INDEPENDENT (London)12 April 2001
By Robert Fisk in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip
Guns and bulldozers raze homes in Gaza
Sharon steps up 'security' measures with soldiers and helicopter gunships
backing up the destruction of houses of 200 Palestinians.
In any other place, it would be a scandal, an outrage. If Palestinians had
wilfully destroyed the homes of 200 Israelis, there would be talk of
barbarism, of "terrorism", grave warnings from George Bush to Mr Arafat to
"curb violence". But it was the Israelis who destroyed the homes of at
least 200 Palestinians early yesterday morning, bulldozing their
furniture, clothes, cookers, carpets and mattresses into the powdered
concrete of their hovels until one end of Khan Younis looked as though it
had been hit by an earthquake.
So of course, it was not "terrorism". It was "security". The old sat like
statues amid the garbage tip that the Israelis had made of their houses.
Many of them, like 75-year old Ahmed Hassan Abu Radwan, had been driven
from their homes in Palestine in his case from Beersheba in 1948; now they
were dispossessed by the same people for the second time in 53 years,
courtesy this time of Ariel Sharon.
Maybe it is possible to shame history. But what happened in Khan Younis
yesterday, however the Israelis dress up their vandalism with talk of
"security", was a disgrace.
It wasn't the first time Israel had destroyed Palestinian homes in Gaza.
They learned the principle, if such a word can be used, of collective
civilian punishment from the British. In 1993, they blew apart the
apartments of more than 100 people because a Hamas gunman had taken cover
among the buildings. They were at it again last week.
But yesterday was on a new and unprecedented scale as a battery of
bulldozers was sent to pulverise the houses above the sea from where,
according to the Israeli army, shots had previously been directed at their
occupation soldiers. As the machines careered up the road from the coast
just after midnight, thousands of people ran screaming from their huts and
concrete shelters.
Many of them fled to the nearest mosque where they seized the loudspeakers
and appealed to their neighbours "to take arms and resist". To the
apparent surprise of the Israeli army, that is just what their neighbours
did.
As Palestinian rifles were turned on the bulldozers, at least two Israeli
tanks raced up the same road and began firing shells into the nearest
apartment blocks. An Apache helicopter gunship appeared out of the
darkness, launching missiles into the same buildings. And as old Ahmed
Hassan Abu Radwan and his family remember all too clearly, a crane
suddenly moved out of the darkness, a clutch of Israeli soldiers in the
bucket from where, once the crane's chain had hauled the container to its
highest point, the troops opened fire.
The firefight lasted for four hours and left two Palestinians dead and 30
wounded, 12 of them critically, among them a Reuters camera crew hit when
a shell shattered the wall behind which they were standing.
Ariel Sharon, the biggest bulldozer of them all, had taught the
Palestinians another lesson. But picking one's way through the muck and
dust of 35 houses, it didn't take long to realise that the lesson they had
grasped was not quite the one Israel had intended.
Mariam abu Radwan, a cousin of old Ahmed, put it very eloquently yesterday
afternoon. "We have no life anymore," she said. "This is the destruction
of our life. Let them shoot us please let them shoot us and we can die
here. And let the Israelis die too. No-one is looking after, no Arab
countries, no foreign countries also."
One of the dead was Riad Elias, a Palestinian security forces officer, who
was presumably fighting the Israelis when he died, but the second, Hani
Rizk, was identified to me as a cleaner at the local Naser hospital, the
same hospital to which his body was taken before his funeral yesterday
afternoon.
Ibrahim Amer, a 35-year old agricultural worker who says he was hit in the
back and side by machine-gun bullets from a helicopter as he ran (he lay
in bloodsoaked pain in the Naser hospital yesterday afternoon) saw Rizk
running in the street "when a spray of bullets from the helicopter
ricocheted against a wall and hit him. He had at least 12 bullets in his
body." A Jewish settlers' road, forbidden to Arabs, runs along the
sea-coast below this end of Khan Younis.
At least one family told me they did not always stay in their home
"because of the shooting". Ask anyone amid the rubble yesterday if shots
had, in the past, been fired at the Israelis from here and the answer was
invariably the same: "I never saw anyone." Which is not quite the same as
saying that no-one ever fired. But like the nightly shelling of Beit Jalla
village, the Israeli onslaught on Khan Younis was more than
disproportionate; it was a deliberate attack on civilians. The only record
of the event was made by a Palestinian Reuters camera-crew who were
filming one of the Israeli tanks from 50 metres away.
"We were on the second floor of a building and some bullets from a
helicopter came into our room," Mohamed Shenaa, the Reuters sound-man,
told me from his bed in the Naser Hospital. "We tried to look after the
camera and were standing with our backs to a wall when the wall was
destroyed and I was thrown six feet into the air." He has wounds in his
back, thigh and left arm.
As usual, shots were fired into the air at the two funerals yesterday
afternoon. Just three hours earlier, Wail Hawatir, a Palestinian military
doctor was buried, the victim of the previous night's helicopter attack on
what the Israelis called a "Palestinian naval base" (in fact, the
Palestinians have "navy" personnel but no navy) so the day began and ended
in usual Gaza fashion: with funerals. Needless to say, Mr Bush was silent.
==================
INDEPENDENT (London)13 April 2001
By Robert Fisk in Gaza
Death by remote control as hit squads return
When the Israelis came for Abu Jihad exactly 13 years ago, they employed
up to 4,000 men for his assassination. There was an Awacs plane over
Tunis, a squadron of jets to protect the Awacs, two warships in the
Mediterranean, a submarine to guard the warships, a 707 refuelling
aircraft, 40 men to go ashore and surround the home of Yasser Arafat's PLO
deputy commander, and four men and an officer to murder their victim.
Abu Jihad's son Jihad al-Wazzir recalls: "First they killed the bodyguard
who was asleep in the car outside. Then they killed the gardener and the
second bodyguard ... My dad was writing in his office and went into the
hall with a pistol. He got off one shot before he was hit. My mother
remembers how each of the four men would step forward and empty an entire
clip of bullets from an automatic weapon into my dad like it was a kind of
ritual. Then an officer in a black mask stepped forward and shot him in
the head, just to make sure."
Today, Israel's murder squads come cheaper: a computer chip that activates
a bomb in a mobile telephone, a family collaborator, or even a splash of
ultra-violet paint on the roof of a car to alert an Israeli Apache
helicopter pilot to fire a Hellfire missile into the Palestinian's
vehicle.
It's long-range assassination. But some things don't change. Palestinians
have long believed and Jihad al-Wazzir Jnr is convinced that the Israeli
who delivered the coup de grce to his father on 16 April 1988 was an
intelligence officer called Moshe Yalon. And today, one of the principal
instigators behind the policy of murdering Israel's Palestinian military
opponents is the deputy chief of staff, a certain major general called
Moshe Yalon.
It's a cruel, vicious, internationally illegal war in which the
Palestinians have themselves been guilty in the past. Back in the
Seventies, Israeli and PLO agents murdered each other in Europe in a
policy of retaliation and counter-retaliation that drove European security
forces insane with anger. "In the end, these murders led to a ceasefire,"
Mr al-Wazzir explains. "The whole thing ended."
It continued, however, in Beirut where two of the men involved in
murdering PLO leaders were called Ehud Barak and Amnon Shahak. Shahak
would later become the Israeli military commander in Lebanon in 1982. And
it was Mr Barak who as Prime Minister last year relaunched Israel's murder
squads.
Historians will one day debate the worth of such killings. Hamas and
Islamic Jihad, after all, have their own murderers though their suicide
bombs slaughter civilians as well as soldiers, hitherto unknown victims
rather than individual Israeli intelligence officers.
But Israel's killers take innocent lives too. An Apache helicopter attack
on a Palestinian militant tore two middle-aged Palestinian women to
pieces; the Israelis did not apologise. The nephew of a man murdered by
the Israelis in Nablus later admitted to the Palestinian Authority that he
had given his uncle's location to the Israelis. He told his interrogators:
"They said they were only going to arrest him. Then they killed him."
If it's a dirty war which it is it's also a developing one. Mr al-Wazzir,
now an economic analyst in Gaza, explains: "It's small-scale now and in
known locations. People who did not think of themselves as targets are
killed. There's a network of Israeli army intelligence and air force
intelligence, and Mossad and Shin Bet that works together, feeding each
other information.
"They can cross the lines between Area C [under Israeli control] and Area
B [shared control] in the occupied territories. They can penetrate these
borders. Usually, they carry out operations when the IDF [Israeli Defence
Force] morale is low. When they killed my father, the IDF was in very low
spirits because of the first intifada. So they go for a 'spectacular' to
show what great warriors they are. Now the IDF morale is low again because
of the second intifada."
Palestinian security officers in Gaza have been intrigued at the logic
behind the Israeli killings. One of the Palestinian officials says:"Our
guys meet their guys and we know their officers and operatives. I tell you
this frankly they are as corrupt and indisciplined as we are. And as
ruthless.
"After they [the Israelis] targeted Mohamed Dahlan's convoy when he was
coming back from security talks, Dahlan [the head of Palestinian
'preventive security' in Gaza] talked to [the Israeli Foreign Minister
Shimon] Peres. 'Look what you guys are doing to us,' Dahlan told Peres.
'Don't you realise it was me who took Sharon's son to meet Arafat?'"
Was this a threat? Mr al-Wazzir understands some of the death squad logic.
"It has some effect because we Palestinians are a paternalistic society,"
he says. "We believe in the idea of a father figure. But when they
assassinated my dad, the intifada didn't stop. It was affected but all the
political objectives failed; rather than demoralising the Palestinians,
the assassination fuelled the intifada.
"They say there's a list now of 100 Palestinians on the murder list. No, I
don't think the Palestinians will adopt the same type of killings against
Israeli intelligence. An army is an institution, a system. Murdering an
officer just results in him being replaced."
The Israelis have murdered up to 20 Palestinians they claim to be
"terrorists" with no concrete evidence and no court hearings. It's a
practice they honed in Lebanon where guerrilla leaders were blown up by
hidden bombs or shot in the back by Shin Bet execution squads, often as in
the case of an Amal leader in the village of Bidias after interrogation.
All this was, and still is, in the name of "security". And that is
something the murders have clearly not produced.
================
INDEPENDENT (London)14 April 2001
By Robert Fisk in Gaza
How pointless checkpoints humiliate the lions of Palestine, sending them
on the road to vengeance
"If we can get past the Israeli checkpoint at Kfar Darom, they'll let us
through the checkpoint at Gush Katif," Khalil announced to me. I was on my
way to Khan Younis from Gaza City, from one end of Yasser Arafat's little
garbage tip to the other. And when we joined the end of a mile-long queue
of shimmering cars and trucks and buses in the midday heat, Khalil whose
yellow Mercedes taxi turned into an oven every time he stopped slapped his
right fist into his left hand and uttered a familiar Arab curse. It
involves the desire to do something obscene to the sister of one's
antagonist.
It is always the same. In an Arab society, man is all-powerful, his
potential humiliation not far from death itself. And at an Israeli
checkpoint, his gradual descent from potentate to grovelling serf is a
terrible thing to observe.
At the back of the queue north of the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom,
Khalil was still a "pasha". But thanks to Mr Arafat's acceptance of the
now-dead Oslo agreement, Israeli troops have the right to "control" the
lateral roads in the Gaza Strip at three separate locations. By means of
designated Area A (Palestinian- controlled), Area B (jointly controlled)
and Area C (Israeli-controlled), the Israelis can keep the roads open or
if someone has fired home-made mortars at their illegal Jewish settlements
(built, of course, on land belonging to Khalil and his
fellow-Palestinians) they can throttle the roads. Today was a throttling
day.
At the back of the queue, Khalil was a nisr, an eagle, threatening eternal
damnation on his Israeli tormentors. A few hundred metres later, he was an
assad, a lion, demanding to know why the Israelis were ever given the
right to occupy his land.
Around us, in taxis and clapped-out family cars, babies screamed and old
women sighed and young men glowered and older men the wise and the revered
in the Arab family called down the curses of God upon their enemies. It
grew warmer. Flies moved slowly through the taxi, sunning themselves on
the boiling plastic seats, bathing in our perspiration.
In a fog of exhaust, we crept another hundred metres towards the Israeli
checkpoint. "Don't look at the Israelis or they might stop us and ask who
you are," Khalil said carefully. Europeans are outnumbered 5,000 to one on
the road to Khan Younis. Khalil was no longer an assad. Now he was a
hissan, a horse, noble but potentially obedient, ready to be someone
else's servant. This is what occupation is about.
I've sat through this outside Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, and through 22
years along all the roads of southern Lebanon, between Beirut and Sidon
and Sidon and Tyre and Tyre and Nabatea and between Moukh-tara and
Jezzine. Miles and miles and miles of little mobile human bakeries, filled
with the smell of hot plastic, sweat and cigrarette smoke, while the
occupiers, an Israeli sergeant or corporal or captain, turn a whole
male-oriented society on its head.
At a place called Bater Bridge in Lebanon, civilians were kept for two
days and nights in the miles of queues, Israel's grotesque proxy Lebanese
militiamen sometimes propositioning lone females in return for a quicker
transit through Israel's checkpoints, as they tried to return to their
homes.
Far away through the heat haze, I could see an Israeli armoured personnel
carrier. The red roofs of Kfar Darom hid behind watchtowers and the stumps
of palm trees cut down by the Israelis. Khalil lit a cigarette, moved in
his seat, repeatedly cut the engine and restarted it. He was no longer a
hissan. Now he was a pseini, a pussy-cat, a quiet, frightened creature
awaiting his fate.
Man's indignity is a theme throughout the Middle East. That great Polish
journalist Risteard Kapucinski described in his book on the Shah of Iran
how Iranian men were dictators in their homes, masters of all they
surveyed, treated with unquestioned obedience by wife, sons and daughters
but grovelling servants the moment they encountered the Shah's brutal
policemen.
The Israelis were now only 50 metres from us. Khalil threw his half-smoked
cigarette out the window, then lit another. "Remember what I told you," he
said. "Don't look at them." I slid my Arab press card from my shirt pocket
and gently replaced it with an Israeli press card, the hannaka candle
gleaming at the top left.
Now Khalil was turning we were all turning into those most despised
creatures of the Arab world, hamir, donkeys, obedient, ready to be whipped
and to obey. Please, please, please, let us through, let us go.
Two bored Israeli soldiers slid up to the left windows, the car bouncing
in the dust-bowls of the road. One of them told the truck-driver in front
to open the back doors of his lorry. There were large cardboard cartons
inside. Crisp packets or rocket-propelled grenades? The Israeli stared,
then told the driver to close the doors. Khalil looked straight ahead,
unblinking, foot hovering over the gas. Now it was our turn, sarasir,
cockroaches, ready to be crushed. The soldiers paid no interest. Khalil
gunned the taxi. "Mish mishkl, habibi," he shouted. No problem, my friend.
And he reverted to his original curses about the sister of his enemies. He
had become a nisr again, an eagle.
So what are these checkpoints for? Why did the people of southern Lebanon
have to wait two days in such conditions? A few weeks ago, I was stopped
by an Israeli army checkpoint north of Nablus, en route to Jenin. I was
the only motorist on the road, driving myself. "You'll have to wait," the
sergeant said on that occasion. So like the refugees in Casablanca, I had
to wait. And wait. And wait. Palestinian cars queued behind me. After an
hour and a half, I played an old Lebanon trick.
The Palestinians stayed where they were but I drove back down the road,
found a farm track to an old village and within 10 minutes returned to the
highway on the other side of the checkpoint. The Israelis must have known
I could do this. So why did they stop me? For "security" reasons? Or
because their checkpoints are not about security at all, but about
humiliation?
On the way back from Khan Younis, we were pulled up before the Israeli
checkpoint at the Gush Katif settlement. It was the end of the day and now
the Palestinian men cut each other off to reach the checkpoint, jumping
the queue, swerving on to the dust and hedgerows to pass their fellow
citizens, cursing not the Israelis now but each other.
That wonderful Israeli journalist Amira Haas may she receive a thousand
press awards for her eloquence and moral courage has described this
process, the embitterment of a whole people, the humiliation of the Arabs
as they watch impotently while ambulances are turned back, expectant
mothers ignored or allowed to die, decent people treated like animals.
Khalil stopped for a minute while car-loads of Jewish settler men, kippahs
on their heads, rifles poking from the open windows, raced across in front
of us to one of their exclusive settlers' roads. Then we growled through.
Khalil was not cursing now. He was tight-lipped, aware that his impotence
had been made manifest, his patriotism turned to self-loathing, no longer
an animal but a thing. And around me, young Palestinian men sat in cars
with equal loathing cast like a mask over their faces, humiliated in front
of their fathers and mothers and sisters and wives. And it occurred to me
that one or two of them would be just angry enough to retrieve their
dignity in self-immolation against their tormentors, without discrimin-
ation between soldiers and civilians to leave the world of animals to
become what the Palestinians call "martyrs". And what the Israelis call
"terrorists". That is what occupation is all about.
====================
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