Robert Fisk: Watching from on high as Israeli guns keep firing
Independent, 01 April 2002
Robert Fisk: Watching from on high as Israeli guns keep firing
From Psagot, in the West Bank
01 April 2002
The grey smoke rose in a curtain over Yasser 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 at the edge of the
Jewish settlement just 400 yards 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 20
seemed to be too young to be a soldier. "That's what my mother says."
He was eating matzah 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 soldiers above Ramallah, a bit like those awful viewing platforms
which generals would arrange for their guests in the Napoleonic wars, where
food might be served while they watched the battlefield.
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 with
a smile. "She's studying the history of the Crusades." A bloody business,
I remarked, and her companion cheerfully 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 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 have four men bound and blindfolded
in the little garden. When I asked the 20-year-old about them, he shrugged
like the paratrooper. "They are not my prisoners," he said.
I walked round the corner of a building to the little
lawn upon which they were being questioned. A soldier was putting a new
pair of cuffs on one of the kneeling men. Another Palestinian 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". Indeed, another soldier
eating a plate of greens said that he thought "all the people down there"
were "terrorists".
In front of us a Merkava tank passed, roaring down
the hill below in a fog of blue smoke, its barrel gently swaying up and
down above its hull. "Tomorrow is going to be worse," the paratrooper said.
"This is only the beginning."
Had he been reading the newspapers? Or did he know
something I had missed? There are all kinds of rumours in the settlement
of Psagot; that the West Bank is going to be totally reoccupied, that the
Israelis intend to re-establish their so-called "Civil Administration",
that the Palestinian Authority will be dismantled and its leaders exiled.
The paratrooper's friend, a smiling sergeant who
dwarfed both of us, thought it a good idea. "My only question is why we
didn't do this weeks ago," he said. More troops arrived in more trucks
with their Galil assault rifles. Radio shacks were being erected, armoured
vehicles positioned above Ramallah. An officer asked what would happen
if this operation failed. He answered his own question: "Sharon will be
finished." Yes, you could not help feeling, something was coming.
On the road back to Jerusalem, I passed a rusting
old bus opposite Maale Adumim, its windows covered in wire. Hands were
gripping the wire and behind them, 20 or 30 faces stared through the mesh.
The Palestinian prisoners were silent, looking out at the massive Jewish
settlement, watching us, dark faces in shadow, guarded by a Jeep-load of
troops.
A few minutes later, I stopped 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 – were standing below
the store's television set, plastic bags of food hanging from their hands.
Israeli television does not flinch in telling the truth about its own casualties.
"The toll so far appears to be 14 dead," the commentator announced. The
Palestinians of Jerusalem understand Hebrew. A camera aboard a helicopter
was scanning the roof of a Haifa restaurant, peeled back like a sardine
can by a Hamas suicide bomber's explosives. A boy shook his head but an
elderly man turned on him: "No," he said, pointing at the screen, "that's
the way to do it."
And I thought of a girl in Cambridge who is studying
the Crusades, and what a bloody business we agreed it all was. And how
religious wars tend to be the bloodiest of all.
© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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