A Gaza Diary, part 2
Monday morning, June 18, Khan Younis
In the morning we attend the boy's funeral. It is easy to find. Trucks with mounted loudspeakers tour the camp urging residents to attend and giving the street address. Going to funerals is a prerequisite of covering conflicts. I have been to countless. In many places I have had to inspect the bodies and faces to verify or refute claims of torture and mutilation.
The boy's father, Murad Abdel Rahman, stares vacantly as he stands up from one in a long line of purple plastic chairs placed in the street and shakes the hands of mourners. Posters of his dead son adorn the walls. Black flags of mourning, green banners with Koranic verses, the yellow flags of the Fatah militia, and signs from Palestinian factions surround the white canopy that has been spread out over the rutted, dirt street.
I shake his hand. I offer my condolences. We incline our heads together to talk. The small body lies a few feet away.
It is hard to concentrate. The frail form of the dead boy, wrapped in a shroud, reminds me of my eleven-year-old son. I was in a room once in Kosovo with a mother and her children shortly after her husband was murdered by the Serbs. The man's young son kept looking at the photo of his father on his identification card and weeping. I want, as then, to flee. I want to go home to my children.
A truck, manned by militants, is parked at the end of the street. The bearded Islamists in white robes wait to turn the funeral into a rally. The boy's body will be the prop. It is a familiar act. Martyrs, especially child martyrs, are a potent weapon in the hands of radical groups. It is hard to argue with death. Nationalists in Bosnia or Kosovo, insurgents in Central America, made a great show of funerals and the remains of those who were sacrificed for the cause.
The father says that he had no part in the decorations, which include posters of Saddam Hussein. He seems indifferent to the display. He speaks slowly, his puffy eyes and uncomprehending gaze giving the lie to the rhetoric of sacrifice and glory.
"This is what I worked so hard to prevent," he says, his voice hoarse and low. "I took Ali with me every day to my restaurant at 6:00 in the morning on al-Bahar Street. I made him promise he would not go to the dunes to throw rocks. Yesterday he asked to go home at 3:00. He said he had to study for the makeup sessions they are holding because of all the school closings this year. A half hour after he left people came running to tell me he was shot in the leg. I ran through the streets to the hospital. They would not let me in. They said he would be discharged soon. They told me he was okay. I forced my way inside and saw him lying in the corridor dead with a bullet hole in his heart. I fainted."
Several small boys stand glumly on the edge of the tent. They say they had called to Ali as he walked home to join them on the dunes.
"We all threw rocks," says Ahmed Moharb, ten. "Over the loudspeaker the soldier told us to come to the fence to get chocolate and money. Then they cursed us. Then they fired a grenade. We started to run. They shot Ali in the back. I won't go again. I am afraid."
During the funeral, sixteen-year-old Aadel Hussein al-Muqannan, who was wounded with Ali, is pronounced dead at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. He was shot in the abdomen; the bullet severed his aorta. Aadel's fifteen-year-old brother, Hussein al-Muqannan, was killed by Israeli troops on November 22, 2000, at the Tuffah checkpoint at the edge of Khan Younis.
The residents in the camp insist the Arabic accent is Lebanese. They believe that mercenaries from the South Lebanese Army, once a Christian proxy army for Israel and long a bitter foe of the Palestinians, have been integrated into the Israeli force. The word in Palestinian Arabic meaning "to shoot"--ahousak--is never heard over the loudspeakers but rather the Lebanese word in Arabic, atoohak. And the Palestinians in the camp say that they can hear Lebanese music coming from the guard posts.
Ali's small body is loaded onto the back of a truck. A cadre of young men, some bearded and in robes, others dressed in black and wearing wraparound sunglasses, march in three rows, with automatic weapons pointed in the air, behind the bier. The crowd of several hundred, egged on by the speakers mounted on the truck, chant Islamic and anti-Israeli slogans.
"Mothers of Jews!" they shout. "We will make you weep like Palestinian mothers."
The truck, with a generator in the back to power the loudspeakers, lumbers ahead of the procession. Posters are displayed of young martyrs, often holding clunky machine guns in front of a backdrop of the al-Aqsa Mosque. These boys probably never owned a gun or saw the mosque in their lives. The chanting crowd passes the murals and graffiti that smother the walls of the camp. One shows an Israeli bus, marked by a Star of David, smashed and on fire. "Don't be merciful to those inside" reads the slogan underneath. "Blow it up! Hit it!" Hamas has signed the mural. Another shows masked Palestinian gunmen, AK-47 assault rifles strapped to their backs, loading a mortar to fire on a settlement. One mural shows a pile of yellow skulls, all marked with a blue Star of David. On one wall the skeleton of a settler has been painted hanging from a post. Nearby a huge hand thrusts a knife into the Star of David. Many walls list the names of the thirty-seven Palestinians killed in Khan Younis since September.
Every new death pushes the voices of moderation deeper into the background. Azmi, who has Israeli friends, says he no longer speaks of them for fear of being branded a collaborator. Those moderates who keep open the channels of communication are often the first to be silenced by their own side. As in most conflicts, all dialogue has been reduced to a scream.
Monday afternoon, June 18, Khan Younis
Fahdi Abu Ammouna, thirteen, lies on a bed in the al-Amal Hospital, his feet propped up on a pillow. Dried blood covers the sheets. He says that some of his rocks hit the army jeep, though I doubt he or any of his friends could throw that far past the electric fence.
"The soldier said over the loudspeaker that those who wanted to live should run," he says, "and those who wanted to die should stay. Then they swore at us. They said everyone who lives in Khan Younis is a dog. I started to run. I was shot. I never heard any shots. The bullet went through both of my legs. I crawled to the ambulance. It was the first time I went."
His mother, seated next to him and wearing a black head scarf, slowly shakes her head. "He goes every day," she says softly. "I sent my older son to bring him home. And he was not home five minutes before he went back. I tell the boys it is useless, throwing stones and becoming a martyr will not make the Israelis leave. My sister has lost a son. My brother has lost a son. One of my uncles was killed and a cousin is dead. I tell them to look at the history of our struggle. All these deaths achieve nothing."
She begins to talk about the first uprising, which led to the Oslo peace agreement. Her husband, Samir, stands in a blue shirt, white pants, and sandals at the end of the bed. He was a prisoner then in Israel. One morning Israeli soldiers burst into her two-room house in the refugee camp while she was baking bread. Her son was six months old. They turned the place upside down and threw the boy on the stove. He was severely burned. As she speaks she gently places her fingers on his small arm, now hooked up to an intravenous tube.
Before we leave, we visit the office of Dr. Mahmoud al-Madhoun, the hospital's director. He hands us plastic bags filled with bullet fragments he has taken out of his patients. All have the dates, the types of wounds, and the names of the victims printed neatly on the outside. Of the 1,206 killed and wounded, he says, 655 were under the age of eighteen. He cannot understand why soldiers would fire at children.
"In thirty years of practice," he says, "I have never treated a patient who died after being hit by a rock."
Tuesday, June 19, Mawasi
We want to spend a day in Mawasi, a Palestinian village cut off from Khan Younis and surrounded by the Israelis. I call the army press office in Jerusalem and ask permission for Azmi, Joe, and me to cross the Tuffah checkpoint at the edge of town. It is agreed that we will be allowed to pass through the checkpoint at 11:00 in the morning.
We walk down the sloping asphalt road to the bleak Tuffah crossing. (Tuffah means "apple" in Arabic.) Behind me rises the El Katadwa neighborhood. Mounds of rubble, the remains of thirty-nine houses demolished by Israeli bulldozers in April, are interspersed with green tents and black plastic water tanks mounted on wooden frames. This was the first incursion by the Israelis into land that had, under Oslo, been given back to the Palestinians.
Nervous groups of Palestinians stand a few hundred yards from the checkpoint. The slogan "We will shield the al-Aqsa Mosque with our bodies from the Zionist enemy" has been spray-painted on the wall next to them. Straw, oil-covered sand, and crushed soda cans litter the road. An Israeli helicopter passes noisily overhead.
The Palestinians wait for the loudspeaker order to come forward in clusters of three. Only those who live in the coastal village of Mawasi can pass. All must have special Israeli identity cards. As the groups of three approach the concrete guardhouse, all lift their shirts to show that they are not hiding weapons or explosives. The women pull up their veils to expose their faces. Dogs trained to sniff out explosives root among suitcases and boxes. Many Palestinians clutch clear plastic bags filled with food or flour. They hold up the bags so that the soldiers can prod and inspect them.
Mohammed al-Magida waits to pick up vegetables grown by farmers in Mawasi. The tomatoes he loaded yesterday were left too long in the sun by the Israelis and spoiled. He has been here today for two hours. On the other side are crates he hopes to have passed to him by hand. But the soldier with the dog that sniffs the produce is not around.
"A lot depends on the mood of the dog," he tells me.
Many items, such as bags of cement and propane tanks, are simply banned. No vehicles, save those of the Israeli army, are permitted to drive back and forth. Pregnant women in labor, held for hours at the checkpoint, often cannot get to the hospital in Khan Younis; two have given birth at the checkpoint. When someone dies in Mawasi the corpse must be carried across for burial in Khan Younis on someone's back.
Ibrahim Abu Awad, a dirty and disheveled boy of ten, pesters me for a shekel, and finally stands and stares intently at the post. I ask him what he wants to do in life.
"Kill Jews," he says.
A soldier barks an order in Arabic over the loudspeaker for Azmi, Joe, and me to approach the post, one by one. We enter a corridor of plastic barrels filled with sand. We pass through a metal detector. Coils of concertina wire spread out around us. I hand our Israeli press cards through the slit in the guardhouse. The area around the guardhouse is blackened by soot. The fence is a tangled mass of wire. This damage is the result of a suicide bomber who blew himself up at the post in May. After the explosion an accomplice threw grenades at the soldiers before being shot dead. The pictures of the two dead men cover the walls in Khan Younis.
Mawasi, with some 5,000 villagers, was split from Khan Younis in 1972 when the Israelis began to build the Neve Dekalim settlement, one in a chain of eleven small settlements along the Gaza coast that include a tourist hotel, a golf course, and horse-riding trails. The Palestinians who live in the village are prohibited from using the modem highway that runs north and south-it is only for the Jewish settlers and the army--and must travel along a one-lane asphalt track that runs parallel to the main road. Mawasi has most of the good farmland in the area. But the closure has left the fields fallow. Khan Younis once depended on Mawasi for 80 percent of its produce, and some 60 percent of the crop used to be shipped to the Gulf states. Now only a pittance gets out.
Once through the checkpoint we proceed down the narrow lane past heaps of rotting garbage. For the last eight months, Israel has refused to allow the Khan Younis municipal authorities, which are in charge of garbage collection on this side as well, to cross Tuffah.
Relations between the Palestinians in Mawasi and the settlers have never been good. But last January, Palestinian gunmen murdered a settler and escaped in the settler's car. The settlers then went on a rampage. The settlement appropriated another 200 dunams (about 45 acres) of land after the killing and erected an electric fence around the barren brown fields. Ahmed Moustafa al-Magida, an imposing man of fifty who is one of the leaders in the village, insists that we take a look at the losses. We pile into his car and tour the area. All around us are confiscated fields, the blackened remains of Palestinian greenhouses, the charred hulks of tractors and farm carts. One Palestinian home has been gutted by fire. Electricity has been cut every. where. Tonight, with the lights of the settlements shining above them, the residents of Mawasi will gather around wood-burning fires.
We decide to visit the beach, negotiating another Israeli checkpoint to do so. Mawasi has seen its fishing industry shut down. The small huts and shacks where Khan Younis residents once sat to drink Coke and swim in the surf are deserted. Fishing boats, the fiberglass hulls cracked from disuse, clutter the sand.
We come upon five fishermen who returned to their boats three days ago after eight months of being denied entry; the Israelis have promised to allow limited fishing near the coast.
"It has been eight months since my feet were wet," says Naim Kanan, forty, a well-built man in a yellow bathing suit. "I am ruined. I sold my wife's gold bracelets, the ones I gave her when we were married. All I hope now is that I can keep my boat."
Joe picks up a small shell on the sand and notices that it has a hole in it. We decide to make a necklace for my daughter. When Kanan sees us searching in the sand, as well as Azmi's impatience with our frivolity, he wades into the surf. He scoops his hands into the water and emerges with dozens of glistening white shells. He dumps them into a plastic bag for us. Later, when the Israeli soldiers pull us out of the car, they will poke deep into this bag, not sure what to make of it.
On our way back to Khan Younis, Joe and I stop at the settlement and peer through the chainlink fence at an Indian worker driving a tractor mower across a lawn, skirting the sprinklers. We ask the soldiers for permission to enter and are told that we must speak with a settlement official. We stand in the sun, gazing at the emerald lawns and the palm trees. Azmi waits for us down the road at a bus stop. Finally we are handed back our Israeli press cards and told to leave.
As we cross into Khan Younis, ambulances are leaving the dunes with eight more wounded, five under the age of eighteen.
Tuesday evening, June 19, Khan Younis
It is the end of the day, but we have made plans to visit a factory. Nearly all commerce in Gaza has been shut down. The 12,000 Palestinian workers from Khan Younis who had jobs in Israel and the 2,000 who worked in settlement factories are now unemployed. The inexpensive piecework done in Palestinian shops may still be sent abroad, but raw materials no longer arrive. The textile- and furniture-factory floors are empty.
We find Abdullah Mousa al-Dosouki, fifty-one, just opposite the dunes, amid his sewing machines and large spools of white thread. Before Israel closed off the strip, he employed sixty people. He made uniforms for El Al, Israel's national airline, and for Bezek, the Israeli telephone company.
"Once the closure began we could not guarantee delivery, and we lost our contracts," he says. "I took out a $12,000 loan to buy new machines. I cannot pay it back. I had a good relationship with three Israeli companies. They now import from China."
As night comes on, Dosouki and his neighbors have an even more pressing concern: water. The water in Khan Younis, when it is available, is salty and riddled with chlorine. Ten of the town's twelve wells do not meet World Health Organization purity standards. Because of the violence at night, public-works employees often refuse to man the pumping stations at the edge of the settlement. In Mawasi many wells have gone completely dry, but the Israelis refuse to allow the villagers to drill new ones.
When I met a few days earlier with Osama al-Farra, the mayor of Khan Younis, he explained to me why the Israelis chose to build a settlement right between Mawasi and Khan Younis: "It is over the aquifers. In 1980 the Israelis began to drill. They have thirty-two wells. They built a pipeline in 1994 to carry the water into Israel. There are probably about 1,000 people in the settlement next to the camp, but they consume one third of our water supply, though about 160,000 people live in Khan Younis."
This Arafat loyalist--he had a huge portrait of Arafat on the wall behind his desk--said that in general his city is nearly bankrupt. Revenues have fallen from $250,000 to $80,000 since the intifada began in September 2000. Salaries of public officials are paid only with assistance from the Gulf states.
The mayor, who is fluent in English, was just seven when his father was killed in the 1967 war. The body was never found. He worries that the current round of violence will lead, as it has in the past, to war.
"My five-year-old son was pretending to present the news," he told me. "He began by saying that five Palestinians had been killed by the Israelis today. His two-year-old brother, who wanted to play, threw himself on the floor and said he was a martyr."
Wednesday, June 20, Khan Younis
The mosque dominates camp life. Five times a day, including calls before dawn and after sunset, the amplified chant of the muezzin lends a coherence and rhythm to existence here. Islam has squeezed out the secular, urban-educated Palestinian leadership in Gaza. In places like Khan Younis, Arafat's Palestinian Authority bows to the militant's interpretation of Islam. There is no alcohol sold in the camp. There are no cinemas. Women, even those who are not religious, find it prudent to walk the streets with their heads covered. Special Islamic reconcilers settle disputes and blood feuds. The militants, imbued with religious zeal, are intolerant of anti-Islamic practices, but they are also widely respected for being honest, in stark contrast with Arafat's bloated and bribe-ridden government. Shop owners complain of having been forced to pay kickbacks to local Arafat officials in order to do business. Landlords say that Palestinian Authority officials rarely pay rent on stores or apartments. Many of Arafat's officials have set up lucrative businesses importing duty-free goods, including cars, and selling them at huge profits.
In the afternoon we visit the cramped office of an Islamic charity that provides food to families in Khan Younis. The room is filled with young bearded militants. A truck has backed up to a warehouse next door, and men are unloading sacks of flour, sugar, and rice, as well as red lentils, tea, macaroni, tomato paste, and corn oil. The charity, which raises its money in the Gulf states, is not officially tied to the militant Islamic group Hamas. But it is here, I have been told, that I will meet Sheikh Younis al-Astal, the camp's senior Hamas leader.
He enters dressed in a white robe. The men in the room fall silent. He speaks, as so many Hamas leaders do, in an even, gracious tone. He offers me tea or coffee.
Arafat loyalists in the camp, such as Faqawi, concede that Hamas is ascendant. If Oslo had led, as many had hoped, to a two-state solution, and thereby given Palestinians some glimmer of a better life, it is a fair bet that Hamas would be a marginal force in Gaza. But Israel's occupation and Arafat's mismanagement have made it only a matter of time before the militants come to power. They already rule the street. If Sharon unleashes Israel's might, as he did in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority will be his first victim.
"What has happened since the Palestinian Authority came to power?" the sheikh asks. "Everyone is poorer. The Israeli occupation has not ended. Hardship always brings people back to God. It is like sickness. To quote the Prophet, peace be upon him, a believer should never be afraid of being poor but of being rich. When you become rich you think only of things. This kills your soul. Islam has given Palestinians cohesion. We feel as one body, in our dreams and our agony. And Islam distinguishes us in that it prepares people to die for the sake of Allah. They are always ready to die for Allah. They are ready to spread the message of Islam, ready to rescue someone weaker than they, even animals."
Hamas is primarily known outside Israel for its suicide-bomb attacks against Israeli civilians. The sheikh tells me that Hamas orders suicide bombers, under its military wing, the Iz al-Din al-Qassam, to attack Israeli civilian targets because Israeli troops and armed settlers routinely attack Palestinian civilians.
"As long as they target our civilians we will target their civilians," he says. "When they stop we will stop."
From 1987 to 1993, during the first intifada, Hamas targeted only Israeli soldiers and settlements. It began to attack individual Israeli civilians after a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. But these attacks have had the added benefit of discrediting and weakening Arafat's authority, of exposing his helplessness in the face of settlement expansion, closures, and the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. Still, even the sheikh has used his time during Friday prayers to implore the young boys not to go out on the dunes.
"I know that every father tries to keep his children away from the fence," he says. "The teachers and the imams tell the children not to go. When I preach in the mosque I tell them to stay away. But these kids have no place to go. The only place to play is in the alleys or the dunes."
The gun battles on the rim of the camp at night have fused the various factions. The Fatah Hawks, who once battled Hamas activists for control of the street, now swap weapons and ammunition with their old foes. The factions march together at funerals. We meet next with one of the leaders of the gunmen who fire on the Israeli positions at night. Mohammed Abu Rich, thirty-one, leads the Ahmed Abu Rich brigade, which is made up of a couple dozen men. The group is named for Mohammed's brother, shot in November 1993 by the Israelis. He meets us in his house, a huge painting of his brother on the wall surrounded by three Palestinian flags.
He tells us that he spent six years in an Israeli prison. His parents died while he was incarcerated. He has no family left. He swings from polite conversation to a thinly veiled hostility. I am uneasy. For the only time in Gaza, I hand over my Swiss passport when asked for identification to avoid being judged as an American. He writes down our names and our passport numbers--Joe uses hi.' Maltese passport--in a school notebook.
I have seen his type before in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Congo, and Central America. Driven by rage and somewhat intoxicated with the authority carrying an automatic weapon can bring to the dispossessed, these are the combatants I fear the most. They are always looking for hostages, sure we are all spies. During the first intifada, a group of Fatah Hawks hauled New York Times photographer Rina Castelnuovo and myself into a room and accused us of working for Israeli security. We were lucky to talk our way out.
As often happens in such encounters, I am soon the one being interviewed. He asks me what I think of the conflict, which Palestinians I have met with, where I have been in Khan Younis, and what I think of Israel. I mutter brief and tepid answers. Odds are that the next time I arrive in Gaza I will hear that this man has been killed.
"I can't stand to see the children get shot," he says as we stand to leave. "I don't care about the others. But when the children get shot I cry. I can't take it. I feel like I am sixty."
Thursday, June 21, Khan Younis
Sabha Abu Mousa, fifty-five, picks through the shattered tiles and stones that were once her home in the neighborhood of El Katadwa. She is searching for her daughter-in-law's two gold bracelets. She and her husband ward off packs of scavengers, most of them young boys.
In one of the few gutted buildings that remain standing after the April attack, a ceiling fan, its blades shredded, hangs tenuously by a wire from what is left of the roof. The attack left the fifteen people who lived in this woman's small house homeless. They have moved into two rooms in an unfinished housing project where they have no running water or electricity.
"My son is in an Israeli prison," she says, standing near what's left of her refrigerator. "He is serving a ninety-nine-year sentence for killing Jews. I saw him twenty days ago. Before that I had not seen him for seven months. We lost three refrigerators. We lost my son's new bedroom furniture. And we lost the two bracelets."
She pauses and looks toward the settlement.
"All will vanish in the end except Allah," she says.
I pick up a child's notebook. It belongs to the young boy who lived next door. It reads, in broken English, "It's a pleasure to writ to you after a long time and I hope you are fine and I will visit you in Jericho in the winter holiday because the weather is fine. I am looking forward to seeing you. Remember to your family. Your cousin, Anis."
The small boy's room, which he shared with his brothers, is now a pile of stone and plaster.
There is shooting again at the dunes, though the only injury occurs when a fourteen-year-old boy suffers a fractured skull after being hit in the head by an Israeli tear-gas canister.
I watch Jihad Abu Mousa, twenty-two, kick at a few pieces of rubble. He is morose and silent. He has a closely cropped beard, wears blue sweatpants and a green shirt. He quit high school to work as one of the 2,000 Palestinian laborers in the settlement. He earned $10 a day tending vegetables in the greenhouses, arriving at work at 6:00 in the morning and leaving at 3:00.
On January 29 his twenty-three-year-old brother Mohammed was shot dead by Israeli soldiers while, Jihad says, playing a game of soccer. Jihad, considered a security risk, lost his job.
"I worked for them for two years," he says. "They have quite a life--nice cars, big houses, yards, hot clean water, and electricity, not like us. But they treated me well. I have nothing now."
He stops, the familiar thousand-yard stare of despair and incomprehension creeping across his face, the look beaten into him, beaten into his father and his father's father and, no doubt, if he has children, a look that will be beaten into them.
"Today or tomorrow," he says. "What does it matter when I die?"
Thursday afternoon, June 21, Jerusalem
Joe and I cross back over Erez, our heavy body armor slung over our shoulders. I pull our bags behind us on the cart, which bounces over the pitted asphalt. We shove our bags through the metal detectors. We give our passports to a female Israeli soldier seated behind a long wooden counter. She hands each of us a slip of paper. She tells us to carry the slips to the last guard post into Israel. We walk into Israel and enter the vast, empty parking lot next to Erez. We climb into an old taxi, which we have arranged to meet us, and start for Jerusalem. The wide expanse of highway, the gleaming gas stations, the roadside restaurants, the stucco homes, the lush valleys filled with vineyards and crops, seem shockingly unfamiliar now.
It is not long before the ancient Mercedes gives out. The driver, an Israeli Arab, cannot budge it out of second gear. When he tries there is a loud bang. The car shudders. The pace is excruciating. He does not want to let us go. He talks about being met on the road by another car from his company, about waiting a little longer to see if the wreck will come back to life, about how little we have to travel until things will be fixed. I lose my patience. I insist he let us off at a bus stop on the highway, where a group of young Israeli soldiers, M-16 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, stand waiting for a ride.
We hitch a ride with two nuns in a van. The sisters run health clinics in Gaza. They speak in French, the common language of their religious order. As we rise steadily toward the Jerusalem hills, the banter reminds me of another era, when the educated upper classes in the Middle East were taught French. One may still stumble onto elderly French-educated doctors and intellectuals in Cairo or Damascus, but that world is all but gone, replaced with American slang and McDonald's.
The afternoon light casts a soft golden glow over Jerusalem, on the crest of the hill before us. It is hard not to be moved by the city, by all that it has endured and will endure. It has seen its share of zealots, those who killed in the name of causes now forgotten. They, too, believed that they were faced with an insoluble human dilemma.
I have been invited to dinner with a friend, a surgeon, and his family in their affluent home in West Jerusalem. His father fled Vienna for Palestine shortly after the Nazis took over Austria. They are liberal Israelis, no friends of Sharon and no friends of the growing religious right. They support the creation of a Palestinian state. I worry about them every time a suicide bomb explodes in the city.
At the table I try to make them grasp, just for a moment, what I felt watching the children on the dunes in Khan Younis. I tell the story. They admit that it is wrong, and then add, "But you have to understand, the Palestinians are brainwashed." I concede the point, hoping only to impart the raw cruelty of what I saw. I try again. I fail. I fall silent.
It is late when I leave. I walk toward the center of Jerusalem. The night air is a welcome relief after the summer's heat. I am glad to be alone. I pass in and out of patches of light and dark cast: by the periodic streetlamps. My shoes are covered with the dirt of the camp.
War has an alluring simplicity. It reduces the ambiguities of life to blacks and whites. It fills our mundane days with passion. It promises to rid us of our problems. When it is over many miss it. I have sat in Sarajevo cards and heard that although no one wished back the suffering, they all yearned for the lost spirit of self-sacrifice and collective struggle.
War's cost is exacting. It destroys families. It leaves behind a wasteland, irreconcilable grief. It is a disease, and in the night air I smell its contagion. Justice is not at issue here: war consumes the good along with the wicked. There will be no stopping it. Pity will be banished. Fear will rule. It is the old lie again, told to children desperate for glory: Duke et decorum est pro patria mori.
~~~~~~~~
By Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, a reporter for the New York Times, was the Middle East bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, based in Jerusalem, from 1988 to 1990. He was the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, based in Cairo, from 1991 to 1995. Joe Sacco, the cartoon journalist whose illustrations appear throughout this article, is the author of Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, both from Fantagraphics Books. |
