Dark days in the Holy Land

The Middle East body count keeps mounting and now, as SIMON COLLINS discovers, the human spirit has been pushed to breaking point.

It has taken 18 months, but the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule that began in September 2000 has finally brought fear to all Israelis.

A year ago, when the Herald visited Jerusalem looking for lessons from Israel's high-tech success, German tourist Christian Egger was sunbathing on the grass alongside the walls of the Old City.

"The first day you don't feel safe. After that you forget about it," he said.

Today, residents such as New Zealand-born trader John Ponger cannot forget about it any longer.

"There is a worry when I leave the house, no matter where I go, about whether I am going to safely make it home in the evening," Ponger said this week from his home in Gilo, a hillside suburb of Jerusalem which is counted by the Palestinians as an Israeli "settlement" on land taken from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967.

"In my daily business life I'm very, very scared to walk out of the office and cross the street because you don't know where the next suicide bomber will strike."

A 15-minute drive south of Jerusalem, in Bethlehem on the Palestinian side of the divide, life is even more desperate.

Eighty-four-year-old diabetic Wardeh (Arabic for Rose) Giacaman, who has a son, daughter-in-law and five grandchildren in Auckland, had just one day's supply of insulin left when the Herald rang on Thursday. Israeli soldiers were outside her house, shooting anyone who moved.

Her son Jiries, who brought his family to New Zealand in 1987 rather than let them grow up "with hate inside them" in Palestine, broke down uncontrollably when he spoke of the plight of his mother, sisters and brothers.

"They are living in fear. They can't look through the window," he said. "It is war. It is terror."

In this darkest moment of the Middle East's long history of conflict, the only hope lies in the logic that human beings cannot keep living like this for long. At some stage, unless one side wins, both sides will be forced to talk.

Right now, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evidently still believes Israel can win a straightforward military victory, killing or detaining all Palestinian terrorists and confiscating their guns and bombs.

In the short term, he may be right. The Palestinians are so vastly outgunned that they can barely survive.

"We have no food, no bread, no water," said Jiries Giacaman's sister, Angela.

"We are surrounded by military tanks and jeeps. Every time the tanks go past they break the water tubes. We have no electricity. People are shot in the street. The ambulance cannot pass."

When the present uprising or intifada began in 2000, Israel shut the borders between its own state and the territories on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in Gaza, which had been nominally controlled by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority since an accord signed in Oslo in 1993 set out a path towards a "two-state solution".

For the past 18 months, Palestinians have been unable to work in Israel. In particular, the 1.6 million Palestinians on the West Bank - a tiny area stretching about as far as from Warkworth to Te Kauwhata - have lost their jobs in Jerusalem, the metropolitan area which dominates the heart of the territory.

Israeli roadblocks that went up throughout the West Bank have also effectively stopped tourists from visiting Holy Land centres such as Bethlehem. The Giacamans' business, making souvenirs and selling them in two shops in the town, has dried up.

"For two years we have nothing coming in. No tourists," said Angela Giacaman.

Yet in the long term, this combination of political and economic Palestinian desperation may also undermine the security that Sharon seeks to establish.

"Those who commit suicide are doing it because they have nothing," said Jiries Giacaman.

"There isn't a big army. That's why people are killing themselves, because it is the only weapon they have."

Wisam Salsaa, an executive member of the Bethlehem-based Rapprochement Centre which had 600 foreign volunteers in the West Bank this week trying to lie down in front of Israeli tanks, said Palestinians would continue to commit suicide until they won independence and "dignity".

As bombs exploded in the background, he said: "People think, 'I don't care if I die, I don't care if someone else dies, because our life is intolerable.'

"We have never lived like others. We were always living under pressure and harassment and violation of human rights."

Israelis have always been aware of this intellectually. This time last year, journalists in the Israeli media acknowledged that when you keep people under an effective military occupation, you have to expect a reaction.

Now it is not just an intellectual understanding. It has reached the front of everyone's awareness.

"I don't think anyone is really sleeping easy at night because they are thinking about what is going to happen to them the following day," said Ponger.

"I used to shop at the weekends in the open market. I don't do that any more. I shop in a very, very big supermarket that has got very, very good security to go through.

"I used to indulge in going for a walk on a Saturday which would take me into one of the suburbs a lot closer to the centre of the city and end up having a cup of coffee in a coffee bar. That is not on at the moment."

When Damian Flynn from Auckland's Queen St Backpackers followed his Israeli girlfriend to Jerusalem last year, there was a suicide bomb attack in the city on the day he arrived.

"Then there was nothing for a month, and I got the impression that there might be one attack a month," he said.

"Then there was one every fortnight, and then it was one a week. Now it's once a day. In some cases, there are two bombs a day in different parts of the country. It's become very scary."

Flynn walks 20 minutes each day from his flat to his job at an internet cafe. He stopped catching buses because they are among the suicide bombers' favourite targets.

At an intersection where he has to wait for traffic lights to cross a road, he hangs back from other pedestrians waiting to cross. Even a few people standing at a traffic light can attract a bomb.

About a month ago, he forgot his keys and had to ring his boss when he got to work at 8am, asking her to come and open the cafe.

"I was wearing dark-coloured jeans. It was a cold day so I had a jacket and my bag," he said. "I was standing there and people were looking at me as they passed.

"The next thing I knew the police jumped out of a car and asked me to open my bag, open my jacket. They wanted my ID. I didn't have my passport on me. After they talked to me they went away.

"I was still waiting there and I saw some people on motorbikes in black uniforms who work in the Intelligence Department. The next thing I knew I was being searched again. This time I was lying on the ground with my arms up in front.

"This was all in the space of 25 minutes."

On another day, Flynn was eating in a cafe near his flat when a suicide bomber walked in.

"The security guard on the door noticed something was wrong, tackled him to the ground, the police took him away and did a controlled explosion to destroy his explosive belt."

Three weeks ago, he was walking home when another suicide bomber blew up himself and about five other people in a cafe which Flynn had just walked past.

"People just started running in all directions," he said.

"I basically just started running and ran all the way home. You hear stories here that they have one bomb and they wait for the [ambulance] crew to arrive and a second one goes off.

"I was literally right there. If I had been 30 seconds later I would have been walking past that cafe."

Not surprisingly, Flynn says many cafes and bars have closed. Business is down 80 per cent in the cafe he works in.

Tel Aviv-based New Zealand business consultant Jeremy Levy, who felt a year ago that Tel Aviv was still "a fun place", says this has changed in the past month.

"We don't know anyone now who goes out socially other than to someone's house," he said.

The other day a 10-year-old girl was shot dead just around the corner from where the Levys' two-year-old son Nathan attends playschool.

Yesterday the Levys held a traditional function to celebrate the birth of their new baby, Gili. They had to hire an armed security guard and almost cancelled the event because other private functions have drawn suicide bombers.

"People have said to us, 'You are brave having a function'."

Even the Yizrael kibbutz in rural northern Israel has put guards on its gates 24 hours a day. New Zealander Judy Pezaro, who has lived there for 30 years, says fathers on the kibbutz with young children are among 20,000 reservists who have been called up.

"There is a general feeling of fear and despair," she said. "There is a desperate fear everywhere. Even people who can empathise with the plight of the Palestinians still feel that fear."

In the local hospital where she works, Israeli Arabs "feel just as desperate as we do".

On both sides of the divide, people who can leave are starting to do so. Levy has had "a lot more people" inquiring about emigrating to New Zealand and Australia, and in Bethlehem, Palestinian Odeh Morcos said many young people had left for Europe and the US in the past few months.

But most are staying. Pezaro and Ponger both have sons in the Army and other family members in Israel.

Both believe Sharon has no choice but to hit back to stop Palestinian suicide bombing.

"Whether Ariel Sharon's policy of going in strong to strike at the territory will achieve that, people are not sure," said Pezaro. "But they feel something had to be done and we couldn't sit back and just be slaughtered. The historical thing of Jews being slaughtered is too large."

About 300 reservists have refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. But this is only a tiny fraction of those who have been called up.

Pezaro feels that Israel "will have to unilaterally pull out of certain areas" to get an enduring peace settlement eventually.

Yair Hirschfeld, a cousin of former New Zealand Labour Party president Michael Hirschfeld and a prime mover behind the Oslo accord, believes a plan being promoted by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah offers the best chance for peace.

In Abdullah's words, the plan would involve "normal relations and security for Israel in exchange for full withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories, recognition of an independent Palestinian state with al-Quds al-Sharif [Jerusalem] as its capital, and the return of refugees".

Hirschfeld said the plan was supported by the Israeli Labour Party and the peace movement as the basis for negotiations.

"There will have to be a going back to the borders of 1967, with mutual border changes to prevent the expulsion of Jewish and other populations where there can be mutual adjustment," he said.

But Sharon cannot accept turning over the 200,000 Jewish people in more than 200 suburban "settlements" in the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian rule. They now make up a significant minority among the total three million people in the territories.

And even Hirschfeld, in an interview a year ago, said Israel would never accept the "right of return" for a further three million Palestinian refugees living in surrounding countries such as Lebanon and Jordan.

Although they or their ancestors lived in what is now Israel before the Jewish state was created in 1948, their return, joining one million Arabs within Israel, would risk eventually swamping the state's five million Jews.

Asked what ordinary Israelis were feeling right now, Hirschfeld said: "The ordinary gut reaction is to kill them [Palestinians]."

Equally, the war had created "far more anti-Israeli feeling in the Arab world".

"They see violence against the Palestinians. We see violence against us," he said. "There is the same anger and hate on both sides at the bottom. It's got far worse."

He sees two possible scenarios.

"One is that the Government will not be able to handle it and there will be a radicalisation, leading to the overthrow of the Government and promoting a more radical outcome.

"The other way is to find a way of moving into the Abdullah proposals."

In Bethlehem, Wisam Salsaa also sees the Abdullah plan as a basis for talks.

"Any negotiation should start with an independent Palestinian state and remove all of the colonies that Israel has placed on our land," he said.

In his view, Oslo was "a kind of execution for the Palestinians" because, in the name of creating an independent Palestinian state, it actually cut up the territories into tiny pockets. Only 3 per cent of the West Bank came directly under Palestinian control, 27 per cent was mixed and 70 per cent remained under the Israelis.

Finding a better compromise will not be easy, and it seems inconceivable that it will happen in a hurry in the present climate of fear.

But, said Salsaa: "We have just one option - either we live together or we die together, and no one wants to die."

Feature: Middle East

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