Charles Glass
Most afternoons, the boys
head from their schools down to the edge of town where Israeli tanks and
soldiers are standing by to watch unarmed children wage war. A wide road heads
from the center of Ramallah downhill towards a hotel, the City Inn, where the
Israeli army has set up shop. From there, it rises again towards a settlement,
an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) base and the military court at Beit El. The
kids, whose ages range from twelve to twenty-eight, mill around until a few of
the bolder ones walk towards the line that demarcates the Israeli zone. When
they are about eighty yards from the Israeli troops, they throw a few stones.
The Israeli soldiers in tanks or on foot in riot gear ignore them. Then a few
more boys join the stone-throwing, although the greater number of them hold
back. In the midst of the crowd, a man with a huge brass pot sells coffee. We
could have brought picnics.
Stones fly through the air
without hitting the soldiers, who are, anyway, out of range. The boys return in
triumph to those who lagged behind. People talk , drink coffee and watch the
occupation army down the road. Then a few more lads go forth for another bout of
rock-throwing. The Israelis, apparently bored and impatient with the
Palestinians’ afternoon entertainment, fire heavy machine gun bursts. The stone
throwers run back into the crowd, which itself retreats up the road to hide
behind the taller buildings. No one is hit. A little later, when the young men
venture back onto the exposed road, one or two are felled by live rounds.
Ambulances, which are parked near the crowd every day, rush the boys to a
hospital in town.
In the first month of this
Palestinian rebellion, the Israeli solidiers, police and settlers wounded 7,000
Palestinians. During the entire seven years of the first intifadah that ended in
1993, the total number of Palestinian wounded was 18,000. At the present rate of
injury, the Israelis could wound 84,000 people in a year – or an astounding
588,000 if this intifadah lasts as long as the first. So far, 240 people have
died, about 220 of them Palestinian and twenty Israeli. Lest this battle seem
about body counts and kill ratios, neither side is killing and maiming the other
with the objective of annihilation. Violence is a way of sending messages to the
other side. The Palestinians are saying they want independence within the
pre-1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza, without settlements and soldiers
robbing their independence of meaning. The Israelis are clearly stating, with
every round they fire into a crowd, that they cannot have it. At this stage, the
deus should fly in on his machina and force the two sides to accept peace.
However, the world’s deus lives in Washington and is not imposing full
decolonization of the occupied territories. Anything else seems unlikely to stop
the blood draining from Palestinian and, in smaller numbers, Israeli veins.
One evening, I am sitting
in a house in Ramallah with friends. Their twelve year old son tells me in
fluent English about his school, then drifts off to watch television. Many cups
of tea and coffee later, his father asks the family where the boy is. He has
gone to one of the confrontation points, either to throw stones or watch his
friends throw stones across an open field through a barbed wire fence at Israeli
soldiers in a tin and sand-bag bunker. Later, he comes home unhurt. On another
evening, they tell me, the local leader of Yasser Arafat’s al-Fateh group, a 41
year old man named Moustafa Barghouti, came himself to order young men in a
house nearby to stop shooting at an Israeli settlement on the hill above
Ramallah. Reluctantly, they obeyed. Yet another night, someone set up a machine
gun on a neighbor’s roof and fired into the air. Everyone rushed out to tell him
to stop, lest the Israelis in the settlement above rocket their houses. The
young men folded up the gun and left.
Things are worse in Beit
Jalla, a Christian village next to Bethlehem. Above it sits Gilo, which the
Palestinians call a settlement and the Israelis a neighborhood. (It was built
after 1967 in occupied territory on land confiscated from Palestinians. Israeli
banks gave low-interest loans and the government subsidies to persuade people to
move there.) The IDF closed the town, so I leave my car and walk over concrete
barriers to get in. I visit the Amaya family, whose three-story house wears
bullet holes in windows and walls to show it is one of the closest to Gilo. Each
of the three Amaya brothers lives with his wife and children on a different
floor. The children become terrified after dark. Elias Amaya, who is
thirty-eight and runs a cellphone business, tells me that if anyone shoots at
Gilo near his house, he tells him to stop. Not only because it invites Israeli
tank and rocket fire, but because it is useless. (It may not be as useless as he
thinks, because some Israelis have left Gilo in the last month. House prices,
the greatest indicator of all, are collapsing.) Elias’s sister-in-law said that,
while some of her neighbors have died, she retains friendships with Israelis.
Some have called offering to take her children in until the shooting stops.
Elias says in words familiar to Israelis who settled in Palestine before 1948:
"We need a real state. Not one without weapons, without borders. We need a
minimum to live." This is a rebellion, across the West Bank and Gaza,
against the two O’s: Occupation and Oslo, under whose accords the occupation
continues and the settlements expand.
The Israeli response to
Palestinian attacks has been, to put it midly, disproportionate. The night after
I left Beit Jalla, another Israeli rocket barrage killed a German physician who
lived and worked in the town of 14,000 souls. Amnesty International issued a
report on 19 October, and things are worse now, saying that "Israeli
security forces repeatedly resorted to excessive use of lethal force in
circumstances in which neither their lives nor the lives of others were in
imminent danger, resulting in unlawful killings." Amnesty observers
recorded the repeated use of CS gas, rubber-coated metal bullets and live
ammunition. Yet, Amnesty wrote, the Israelis have experience of effective
non-lethal crowd control. In July and August 1999, riots in Jerusalem "were
policed without resort to firearms." Those demonstrators were
Ultra-Orthodox Jews, who like some settlers in the last few weeks, confronted
the army when it disagreed with Israeli policy. Amnesty noted that in fifty
years of Israeli history "no demonstration organized by a Jewish group has
ever been fired on, even by rubber bullets."