The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  One could only wonder how Lewin’s plan could be put into practice. Would the suicide bomber’s wife—or husband—be put to death first? Or the first-born? Or the youngest son? Or perhaps granny would be hauled from her armchair and done away with while the rest of the family looked on. Lewin’s argument, predictably, rested on scripture. “The biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek served as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that were ‘ordinarily unacceptable’ in the face of a mortal threat.” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who favoured the limited use of torture to extract information, said that Lewin’s proposal was a legitimate if flawed attempt to strike a balance between preventing “terrorism” and preserving democracy. Other American Jewish leaders forcefully condemned Lewin’s opinion as reprehensible and pointed out that scholars had ruled that the lessons of Amalek could not be applied to contemporary events lest the arguments “go all the way and suggest that the Palestinian nation as a whole has earned the fate of Amalek.”

  Not that the Palestinians themselves were averse to death sentences for their own people, albeit that the targets were Israel’s collaborators. On 9 August 2000, for instance, it took just twenty minutes for Judge Fathi Abu Srur to decide that Munzer Hafnawi should be executed. At 10 o’clock he sat in his plastic chair, hands clasped between his knees, his gaze moving steadily over the seething crowd in the Nablus Palestinian courtroom, his solemn brown eyes avoiding the mother of the young Palestinian whose murder by the Israelis he had allegedly arranged. His lawyer, Samir Abu Audi—appointed by the Palestinian Authority— sat meekly below the bench, head bowed, in silence. By 10:20, Judge Abu Srur had ordered the execution of the accused and Hafnawi was crouching like an animal at the feet of his prison guards.

  This wasn’t rough justice. It wasn’t even tragic farce. It was a drumhead court which allowed the public to scream and wolf-whistle at the grey-bearded, forty-three-year-old defendant the moment the judge announced that, according to Jordanian Criminal Article 111 of 1960—a nice judicial Hashemite touch, this—his sentence was “to execute the criminal.” As the guards dragged Hafnawi towards the court door, several men leaned over the barrier to beat their fists on his head. “Your excellency the President,” the crowd bayed—the president being Arafat— “execute the spy at once!” No one in the Nablus court was likely to forget the smiles on the faces of the men when “death by bullets” was demanded by the prosecution, and the hoots of derision towards the doglike, humiliated creature in the open-neck white shirt and beige trousers who clung to the legs of his jailers.

  The evidence, on the face of it, seemed damning. Hafnawi, the court was told, had graduated through the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, through Fatah and then into Hamas solely to betray his comrades to Israeli killers. He had admitted in a signed confession that he had worked for the Israelis since 1979, but it was the murder of twenty-five-year-old Hamas member Mahmoud Madani on 19 February 2000 that did for him. Hafnawi owned a clothing store and employed Madani, who had been shot dead on his way to Hafnawi’s shop from the mosque; the judge referred to an eleven-page “confession”—one could imagine the immutable fairness with which this was obtained—and to Hafnawi’s acknowledgement that the Israelis had asked him to collect information on Madani; Hafnawi had told interrogators that he “didn’t know the Israelis were going to execute Madani.”

  The defendant began to perspire. Beads of sweat began to appear around the corners of his eyes. Then a stream of perspiration ran from behind his ears and poured down his neck. Two policemen linked their arms with his. He was a dead man. Without the help of the defendant, the judge solemnly announced, Madani could not have been murdered by the Israelis. “It is illogical to say he was not responsible because he was not at the scene of the crime,” the judge told the angry crowd of spectators and Madani’s mother. “He played a major role in committing the crime because of his links with the Israelis . . . ” There were eyewitness statements and security force evidence—Hafnawi had ordered his wife to delete the called numbers on his mobile phone when the police came for him a few hours after the killing—and this was the third and final sitting of the court.

  As the moment of sentencing approached, the crowd were like stones. “This defendant, who was a citizen of the homeland but whose loyalty was not to the homeland, sold himself—his eyes and ears—to the usurpers of his homeland.” Judge Abu Srur paused in these words. “What sort of man is he? Didn’t he think about his roots?” There was no decorum about it. No “silence in court” when the judge and his two colleagues—one an army colonel, the other a captain—left the room. In the bright midday sun outside, Madani’s mother, Nihad, told me she was “very happy” at the sentence, but wanted it carried out at once. “My son was a hero,” she said. “He arranged two acts of martyrdom in Tel Aviv and he was planning another six attacks. He was a captain in the Hamas Ezzedine Brigade. I bless God. My heart is at ease now.” A neighbour interrupted to abuse the convicted murderer. “Let him die slowly,” he cursed. Mrs. Madani turned upon him. “I prefer to kill him myself,” she said. Hafnawi and Madani, it transpired, had been imprisoned together by the Israelis. Stool-pigeon. Collaborator. Traitor. Hafnawi’s family, as they say, was not in court. But these legal theatres would not last. It was the Palestinian mob who would ultimately decide on “justice,” once the last shreds of the Oslo agreement had been blown away.

  Hebron, four months later. I drive there on a settlers’ road—Israeli registration plates, of course—then clamber over an abandoned Israeli checkpoint and just walk after all the other Palestinian men, women and children who are moving like a tide into the city. The first body is hanging upside down, one grey left foot tied to the electricity pylon with wire, his right leg hanging at an obscene angle, his head lolling below what remains of a black shirt. This was Moussa Arjoub of Doura village. The second body is infinitely more terrible, a butcher’s carcass, again hanging by a left leg, but this time his almost naked torso riven with stab marks into which Palestinian boys of ten or twelve, whooping with glee, are stubbing cigarettes. This was Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. His head is almost severed from his remains, moving slightly in the wind, bearded, face distorted with terror.

  He reminds me of those fearsome portraits of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and open wounds. But Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb is reviled, not honoured, screaming children and middle-aged Palestinian men roaring with delight when stones thump off the collaborator’s bloody corpse. “This is a lesson to all here.” I turn around to find a portly man with a big brown beard, gesturing towards another revolting bag of flesh behind me. “This was Mohamed Debebsi. This is a lesson for the people. Everyone should see this.” As I watch, a group of youths with grinning faces hurls the corpse into a rubbish truck.

  What do you do when a people go mad with joy at such savagery? At first, I cannot write the description of what I see into my reporter’s notebook and instead draw sketches to remind me of what I am seeing. Allahu akbar, roars that awful crowd. There are girls on rooftops, young men in suits and ties staring at the corpses from only 3 metres away, boys throwing stones to finish the decapitation of Zuheir al-Mukhtaseb. And the street where this—let us call it by its name and say, this pornography—is taking place? Sharia Salam. The Street of Peace.

  The three men had been imprisoned in the local jail—sentenced so long ago that many of the crowd could not remember the date—for collaborating with Israel’s occupation forces. Did they guess their fate, a few hours earlier, when they heard an Israeli Apache helicopter firing its four missiles, the power of the explosions audible in their Palestinian Authority prison a few hundred metres away?

  The Israelis had sent a helicopter death squad to eliminate Marwan Zalum, one of the heads of the Al-Aqsa Brigades in Hebron, the four missiles—another gift from Lockheed Martin of Florida, according to the bits I found—turning his Mitsubishi car into a fireball. Zalum, who was forty-three and married, with a little girl called Saja, died at
once—to a chorus of delight from the Israeli army. He was, they said, “the equivalent of an entire armed militia”—a ridiculous exaggeration— and they referred to suicide bombings arranged by his men and the “hundreds of shooting attacks,” including the deaths of Shalhevat Pas, a Jewish infant murdered by a Palestinian sniper in March 2001, and of an Israeli civilian—a settler—killed three months later. Three times, the Israeli army’s death squad admission talked of “Jewish communities” when it meant Jewish settlements on Arab land. And true to the morality of such statements, it failed to mention that Samir abu-Rajab, a friend of Zalum, was also killed with him by Israel’s American-made missiles.

  No matter. By 9:30, the Al-Aqsa Brigades and probably Hamas and no doubt a vast rabble of Palestinian corner-boys decided to revenge themselves by slaughtering Israel’s three Palestinian collaborators who sat, helpless, in the local jail. A civil engineer watching the crowds told me that they were dragged to the scene of the car explosion, beaten insensible by the mob and then shot by gunmen.

  So the people of the Hebron suburb of Ein Sara arrived to celebrate this revolting scene. A few touched the corpses, others stood by the roadside to throw stones. It was a meat shop, the kids climbing the electricity pylons to pose beside this butcher’s work for friends with camcorders. And how they cheered when the refuse truck moved through the crowds in front of a German-donated fire engine. After Debebsi’s bloody remains were flung into the back, the lorry moved to the pylon where Mukhtaseb was hanging. His head almost parted from his body as it was thrown into the grey-painted vehicle to another cry of satisfaction from the crowd.

  So the citizens of the nascent Palestinian nation behaved in anger and fury and terrible pleasure at their revenge on Israel for the killing of Zalum and abu-Rajab. And on the way back to Jerusalem, of course, one could well imagine the reaction of the inhabitants of those illegal Jewish settlements of Efrat and Neve Daniel and Gush Etzion with their neat red roofs and water sprinklers. Savagery, barbarism, beasts acting like beasts. And one knew what the Palestinians thought. Those three men worked for Israel, for the country which has occupied their land for thirty-five years. “They probably did it for money,” a Palestinian driver mumbled at me. All three collaborators were married men. It was said in Hebron that they would be refused a Muslim grave. And one wondered how brutalised the Palestinians must become before they inherit a state.

  But what state was there to inherit? On 29 March 2002, the Israelis launched an attack on the West Bank which, for the press, they called “Operation Defensive Shield.”106 Two days earlier, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya and blown up a roomful of people celebrating the Jewish Passover, killing twenty-eight civilians, most of them elderly, some of them survivors of the Jewish Holocaust. It was the worst mass killing of its kind of Israeli civilians since the start of the intifada. In all, between 1 March and 1 April 2002, forty Israeli civilians were slaughtered. So the stated purpose of this Israeli assault, according to the Israeli army, was to eradicate the infrastructure of “terrorism.” Inevitably, their first strike was against Arafat himself, marooned in his old British fortress in the centre of Ramallah. Unable to bamboozle my way through the Israeli roadblocks on the highway from Jerusalem, I drove up to the illegal Israeli colony of Psagot, from where I had an Israeli-eye view of this new battle to destroy the Palestinian Authority. It was the looking-glass again. March the thirty-first, 2002, and here I was, amid a heavily armed settlement crammed with troops—friendly, offering to share their food with me—looking down on the start of “Palestine” ’s latest tragedy. Grey smoke rose in a curtain over Arafat’s headquarters, drifting high above two minarets and then smudging the skyline south of Ramallah.

  “I guess he’s blown himself up,” an Israeli paratrooper said with contempt. “That guy is finished.” We stood on the edge of the settlement—just 400 metres from the first houses of the newly reoccupied Palestinian city—surrounded by Merkava tanks, Magah armoured vehicles and jeeps and trucks and hundreds of reservists tugging blankets and mattresses and guns from the backs of lorries. “It’s only just beginning, you know that?” the paratrooper asked. “They are idiots down there. They should know their terrorism is over. We’re never going back to the ’67 borders. Anyway, they want Tel Aviv.” A clap of sound punched our ears, a shell exploding on the other side of the hill upon which Ramallah lies. I wandered closer to the city, through a garden of daffodils and dark purple flowers, to where an Israeli boy soldier was standing.

  “I want to go home,” he said blankly. I said that twenty seemed to be too young to be a soldier. “That’s what my mother says.” He was eating matzo bread with salami, staring at the empty streets of Ramallah. “They’ve locked themselves in their homes,” he said. “Do you blame them?” I didn’t. But it was a strange morning, sitting with the Israeli soldiers above Ramallah, a bit like those awful viewing platforms that generals would arrange for their guests in the Napoleonic wars, where food and wine might be served while they watched the progress of the battle. There was even a settler couple, cheerfully serving hot food and coffee to the reservists. The woman held out a bowl of vegetables and cheese for me. “My daughter’s at Cambridge University,” she said gaily. “She’s studying the history of the Crusades.” A bloody business, I remarked, and her companion happily agreed. Religious wars are like that. That’s when I saw the four Palestinians.

  Just below us, next to the garden with the daffodils and the purple flowers, three of them were kneeling on the grass in front of a group of Israeli officers. All were blindfolded, their hands tied behind them with plastic and steel handcuffs, one of them with his jacket pulled down over his back so that he could not even move his shoulders. The Israelis were talking to them quietly, one of them on one knee as if before an altar rather than a prisoner. Then I saw the fourth man, middle-aged, trussed up like a chicken, stretched across the grass with his blindfolded face lying amid a bunch of flowers. The paratrooper shrugged. “They all say they’ve done nothing, that they’re innocent, that we just came into their homes and took them without reason. Well, that’s what they say.”

  I mentioned the prisoners to the two friendly settlers. They nodded, as if it was quite normal to discover four men bound and blindfolded in the garden. When I asked the twenty-year-old about them, he shrugged like the paratrooper. “They’re not my prisoners,” he said, and I thought of Amira Hass and her contempt for those whom she saw “looking from the side.” I walked round the corner of the building to the lawn upon which the Palestinians were being questioned. Another prisoner was repeatedly bowing his head before a door and his shoulders moved as if he was weeping.

  None of it worried the soldiers. In their own unique “war on terror,” these prisoners were “terrorists.” Another soldier eating a plate of greens said that he thought “all the people down there” were “terrorists.” Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In front of us a Merkava passed, roaring down the hill below in a fog of blue smoke, its barrel gently dipping up and down above its hull. More troops arrived in more trucks, assault rifles in their hands. Radio shacks were being erected, armoured vehicles positioned above Ramallah. On the road back to Jerusalem, I pass a rusting old bus opposite Ma’ale Adumim, its windows covered in wire. Hands were gripping the wire and behind them, twenty or thirty faces could be seen through the mesh. The Palestinian prisoners were silent, looking out of the windows at the massive Jewish colony, watching me, dark faces in shadow, guarded by a jeepload of Israeli troops.

  A few minutes later, I stop to buy bread and chocolate at a Palestinian grocery store in East Jerusalem. The shoppers—men for the most part, with just two veiled women—are standing below the store’s television set, plastic bags of food hanging from their hands. Israeli television does not flinch from telling the truth about its casualties. “The toll so far appears to be fourteen dead,” the commentator announces. The Palestinians of Jerusalem understand Hebrew. A camera aboard a heli
copter is scanning the roof of a Haifa restaurant, peeled back like a sardine can by a Hamas suicide bomber’s explosives. A boy shakes his head but an elderly man turns on him. “No,” he says, pointing at the screen. “That’s the way to do it.”

  And I think of the girl in Cambridge who is studying the Crusades, and what a bloody business we agreed it was. And how religious wars tend to be the bloodiest of all.

  Whenever the Israeli army wants to stop us seeing what they’re up to, out comes that most preposterous exercise in military law-on-the-hoof: the “Closed Military Area.” As in Lebanon in 1982, as in Gaza in 1993, as in all Israel’s campaigns of occupation—so in 2002; and, as usual, the best reaction was to go and look at what the Israelis didn’t want us to see. In Ramallah, I could see why they didn’t want reporters around. A slog down a gravel-covered hillside not far from an Israeli checkpoint, a clamber over rocks and mud and a hitched ride to the Palestinian refugee camp of al-Amari on the edge of Ramallah told a story of terrified civilians and roaring tanks and kids throwing stones at Israeli jeeps, just as they did before Oslo and all the other false hopes that the Americans and Israelis and Arafat brought to the region.

  It was a grey, cold, wet day for Sharon’s war on terror, and it was a doctor who gave me a lift in his ambulance to the centre of Ramallah, driving slowly down side roads, skidding to a halt when we caught sight of a tank barrel poking from behind apartment blocks, for ever looking upwards at the wasplike Apaches that flew in pairs over the city. The centre was a canyon of fast-moving tanks, armoured personnel carriers with their hatches down and wild shooting from both Israelis and Palestinians. While the bullets crackled across the streets, the Israeli army drove its APCs and Merkavas—and a few old British Centurions, unless my eyes deceived me—around the roads at such high speed that they could scarcely have seen a “terrorist” if he’d waved at them from the steps of the local supermarket. Oslo had come to this.