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"Mr Arafat and his cronies are now so marginalised by
their support for the collapsed Oslo agreement, so
despised by their own Palestinian people, that they
would be assaulted if they did not show some
respect for those ready to 'die for Palestine'."
ARAFAT'S MEN PAY TRIBUTE AT BURIAL OF SUICIDE BOMBER
By Robert Fisk in Gaza
The Independent - 28 October:
They looked embarrassed. They even looked a little frightened, the men of
Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, as they stood to attention a mile
short of the graveyard. But when they presented arms to salute the coffin of
Islamic Jihad's latest suicide bomber, even the crowd were taken aback. Mr
Arafat is supposed to be obeying orders from the United States and Israel to
lock these men up, not honour them as martyrs amid crowds of gunmen.
With his officer's eagle insignia sparkling on his shoulders, Major Najid
Wadiha stood rigidly to attention as the plyboard coffin wobbled past on the
shoulders of a dozen sweating men. What was he doing here, I asked the major..
"Another time," he hissed. "Another time." And he stared straight ahead as
the last mortal remains of 24-year-old Nabil al-Arair -- precious little of
them after the cannon shell strapped to his chest tore him to bits outside an
Israeli army post in the Gaza Strip on Thursday -- passed by the regional
Palestinian Authority headquarters.
There was little doubt what Ehud Barak was going to say. The Israeli Prime
Minister would denounce the honours paid by Mr Arafat to a "terrorist" who
had wounded an Israeli soldier, he would condemn Mr Arafat's men for saluting
a "terrorist organisation" devoted to the overthrow of "peace". But I doubt
if that's what I saw in Gaza yesterday. Indeed, I rather suspect that Major
Wadiha and his 20 soldiers in their mixture of old khaki and kitty-litter
camouflage uniforms were proof of what we have long suspected: that Mr Arafat
and his cronies are now so marginalised by their support for the collapsed
Oslo agreement, so despised by their own Palestinian people, that they would
be assaulted if they did not show some respect for those ready to "die for
Palestine".
It was pathetic. As the major and his men stood to attention, a crowd of
urchins strutted in front of them, mimicking their salutes with grubby hands
while their fathers screamed "Allahu akbar" in their faces. Even in the old
Great Mosque in Gaza City, with its ancient Crusader church foundations and
arches, the crowd was angry with Mr Arafat.
"Why does 'Abu Amar' Arafat not fight with us?" a youth asked the old man
beside him. "Why does he go on playing with the Americans?" And sure enough,
the sermon blasted by loudspeakers from the gentle, floating minaret outside
carried the same withering message: What did Oslo give to the Palestinians?
Disaster. What did Sharm el-Sheikh bring to the Palestinians? Nothing.
"Arafat's men are frightened of us," a schoolteacher said in the stinking
lane opposite the mosque. "Every time we have a martyr, they disappear and
hide."
Nabil al-Arair's story was familiar to every Islamic "martyr" --and the need
for quotation marks around so many words shows the polarisation of this
conflict, whether he be Palestinian or Lebanese. He was a nursery school
secretary who constantly read the Koran, whose family were known to be
"religious", whose last act was to pray at his local mosque in Shijaia before
riding his bicycle down the main Gaza highway to the Israeli post at
Kissufim. His father, Faraj, said he was proud of his son and that Nabil had
"done nothing unusual" prior to setting off to his death.
They never do, of course. The suicide bombers of the Middle East are trained
to do absolutely nothing out of the ordinary on the day of their death. Nabil
al-Arair left just a bicycle in two pieces and a few bits of flesh. The
wooden box was draped with green flags; and with that odd cruelty that fate
bestows on such events, it bore a sticker with the word "coffin" in English
on the side and two black arrows pointing upwards --this side up.
Then, on Baghdad Street, the guns came out: automatic rifles, Kalashnikovs,
M-16s, sniper rifles, pistols. The blue-uniformed Palestinian police watched
expressionless as volleys of bullets rattled into the sky. This was no time
to support "the peace process" by arresting gunmen who --for once --did not
even bother to hide their faces behind masks. The anger was palpable,
genuine, real in every gunshot. Death to Israel, they screamed. Death to
America. We'd heard it all before; but somehow, this time they meant it.
Before sunset they lowered a white cloth containing what was left of Nabil
al-Arair into a muddy hole on the outskirts of Gaza, the first suicide bomber
of the new intifada. Then another burst of gunfire as the men of Islamic
Jihad buried their "martyr", along with the Oslo agreement.
--------------
ANOTHER DAY IN RAMALLAH: FUNERALS, STONES, PEPSI
By Robert Fisk in Ramallah
The Independent on Sunday: 29 October 2000:
It was "clash day" in Ramallah again yesterday. Clash. How amorphous, dull,
indifferent, how very politely neutral the word sounds. Both Israelis and
Palestinians use it when they speak in English. And the "clash point" is an
equally neutral stretch of roadway below the City Inn Hotel. Its bedrooms are
now occupied by Israeli soldiers with sniper-rifles. Across the muddy
construction site to the north is an unfinished apartment block in which
Palestinians also occupy bedrooms, with their own rifles. And up the road,
towards the setting afternoon sun, is the day's "clash".
It is called Ayosha junction and it is also the place -- if you are a Muslim
and if you are religious and if you believe in "martyrdom" -- where a live
round may just send your soul directly to paradise. For the Israeli soldiers
fire so many steel-coated rubber bullets -- as well as real ones -- that they
have a "fairground" chance of hitting someone holding a stone. As for the
live rounds shot across the valley at the Palestinian gunmen, they appear to
have little effect. The casualties are usually the stone throwers.
It has a choreography all its own. A few burning tyres in the morning to
enrage the Israeli soldiers in the clapped-out jeeps. Then two or three or
four funerals for the previous day's Palestinian stone throwers -- capital
punishment now being an unquestioned routine penalty for chucking stones at
Israelis --and then "clash" at Ayosha junction. The tyres were already
burning yesterday when they freighted Hossam Salem to the cemetery near his
home, a cortege of black-dressed women, serious, bespectacled men and cars in
which a convoy of trucks had become entangled.
There was the old wooden coffin and a squad of men shouting "Allahu Akbar"
(God is great), then a bright orange lorry bearing the words "Bambini Fruit
Juice", then a group of women carrying green flags which announce that there
is no God but God and his Prophet is Mohammed. And, of course, everyone was
remembering the unmarried 24-year-old who worked in his father's grocery
store and who --at Ayosha junction, of course --received a bullet full in
the face scarcely 18 hours before.
"He was religious, he had a big beard when he died and he was with Hamas," a
family friend told us. "He was a supporter of Hamas for a long time, then he
became more 'active' three months ago. All his family are with Hamas. When
the Jerusalem intifada began three weeks ago, his brothers all said he would
by a martyr. He also said he would be a martyr. Yesterday, he just said
goodbye to his mother and went to Ayosha where there was a clash."
Active? Did Hossam Salem carry a gun? No one knew. But he was throwing stones
and his grisly post-death portrait -- a massive coloured photograph taken in
the morgue -- showed that the front of Hossam Salem's face, much covered with
a fluffy beard, had been powerfully stove in below the nose. Did he go to
paradise, I asked a middle aged man with a grey moustache and thin-framed
spectacles? "If you are a real believer, then you go to paradise. I believe
he went there, inshallah (if God wills)."
The mourners drifted away from the little mosque where a clutch of 19th
century buildings of dressed stone spoke of an earlier, gentle, Ottoman
Ramallah. And within an hour, more candidates had arrived to take Hossam
Salem's place at the "clash point". There were perhaps 400 young men throwing
and catapulting stones down the road --forget the cliche about
"rock-throwing", these are garden-sized stones, about five inches wide -- and
the Israeli soldiers were hiding behind the armoured jeeps and firing tear
gas back at the Palestinians in a slow, almost lazy way.
One of the Israelis sat in the back of his jeep ten feet from me, pulling on
a cold can of Pepsi Cola. Then he heaved himself from the vehicle, fixed a
grenade to his rifle and fired it into the air above the jeep. It soared like
a constellation plummeting 400 feet down, in a trail of white smoke to burst
amid the crowd. Then his colleague, with an equally casual effort, used the
door of the jeep to aim his rifle and fired off a rubber bullet that bounced
and skipped down the road.
Every few seconds the cartridge case of a rubber bullet would ping at my
feet. Then a Molotov cocktail would blaze harmlessly against a rusting
telegraph pole, and a rain of stones would patter on the road. At mid
afternoon, an ambulance drove at speed into the centre of the highway to
retrieve a stone thrower who had been hit; and a soldier fired another rubber
round in its direction.
And so it went on, and so it goes on, more "clashes" for President Clinton to
bewail before the microphones in Washington. And I was struck, yesterday, by
the sheer vacuity -- the absolute other-planet irrelevance -- of what Clinton
said. He wanted the young people of one side to re-establish contact with the
young people of the other -- as if these "clashes" were taking place in a
vacuum, despite the wishes of thousands of young Palestinians and Israelis.
The problem is that the soldier who was drinking Pepsi Cola and the solider
firing the tear gas and the young man with the Molotov cocktail and Hossam
Salem are the young people.
Mr Salem didn't want to join Mr Clinton's happy-clappy reunion of youth. He
wanted to go to Paradise. And the Israelis were quite prepared to send him
there.
But let's keep calling them "clashes". It sounds harmless enough, child's
play, just a little routine violence from which we can all withdraw and jump
aboard the Oslo train once it's been put "back on track". Or from which you
can speed your way -- if you believe in it -- straight to heaven.
MiD-EasT RealitieS - www.MiddleEast.Org
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