The Middle East's crucible of hate

The collapse of the Mideast peace process has brought bitterness and a hardening of attitudes among formerly moderate Israelis and Palestinians, writes JOSHUA HAMMER.

Not long ago, two families - one Israeli, one Palestinian - thought there might be a road to peace. But now violence has hardened their good hearts.

As his taxi halts near the Kalandia Checkpoint on the West Bank, Dr Samir Khalil steps into a scene of fear and pandemonium. Piles of garbage, tangled barbed wire, concrete barricades and exhaust-spewing trucks block his path. Looming above the wretched scene, Israeli soldiers watch from a hilltop bunker. The 52-year-old neurologist pushes his way to the checkpoint, joining a mob of Palestinian workers waiting to cross into Jerusalem. A cordon of helmeted Israeli soldiers faces them.

"The worst soldiers to deal with are the new immigrants - Russians, Ethiopians," Khalil says, elbowing his way to the front of the crowd. "Can you imagine someone who has been in this country for one year telling me I don't have the proper papers to get to work?"

Five days a week, Khalil makes this gruelling commute from his home in Ramallah to the Al Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, a two-hour journey that brings him face to face with harsh consequences of the collapse of the Mideast peace process. He is one of the few Palestinians who still have permission to work inside Israel, but getting there requires patience that has sapped his strength and weakened his heart.

This morning, after scanning the faces of the troops, Khalil singles out an Army reservist in his late 20s whose expression seems sympathetic, and he catches the soldier's eye. The Israeli beckons him forward, inspects his documents and waves him into Israel. Funnelled with the others down a corridor lined by razor wire, Khalil climbs into another taxi that will take him only as far as the next Israeli checkpoint.

"This is sheer humiliation," he says.

The grinding realities of life in the occupied territories have created an army of Palestinians like Samir Khalil - former moderates now filled with hostility toward Israel and increasingly resigned to the belief that armed struggle is the only way to end the occupation. At the same time, many Israelis have been similarly radicalised. The relentless suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks have hardened their attitudes towards Palestinians, convincing them that brute force may be the only way to quell the uprising.

This is the story of two families, the Khalils and the Rotems, one Palestinian, the other Israeli, whose lives have been profoundly affected by the intifada, and whose faith in peaceful coexistence has been tested as never before by 18 months of violence.

On a weekday morning shortly before Passover, Dr Irit Rotem, a veterinarian in the northern Negev Desert, is arms-deep in slaughter. Five freshly killed lambs dangle from iron beams in an open shed, blood dripping from their slit throats. An Orthodox rabbi wields the ceremonial blade, known as a chalaf, slitting open the bellies and pulling out the guts, which puddle on the tile floor. Urbanised Jewish families who have driven to this farm wait patiently for the rabbi to certify the meat as kosher. Then Irit fingers the organs as she checks them for parasites and other diseases. Often neglected in Israeli cities, the ritual slaughter of sheep for Passover has survived in the country's rural heartland.

Irit grew up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, but eight years ago moved to the Negev with her husband, Gur, an agronomist. They settled in a moshav, or rural community, called Nir Moshe, 1.6km down the road from the sprawling farm owned by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The family's whitewashed, ivy-covered home is surrounded by 0.8ha of almonds, figs, wild fennel, oranges and kumquats.

"It's a small piece of paradise," says Irit, heading home after the morning slaughter. "But we can't escape from the intifada."

Two weeks ago two rockets fired by Palestinians crashed through the roof of a nearby home, injuring two Israelis. Palestinian workers, once ubiquitous, have all but disappeared from local farms. The suicide bombs and mortar attacks led Gur and Irit to remove the TV from their living room, to avoid scaring their four children.

Irit, who comes from generations of liberals, has a measure of sympathy for the Palestinians. "They have no life, no future," she says. "If you're inside a cage, you throw things out." But that's a minority opinion here in Sharon country. A local merchant told Irit recently: "I don't know why they don't drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza."

The Khalil family can't shut out the violence, either. Their four-bedroom apartment provides a direct view of Ramallah's police headquarters, rocketed by Israeli helicopters last August in retaliation for a suicide bombing. The family evacuated to the basement seconds before a second missile struck the building, sending a piece of shrapnel through a bedroom window.

"I could live in Europe if I wanted to," says Algerian-born Salima Khalil, a handsome woman in her 40s who works as a correspondent for the France 2 TV network. "But I won't do it. I will stay in the land of my husband and my kids."

E DUCATED in Paris, Salima says she once admired the West, but the intifada has radicalised her.

"The only solution - it pains me to say it - is for even more violence than exists now," she says. "When Israelis begin to realise that they have no security, that their young people are dying for nothing, then they will begin to feel our suffering."

Salima draws the line at suicide bombings of civilians, but her two sons aren't bothered by it. "They hate the Jews," she says. "It makes me fear for the future."

Gur Rotem was imbued from an early age with a love of the land and a fierce belief in Zionism. But as a student at Hebrew University, where he met Irit, he began to question the wisdom of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He also came to deeply admire former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the general turned peacemaker, who convinced him that Zionism and coexistence with the Palestinians were not mutually exclusive. Rabin's 1995 assassination by a hard-line Orthodox Jew, a few months after Gur's own father died, left him shocked and depressed.

"I felt I had lost a second father," he says.

Yet Gur hardly considers himself a pacifist. He serves a stint each month with Israel's border police, helping to keep would-be terrorists from crossing the Gaza border.

Like Gur, Samir Khalil comes from a family deeply rooted in soil that is now Israeli. Wealthy landowners who lost their citrus farms after the 1948 war, they fled from the southern coastal town of Ashkelon to Gaza, where Samir was born, then moved to Ramallah.

As a boy, Samir was often taken by his father to gaze at the family's confiscated property across the Israeli border. "He said: 'See that? Those are the lands of your grandfather. Those orange trees belong to us'," Samir recalls.

When the Israelis occupied the West Bank in 1967, Samir went into exile and stayed away for 30 years. He enrolled at the American University in Cairo, earned a medical degree in Paris and embraced Palestinian nationalism. But over time, he says, he moved from confrontation to a search for coexistence. "In the beginning I felt, 'Let's throw all the Jews into the sea'," he says. "Eventually we realised Israel was a real power, and we had to learn how to live with it."

In 1997 Israel allowed him and thousands of other activists to return to the Palestinian territories. "It was a time of optimism," he says.

Samir blames Israel for the collapse of the Camp David talks two years ago. He believes Arafat was right to reject the offer made by the then Prime Minister Ehud Barak. With Sharon in power, he doubts a settlement can be reached.

"How can we negotiate with them," he asks, "when they say that Jerusalem is their capital, undivided forever?"

Gur and Irit do not entirely dispute Samir's view. Sitting in their family room, surrounded by four rambunctious children, Irit unrolls a crumbling, 70-year-old map of Palestine that belonged to her grandfather, and runs her hand over the names of dozens of Arab villages inscribed in Hebrew.

"As children, we were told that this land was empty when the Jews arrived, but you can see that the Arabs were everywhere," she says. "We were taught that the Jews have a biblical right to land and were shown nothing to contradict it."

Zionist arrogance still exists, she says. But she also maintains that the Palestinians have been their own worst enemies, repeatedly rejecting coexistence with the Jews. "They keep making the same mistakes, ever since 1948," Irit says.

Gur feels the same knot of conflicting emotions. He regards Sharon's attempts to crush the intifada through force as a disaster. At the same time he believes it would be folly to back down in the face of Palestinian terror. "Two years ago I would have said, evacuate the settlements and turn them over to the Palestinians," he says. "Now I say, we can't move one millimetre. It's impossible. We are in an all-or-nothing fight now, and it's no time for weakness."

Ramallah's City Inn Checkpoint is where Khalil's son, Firas, 16, flirted with martyrdom. Many of his fellow students from the Friends School, an elite academy run by Quakers, were determined to prove that they were as tough as poor kids from the nearby refugee camps.

"But they had no experience like the kids in the camps, who knew how to keep a distance from bullets," says his father.

One of Firas' friends was hit by gunfire in three separate clashes, surviving to become the school hero. One day Samir caught Firas scanning a photograph of himself on his computer, designing a "martyr" poster in anticipation of his own death. "It was frightening," Samir says.

A FTER a stream of injuries and killings, Firas became disillusioned. When Palestinian guerrillas from Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement stepped up their attacks on Israelis, the City Inn clashes faded away. Now daily soccer practice has supplanted the checkpoint battles. But Firas still hates the Israelis. He idolises the unknown Palestinian sniper who killed 10 Israelis at a checkpoint near Ofra last month, and he rejoices each time another is killed.

"During the first intifada, the ratio of deaths was 15 to one. Now it's down to four to one," the boy says. "Soon, maybe we will kill one Israeli for every Palestinian killed."

Gur understands such hatreds, he says, and is working in small ways to overcome them. Late on a chilly afternoon, he packs his children into his Nissan minibus and drives across the Negev's rolling hills toward the border with the West Bank. Once or twice a month, Gur visits this bleak no man's land to meet his former employee, Aed Abed El Kadr Charibat, a Palestinian carpenter from a village near Hebron. Last year Israeli police arrested Charibat for being in the country with an expired work permit; he spent 52 days in an Israeli jail. Gur visited Charibat twice in prison - much to the astonishment of other Palestinian inmates, who couldn't believe an Israeli would maintain such contact. With Charibat out of work, Gur has continued to make regular trips to the border zone to give him money and catch up on news about his family.

The car approaches the border, where a barricade made from ripped-up chunks of tarmac blocks the way.

"The first time I came here, it made me think of the Berlin Wall," Gur says.

Three hundred metres off, Charibat parks his car and, with four kids in tow, clambers across the rocks toward his former employer. Israeli and Palestinian shake hands, embrace and exchange small talk in Hebrew. Is the village generator still working? Is everyone eating well? Charibat's wife, a shy woman wearing a head scarf, shows up, bearing two plastic cola bottles filled with home-pressed olive oil. Palestinian workers returning from illegal labour in Israel glance at the scene curiously; these days, such meetings are rare and sometimes dangerous.

After a little awkward conversation, there is nothing more to say. Gur hopes they will be able to visit each other's homes someday. "Inshallah [God willing]," he says in Arabic. He presses 600 shekels ($294) into his former employee's hand.

Then the two families turn away from each other and scramble down the footpath, like heartsick soldiers heading back to their own lines in a long war of attrition.

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