now Tel Aviv, the son of Russian-Jewish pioneers in British-ruled Palestine. According to a biography by Uzi Benziman entitled “An Israeli Caesar,” Ariel, known as “Arik,” grew up carrying a club to keep away marauding Arabs and punish neighbors who dared pick his father’s fruit. At 14, he joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground that later became the Israeli Defense Forces.
Stories about Sharon’s ruthlessness, demonstrated in battle after battle, are legion. There was the time in the 1950s when Sharon was head of the 101 unit, a special force designed to fight Arab terrorism, and needed to launch a reprisal raid against Syria. His men were staked out on a kibbutz near the border, with orders not to move until provoked. According to the story, Sharon came running in one afternoon, saying: “Great news! They just killed the guard!”
Another telling anecdote places him in 1973, desperate to break the cease-fire agreement between Egypt and Israel, ready to stage training maneuvers to provoke an Egyptian reaction. The plan, which would have put his troops at great risk, was foiled by the army’s upper echelon; but, says Chafets, “he was prepared to risk lots of lives just to get a fight going.”
The Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982 — for which Sharon was found “indirectly responsible” by an official Israeli investigative commission — was his most memorable and disastrous blunder. He was stripped of his job as defense minister and put in the political dog house. Sharon, who saw himself as Israel’s next prime minister, made the most out of the minor portfolios he was given, continuing to push forward his settlement plan no matter what title he held.
But over the years, as the war he hotly pursued in Lebanon festered on, claiming more than 1,500 Israeli lives between the invasion of 1982 and last May’s long-overdue troop withdrawal, Sharon’s mystique as the nation’s savior lost some of its shine.
But he’s still here and, like the Energizer Bunny, he keeps marching on. With the death of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the retirement of President Ezer Weizman this summer, Sharon is one of the only original Israeli statesmen still around.
Sharon’s only total eclipse from public life occurred as the Oslo peace accords were hammered out under the Rabin government. The election of Netanyahu brought him back into the public light. When the U.S. pressured Netanyahu to sign a new interim accord with the Palestinians at the Wye River summit in 1998, he made Sharon his foreign minister to assuage the disgruntled right. In the end, however, Sharon proved a reasonable sidekick, and convinced Netanyahu to sign a peace deal he loathed on the dotted line.
Through his brilliant army career, Sharon has built friendships across the ideological divide. (He is said to be close to the peace-loving Shimon Peres, for example.) And his charm recently spun the head of a left-wing Israeli filmmaker, Avi Mograbi, who created a documentary called “How I Learned to Overcome Fear and Love Arik Sharon.”
But as he approaches his twilight years, Sharon “doesn’t look like a dashing general anymore. He was a tough guy — now he’s just a fat slob,” offers Chafets.
Yet the time to write Sharon’s political obituary has not come. As his Temple Mount visit has shown, Sharon is willing to pay a high price not to be written off politically. Analysts believe the PR stunt was aimed at outflanking Netanyahu, his rival on the right, at a time when Netanyahu, cleared of criminal charges, was about to make a political comeback.
Alluding to the Temple Mount as “the bedrock of our faith,” Sharon the non-kosher Jew, rallied the support of the religious right. The Palestinian uproar that followed has broadened his appeal even more in Israel. The past two weeks’ brutal riots have made Sharon’s black-and-white, us-vs.-them vision of Palestinian-Israeli relations — forged during Israel’s many wars — fashionable again. Israelis too young to remember Sharon’s martial feats know at least one thing now: Sharon is tough with Arabs; Arabs understand only force; therefore, Sharon is the one we need.
Sharon’s clever maneuver, which has cost, indirectly, nearly 100 lives so far, may well succeed. To pull the country through the crisis that Sharon in large part provoked, Barak is thinking of forming a unity government in which the old general, as head of the opposition Likud Party, would be asked to play a significant role.
To Sharon, fighting the Arabs and staying in power is his life’s calling. But to the outside world, placing Sharon at center stage is akin to calling on a pyromaniac to extinguish a fire.
The return of Sharon, the “Butcher of Sabra and Shatila” and the defiler of Al-Aksa mosque, will be viewed as a catastrophic strike by most Palestinians. According to Saeb Erekat, a chief Palestinian negotiator and one of the last moderates in town, Sharon is a “death kiss to the peace process. If General Sharon is going to be Barak’s partner, we no longer have a partner in Israel.”
They’ll have an old cowboy to contend with instead.
Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s longtime president, died Saturday of heart failure while on the phone with Lebanon’s president Emile Lahoud. The autocratic 69-year-old Syrian leader had been sick for years, and rumors of his imminent death had often leaked from Damascus. But this was no false alarm — the news was real, announced in a quaking voice on Syrian national television and followed by mournful reading from the Koran.
The death of Assad, a leader who styled himself as the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism and anti-Zionist sentiment since the day he took power in 1970, ushers in a new era for Syria, its vassal Lebanon, its enemy Israel and the entire Middle East.
The news, which came less than three weeks after Israel’s military pullout of southern Lebanon — ending two decades of protracted war and occupation — left analysts guessing at the possible consequences of the new Mideast configuration of power: Does Assad’s death, combined with Israel’s unilateral withdrawal, spell peace for the region?
Wrestling with that $1 million question, the Israeli press expressed cautious optimism rather than fear or sorrow in its coverage of Assad’s death. In sharp contrast to the mournful Israeli response to the death of friend and ally King Hussein of Jordan last year, Assad’s passing represents the loss of a leader Israel has long viewed as a stubborn enemy, a barrier to peace.
“We Israelis have no reason to shed tears over the death of Hafez Assad. It’s a waste of water,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist at Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper. “The man who missed so many trains, and through his intransigence and hesitation stopped all of the processes, has concluded his role in Middle Eastern history.”
During his 30-year rule, Assad championed Arab opposition to Israel, bitterly criticized Egypt and Jordan for signing separate peace deals with the Zionist state and poured scorn over Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for negotiating a gradual and partial return of Israeli-occupied land to the Palestinians. Assad considered these independent diplomatic moves treacherous to the Arab cause, and supported instead Palestinian organizations in Syria and in Lebanon that rejected the peace process begun in Oslo, Norway, in 1993.
When Assad himself entered into peace talks with Israel, he made clear that his aim was to regain possession of the Golan Heights — a strategic plateau overlooking the Sea of Galilee, which Syria lost to Israel in the 1967 war — not normalizing Syria’s diplomatic relations with Israel. The tensions between the two countries were apparent last winter, when during negotiations in the United States, Assad instructed Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa not to shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The Syrian president also allowed the official Syrian press to carry virulently anti-Semitic articles even as peace talks went on.
Many Israelis read those signals as proof that Assad was not interested in real peace. That view was seemingly vindicated when the leader refused to compromise on the boundaries of the Golan Heights during a meeting with Bill Clinton in Geneva in March. While Israel was ready to give up the Syrian territory (as defined by a 1923 international border) in exchange for peace, Assad insisted that Israel return the entire Golan, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, a crucial water supply for Israel.
Given those expectations, many Israeli and foreign analysts greeted Assad’s passage on Saturday as the lifting of a hefty obstacle to peace in the Middle East. According to conventional wisdom, only an embrace from Assad, the Lion of Damascus (as his name means in Arabic), could provide Israel with the kind of regional recognition and lasting peace it seeks.
That belief fueled a sense of urgency in renewing negotiations over the Golan last fall, after a four-year hiatus, while the ailing Assad was still alive and Clinton still had time in the White House to broker a deal. But that opportunity was lost this spring when the negotiations foundered.
The question now is whether Assad’s son and heir apparent, Bashar, will be able to remain at the helm of the country of 17 million people and do better than his father if and when Syria resumes peace negotiations with Israel.
So far, the succession of power from father to son has been remarkably smooth. Bashar al-Assad, a mild-mannered, mustachioed 34-year-old eye doctor trained in the West, was hastily elected to head the Baath ruling party and appointed chief of the Syrian army on Sunday, just 24 hours after his father’s death. Assad had originally intended to have his eldest son Basil - with tough military credentials and “Top Gun” looks succeed him, but he shifted his attention to Bashar after Basil died in a 1994 car accident. Bashar was called back from his studies in London, and Assad had been preparing him ever since.
The almost monarchistic grooming — in a country that purports to be a republic — included intensive remedial military training and, in recent months, the sacking of opponents to the family succession. Various members of Assad’s old guard in the army and in government who were perceived as anti-Bashar were eliminated — including a former prime minister, who was charged with corruption and committed suicide in prison last month.
If Bashar seems virtually guaranteed to take over from his father after a pro forma referendum is called later this month, the transition is nevertheless seen as a period of potential danger in a volatile Middle East, just weeks after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
Israel so far has not put its army in a state of alert, a sign of confidence in the Syrian regime’s ability to keep things calm despite the death of its charismatic leader. Bashar’s image as a gentle, Westernized man with an interest in computers is also helping assuage Israeli fears.
Although little was known about Bashar’s youth in Syrias secretive realm, in the past year Bashar has earned a reputation of respectability for his designs on modernizing Syria and his intention to connect his country to the Internet and fight corruption.
The heir apparent recently brought Internet technology to Damascus’ universities, overruling the objections of the countrys repressive security services. Bashar is also well known for his desire to rev up the Syrian economy, which is currently in a state of near-bankruptcy and heavily reliant on Lebanese capital. According to Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the younger Assad expressed great interest in Israel’s successful high-tech industry when the two met in Damascus recently. Assads curiosity seems to promise a more open, accommodating and business-oriented Syria than the country led by the elder Assad, who seemed mostly concerned with recovering lost Arab territory and glory.
But a new Middle East of regional peace and economic prosperity is still years away. Most analysts agree that peace negotiations between Syria and Israel are likely to be on hold for as long as it takes for Bashar to establish a domestic image as a tough Arab leader worthy of his fathers legacy and consolidate his power.
“First go for power, then, peace,” advised a headline in Sunday’s Ha’aretz, an Israeli daily. Before Assad took power in a bloodless coup in 1970 and imposed three decades of iron-fisted “stability” on his countrymen, Syria witnessed a number of palace plots and uprisings. A new war of succession is not impossible in the future. Assad’s ambitious and resourceful brother Rifat, now in exile in Spain after a power struggle with Assat, claimed Monday that he, not nephew Bashar, is the rightful heir to the presidency. Members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority who oppose the rule of Assad’s Alawite Muslim minority could also challenge the young heir.
“As long as Syria has a minority regime and an autocratic regime, I’m not sure a deal with Israel is in the immediate interest of the regime,” said Professor Ephraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “It’s more pressing for the heir to find ways of staying in Lebanon and staying in power.”
Even before the senior-Assad’s death, the Israeli pullout gave new life to those in Lebanon who reject Syria’s decade-old heavy-handed meddling in Lebanese politics and massive military presence on Lebanese soil. Calls for the departure of Syria’s estimated 35,000 troops and hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Lebanon were voiced again last week in the leading Lebanese newspaper, An Nahar. Now that the domineering Syrian leader is dead, analysts speculate that the largely Christian political movement to chase Syria out will gain even more momentum, possibly straining relations between Lebanon’s different religious communities and inaugurating a new era of Lebanese instability.
Other groups may seek to exploit Syria’s temporary weakness. Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamic movement that defeated Israel in southern Lebanon, has been coordinating its strategy with Damascus since the mid-1980s. Assad used the Iranian-backed guerrillas to bleed Israel into giving back the Golan Heights, without ever slipping into full confrontation with Israel (a scenario which Syria’s outdated Soviet-era army could not afford). Avoiding escalation required “excellent talent,” said Inbar. “I’m not sure that Assad’s heir will continue to have this type of wisdom.” Assad, allegedly, was capable of ordering its proxies to abstain from striking Israel when it served Syria’s interests; but, with a weaker leader in Damascus, “we may see local initiatives by Palestinian organizations or Hezbollah to inflict pain on Israel,” said Inbar.
On the other hand, Assad was loath to offer Israel’s northern towns any kind of protection from cross-border attacks as long as Israel occupied the Golan, and all but publicly opposed the deployment of Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon. His death may provide the Lebanese army with an opportunity to patrol the recently-liberated south and mitigate Hezbollah’s threatening power on Israel’s northern border. A first token force of about 1,000 Lebanese soldiers and police is expected to move south later this week.
