The Great War for Civilisation (80 page)

Within months, it would be revealed that “cutting a deal” was exactly what Israel was doing—but with the Palestinians rather than the Syrians and Jordanians. The Palestinian delegates to the Washington talks were taken aback to discover that Arafat had behind their backs opened his own secret channels to the Israelis and was even now negotiating for a separate but fatally similar peace plan. All that the Arabs had achieved—or worked to achieve in Washington—disappeared overnight. But the problems that had confronted them, the details that bedevilled them in all those long months since that gloomy conference in Madrid, would now turn up in the fatally flawed Oslo agreement of 1993. Arafat and his ill-trained officials—with not one lawyer among them—would now attempt to overcome arguments framed by Israel's best-educated and shrewdest negotiators, lured on by the chimera of a Palestinian state and a capital in Jerusalem that they would never—ever—be given.

It wasn't difficult to see why both the Israelis and Arafat saw common cause in a secret deal. Israel's occupation was growing ever more brutal and the increasing strength of the religious Palestinian militias, especially Hamas, was frightening both the Israelis and the Palestinian leadership. For years, the Israelis had encouraged Hamas in its building of mosques and social services as a rival to the “terrorist” PLO and the leadership of the exiled “super-terrorist” Arafat. Just as America helped to create Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, so Israel nurtured Hamas and its leadership of imams and self-righteous fighters who now demanded Palestine—all of Palestine—for the Palestinians. In the end, what saved Arafat from obscurity was the power of these Islamic rivals among the Palestinians, and the degree to which they were bleeding Israel in the occupied territories. Without the opposition of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israelis would have had no desire to withdraw. Without their existence—without those uncompromising pan-Islamic demands that far outstripped Arafat's aspirations—the Israelis would have had little interest in recognising the PLO or giving back a speck of Palestine to Arafat.

GAZA. 20 APRIL 1993. The Israelis will not let the ambulances through. The United Nations have been turned away. As the smoke rises from the Tofah suburbs of Gaza City, the Israelis have even told the fire brigade to go away. We could hear the explosions all day, punctuated by rifle fire and the throb of a helicopter gunship that circled the slums. The Israelis are busy losing their war in Gaza. Of course, it did not feel like that to the Palestinians. For Abdul-Rahman al-Shebaki, groaning in front of the X-ray machine at the Al-Ahli hospital with a fragment of Israeli high-velocity bullet lodged three inches from his heart, the Israelis were doing what they wanted in Tofah. “I walked into the street during the curfew—I was very close to the soldiers—and I'd thought they'd let me go home,” al-Shebaki told me as Dr. Salah Saf applied a wad of bandages to the area below his heart.

The nurses produced a series of X-ray photographs that showed an ominous white smudge perforating al-Shebaki's diaphragm, an image held up to the light before his angry, muttering family and friends. The twenty-one-year-old Palestinian had seen the Israeli soldier who shot him clean through the chest. Even before al-Shebaki had been brought out of Tofah, the fury of the Palestinians had been palpable. “Why are you here?” a bearded Palestinian asked me as I cowered in a pharmacy, trying to avoid arrest by the Israeli major who had already brandished a “closed military area” prohibition document in my face and ordered me out of Salahedin Street. “We need help,” the Palestinian shouted. “You've just come here to watch us dance.” We had already watched the first prisoners taken out of Tofah, heads bowed in the back of an Israeli jeep.

The Israelis would not say why they were raiding Tofah, but no one in Gaza City doubted they were searching for the Palestinian gunmen who had knifed and axed to death Ilan Feinberg two days earlier as he sat in the offices of the European Cooperation for Development agency. The “Popular Front for the Liberation Front” 's so-called Red Eagles—how often we have to use “so-called” in the Middle East's self-generating wars—had claimed responsibility for murdering the Israeli lawyer, quite possibly with the intention of provoking the Israelis into just the kind of military operation that would further embitter thousands of Palestinians. If so, they were successful.

What did all this achieve? I asked the Israeli major just that question as we stood in Salahedin Street, Palestinian urchins preparing to set light to the first tyres of the day scarcely a hundred yards away. Wasn't Gaza simply a hopeless case, I asked, a war that was already lost to Israel? “What do you suggest we do?” the officer asked wearily. “What
can
we do?” Well, how about leaving Gaza? “It's a political question,” he replied. And he was right. For no matter how many slums were blown up in revenge for Feinberg's murder, no matter how many Palestinians were arrested, no matter how many ambulances were made to wait outside the curfewed “military areas,” the Israelis had lost the war in Gaza. The walls were heavy with the graffiti of hatred, claims of “collaborator” executions, threats of fire and blood from Hamas and the PLO's Fatah guerrillas. The moment the Israelis left a street, it reverted to Palestinian control.

Next day, we found out what had really happened in Salahedin Street, what that major wanted to conceal from us. The Israelis had found an armed Hamas gunman in Tofah, a man called Zakaria Sharbaji, who belonged to the Hamas “Qassem Brigade,” and they had killed him with a light anti-armour weapon. Palestinians had made off with his head and the Israelis had kept his body—which, of course, created problems for Sharbaji's widow and parents in the Jabaliya refugee camp. His blood still lay across the smashed breeze-block hut in which he was killed along with some remarkably undamaged pages from a Koran which— so his sympathisers unconvincingly claimed—had fallen from his pocket at the moment of death. “They picked up the bones from his head and the brains and took them away,” a visitor to the newly established shrine remarked. “But the Israelis had already taken the corpse.”

No one denied that the thirty-year-old “martyr”—his baby was only six months old—was a member of Hamas. For three months, so they said in Tofah, he had been on the run from the Israelis, hiding in Jabaliya and then in Tofah. Which was why, with their usual penchant for a little collective justice, the Israelis cleared the surrounding streets and blew up no fewer than seventeen Palestinian houses— homes to perhaps 200 people—within the space of just twelve hours. Those were the explosions I had heard from Salahedin Street. The rubble of Sharbaji's last hiding place was therefore the scene of much shrieking and rage from almost a thousand Palestinians who gathered to view the wreckage of broken walls and roofs, fire-scorched furniture, shredded mattresses and clothes, smashed fridges, washing machines and television sets which the Israelis left behind them. Where, one wondered, did punishment end and vandalism begin?

It was not a matter that Sharbaji's parents were likely to debate. Unable to retrieve either part of their son's body, they nonetheless chose to mourn his death at their home in Jabaliya camp, a step to which the Israelis had their own unique response. Jabaliya, they decided, was under curfew. Jabaliya would become—and the phrase had long been part of the lexicon of Gaza—a “closed military area.”

This expression should be studied with great care. For in Gaza, a “curfew” existed—or was brought into being—whenever an Israeli officer produced a piece of paper and scribbled a name, date and hour onto it. It happened to me when we tried to visit Sharbaji's parents. An Israeli border police patrol stopped my car with that imperishable command: “No pictures.” Where, I asked, was the law that prevented us taking photographs in Gaza? Quick as a flash, out came a printed sheet from the pocket of the green-uniformed policeman, an Israeli Arab in dark glasses who swiftly filled in the words “Jabaliya,” “April 21st,” and “0600 hours” beneath the title “Closed Military Area.” Would we like to take a picture of him signing the piece of paper? Of course we would. Kafka had nothing on this.

This whole charade had little effect on the streets of Gaza City. No sooner were stones thrown at the Israelis from behind the smoke of burning tyres than the first wounded were carried, yelping with pain, into the Al-Ahli hospital. One man arrived with a plastic-coated bullet buried deep in his thigh, another with blood streaming from a bullet wound in his ankle. The doctors routinely administered local anaesthetics, probed the wounds of the victims and brought out the bullets one by one, clinking them neatly onto a metal tray in the operating theatre.

Before dark that night, uniformed and hooded men—two of them carrying axes—appeared at the corpseless funeral rites for Zakaria Sharbaji in a wasteland of sand in the very centre of Gaza City. They took me to a shabby street where a cheap concrete breeze-block was lying in a square foot of newly smoothed sand below the wall of a tenement. “Here we buried our martyr's brain,” a bearded Hamas official confided with solemnity, then pointed to a tree. “Over there we buried some pieces of his jaw.” There was a pause. “Would you like us to dig them up to show you?”

For three days, the shooting continued in Gaza City, the Palestinian victims— armed men, stone-throwers, kids, passers-by—gunned down as if gun battles were rainstorms, something from which you could shelter indoors if you wished, something that was no longer dreadful or unreal or even un-normal. In the chaos and hysteria of the Shifa hospital, it was impossible to ask the doctors, overwhelmed in bloodstained gowns amid the din of screams and shouting, for the identities of each victim. By the hour of curfew on 24 April, 27 Palestinians with gunshot wounds had been brought to the hospital, another 13 to Rafa hospital and another 25 to the Al-Ahli clinic, a total of 65 wounded by the Israelis in scarcely three hours. Trails of blood ran across the entrance to the Shifa hospital. Most of the wounded had still been demonstrating against the destruction of the homes in the Tofah district.

When I arrived at the hospital shortly after 6 p.m., distraught relatives were already shouting and weeping at the entrance. Young men and a small boy lay on the beds, blood covering their legs or chests, while another man, his clothes cut open, his chest streaked with blood, lay gasping on a table. His chin showed the mark of a bullet hole. On a screen above his bed, a green track described a wild stock exchange index. Life up, life down, life functions impaired. “The bullet entered his brain—he is critically ill,” a nurse shouted as doctors thrust a tube down the man's throat and pushed a drip-feed needle into his arm. They were pushing their fingers into his mouth, trying to stop the man swallowing his own tongue. But he died in front of us, his eyes tight shut, his head lolling to the right, the doctors stunned by their failure to keep the man alive. The heartbeat on the screen now registered a thin green line. Within less than a minute, male relatives— all bearded and shouting religious chants—swept his shrouded body into the back seat of an old white Peugeot car. A crowd at the front of the hospital watched the car race away and chorused: “Kill the Jews.” This was the “Palestine” that Arafat was now supposed to inherit.

THE OSLO AGREEMENT, hatched in secret, heavy with unguaranteed dreams, holding out false promises of statehood and Jerusalem and an end to Israeli occupation and Jewish settlement building, was greeted by the world's statesmen—and by most of the world's journalists—as something close to the Second Coming. The “handshake on the White House lawn” between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat on 13 September 1993 became a kind of ideology. Critical faculties had no place here. Enough of blood and tears. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb—just who was the wolf and who the lamb was not vouchsafed to us—and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares. No one noticed that of the three men on the White House lawn, it was President Bill Clinton who quoted the Koran. No one, for that matter, asked how a bunch of Norwegian politicians—some of whom had little practical experience of the Middle East—could have helped to produce this supposed miracle. “Peace,” briefly, could sell as many newspapers as war. And any of us who dared to suggest that Oslo was a tragedy for the Palestinians—and, in the end, for the Israelis—was accused of being anti-peace or “pro-terrorist.”

Under an “interim status” agreement, Arafat and his PLO cronies could create a “Palestinian Authority” in Gaza and Jericho and then, subject to a long and intricate timetable of withdrawal by the Israeli army, in the other major cities of the West Bank. But only a “permanent status” agreement five years later would resolve the future of Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and the “right of return” of at least 3 million—perhaps 5 million—Palestinian refugees. In other words, the statehood which Arafat believed—and which the world was led to believe—was inevitable had to be taken on trust. The Israelis and Palestinians had to marry before proving their faithfulness, and had to accept the word of a father-in-law— Bill Clinton, who as an American president would inevitably be the protector of Israel's interests—that the marriage would work.

Before that handshake, Arafat had visited President Mubarak of Egypt and I travelled to Alexandria to look at the old man of the mountain, the PLO chairman who had once talked of being fifty thousand miles from Palestine but who now believed he was “going home.” Standing beside Mubarak in Alexandria, he looked a truly pathetic figure. His once-plump torso had shrivelled to near-starvation proportions while the ubiquitous, angry scowl of pride with which he used to address his audiences had been replaced by a constant, almost simpering smile. “The fingers of Egypt are on many pages of this plan,” he said of the proposal that would give him and his discredited PLO two little Palestines amid Israeli occupation. The word “fingers” made the plan sound like a crime—which many Palestinians suspected it was, although their voices were rarely broadcast in America or Europe— but Arafat was oblivious to this. He was trying to be nice to Mubarak. In fact, he was trying to be nice to everyone. He was now to accept, formally and on paper, the partition of Palestine which he had always refused and to shake hands, as Middle East journalist David Hirst so pointedly wrote, “with the prime minister of the Jewish state which he had once made it his sacred mission to remove from the face of the earth.”