The Great War for Civilisation (99 page)

As the wreckage of the Oslo agreement rusted away, the once viable alternatives were also being slowly dismissed. For years, critics of the Oslo agreement pointed to the vital, undeniable UN Security Council Resolution 242. But now even this alternative is losing its appeal. More and more among Palestinians I hear the words that so frighten Israelis: that they must have “all” of Palestine, not just the lands taken by Israel in 1967. In Gaza in the autumn of 2000, I actually encountered this transition in progress. A Palestinian computer trainee began by telling me that UN Resolution 242 was the only path to real compromise and peace. But by the end of his increasingly bitter peroration, he began talking about Haifa and Acre and Ashkelon, cities which are in Israel, not in the nation of “Palestine” that Arafat was prepared to accept.

And all the while, reading back through my own reports as I write this book, I come across frightening little portents. “Do the Americans realise the catastrophe that is about to overwhelm the region?” I find myself asking in a feature filed to
The Independent
on 25 February 2001. “Have they any idea of the elemental forces that may be unleashed in the coming months?” Again, I ask myself why I wrote these words. Less than six and a half months before those elemental forces did explode, what did I expect? And I remember that friend of mine in Ramallah, the one who tried to explain the Palestinian reaction to suicide bombers by saying that Palestinians felt that their enemies “should suffer too.”

And so, as I pull my files from the shelves, my notebooks from Beirut and Israel and “Palestine,” I hear the clock ticking towards 11 September 2001, the calendar spitting out the dates. I have a hard copy of a long report filed from Jerusalem on 28 August 2001. There are just two weeks left to go.

THERE ISN'T A SCRAP OF INAS Abu Zeid left. She was only seven and the “martyrs” posters already going up around Khan Younis show her to have been a delicate-featured girl. But there isn't a trace of her amid the fragments of corrugated iron and plastic, nor in the soft brown Gaza sand. Inas had been atomised, turned to dust in a millisecond. “I will show you where the missile came from,” a boy tells me, pointing far across the sand to where a few miserable concrete huts, with rag windows and flapping, sand-caked washing, stand near the horizon. “The Israelis fired from behind those houses. It was a tank.”

Was it so? I say this to myself, not as a question but as another of those remarks you find yourself making in Gaza. Lie? Truth? They matter when a war has grown so brutal, so cruel as this. Inas's father, Sulieman, died with her. So did his six-year-old son, also named Sulieman. I don't think I've come across a war in which children are killed so quickly. If it's not an Israeli baby in a Palestinian sniper's crosshairs, it's two pesky Palestinian kids stupid enough to stand outside a Hamas office when the Israelis have chosen to blow the place away, or schoolkids who decide to take an early afternoon pizza, or Inas and Sulieman junior who got in the way or—if Hamas was lying and the Israelis are telling the truth—were turned to wet dust by their father's bomb.

The Palestinian Authority has made a clean sweep of the Abu Zeids' backyard. If he was making a bomb, it has disappeared, like Inas. I poke around amid the desert trash. How could an Israeli missile fly over the other huts, turn the corner outside the Abu Zeids' backyard, pass over the yard walls and then dip below the plastic roof to blast the family apart? But who would make a bomb with his two tiny children standing next to him? Or maybe there was a bomb hidden at the back of the yard and Inas or Sulieman Junior touched it.

A crowd has gathered around us, unsmiling, suspicious. It's not so easy now to investigate these deaths. “I'm Norwegian but Palestinians have started to look at me in the street and talk about me as if I'm an American,” a smiling aid worker says to me. “They blame the Americans for what the Israelis do. And now they blame the Europeans because we do nothing to help them.” Which is exactly what happened in Lebanon. The Norwegian lady is right. I was watched as I walked through the street in Gaza City, scrutinised by youths in Rafah. At Kalandia—just outside Jerusalem, on the road to Ramallah—a Palestinian boy of perhaps twelve looks at my car's Israeli registration plates, picks up an iron bar and smashes it as hard as he can onto the back mudguard. Two men in a truck—we are all waiting at one of Israel's humiliating checkpoints—jeer at me.

Everywhere, you notice the signs of collapse, of incipient anarchy. The Gaza wall murals used to depict Yassir Arafat's beaming, ugly mug and pictures of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Now they are filled with exploding buses and dead children and Israeli soldiers on their backs with blood squirting from their heads. “They don't even talk about Arafat any more,” a Palestinian café owner says to me as three horse-drawn water carts clop lazily past us. “There's only one joke going the rounds about him. Arafat is at Camp David and the Israelis are demanding that he ‘ends the violence.' And Arafat replies: ‘I can't end the violence until I can stop my lips from trembling.' ” Arafat's growing senility is a source of deepening concern. Not far from Hebron, I meet a prominent Palestinian figure, important enough to require anonymity, who shakes his head in despair. “What can Arafat do now? His marriage is in bits—he's only seen his wife for three minutes in the past ten months. His child needs a father and he's not there. And he's allowing the whole place to tribalise and disintegrate. There is complete disintegration here.”

It's true. On the road south of Nablus, a yellow Palestinian taxi is hit by a stone—apparently thrown by an Israeli driver in an oncoming car, or that's what the Israeli cops thought—and careers off the road. Its driver, Kemal Mosalem, is killed outright. But when his body arrives at the Rafidiyeh hospital, his family believe he has been killed by a rival Palestinian clan led by Ali Frej. The Frej family then ambush the grieving Mosalems with Kalashnikov rifles. Among the four Palestinian dead is Ali Frej and a Fatah official who had been part of Jibril Rajoub's local “preventive security” unit. Six others are wounded. These are Arafat's people. They are killing each other. And Arafat remains silent.

Yet here's the thing. Ariel Sharon keeps saying that Arafat is a murderer, a super-terrorist, the leader of “international terror,” linked to Osama bin Laden, a man who gives orders for the murder of kids in pizza parlours. And the Israeli public are buying this, their journalists front-paging it, their people repeating it, over and over. Talking to Israelis—in taxis, on aeroplanes, in cafés—I keep hearing the same stuff. Terror, murder, filth. Like a cassette. Where have I heard this before?

In Gaza, I cannot fail to remember Beirut in 1982. Gaza now is a miniature Beirut. Under Israeli siege, struck by F-16s and tank fire and gunboats, starved and often powerless—there are now six-hour electricity cuts every day in Gaza—it's as if Arafat and Sharon are replaying their bloody days in Lebanon. Sharon used to call Arafat a mass murderer back then. It's important not to become obsessed during wars. But Sharon's words were like an old, miserable film I had seen before. Every morning in Jerusalem, I pick up the
Jerusalem Post
. And there on the front page, as usual, will be another Sharon diatribe. PLO murderers. Palestinian Authority terror. Murderous terrorists.

Each day I travel to the scene of new Israeli incursions. The Israelis bomb Palestinian police stations, Palestinian security annexes, Palestinian police checkpoints. Why the police? I drive round the Gaza Strip with an old friend from the Beirut war, a European aid worker who still bears the webbed scar of a Lebanese bullet in his arm and stomach—the round punctured his spleen and liver. “Now if you look to your right, Bob, there's the police station that the Israelis bombed two weeks ago,” he says. There's a mass of burned-out rooms and a crumpled office. “And just round the corner here is the police post the Israelis hit last week.” More trashed buildings. “And down that road you can just see the Palestinian offices that were hit in July.” After the early raids, the Palestinians would do a quick rebuilding and repainting job. Now they no longer bother. But how can Arafat “arrest the murderers” if the Israelis are going to destroy all his police stations?

There was a story told to me by one of the men investigating Sharon's responsibility for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, and the story is that the then Israeli defence minister, before he sent his Phalangist allies into the camps, announced that it was Palestinian “terrorists” who had murdered their newly assassinated leader, president-elect Bashir Gemayel. Sharon was to say later that he never dreamed the Phalange would massacre the Palestinians. But how could he say that if he claimed earlier that the Palestinians killed the leader of the Phalange? In reality, no Palestinians were involved in Gemayel's death. It might seem odd in this new war to be dwelling about that earlier atrocity. I am fascinated by the language. Murderers, terrorists. That's what Sharon said then, and it's what he says now. Did he really make that statement in 1982? I begin to work the phone from Jerusalem, calling up Associated Press bureaus that might still have their files from nineteen years ago. He would have made that speech—if indeed he used those words— some time on 15 September 1982.

One Sunday afternoon, my phone rings in Jerusalem. It's from an Israeli I met in Jaffa Street after the Sbarro bombing. An American Jewish woman had been screaming abuse at me—foreign journalists are being insulted by both sides with ever more violent language—and this man suddenly intervenes to protect me. He's smiling and cheerful and we exchange phone numbers. Now on the phone, he says he's taking the El Al night flight to New York with his wife. Would I like to drop by for tea?

He turns out to have a luxurious apartment next to the King David Hotel and I notice, when I read his name on the outside security buzzer, that he's a rabbi. He's angry because a neighbour has just let down a friend's car tyres in the underground parking lot and he's saying how he felt like smashing the windows of the neighbour's car. His wife, bringing me tea and feeding me cookies, says that her husband—again, he should remain anonymous—gets angry very quickly. There's a kind of gentleness about them both—how easy it is to spot couples who are still in love—that is appealing. But when the rabbi starts to talk about the Palestinians, his voice begins to echo through the apartment. He says several times that Sharon is a good friend of his, a fine man, who's been to visit him in his New York office.

What we should do is go into those vermin pits and take out the terrorists and murderers. Vermin pits, yes I said vermin, animals. I tell you what we should do. If one stone is lobbed from a refugee camp, we should bring the bulldozers and tear down the first twenty houses close to the road. If there's another stone, another twenty ones. They'd soon learn not to throw stones. Look, I tell you this. Stones are lethal. If you throw a stone at me, I'll shoot you. I have the right to shoot you.

Now the rabbi is a generous man. He's been in Israel to donate a vastly important and, I have no doubt, vastly expensive medical centre to the country. He is well-read. And I liked the fact that—unlike too many Israelis and Palestinians who put on a “we-only-want-peace” routine to hide more savage thoughts—he at least spoke his mind. But this is getting out of hand. Why should I throw a stone at the rabbi? He shouts again. “If you throw a stone at me, I will shoot you.” But if you throw a stone at me, I say, I won't shoot you. Because I have the right not to shoot you. He frowns. “Then I'd say you're out of your mind.”

I am driving home when it suddenly hits me. The Old and New Testaments have just collided. The rabbi's dad taught him about an eye for an eye—or twenty homes for a stone—whereas Bill Fisk taught me about turning the other cheek. Judaism is bumping against Christianity. So is it any surprise that Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other? For despite all the talk of Christians and Jews being “people of the Book,” Muslims are beginning to express ever harsher views of Jews. The sickening Hamas references to Jews as “the sons of pigs and monkeys” are echoed by Israelis who talk of Palestinians as cockroaches or “vermin,” who tell you—as the rabbi told me—that Islam is a warrior religion, a religion that does not value human life. And I recall several times a Jewish settler who told me back in 1993—in Gaza, just before the Oslo accords were signed—that “we do not recognise their Koran as a valid document.”

I walk out of
The Independent
's office and home in the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Tor to find my car surrounded by glass. Now it's my turn to get angry. The driver's window has been smashed, the radio torn out. It is plastered with “TV” stickers—in the hope that Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers will not open fire. Abu Tor is mostly Arab, although
The Independent
's house is right on the old green line, Arabs to the right of the front door, mostly Jews to the left. I drive down to the Hertz agency, sitting on piles of glass. The girl tells me that to avail myself of Hertz's insurance, I have to report the robbery to the police. She tells me to go to the Russian Compound.

Now I know about the Russian Compound from Amnesty's reports. This is where most of the Israeli torture goes on, the infamous “shaking” of suspected Palestinian “terrorists.” It should be an interesting trip. The moment I park my car, a loudspeaker shrieks at me in Hebrew. A cop tells me that for security reasons I have to park round the corner. No trouble with that. I watch two big police vans with sealed windows pass through the security barrier. I park and return to the door. “Where was your car robbed?” I am asked. Just outside the office, in Abu Tor, I reply. The policewoman shrugs. “Well, what do you expect?” she asks. I understand what she means. Arabs rob, don't they, they steal car radios as well as blow up pizzerias? I wait for an hour. There is no cop to make out a report, although there are more than 200 policemen surrounding Orient House, a few hundred metres across the city.