Fire in the Hills
“Fire in the Hills” is a four-part series of articles, written in a narrative style, that traced the journey of two families – Muslim and Jewish – from two neighborhoods in northern New Jersey that were only five miles apart to two communities in the West Bank that were only 500 yards apart. By chronicling the daily lives of these families, Columnist Mike Kelly, who was accompanied by senior photographer Carmine Galasso, traced how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was affecting ordinary people. Kelly and Galasso spent several months tracing the families and their backgrounds in New Jersey, then another two weeks with them in the West Bank as they tried to go about their normal lives against a backdrop of increasing violence.
Included here are the four-part series, along with four additional columns.
Introduction to "Fire in the Hills":
They face each other across a dry riverbed, through the gunsights of separate guardians. They are two West Bank communities - the Jewish settlement of Psagot, the Palestinian town of Ramallah.
They are close enough to hear the laughter of children playing, so far apart that their only links now are the bullets and blame that pass between them almost every day.
The people of Psagot and Ramallah embody the pride and passion at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Psagot's Hindi Cohen says of her Palestinian neighbors and the hilly landscape she cherishes: "I'm not pushing them out. We wanted to be part of history. We wanted to be part of the Jewish people coming back after thousands of years of being exiled."
Beneath the fervor are ordinary families, with ordinary dreams and difficulties - all framed by extraordinary events.
For two weeks last month, columnist Mike Kelly and senior photographer Carmine Galasso walked the streets of Ramallah and Psagot, chronicling the days and nights of several families, including some who once lived only miles apart in northern New Jersey.
Their four-day series begins on Page NJ-1 – a special section devoted to the series.
In the West Bank, the Atmosphere Is Thick with the Dreams, Devotions – and Now, the Rocks and Bullets of Two Peoples Who Call It Home
April 1, 2001
Part I: Fire in the Hills
Ramallah, the West Bank:
The boy went to his grave with a smile on his face.
He was 15 and had been shot to death the night before by Israeli soldiers guarding an airport runway that sits across a lumpy road from a dusty West Bank refugee camp where the stench of rotting garbage cuts the air.
The boy's friends say he was doing nothing more threatening than walking home from school when three M-16 bullets slammed into his chest.
Israeli authorities tell a different story - that Hassam Imad Disi was leading several dozen rock-throwing youths in one of the daily Palestinian protests known as the intifada - the uprising. When the throng tried to scale the airport fence, the soldiers switched from firing rubber-coated bullets, meant to wound, to live ammunition.
The next morning, on a sun-splashed street in the Palestinian town of Ramallah, just 10 miles north of Jerusalem, there is no room for argument.
Hassam is a martyr, pure and simple, anointed as such by local Palestinian officials before the sun rose over the Judean hills.
By noon, scores of Ramallah's walls and store windows are plastered with color posters of Hassam's boyish face superimposed on a photograph of Jerusalem's golden Dome of the Rock mosque and accompanied by this epitaph:
"Killed by Zionists."
Now Hassam, the son of a carpenter, will get a martyr's funeral - right down to the Islamic tradition that anyone killed in battle for faith or country is not to be touched again until angels greet him in heaven.
No embalming.
No changing of clothes.
No washing of blood.
No closing of eyes.
No mortician's altering of the final expression when death came - in this case, a toothy grin on a boy barely beyond puberty.
"Revenge! Revenge!" the crowd of 1,000 mourners chants in Arabic. "Your blood will not be dry before we avenge you."
By week's end, Ramallah will see three more martyrs' funerals, but with a significant change of circumstance.
In the three deaths to come, the fatal shots come from Israeli soldiers guarding the Jewish settlement up the hill, a community so close to Ramallah that residents say they sometimes hear the playground laughter of children.
A place called Psagot.
There are many ways to view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
There is the lens of history, and the meandering paths of politics and negotiation, so promising a year ago and now so cloudy. There is also the lens of war, the bloodletting on each side that forms a scab of mistrust.
In the six months since the intifada erupted, more than 430 people have been killed in Israel and the West Bank, including some 350 Palestinians, almost 60 Israelis, and about 20 others.
But in a fundamental way, this conflict comes down to land - and, more basically, to neighborhoods.
Places like Ramallah and Psagot.
The communities are no more than 300 feet apart in places, separated by a dry riverbed and a steep, rocky ridge dotted with olive trees and patches of grass where an occasional goat grazes. The Bible tells us that Joshua and Samuel walked these same craggy Judean hills.
And yet, Ramallah's 40,000 Palestinians and Psagot's 1,500 Jews might as well be living in separate, parallel universes. Their residents not only speak different languages, they also shop in separate groceries, rely on separate police, fire, and ambulance services, use separate courts and hospitals.
Even the name of the new Israeli-built ribbons of asphalt that wind through the hills and are designed to keep Jews and Palestinians apart underscores this separateness - they call them "bypass roads."
Ramallah and Psagot used to be linked by the daily routines typical to neighbors: mechanics, bakeries, groceries. If they have a common link now, it's gunshots, traded back and forth, almost every day since September. And yet, amid the daily tit-for-tat violence, ordinary people on both sides try steadfastly to go on with their lives.
Two such ordinary families - one in Ramallah, one in Psagot - have ties to northern New Jersey. Their stories show that this is more than an obscure conflict in a faceless, faraway land. It is a world tinged with pain and suspicion right outside the back door.
Until seven years ago, Fuad Khalil, 53, managed a ShopRite grocery store in Clifton. Like many Palestinians, Fuad, who was born in Jerusalem, dreamed of returning to his homeland.
When peace seemed so promising between Israelis and Palestinians, he and his wife, 41-year-old Nadia, who was also born in Jerusalem, moved their four children from Paterson to Ramallah. Their goal was to make a better life in the same hills their Palestinian ancestors once walked.
In Psagot, Aharon and Rachel Maman nurtured a dream not all that different from the Khalils'. The Mamans, who lived briefly in Teaneck with their four children, wanted to build a home on the same biblical landscape their Jewish forebears trod.
In Ramallah and in Psagot, the Khalils and the Mamans put down roots. But six months of intifada has left each family deeply saddened about what the future may hold.
Nadia and Fuad Khalil worry about what will become of 14-year-old Fuad Jr., who wants to join other local boys in throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers.
"I'm not afraid to be a martyr," the boy says.
Among Palestinian youths, throwing rocks is something of a rite of passage, encouraged by even some Palestinian officials, who see it as a form of civil disobedience. But such rites sometimes come with tragic consequences.
Last fall, Fuad Jr. was hit in the buttocks by a rubber-coated bullet, the sort of ammunition Israeli authorities say is meant to scare off demonstrators. He says the rubber bullet left him bruised but not dissuaded from throwing rocks.
Palestinians say the bullets - some are hard rubber, others are rubber-coated lead - can be lethal if they strike an eye or other vulnerable area of the body.
"The doctor told me he was lucky he wasn't hit in the head," frets Fuad Khalil Sr.
In his baggy jeans and Chicago Bulls T-shirt, Fuad Jr. could pass easily for an American teenager. But he now speaks the words of Palestinian revolution. He says he has never set foot in Psagot, never met any Israeli Jews - and doesn't really want to.
"It's our Palestine," Fuad Jr. says. "It's our world. It's our town."
Nadia Khalil shakes her head and falls silent at her son's new vocabulary, much of it learned at Palestinian schools that Israeli authorities say encourage anti-Jewish sentiments.
"I'm so frightened," she says after her son leaves the room. "I want to control him, but I don't know what to do."
The Khalils say they have heard that some people in Psagot once shared the same northern New Jersey landscape they once knew, but they have never visited Psagot, never found the opportunity to even inquire about other Americans there, much less seek out those from New Jersey.
"What are they like up there?" asks Nadia Khalil, whose three older children live in Chicago. "I wonder."
Up the ridge in Psagot, the Mamans say they regularly passed through Ramallah in more peaceful times, mainly to buy groceries or to get to Jerusalem.
No more. "Too dangerous," says Aharon Maman, 53, a professor of linguistics at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. Seven years ago, his family lived in Teaneck, just off Teaneck Road, while he did a year's research at Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary.
Like Fuad and Nadia Khalil, Aharon and Rachel Maman worry about the safety of their children - four daughters - especially their oldest, 22-year-old Yifat.
As a student of interior design, Yifat Maman often drives the roads to Jerusalem at night, a dangerous practice for any Jewish resident of the West Bank these days.
Some 20 Jewish settlers have been killed by Palestinian gunmen during the intifada. No one in Psagot has been hit, although a few say their cars have been struck by bullets. Others say they have friends who have been killed.
Three weeks before Ramallah mourned Hassam Imad Disi, many Psagot residents mourned 55-year-old Arieh Hershkovitz, a heating repairman from a neighboring settlement who died when his truck was hit by machine-gun fire from a passing car.
Hershkovitz, a father of four, was often in Psagot to tinker with faulty heaters or air conditioners.
"He was in our home a number of times," says Chaim Bloch, whose terrace overlooks Ramallah. "He repaired our furnace." Bloch's wife, Shifra, teaches one of Hershkovitz's daughters.
Aharon Maman travels with a semiautomatic pistol wedged between his driver's seat and the emergency brake, the same spot where many Americans perch their spill-free coffee cups. His 18-year-old daughter, Avital, has taken a special pistol-shooting course offered to residents of the 144 Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Many settlers, in fact, can get an M-16 assault rifle from the Israeli government.
Yifat Maman, however, carries no armament.
"I won't use a gun," she insists.
But she says she is acutely aware of the danger of driving at night. "I drive fast," she says. "And I'm always aware of the cars around me."
One recent evening, roadside snipers targeted a friend's car. Bullets riddled the engine. One passed through the windshield and between driver and passenger.
"A miracle no one was hurt," says Rachel Maman, 46, who teaches Arabic in a Jewish school in Jerusalem.
For Yifat Maman, her friends' brush with death has caused a subtle yet profound change in one of her most ordinary interactions - the way she signs off a telephone conversation with one of her close friends.
"Don't forget I love you," she says to a girlfriend one evening before setting out on a drive to Jerusalem.
"Don't talk like that," the friend cautions.
"I'm not panicked, but you have to be realistic," Yifat says after hanging up the phone. "I might not come back."
She pauses.
"I'm just being realistic."
In Ramallah, on the day of the funeral for 15-year-old Hassam Imad Disi, Nadia Khalil finds herself facing reality, too - one that is all too familiar to Palestinian parents.
Just home from running errands in Jerusalem, she is dusting furniture in her living room when she hears the chanting of the funeral procession.
"Allahu akbar."
"God is great."
She runs to the front porch and finds herself transfixed by the scene up the block. Palestinian flags flutter and marchers stream by, men in the lead carrying Hassam's flag-draped body on an orange stretcher. The women follow, most draped in the traditional shoulder-to-ankle robes known as hijabs, with scarves to cover their hair.
Nadia Khalil falls silent. She thinks of the dead boy's parents. "God bless them," she prays aloud. "God, just take him to heaven, and bless them all."
Then she thinks of herself and what she might do, or feel, if her son met the same fate on one of his rock-throwing forays.
"Can you imagine? Can you imagine? My son, standing in front of me one day and the next he's not there anymore."
Hours later, as she recalls the moment, a solitary tear rises in the corner of her eye, then slowly follows the line of her cheek to her chin.
"I'm so afraid," she says.
Her family, she says, moved to Ramallah from Paterson in 1993, not long after Israeli and Palestinian officials reached a peace agreement. In the years since, however, various attempts to forge some sort of peaceful coexistence foundered, with each side blaming the other for not living up to promises.
Israel had seized the West Bank, an arid oval of land not much larger than New Jersey's Bergen, Passaic, Essex, Morris, and Sussex counties, as a security buffer after its 1967 war with Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. Many devout Jews, of course, considered the West Bank more than a buffer. Far more than the coastal areas of Israel near Tel Aviv, the West Bank was the ancient kingdom of David and Solomon, the home of the Jewish faith.
Over time, Israel had ceded control over pieces of the West Bank, including Ramallah, to the Palestinian National Authority, and the 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank today think of it as their once and future homeland, as well.
The peace process seemed aimed at giving Palestinians just that - until September and the violence.
"We wanted to have a better life," Nadia Khalil says in explaining why her family came back. "But this is not peace."
After passing the Khalils' block, the funeral throng marches for another mile, joined now by six men in black woolen masks who carry AK-47 assault rifles - an honor guard, courtesy of the Palestinian Fatah movement.
At the boy's house, a man in camouflage pulls out a 9mm pistol and fires eight shots into the air, the bullets whizzing past posters of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat that hang from telephone wires.
The crowd sweeps on, toward a cemetery, passing a billboard ad for Reese's Pieces candy, the Friends Restaurant, and a store that sells Pok'emon characters.
A boy walks by. "Shalom," he says to an observing reporter, laughing in a mocking tone at the traditional Hebrew greeting.
"Shalom," says a boy with red hair.
"Shalom," answers Aharon Maman.
A few days after Hassam's funeral, Maman is out for a walk. He gently pats the boy on the head and smiles as he passes.
Maman heads toward what was once Psagot's main entry point from Ramallah. Only 70 yards from where a Palestinian woman hangs laundry in her yard, a yellow steel gate now blocks the road. Barbed wire is strung across the nearby field.
"They started shooting at us last September, on Rosh Hashana," he says, his voice trailing off.
On the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashana marks the new year. Last fall, Muslims noted it as the day an oft-disregarded right-wing politician named Ariel Sharon paid an unexpected visit to the Temple Mount.
Sharon's walking tour of the Islamic shrines built over the ruins of Jerusalem's ancient Jewish temple, accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police officers, provoked the wave of violence that Palestinians call the "al-Aqsa intifada," for the Temple Mount's 1,000-year-old al-Aqsa mosque.
The Temple Mount, which also includes the 1,300-year-old Dome of the Rock mosque, is considered Islam's third-holiest site, after the cities of Mecca and Medina. It is also the site of Jerusalem's last Jewish temple, destroyed by Roman legions in A.D. 70. Its surviving remnant, the Western Wall or Wailing Wall, is Judaism's holiest site.
Sharon, two decades ago an army general disgraced for allowing the Lebanese militia to massacre Palestinian refugees, has always been considered something of a spoiler in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
But in Psagot, he is much admired.
In the recent election that made him Israel's prime minister, Sharon got 494 of the 495 votes cast in Psagot, according to election officials. The lone dissent went to a write-in candidate: "The Messiah," was all the ballot said.
Aharon Maman was more than happy to vote for Sharon, who promised to bring greater security to the West Bank's 200,000 Jewish settlers. But as he stands by the Psagot gate, looking down at Ramallah, Maman says he feels sad.
It was a Palestinian craftsman from Ramallah, says Maman, who made Psagot's steel outdoor Hanukkah menorah as a gift. A Palestinian carpenter made the tabernacle where Torah scrolls are stored in Psagot's synagogue.
Maman remembers going to a Ramallah bakery for challah bread each Friday, before the Jewish sabbath. Every morning, before he and other men gathered for daily prayers at the synagogue, a friend brought pita bread from the bakery.
"It was hot, fresh pita," Maman recalls. "It was wonderful."
The Mamans are one of five hardy families who founded Psagot, which translates roughly to "summit" in Hebrew, in 1981.
Aharon Maman had come to Israel in the mid-1960s from Morocco, where his father had been jailed as part of the government's crackdown on Jews. Some 500 years before that, the Maman family had been chased out of Spain during the Inquisition.
Rachel Gruber's family came to Israel from Hungary after escaping the Nazi Holocaust. A Christian family hid Rachel, her four sisters, and their mother, but other family members were killed. Rachel's mother saw the Nazis' dogs kill her brother when he tried to run away.
Compared with the specters of jail and concentration camps, Psagot was something of a heaven.
The five families lived in trailers the first year. They shared one phone, one electric generator. "When someone did the wash, we had to tell everyone else to turn off their electricity," recalls Rachel Maman with a chuckle. "We were pioneers."
Today, the settlement has some 250 houses, most made of stone. Yards are dotted with lemon and olive trees. It could be a Southern California suburb, except for the soldiers.
As he stands by Psagot's main gate, Maman points to a bullet hole in the window of a guardhouse, abandoned last September when firing became too intense. A half-filled bag of ground coffee sits on the floor.
The soldiers now take up positions behind sandbags and in foxholes dug into mounds of earth and rimmed by concrete, their machine guns pointed toward Ramallah. A U.S.-made Patton tank sits nearby, along with two Vietnam-era armored personnel carriers.
Maman looks at Ramallah.
"We never go there anymore," he says.
Hassam's funeral has been over for hours.
After being carried almost three miles, the boy's body was placed in a grave on a cliff that overlooks a gravel pit to the south and Psagot to the north.
As his family prayed over his body, the Fatah men with AK-47s formed a skirmish line and fired shots to honor his martyrdom. A man with a bullhorn lectured the crowd about the alleged evils of the Israeli government.
Then everybody walked away, the only sound the beep-beep-beep of a dump truck in the gravel pit.
That evening, Nadia Khalil stands at her kitchen counter, chopping pickles and cucumbers for a dinner salad, her knife striking harder with each word.
"Will Sharon kill us?" she asks.
She refers to the Lebanese militia massacre of Palestinians, now 20 years in the past. She speaks as if it took place last week.
Her voice rises.
"Remember Lebanon? Who will stop Sharon? Colin Powell? Or Bush? Who is going to stop him? No one could stop him! Maybe Saddam Hussein will stop him. But Saddam is tied up."
Then she trails off.
"Oh, I hate talking about politics."
Nadia Khalil was born in the Jewish section of the Old City of Jerusalem. Her husband, Fuad, grew up in west Jerusalem.
In 1948, after the United Nations set aside half of British-controlled Palestine as a Jewish homeland and war erupted, the Israelis drove their families out of their homes, the Khalils say.
Nadia's family became refugees; her mother lives today in a refugee camp outside Jerusalem. Fuad Khalil's father built a stone house in Ramallah - the same house Fuad returned to when he left Paterson in 1993.
Like the Mamans' move to Psagot, the Khalils' return to Ramallah was meant to be the start of a new life.
"It was the wrong decision," says Fuad Khalil Sr.
Nonetheless, he and his wife still cling to their dream, a hope that their homeland will materialize. Besides, there is no money now to take his family halfway back around the globe.
With dinner over, he decides to take a walk. Most of the shops are shuttered early, a result of the nightly shooting between Ramallah and Psagot. Only a few coffee shops are still open.
Men wearing the traditional Palestinian red or gray head scarf, or kaffiyeh, smoke water pipes. A vendor sells almonds from a cart.
Fuad Khalil Sr. grabs a handful of the nuts. The man nods, says nothing. Fuad walks on.
"Salaam," Fuad says.
After returning to Ramallah, Fuad opened a sandblasting and general contracting business. But with the intifada, most building in Ramallah came to a halt. Across the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations estimates, unemployment has risen to 45 percent.
Fuad Khalil says he lives mostly off savings. Nadia Khalil says she owes almost $400 to the local butcher and grocer.
"Things are not going the way they should," Fuad says.
He walks home and gets into a truck he uses for his contracting business.
"Let's take a ride."
He drives by the main Ramallah mosque, plastered with posters of young Hassam, then down a succession of darkened streets.
Suddenly, an Israeli army flare lights the sky. Over a hill, an Israeli tank fires a shell. Palestinian machine guns respond.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
The truck rolls down a hill. In the shadows, squads of camouflage-clad Palestinian soldiers gather. Up the middle of the street, twirling an AK-47, strolls a lone Palestinian, clad in black jeans and a gray T-shirt.
More shots ring out.
As he turns down another block, he looks across the darkened ravine and up the hill at Psagot, its streetlights still burning.
Then, to his left, Palestinian gunmen fire machine guns at Psagot.
Israeli soldiers in Psagot answer with bursts of their own. Red tracer bullets streak across the road, only 50 feet ahead of Fuad's truck.
He stops, shuts off the lights. More tracers fly overhead and pound into a vacant lot, their red streaks extinguished as the bullets hit the dirt.
As quickly as it started, the firing stops. He waits 10 minutes, then puts the truck in gear, makes a U-turn, and heads home.
"We get used to it," he says.
Later that night, he and Nadia watch TV. The machine guns start up again, muffled and in the distance.
Pop-pop-pop.
"That's Palestinian," says Nadia.
Rat-tat-tat. A deeper burst of sound.
"That's the Israelis," says Fuad.
Then silence.
"Can you believe this?" says Nadia. "This is nothing. We're used to it."
That night in Ramallah, another Palestinian dies.
Naim Badarin is killed instantly when an Israeli tank shell, aimed at Palestinian machine guns, hits his house.
Badarin, 55, reportedly was watching TV in his living room.
* * *
Where Gunfire and Bullets Are Things Children Really Know
April 2, 2001
Part II: “Fire in the Hills”
Psagot, the West Bank --
Eliraz Weingot knows war.
She knows there are good soldiers and bad, that bullets sometimes pierce windows and walls, that the rat-tat-tat bursts of machine guns and the hollow thump-thump-thump of tank cannons are simply part of life in this Jewish settlement that crowns a rocky hilltop overlooking the Palestinian town of Ramallah.
Eliraz is 5 years old.
One recent pristine morning, with the carefree chirping of birds and a blue sky stretching like a seamless dome from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, Eliraz takes a break from playing tag and sits at a special table in a corner of her kindergarten classroom.
The kids call this "the war corner."
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict affects the most ordinary moments of life on the West Bank. But in Psagot, one of 144 settlements established by deeply spiritual Jews who believe God called them to expand Israel's borders into ancient Judea and Samaria, the psychological barometer perhaps most closely watched by parents is the kindergarten war corner.
It's one thing for an adult to try to go on with life amid the gunfire and tension. It's something else for children.
Since peace talks broke down last year, Palestinian gunners in Ramallah have taken aim at Psagot's homes almost every night. No Psagot resident has been wounded, but so many homes have been hit that residents keep a photo album of bullet holes in walls, windows, windowsills, cabinets, porches, and cars.
One of Psagot's mathematically inclined residents calculated that 120,000 bullets have been fired at the town since the first shot on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, last September - about 80 bullets for every resident. One slug hit Psagot's synagogue, shattering a stained-glass window and lodging in the balcony where women sit for the Orthodox services.
Many consider it a miracle from God that no one has been wounded - and evidence that God has blessed the Jewish presence on the West Bank in spite of immense Palestinian opposition.
Of all their worries, though, the children concern them the most, especially those too young to express themselves.
"Some of the children started wetting their beds," says Chaya Maur, a kindergarten teacher. "Some would not go upstairs alone. Or if the windows were shot out, they wouldn't stay in the house at all."
So Maur and other teachers set up the war corner.
Here, children too young to express their deepest fears are invited just to sit and play. The goal, says Maur, is to help children sort out their emotions - and to help alert adults when something is wrong.
The toys are not typical kindergarten fare. There are toy tanks, toy jeeps, toy fighter planes, and plastic soldiers in all manner of combat positions: kneeling with rifles, throwing grenades, prone and taking aim.
And there are bullet shells.
The shells are real, empty brass casings from M-16 cartridges and other ammunition fired by the 40-odd Israeli soldiers who guard Psagot's 1,500 residents.
That morning, in the war corner, Eliraz Weingot, her wide eyes carefully assessing the variety of war toys before her, quietly assembles an array of soldiers. Another girl sits next to her and grabs a tank, holding it in her hand for a few moments before rising and showing it to a teacher.
Eliraz stays in her seat. On a white counter, she arranges a dozen or so green soldiers facing a dozen gray soldiers. The greens, she explains, are Israeli soldiers.The grays are Palestinians.
Between the grays and the greens, she lines up a kind of picket fence - a dozen 2-inch-high bullet shells.
A few nights before Eliraz's playtime in the war corner, real Israeli soldiers guarding Psagot opened fire with real bullets on a neighborhood down the hill in Ramallah.
The soldiers said later that Palestinian snipers had drawn their fire by shooting at Psagot from positions in the neighborhood.
No one in Psagot was hit, and Palestinian authorities acknowledge no casualties among the armed fighters on their side.
But they say one Israeli bullet found a target. Obei Darraj was watching his father paint his brother's bedroom when a bullet came through the window and hit him in the chest.
Obei was 9.
The next day, the Israeli army says it knows of no Palestinian casualties.
* * *
Perspective means everything here.
From atop the arid hill that is home to Psagot, you can see Jerusalem. On clear mornings, when the cool air acts as a blanket to hold down the haze that typically rises from the Judean desert, residents say, you can spot the silver, finger-like Dead Sea 30 miles to the east.
But one of the most inspiring sites, residents say, is a field just outside one of Psagot's gates.
Here, amid stone remains of ancient walls and buildings, archaeologists say, the Biblical hero Joshua won a critical battle that helped open the door for the ancient Israelites to settle these same hills some 4,000 years ago. For Psagot's devout Jews, living amid such history is rock-solid evidence that their claim on the West Bank is legitimate.
"We wanted to be part of history," says Hindi Cohen, whose family came to Psagot soon after it was established in 1981. "We wanted to be part of the Jewish people coming back after thousands of years of being exiled."
Cohen, whose Brooklyn accent still enlivens conversations, says she was taught that "America was our house, but Israel is our home."
As for the Palestinians, who have called the West Bank their home for thousands of years, she says, "I'm not pushing them out, but if they have a problem with me being here, then they have a different country to go to."
She pauses.
"How many countries do Palestinians live in? Twenty? Fourteen? I don't know. For Jews, this is our only country. We believe this land was given to us by God, and we are the chosen people and we are the only ones who received it."
Down the hill in Ramallah, such words are akin to sparks that threaten to rekindle fires of war - or, at least, proof of the region's intractable battle over land.
"The Jews want to take everything," says Salemeh Ibrahim, 73, who sold carpets in Paterson two decades ago before moving back to the land of his birth.
Just as Jews point to their Bible for proof that they have holy claims to the West Bank, Ibrahim points to his religion.
"We have the same father as the Jews - Abraham," says Ibrahim, citing teachings that the Israelites trace their lineage to Abraham's son Isaac, while Arabs trace theirs to Abraham's son Ishmael. "Whatever our father left us is for us and them."
Another transplanted Paterson resident, Nadia Khalil, once believed the peace talks would lead to establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank. Such optimism prompted her to move to Ramallah with her husband and four children seven years ago.
Today, Psagot and Ramallah are in a virtual state of war. One recent evening, as Palestinians in Ramallah traded fire with soldiers in Psagot, Nadia Khalil thinks about her neighbors up the hill.
"I wonder if the Israeli families have children that are afraid," she says. "It would be interesting to know. I wonder if the kids in Psagot have trouble sleeping."
* * *
In Psagot, Chaim and Shifra Bloch's 4-year-old son is so afraid of the gunfire from Ramallah that he isn't sleeping well.
"It's most difficult on him," says Shifra, standing with her son across from the kindergarten war corner where Eliraz Weingot arranged toy soldiers and real bullet shells.
Then, caressing her son's shoulder, she considers herself, too, mentioning how sad she is at the news that morning that a Palestinian had set off a bomb near Tel Aviv and killed himself and two Israelis.
"Our normal life," says Shifra, "is not normal. It's not normal that we hear about these bombings and go on. It's not normal that we sleep at night with shooting."
And yet the Blochs - Chaim is a rabbi, Shifra a teacher - face a perplexing challenge. They want to keep family life as unchanged as possible by not drawing attention to the gunshots - no easy task. The Blochs' home sits on the settlement's western edge, the side most vulnerable to Ramallah's guns.
Every house around the Blochs is stacked with sandbags, protecting porches, windows, and doors. The Blochs refuse.
"We're doing our best to be normal," Chaim insists.
It is midafternoon. Chaim sets down the volume of Talmudic verses he has been reading and steps onto the concrete porch. He points to his next-door neighbor's house - and a 3-foot-high pile of sandbags the neighbor stacked up to shield his porch.
"He spent an entire day carrying the bags there," says Chaim. "A wind knocked them over."
He laughs, but is quick to note the dearth of humor in his family's circumstances.
"We're not crazy," he says. "We're cautious."
When the gunfire becomes intense, the Blochs pull down special plastic shades to darken their windows. The shades allow the Blochs to keep their lights on without giving Palestinian gunners easy targets. But the tactic does not always soothe their fears, or their children's.
"Sometimes," adds Bloch, "we move into a back room. It's difficult to sit and have dinner as bullets fly."
Such decisions are now as much a part of daily household routine as peeling carrots or folding the laundry. For the moment, as Bloch describes a litany of precautions, all is quiet. Sun bathes his porch. A breeze brushes his beard. Somewhere in Psagot, a dog barks.
Bloch looks down the hill toward Ramallah. Only a few hundred yards away, he can see Palestinians walking between houses. A car engine turns over, and a Palestinian heads down a narrow road. From Ramallah's center, the loudspeakers of a mosque sound the high-pitched Muslim call to prayer.
"I like the view of Ramallah," Bloch says.
He is silent as he takes in the scene.
"It's frightening when they're shooting," he adds.
Bloch points to several five- and six-story apartment buildings on the edge of Ramallah. Windowless and pocked with bullet holes, they are empty concrete shells now. No one lives there.
Chaim Bloch, who served as a medic in the Israeli army during its invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s, says Palestinian snipers take up positions in the buildings at night.
"They come into those places and shoot and put Psagot in danger," he says.
Then he asks the sort of question that underscores his religious and legal training: "Morally, what's the right way to respond to that?"
He gestures toward several one- and two-story houses around the vacant apartment buildings, all of them occupied by Palestinian families. It was in just such a house that 9-year-old Obei Darraj died, shot by Israeli soldiers returning the fire of Palestinian snipers.
Bloch's question - how to distinguish between the enemy and civilians - is a staple of daily conversation in Psagot. But a clear answer is as fleeting as the snipers themselves, he says.
"Of course, we have to do our best not to hit anybody that's not part of the fighting," Bloch says. "But should we say, `Look at those people shooting at us, and we have nothing to do because there are five innocent people there, too?'"
He falls silent for a moment, then continues. "The first concern has to be the security of your own people. And it's true - in any war, innocent people are killed. It's unpleasant. War is an unpleasant thing, but in a war innocent people will get killed."
He mentions the overnight news, that yet another Palestinian was killed by Psagot's soldiers, this time a 43-year-old woman, Aydeh Efteehe, who was shot in the stomach while walking home through downtown Ramallah with her husband and three children.
Israeli army officials say they cannot confirm whether their soldiers fired the fatal bullet.
"It could be," Bloch says, conceding that an errant bullet from Psagot may have accidentally killed the woman.
"I'm happy that our army does its best to be careful, that these things should happen as little as possible," he says. "But it can happen. Because it's a war."
* * *
The next morning, a machine gun breaks the stillness.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Jacob Berg, Psagot's civilian security chief but nicknamed "the sheriff," grabs his walkie-talkie.
"Come in. Come in," he demands.
An Israel soldier, manning a lookout post on the southwestern edge of Psagot, reports that the gunfire is coming from Ramallah.
This is not normal, says Berg, jumping into a white pickup truck. Most shots from Ramallah come at night. Berg pushes the gearshift forward and heads in the direction of the shots - near the home of Esther Jacobi.
Berg, 24, was born in Moscow during the Soviet era and moved to Israel with his family as part of the Jewish exodus in the mid-1980s. In Psagot, he and his wife, Naama, a 21-year-old biology student at Bar Ilan University, live in a true railroad flat - a wooden boxcar, built in 1942 in the United States and now converted into a two-bedroom home.
The boxcar, painted green and yellow, sits on a gentle slope on the eastern edge of Psagot - the side farthest from Ramallah - and is surrounded by cherry trees and grapevines planted by Berg and his father.
It is Berg's job to augment the work of soldiers by organizing nightly patrols by Psagot's civilians. He also checks the background of any Palestinian worker who comes to Psagot to paint a house, repair a leak, or mow a lawn.
Because of the shootings and the constant worry about Palestinians who might carry bombs, Berg now allows only two or three Palestinians into Psagot on an average day.
It's a quick trip to Jacobi's house. Psagot is barely a quarter-mile wide by a half-mile long. Berg jumps out of his truck, grabbing his M-16 with a sniper's scope attached. On his belt, he wears a 9mm pistol and a special electronic pager that reports incidents of gunshots. Many West Bank residents carry similar pagers that alert them to trouble.
Jacobi peers around the corner of her home, down toward Ramallah. Berg points his M-16, using the rifle's scope to scan the hills.
Nothing.
"I'm not afraid, but worried," says Jacobi, kneading one hand with the other, then folding her arms against her chest.
Her children are all at school. "I feel safer," she says, "when they are in the house."
Inside, at the bottom of stairs, sandbags block a window that faces Ramallah. Partly out of pride, partly to hide their coarse, olive-green canvas, Jacobi's children have draped the sandbags with the blue and white Israeli flag.
Berg smiles, tells Jacobi not to worry, and heads back in his truck.
Even before the shootings, he says, Ramallah's Palestinians often threw rocks at people from Psagot who drove through town. Many Psagot residents now have shatterproof glass in their car windows, courtesy of the Israeli government.
Berg, the target of stones many times as a youth, says he has been forced to shoot back at Ramallah's gunners on several occasions in recent months. "We should live together," he says of the Palestinians. "But the thing they should know is that this is our country."
After sunset, Berg heads to the army encampment on Psagot's northwest corner - the real war corner. He checks with the soldiers, then drives home to the boxcar.
A small contingent of Israeli infantry wearing olive-green flak jackets and helmets takes up positions in foxholes, fortified with sandbags or concrete.
The men have one tank and two armored personnel carriers - all courtesy of the United States, all dating from the Vietnam War era. Tonight, the tank and APCs are patrolling Psagot's hillsides, their treads gouging the caramel-colored earth.
Behind a row of concrete blocks set up to protect the army's sleeping huts, a jeep pulls up and three soldiers jump out. Each methodically empties the chamber of his M-16 before heading into the command hut.
Inside, the commanding officer - with captain's bars gleaming under overhead fluorescents, his hair cropped in military style - is stern. "Yes?" he asks as the door opens, slightly perturbed at the interruption.
One of the soldiers just out of the jeep has a question: May he show a visiting journalist what the front-line foxholes look like at night?
The captain's eyes narrow, his jaw squares. He says something about checking first with headquarters, that it's too dangerous to take a stroll on the front line, even when no one is shooting.
Then the captain's cellular phone rings.
"Hello?"
His voice is serious, but as quickly as you could say "about face," he starts to chuckle.
It's his mother, checking to see how he's doing this evening.
Outside, a soldier walks toward a foxhole, his M-16 slung over a shoulder. He stops and scans the lights of Ramallah.
He says soldiers feel angry that Palestinian snipers sometimes take up positions in residential neighborhoods, forcing Israelis to hold their fire or risk shooting civilians.
"We don't shoot at them on purpose," the soldier says. "If they shoot at us and we shoot back at a spot where the shooting comes from and there are kids there, it's not our problem. It's their problem."
All is quiet this night, though. No Israeli bullets find their way into Palestinian homes. No Palestinian sniper's slug breaks the evening routine in Psagot.
A block from the foxholes, another sound reverberates from Psagot's outdoor basketball court, where lights shine off the rims.
Thump, thump, thump.
With no shooting from Ramallah, a teenage girl is practicing her dribble.
* * *
A Palestinian Teenager Ponders the Revolution
April 3, 2001
Part III: “Fire In the Hills”
Ramallah, the West Bank --
Junior stares out the window.
It is a few minutes shy of 7 a.m., a school day. A pale sun peeks over the towers of Ramallah's main mosque, scene of all the Palestinian martyrs' funerals that week.
Fuad Khalil Jr. lets his gaze follow the front steps that lead from his family's house, the one his grandfather built in 1949 after the family was forced to leave their home in Jerusalem. In the next room, Fuad's mother, Nadia, struggles with his sister's unruly hair, fixing it finally in a ponytail.
His eyes walk across the street, past the long morning shadows, over a stone fence and an olive tree, to another stone house - the home of a boy killed by Israeli soldiers. But his thoughts are far away.
Asked what he's thinking about, Fuad replies, "Paterson."
New Jersey.
Only 14, Fuad is already experiencing the sort of emotional divide common to Palestinians everywhere, especially those on the contentious West Bank.
Should he stay in this homeland that is not a nation - not a Palestinian nation, anyway? Should he go back to Paterson and life in the house on Main Street near the Chinese restaurant and the city's Islamic enclave? The same Paterson neighborhood that is home to a corner eatery called the Ramallah Restaurant?
Life was less tense in Paterson, he says. But then, just about any place is less tense than Ramallah these days.
For Fuad, as for other teenage boys in Ramallah and other Palestinian towns, another basic question has come to dominate much of daily life: Should he join the revolution, these street protests that most Palestinians refer to as the intifada?
Paterson offers its share of temptations - drugs and gangs, for those who want a touch of danger; malls, movies, and occasional jaunts to the New Jersey shore, for those who want a little fun.
Ramallah has no mall, no movie house. Rubaks, a local ice cream shop, has closed. The local athletic field is still occupied by a blue tent, set up last fall for a one-ring circus, but the circus left town when the intifada started. Today, the tent's ripped remains flap in the wind.
On many days after school, Fuad's buddies head for the closest Israeli army checkpoint and throw stones at the soldiers. It's part sport, a sort of Middle Eastern version of catch-me-if-you-can. But the stone-throwing is also part Russian roulette. Some boys die.
The boy who used to live across the street was shot to death while throwing rocks at soldiers last year. About two dozen Ramallah residents - half of them children - have been killed by Israeli bullets in the last five months.
Throughout the West Bank, more than 430 people have been killed since the outbreak of violence in September, including about 350 Palestinians, almost 60 Israelis, and about 20 others. The fatalities include more than 60 Palestinian children, many of them boys who were throwing rocks at soldiers.
Four months ago, an Israeli bullet found Fuad.
Luckily the bullet was the rubber-coated version, which the Israeli army uses along with tear gas to disperse Palestinian demonstrators.
The use of this ammunition is drawing its own fire. Palestinian doctors and medical officials from other nations say rubber bullets can cause the loss of eyes and other serious injuries, especially to children. Some Israelis allege that Palestinians are pushing their children to engage in lethal demonstrations and attract such retaliation.
Luckily, too, the bullet that struck Fuad found a spot with plenty of padding - his buttocks.
At 7:10 a.m., he grabs his backpack.
He is silent as as he heads out the door.
For Palestinians in towns such as Ramallah, these are days when anger easily boils above the sullen silence.
Peace was supposed to be flourishing by now. At least that was the hope in 1993, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House and promised violence would end.
There was talk of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, with Ramallah as its economic and cultural hub. When the Israelis withdrew their soldiers from Ramallah and other West Bank towns such as Jericho and Hebron, Palestinians say, you could feel the pride rising.
In Ramallah, a new radio station was named Radio Peace and Love. Today, the station plays mainly martial music.
"I felt things were really going to take off," says Samir Asmer, who moved from Paterson to run his brother's two drugstores after the brother was killed in a car accident outside Ramallah.
There was even talk that the Jewish settlers in Psagot might move from their hilltop perch looking down on Ramallah. Even if Psagot did not vanish, some maps in the peace negotiations indicated it might be forced to join the new Palestinian state.
It hasn't happened. There is no Palestinian state.
Perhaps Ramallah's most famous image is last October's television footage of a mob bursting through the doors of the police station and killing two Israeli soldiers who had been taken there after making a wrong turn and getting lost in Palestinian territory.
Hours after the two Israelis were killed - with one body tossed out a window and jubilant Palestinian youths displaying hands coated with the soldiers' blood - Israeli army helicopter rockets reduced the police station to rubble.
Today, the rubble remains untouched, with anti-Israeli graffiti covering the station's perimeter wall. The car that the soldiers drove that day still sits by a curb, burned and rusted, an empty Coca-Cola can tossed in the back seat, just up the block from Asmer's pharmacy.
Because of the increasing violence, the West Bank sectors that were turned over to a fledgling Palestinian government after months of painstaking negotiations are now essentially islands, controlled by surrounding Israeli authorities.
Want to visit your grandmother in Jerusalem? Commute to a job? Go to school? Get to the airport? The Israeli army regulates Palestinian traffic - and 120,000 Palestinians who commute to jobs in Israel - with a series of checkpoints and ID checks that have increased during the intifada.
If Israel declares a security emergency, Palestinians face roadblocks or, worse, a complete shutdown.
Israel even regulates water to Palestinian areas, and Palestinian officials contend that the Israelis sometimes turn off the tap unannounced.
This morning, it takes the Khalil family almost an hour to travel less than two miles to drop the children at their schools.
First comes the challenge of finding a taxi large enough to hold Nadia Khalil and her four children.
There are no school buses, and public buses are rare. At this hour, students compete with workers for taxi seats.
The family stands on a corner a block from their house for 10 minutes. Dust curls up from the passing traffic stream. Nadia Khalil, dressed in the traditional ankle-length hijab and head covering of Muslim women, grabs the hand of 6-year-old Hala, fearing that one of the careening cars and trucks might hit the girl.
Nadia harbors another worry for Hala at school. The Israeli army has parked a tank near the girl's elementary school. "She's very afraid," whispers Nadia.
Fuad's younger brother, 12-year-old Saleh, flags down a driver. "Oh, Saleh," his mother says. "You're wonderful."
The taxi winds through town. Half the stores are closed, victims of the economic cloud that hangs over Palestinian towns as the violence worsens. Men - young, middle-aged, old - stand on corners looking for work. Stores that once seemed so promising - Miami Furniture, for example - stand empty.
The World Bank estimates that 32 percent of the 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live below the poverty line - a 50 percent increase since the violence began. The United Nations estimates that unemployment among Palestinians has soared to 45 percent.
Many Israelis - and more than a few Palestinians - accuse Palestinian authorities in Ramallah and elsewhere of corruption. The Palestinian National Authority barely makes its $45 million-a-month payroll. Such basic services as garbage pickup and road repair are not done.
The taxi carrying Nadia Khalil and her children jostles as it hits a pothole.
After a mile, the taxi passes a Palestinian checkpoint and its camouflage-clad soldiers with AK-47 rifles. A mile beyond that, the traffic slows, then stops. A quarter-mile line of cars snakes back from the Israeli army checkpoint.
The taxi driver turns hard to the left, guns the engine, and climbs a one-lane road that winds up a steep ridge, then down again after a half-mile, finally spilling back onto the main road and evading the Israeli checkpoint.
Other cars follow, their tires slipping off the asphalt and skidding on rocks as they try to dodge vehicles coming down the road in the opposite direction, also trying to avoid the checkpoint.
That the Palestinian drivers do this in full view of Israeli soldiers only adds to the frustration.
"Why do they even have the checkpoint?" Nadia asks. "Are they just trying to harass us?"
Another mile beyond the checkpoint, past the Kalandia refugee camp, more piles of garbage, an airport runway, another Israeli checkpoint, and another road around it - the taxi drops off Fuad and his brother.
Nadia can't pick the boys up after school. "Come right home," she calls out.
The boys nod.
Back home an hour later, Nadia stirs her coffee and sighs.
"I don't care what I'm doing. I make sure I'm home when they get out of school" she says. "I don't want them throwing rocks."
She knows they do.
Upstairs, in a room with a Michael Jordan poster on the wall, boxing gloves, and a bookshelf that is home to English-language copies of "Schindler's List," "100 Successful College Essays," and "Vocabulary for the High School Student," Fuad keeps his own personal weapon for the revolution.
It's a homemade slingshot he fashioned from scrap metal and rubber cords. It can shoot marble-sized rocks 100 feet or more.
Only a few days earlier, Fuad showed it to his mother.
"I can't believe this," says Nadia, sipping her coffee. "A slingshot against soldiers?"
Fuad Khalil Sr. stares out the window.
It is almost 10 a.m., and young Fuad's father sits in his storefront office, just steps from the family home, and gazes into the morning traffic.
One way to understand why teenage boys throw rocks is to spend time with their fathers - especially the fathers who struggle to pay the bills in an economy that is so closely tied to politics and the confused path of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Fathers like Fuad Khalil Sr.
He came to Ramallah from his job as manager of a ShopRite grocery store in Clifton, encouraged by peace negotiations in 1993 and hoping to earn good money. He started a contracting company, and for a year or two the work was steady. Then violence crept in and the economy shut down.
On this day, he has no work. He takes his time flipping through the morning Arabic-language newspaper. His wife walks in and joins him.
As he reads an article about a Palestinian killed in his home the night before - by an Israeli tank shell aimed at gunmen firing at Psagot - he sighs, then hands the newspaper to his wife.
The dead man was 55, only two years older than Fuad himself. And like Fuad, the man was a builder.
"Coming back to Ramallah was the wrong idea,"he says.
He quickly drops the thought and turns his attention to his hobby - the mating of French finches with canaries. By the front door, a yellow canary sings. In a back room, more chirps and birdsong.
Fuad smiles. He steps into the back and emerges carrying a cage with a small nest and three eggs.
"In a few days we'll have baby birds," he says.
Nadia Khalil looks up from the paper.
"Life has to go on," she says.
It's a common sentiment. But here, it seems to embody another meaning - that life is in a holding pattern.
Across town, in a coffee shop, Abdul Abu Hadba nurses a cup of thick Arabian coffee. If ever there was a man in a holding pattern, it is Hadba.
Like Fuad Khalil Sr., he came back to the West Bank from Paterson. He opened an electronics store just outside Ramallah, on the road between Psagot and another Jewish settlement, Beit El.
"It was the hottest spot," says Hadba, whose store was stocked with TVs, appliances, and lighting fixtures.
The store is still stocked, but its doors are shuttered.
When the violence increased last fall, Israeli troops blocked Palestinians from the roads to Hadba's store. Jewish settlers stayed away, too, fearful that they might be attacked if they ventured from their community.
Hadba finishes his coffee and heads to his store for his weekly check. He finds his inventory intact - with a coating of dust.
He drops into the pharmacy next door and greets the owner, Khaldoun Shouman, with a smile.
"You are the first person in the store today," says Shouman.
It's 11:30 a.m.
Back in Ramallah, a sandwich shop owner gets ready for his lunch crowd - what's left of it.
Solomon "Joe" Ally came to Ramallah from Boston for the same reasons as Fuad Khalil and Abdul Abu Hadba. He saw a business opportunity - and a chance to raise his children in a Palestinian nation.
For a few years, Ally sold more than 130 chicken, beef, and salad sandwiches a day. Today, he says, he is lucky if he sells 25, at about $3.50 each.
His best customers? The stone-throwing boys.
Ally's shop is just up the block from ground zero of the intifada in Ramallah - a stretch of road flanked by a farm field on one side and a dozen olive trees on the other.
This used to be a crossing point, where the roads from Ramallah and the Jewish settlements of Beit El and Psagot all merged in a Y. But no one drives here anymore.
Israeli jeeps block one side of the road to Ramallah. The burned and rusted hulks of a half dozen cars block the other.
The kids call this place Martyrs' Crossroads.
The Israeli soldiers are there to protect the road to Psagot and Beit El. The charred cars protect the stone-throwers from the rubber bullets - and occasional live shots - fired by the Israelis.
A six-story hotel, financed by Palestinian-American investors, sits on the Israeli side, curtains billowing out of broken windows. Today, the hotel is home to Israeli army lookouts and snipers.
Ally's own son, 17-year-old Husain, has been hit twice with rubber bullets.
Across town now, Nadia Khalil waits for her children to come home from school. She thinks of Martyrs' Crossroads. "I know if my boys went out there, they would get hurt," she says. "They're not as good as these other kids."
She pauses, then adds, "We have a saying in Arabic. `Don't let me experience my child's death.'"
Wounds tell stories.
On the western side of Ramallah, a mile from the Khalil house, two miles from Martyrs' Crossroads, sits another sort of crossroads: the town's rehabilitation center.
Since the violence erupted last fall, the center has been flooded with 600 patients wounded by Israeli gunfire. Throughout the West Bank, in addition to the fatalities, Palestinian medical officials estimate that as many as 10,000 people have been wounded. Israelis say that figure is high, but nonetheless agree that several thousand Palestinians have been hurt in the violence.
Dr. Arafat Eideh, 39, walks into an examination room and pulls out a sheaf of X-rays for current patients.
One boy was shot in an eye. A man was shot in a shoulder, and the scattered bullet fragments look like stars on the X-ray. There is a man shot in a thigh, yet another man with both shin bones splintered by a single bullet. On his X-ray, the ends of the bones look like dry, broken twigs.
"This is very difficult to deal with," says Eideh. "I've never seen such wounds."
In a ward, Aba Mohammed, 37, sits in a wheelchair, a cellular phone in his lap. He was shot in a thigh with a live bullet at Martyrs' Crossroads in January.
"I was throwing rocks," he says. "I want to go back."
Nearby, a 16-year-old adjusts the patch over his right eye, where an Israeli rubber bullet hit him as he threw rocks at Martyrs' Crossroads in early February.
Would he go again?
He nods yes.
His mother stands nearby. "I didn't want him to go," she says. Then she adds, "He does a good thing for his country."
Such dual messages are not uncommon in Palestinian families. Even Nadia Khalil concedes that she sometimes finds herself praising, within earshot of her two sons, the bravery of the boys who throw rocks.
"And then I have to stop myself from talking," she says. "What am I saying? What am I saying?"
Junior tells his mother he is going to an Internet cafe.
He is fibbing.
It's almost 3 p.m. at Martyrs' Crossroads - a Thursday. Normally, Fridays are the prime days for throwing rocks at the crossroads.
But a few boys gather on this Thursday.
Fuad stops by Solomon Ally's sandwich shop. A younger boy with a sling practices. As the boy loops the sling in a circle - the way David did against Goliath - the rock falls out.
Fuad chuckles to himself.
Down the block now, other boys are throwing rocks at Israeli jeeps.
A soldier emerges, aims his M-16.
Pop.
A rubber-coated bullet skips up the street. The boys let go a volley of verbal taunts.
The soldier aims again.
Pop. Pop.
More misses.
Fuad says he is doing God's bidding by coming here. "I told my Mom that I wanted to check out the Internet," he says.
His mother even gave him taxi fare.
He looks across the street and points to a wall with a swastika. On the same wall, a few feet away, someone has written an epitaph for one of the youngsters who died recently.
"God's hero killed by Jewish bullets," Fuad translates from the Arabic.
He says he is not afraid to die.
But today he has forgotten his slingshot.
"I'm going home to get it," he says. "I'll be back."
* * *
The Rocks and Bullets Fly on Fridays in a New Local Ritual
April 4, 2001
Part IV: “Fire In The Hills”
Ramallah, the West Bank --
On Martyrs' Day, the spectators show up early.
They huddle by the auto body shop, across from the palm trees that poke from a divider in the middle of the empty road like nails from a weather-beaten boardwalk.
Then come the main players - the boys dragging tires to burn and buckets of rocks to throw, the men bearing flags from Fatah, Hamas, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the women grasping the hands of young children, the local politicians who want to be seen, the ambulances.
One boy wears rubber surgical gloves as he tosses rocks into a bucket. Another wears a Yankees cap. A middle-aged woman bends over a boulder the size of a watermelon, pounding its edge with a hammer to break off small pieces.
A father walks by with a young boy on his shoulders. In the boy's hand is a toy pistol.
Farther along, where the roads from the Jewish settlements of Psagot and Beit El merge with the road from Ramallah - the place the Palestinians call Martyrs' Crossroads - Israeli soldiers drive up in their jeeps.
A boy throws the first rock.
A soldier aims his rifle, then gets back in the jeep and rides away.
Many places define themselves by rituals, the sort of community events that bring people together to celebrate common values. Whether they're parades, youth soccer championships, or just picnics, such rituals give hints about towns and the energy that burns beneath the humdrum of ordinary life.
The West Bank Palestinian town of Ramallah has a new ritual every Friday - the gathering at Martyrs' Crossroads to throw rocks.
In the complicated relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, the violent uprising known as the intifada has taken on such a ritualistic bent in Ramallah that you can almost predict what either side will do even before it does it.
"Let me tell you what happens."
The speaker is Yedidiya Atlas, who works for a right-wing Israeli radio station and lives in a Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Ramallah. And while his voice is tinged with sarcasm that belies his deep passion, his words are echoed by many - on both sides.
"The Palestinians all go to the mosque," says Atlas, who grew up in Philadelphia and whose parents now live in Paramus. "After two or three hours of sitting in an uncomfortable position and listening to the most hateful, vile rhetoric, they're very fired up. When they leave the mosque, instead of going home, they march to the junction and throw rocks at the soldiers. At 2:30 p.m., they start shooting. The soldiers then shoot back. It's like a weekly routine."
On this day, Yedidiya Atlas' prediction comes true, mostly.
Fuad Khalil Jr. arrives early - this time, remembering to bring along his weapon. Hanging from a back pocket of his jeans is the slingshot he made from scrap metal and rubber strips.
"I'm going to throw rocks," says the 14-year-old.
His younger brother, 12-year-old Saleh, follows a few steps behind, carrying a sling made from two strips of rope attached to a cloth pocket that holds a rock the size of a tennis ball.
"I'm not afraid," Saleh says matter-of-factly when asked if he worries about getting shot.
Such nonchalance among Palestinian boys, indeed the fact that two boys so young have even come to such a dangerous place, provokes fierce criticism from Israelis and others.
The criticism has grown especially heated since Palestinian authorities acknowledged that families are given money if a relative is killed or wounded - a reported $10,000 from Iraq's President Saddam Hussein and $2,000 more from the Palestinian National Authority. Hussein is also said to give $1,000 to Palestinians with serious injuries and $500 to those with lesser wounds.
Only the month before, a local newspaper reported, the parents of a 15-year-old shot to death at a Friday confrontation at Martyrs' Crossroads received checks from Hussein and local Palestinian authorities, along with a red felt-covered plaque designating their son a martyr.
Such news reports, which have a wide resonance among Palestinian critics, beg a question that has nothing to do with money: What kind of parent lets a child do this?
Majeda Abu Gush, a Ramallah social worker, says "90 percent of the parents" don't know their children participate in the rock-throwing.
"These children see this on TV," she says. "So they come here. Here, they grow up."
Some Israelis offer a less forgiving take on the children's participation.
"In the synagogue, no matter how long the sermon is, we always have some time in the afternoon to relax," says Yedidiya Atlas, who lives in Beit El, not far from its sister settlement of Psagot. "In Ramallah, they whip the people into a frenzy at the mosque. So they riot."
It's not exactly a riot - not yet, anyway.
The boys push rusted and fire-scarred hulks of cars into barricades. Behind the cars, other boys pile rocks, their ammunition.
In front of the barricades, a boy in a black T-shirt and black jeans, with a red bandanna tied around his head, sets fire to three stacked tires.
Black smoke curls skyward.
An Israeli jeep pulls forward. Two more jeeps follow.
The door of one jeep opens on the passenger side, and a soldier steps out.
A boy in a white shirt runs forward, twirling his rope sling. The boy stops by the burning tires, his feet skidding on the road's cinders and chewed-up asphalt. He whips his sling around his head, faster, faster, faster - then lets the rock fly.
The rock, a black dot against the overcast sky, heads toward the jeeps in a slow arc.
And falls 50 feet short of its mark.
The boy in the white shirt turns and runs toward the barricades. The soldier raises his M-16 and fires a rubber-coated bullet with a hollow pop.
The boys behind the barricades duck, then cheer as the bullet pings off a car carcass, so dented and charred that its make, model, and original color are indiscernible. The boy in the white shirt fetches another rock for his sling.
It's 11:52 a.m.
Six minutes later, Fuad Khalil Jr. slings his first rock. His brother, Saleh, huddles against the wall of an apartment house, watching, the strands of his sling swaying in the breeze.
Fuad's rock also falls short.
Up the hill from the barricades, past the palm trees and the spectators by the auto body shop, the boy's mother, Nadia Khalil, walks with the marchers from Ramallah's mosque. All morning - indeed, all week - she has worried about her sons.
She knows they want to join their friends throwing rocks. She says she tries to fill their schedules with tutors, chores, and errands.
But she is also angry. Ramallah has buried two children this week and two adults - all killed by Israeli guns.
"I'm very upset," she says.
Earlier that morning, she sits in the kitchen of her home across town and wonders what the day will bring.
Her husband, Fuad Sr., walks in.
Like Nadia, he suspects that his sons are throwing rocks, "probably twice or three times a week." But he, too, feels frustrated.
"It's very hard to control him," he says of his son. "The whole population is fed up. They want to get out their frustration."
He pauses.
"Believe me, if I could throw rocks, I would." His voice drops off. "But it's not going to get us anywhere."
His wife picks up the thought, but raises a concern that bothers her deeply.
"I believe what Islam says about the children who die in these protests going to heaven as martyrs," she says. "But for me to want my kids to go out and fight so they can go to heaven - that would be terrible of me. To do that to a child? To push him to do these things?"
She knows that some Palestinian parents encourage their sons to throw rocks.
"It happens to me sometimes," she says. "I think, `Fuad, you're a couch potato. Why don't you get up and go with those kids?' And then, I have to stop."
She places her hand over her mouth.
"I want him to do it," she continues. "You have to do it for your country and for your mosque. But at the same time, I say, `My God. I just want to see my son grow up and go to college.'"
"So are you here to take pictures of us shooting children?"
The Israeli sentry grins at the approaching reporter and photographer.
It is another morning, a mile from Martyrs' Crossroads. At a sentry post, rimmed with sandbags and concrete, on the eastern edge of Psagot, the soldier laughs. But he isn't really joking. Behind the soldier's laugh is a sentiment common to many Israelis - that the Palestinian kids who throw rocks are unfairly depicted in news stories as victims and the soldiers as bad guys for shooting at them.
"Why don't you take a picture of the kids throwing rocks at us?" the soldier asks.
Soldiers aren't the only targets of rocks. Almost all residents of Psagot, especially those who drive cars, have been targets.
"So much has passed," says Hindi Cohen, one of Psagot's first residents. "Everyone has their own psychological defense on how to deal with it."
Cohen's car windows have been smashed several times, and her car was pelted with rocks during Palestinian protests in the late 1980s. Today, Cohen and other Psagot residents use so-called bypass roads to circumvent risky Palestinian neighborhoods.
Another Psagot resident, Aharon Maman, who lived with his wife and four daughters in Teaneck during a 1994 sabbatical, sighs as he describes his travels on bypass roads.
Maman carries a pistol on his 10-mile commute to his job in Jerusalem as a linguistics professor at Hebrew University. Like many here, his red compact is also equipped with shatterproof windows, paid for by the Israeli government.
But Maman says the bypass roads merely bypass a deeper problem - how can Jews and Palestinians ever hope to live together if they can't even share the roads?
"They have their roads and we have ours," says Maman, standing on a bluff in Psagot overlooking Ramallah.
He points to a narrow lane that runs below.
"We used to use that once. Sure, it was dangerous. But it shouldn't be. It doesn't have to be. But now it's an Arab-only road, and our bypass roads are Jews-only."
And then, there is Martyrs' Crossing.
No one passes there anymore.
Fuad Khalil Jr. runs toward the burning tires.
He stops, pulls back on his slingshot and lets go. The rock vaults skyward - and falls to earth after 50 feet, at least 150 feet short of the Israelis.
Saleh Khalil twirls his sling. His rock falls short, too. A dozen other boys launch rocks from slings or throw them.
An Israeli fires a shot.
Then another.
And another.
It's almost 12:30 p.m. More marchers show up, with a score of them dragging a piece of sheet metal that just the day before was a billboard for a new apartment complex. The billboard, along with others advertising a wedding caterer and M & M candies, stood on the edge of the crossroads. But overnight, Israeli soldiers with chain saws cut them all down.
The boys wrestle the sheet metal up on end and prop it against a telephone pole: billboard-sized protection against Israeli rubber bullets.
The boy in the black T-shirt clambers up the slanting metal. Like a character from "Les Mis'erables" breaching the barricades of Paris, he attaches a Palestinian flag to the telephone pole.
The crowd cheers as Israeli bullets ping-ping-ping off the sheet metal.
At the edge of a building, a Franciscan monk, wearing a white vest over his brown robe to designate him a medical volunteer, waits with a Red Crescent ambulance squad.
Newly assigned to a Jerusalem monastery after a decade in Washington, D.C., the Rev. Kevin Flanagan, 39, is attending his first Friday demonstration. Flanagan is also is a surgeon. Stethoscope around his neck, he says he wants to care for wounded Palestinians.
"I guess if the Israelis got hit, we'd take care of them, too," he adds.
Rubber bullets kick up road grit.
"I have a bad feeling here," he mutters, ducking behind the corner of a building painted with a large swastika.
Fuad Jr. crouches behind the dented cars. When the bullets let up, he stands, pulls back on his slingshot and lets another rock fly. As he yanks the rubber bands taut across his chest, his gray jacket gapes open, revealing a T-shirt imprinted with "USA" in large letters.
"I'm looking for more rocks," says Fuad, running back toward the building where Flanagan and other volunteers wait with a stretcher.
At 12:54, a young man spins and drops to the ground, hit in the ankle by a rubber bullet.
Flanagan's squad rushes forward and helps the boy limp behind the building.
At 1:02 p.m., a boy gets hit in the right shoulder.
At 1:04, a second boy gets hit in the neck.
An ambulance pulls up. The volunteers push the boy with the neck wound into the back. The driver guns the engine and drives off, red lights flashing.
Five minutes later, after another ambulance takes away another boy shot with a rubber bullet, Fuad and Saleh, their faces blackened with soot from the burning tires, slip away up the hill and head home.
Standing with the ambulance workers, social worker Majeda Abu Gush watches as more boys run for cover.
"This is how they define themselves. They believe they can get their rights this way," she says. "They are protecting their soil. They believe they are protecting each other."
Now more boys run forward - boys in Chicago Bulls shirts, Dallas Cowboys shirts.
Rubber bullets ping off the cars, ping off the billboard.
It goes on like this for another hour. More than a dozen ambulances streak forward, one after another, arriving and leaving only minutes apart, each taking away someone struck by a rubber bullet.
Flanagan runs out to help a wounded boy and feels a bullet hit his brown monk's robe. A woman in a Red Crescent vest is hit in the thigh. Then another Red Crescent volunteer is hit. The older woman who was pounding rocks earlier is hit in the forehead. A Japanese news photographer gets hit in the arm.
In all, more than a dozen Palestinians and others are hit by rubber bullets.
Odeh Mahoud, 39, limps forward on crutches. He was wounded in the leg a few weeks earlier - with conventional ammunition.
"We are people," he shouts above the gunshots. "I am a man. Why are the Americans helping the Jews? Why are the Jews even here? This is my land."
The Israelis fire tear gas. The boys scatter. A few run forward and grab the hissing tear gas canisters and toss them toward the Israelis. A few others, their eyes watery and red, run to the rear, where medical volunteers dab their eyes with cotton swabs.
Gush, the social worker, holds a bottle of Polo cologne. "We find that the smell of perfume or cologne helps take away the pain of the tear gas," she says.
Then, a loud crack reverberates.
A real rifle shot.
The crowd seems to freeze - if only momentarily. Was that an Israeli shot? Palestinian? A warning shot? A new attack?
This day, it's the only live round fired.
With a west wind, the tear gas blows back at the Israelis. The boys cheer.
Then, as if by signal, everything stops.
The Palestinians walk back up the hill. The Israelis back their jeeps away.
Within 10 minutes, shortly after 3 p.m. on this particular Friday, Martyrs' Crossroads is quiet - except for a solitary clonk-clonk-clonking. In a vacant lot beside an empty shop with its windows shot out, a white-bearded Palestinian straddles a boulder, pounding its edges with a hammer.
He doesn't look up as the crowd streams past.
An hour later, across town, Nadia Khalil sets down the lunch dishes she has dried and walks to the front door, towel in hand.
Fuad rushes up the stairs with Saleh. The boys head for the bathroom. Nadia hears them turn on the faucet.
"Their faces were all dirty," she says. "They went to throw rocks. I know."
She slumps against the door frame and glances up the stairs.
"And now they are home. Thank God."
Four days later:
Nadia sits in her living room with another woman, visiting from Jerusalem.
The woman, Salwa Juhan, is the wife of Nadia's cousin. Last November, in a rock-throwing clash with the Israeli army in Jerusalem, her 21-year-old son was shot and killed.
If Salwa Juhan received $10,000 from Saddam Hussein and $2,000 from the Palestinian National Authority for her son's death, she is hiding her wealth well.
"She is wearing the same clothes she had on at her son's funeral. She always wears them," Nadia says.
She is visiting Nadia on the way to a stop at a U.N. relief agency. Her husband is out of work. So is her other son. She asks Nadia for taxi fare back to Jerusalem.
Nadia hands her a few coins.
"She's always crying," says Nadia, speaking English so the woman won't understand her. "Always crying. They say her son is a martyr, but she's always crying."
Nadia starts to cry as she gazes at the woman across her living room.
"Every time I think of her and her son who died," says Nadia, "I thank God my boys are OK."
That same morning, in Psagot, several children who are headed for elementary school gather on a corner. The bus that comes for them is armor-plated and has bulletproof windows. An Israeli soldier sits in the front seat, the barrel of his weapon resting on his lap.
The children are costumed for the Jewish holiday Purim, which celebrates the victory of ancient Israelites over an evil ruler. One boy is dressed as E.T., another in a hula skirt, another as King David, yet another as Harry Potter.
The most popular costume is an army uniform. A common sound is the clicking of toy guns that the children point playfully at each other. Seeing the boy get on dressed as Harry Potter, the real soldier on the bus, Ronen Lev, remarks how much he enjoyed the series of books about the boy wizard.
At the next stop, a teacher steps aboard.
For Purim, the teacher wears a cowboy hat, with a Hebrew inscription on the crown.
"Trust only in God."
The bus pulls away. The teacher grabs a microphone and starts to sing Psalms about the hills and the fields and God's protection.
"Thank God," sing the children. "Thank God."
* * *
Additional Columns:
Reported from Israel and the West Bank during research for “Fire In the Hills.”
"After Arafat: The Man Who Would Be Leader."
April 1, 2001
An Interview with Palestinian Militant Marwan Barghouti
Review & Outlook:
Ramallah, the West Bank --
TERRORIST? PEACEMAKER? Political spinner? Political visionary?
Just who is Marwan Barghouti?
Right now, he's a man with this prediction. "More casualties," he says. "On both sides."
You may not recognize the name unless you closely follow the intricate political dance of peace and war played by Israeli and Palestinian officials. But Barghouti, general secretary of the West Bank Fatah Movement, is well-known to Israeli authorities who monitor the increasing violence against Jews on the West Bank and in other parts of Israel.
To them, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat may be giving a final seal of approval to the violent uprising known as the Intifada, but Barghouti - pronounced "bar-GOO-tee" - is one of a handful of trusted aides who makes it happen, especially in the important cultural and economic hub of Ramallah, 10 miles north of Jerusalem.
Will there be a "Day of Rage" by Palestinians? A mass march? More rock-throwing at Israeli soldiers by Palestinian teenagers? More gunfire at night against Jewish settlements?
"Barghouti orchestrates all that," says Raanan Gissin, one of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's close advisers.
Barghouti doesn't deny this. "What the Israelis will discover after six months," said Barghouti, "is that there will not be any kind of security. The Palestinians will continue the Intifada and the resistance."
On a recent afternoon in his family's apartment on the outskirts of Ramallah, Barghouti consented to an hour-long interview with The Record - with no strings attached.
His only aide present was a bodyguard who sat on a sofa, occasionally getting up to fetch coffee, answer the phone, or monitor television news. Two camouflage-clad guards, armed with AK-47 rifles, watched a downstairs parking lot. On the porch, laundry hung on a line.
What is striking about Barghouti is how different he is from Arafat. While Arafat is almost never seen without his military-style green jacket and gray-and-black Palestinian kofia head scarf, Barghouti - in jeans, a gray polo shirt, and black loafers and no socks - cut a distinctly Western look.
He seems to bring to the Palestinian movement and its terrorist reputation the same quality Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams brought to violence-prone Irish nationalists of Belfast who were trying to improve their image in the early 1990s - a softer look in a TV-oriented world.
It doesn't hurt that Barghouti, unlike many Palestinians, speaks English and Hebrew - as well as Arabic. Only 41, he is seen as among the leaders of the next generation of Palestinians vying for control after the 72-year-old Arafat retires or dies.
Israelis seem to recognize this. As violence on the West Bank increased in recent weeks - and Israel's military threatened tougher measures - an army spokesman went out of his way to specifically state that Barghouti was not being targeted for assassination.
Barghouti, meanwhile, made a series of contradictory statements on television that caught the attention of Israeli officials. Indeed, Barghouti's recent coy dance around the question of whether he supports violence or attempts to plan more peaceful protests underscores why Israeli and American negotiators have become so frustrated with Palestinian officials.
After a non-violent protest march by Palestinians and Israeli Arabs near Ramallah, Barghouti was quick to declare that he, too, supported "peaceful ways" to resist Israeli occupation. A day later, however, Barghouti backtracked, saying that he had not renounced the gun, grenade, and bomb attacks that have increased in the last month.
"We will not replace any activity by others," said Barghouti. "You think that Palestinians have to distribute flowers to Israelis?"
Such provocative words are met with scorn by Israeli officials - and see-I-told-you-so type statements of how Palestinians can't be trusted.
Said Israeli official Raanan Gissin:
"There are always those terrorists who will find their way into the crowd and do the shooting."
Barghouti chuckled when he was reminded in the interview of how Israelis distrust him.
"I know the Israelis very well," he says, adding: "Sometimes the Israelis say, `You didn't give us security.' But it's crazy to ask the Palestinians to sit down politely like that when the Israelis confiscate the land and build the new settlements."
What Barghouti refers to is one of the most controversial elements of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that has now stretched over eight years. When the much-heralded Oslo Peace Accords were signed in 1993 by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat, Barghouti said Palestinians assumed that Israel would block future Jewish migration to what he assumed would be a Palestinian state on the West Bank.
This is a crucial issue, with political and religious angles.
For devout Jews, the West Bank is considered the ancient Jewish homeland. Tel Aviv may be nice, but the West Bank hills of Judea and Samaria are where David, Joshua, Samuel, and the prophets set down the roots of Judaism 4,000 years ago. Since 1993, some 50,000 new Jewish settlers have moved to the West Bank, bringing the total there to 200,000.
The West Bank's 2 million Palestinians, meanwhile, see the area as the site of their future nation.
For violence to end, Barghouti says, the settlements - and settlers - have to disappear. Like many Palestinians, he considers the 144 Jewish settlements that dot West Bank hills to be a form of Israeli occupation. Newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Sharon not only vows to keep the settlements but has hinted he may allow them to increase.
Barghouti's response is blunt and threatening: "The condition for security is an end of the occupation. I'm saying full withdrawal for the Israelis. The settlements are part of that. No settlements.
"The Palestinians understood from the agreement that there would be full Israeli withdrawal," adds Barghouti.
Israel says withdrawal from all settlements was never agreed to. Indeed, the construction of special Israeli roads linking settlements after the 1993 accords seems to bolster that view. Barghouti says the Israelis could move all settlers from the West Bank "during six months."
And if Israel refuses?
"In the short term," says Barghouti, "I'm very pessimistic. In the long term, I'm very optimistic. Always, according to our experience, the Israelis take a long time to understand. And it's not easy. The Israelis will understand, but unfortunately after a lot of casualties from both sides, a lot of victims from both sides, that the Israelis will not feel secure, will not feel stability or security or peace."
Without Israeli settlers or its army on the West Bank - and with a Palestinian state there - Barghouti actually envisions friendly relations with Israel. He says the two nations should have "open borders," with mutual economic and military ties and open access by Jews to religious sites across the West Bank.
Farther down the line, he says, Palestinians would even be open to a single, combined state of Israel and Palestine - a nation, fashioned along the lines of the United States, with autonomous states united to form a stronger nation.
"If you ask me," says Barghouti, "I prefer one state for the two peoples. Why not? I think we are ready to live in one state, in equal rights, as human beings."
But first, he adds, "the Israelis have to liberate themselves from the mentality of the occupation" and that "separation of the two peoples is a condition for cooperation."
As he speaks, a television in the next room comes to life with news of a car bombing by a Palestinian militant.
Did Barghouti order the bombing? He doesn't say.
Barghouti rises from the sofa he is seated on, walks around a glass-topped coffee table that covers a white model of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock mosque. He walks into the next room and stands before a television, a remote-control channel-switcher in his right hand.
He pushes one button, then another, watching the newscast in silence. He then steps into the next room to take a call on a cellular phone.
He returns a few minutes later.
"The only thing left from the peace process," says Barghouti, is the name. There is no real peace now."
* * *
Review & Outlook,
March 18, 2001
Jerusalem, Israel --
HASSAM AWAD figured he was on the crest of an investment wave, once known here as "the peace process."
Then the rocks and the bullets started flying. And the tourists stayed home. And now - well - he wonders how to pay the bills.
All conflicts have casualties. But what Awad represents is a class of victims whose losses are rarely counted amid the current bloodshed between Israelis and Palestinians.
He is 22, not a political activist. Yes, he is Palestinian, but he does not support the rock-throwing demonstrations by Palestinian youths or the car bombings and roadside ambushes of Israelis by Palestinian guerrillas. Nor is he entirely pleased with Israel's response either - namely, the firing of rubber-coated bullets at Palestinian demonstrators and, recently, the sealing off of entire Palestinian towns with moat-like trenches.
Awad represents another voice in Israel right now. He's a business owner with a problem. He has no customers.
A year ago Awad opened a small internet caf'e on the Via Dolorosa, the tunnel-like street in the ancient, walled section of Jerusalem that Christians believe to be the same route taken by Jesus as he carried a wooden cross to his crucifixion some 2000 years ago by Roman authorities. The street's name translates loosely to "way of sorrow," but Awad saw only happiness there. If ever there was a place to snag tourists for a stop on the internet, Awad figured, the Via Dolorosa was it.
But after six months of turmoil between Israelis and Palestinians, the Via Dolorosa is an all too fitting name for Awad's venture. "This is a tourist city," said Awad one recent evening as four of his nine computers went unused, "but there are no tourists. You should have to wait tonight to use a computer."
It's a familiar refrain. Israel is not just a Jewish homeland; it has been a tourist's and pilgrim's magnet for centuries, a religious and archaeological theme park. Here, there is not just one culture or religion to take in, but many. In Jerusalem's Old City, you can view ancient Roman arches, Muslim walls, Crusaders chapels, and steps that once led to a Jewish temple. And those are just a few of the sites within a short walk.
But if the first casualty of war is truth, surely the second must be economics. Shops near Judaism's Wailing Wall stand empty at mid-day. The same is true of the string of stores that deal in religious artifacts on the streets near the cavernous Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Not far from the Damascus Gate stand two Israeli-owned hotels, notable because they represent Israeli investment in East Jerusalem, long regarded as Palestinian turf.
But one hotel is mostly empty these days, its rooms renting for less than $70 a night. The other stopped work on its pool and exercise room. "It's the situation," said a manager, using code for the current turmoil in which more than 420 people have been killed, including some 350 Palestinians and 57 Israelis.
On a recent night, with the Via Dolorosa vacant except for a stray cat and three boys on scooters, Hassam Awad gazed at his empty caf'e and wondered about his future. Outside, on a stone wall, a sign tells pilgrims that this is Christianity's "eighth station of the cross," the spot where Jesus lamented to residents of ancient Jerusalem: "If men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?"
Hassam Awad says his business is not dry yet, but he asks this question: If there is no peace in this land of seemingly eternal conflict, how can anyone expect investors like him to have faith in the future here?
"I don't want to leave," he adds. "But if I leave, I'm going to leave forever."
"Gunshots Are a Way of Life"
March 11, 2001
Review & Outlook:
Jerusalem, Israel --
THERE IS another sound now in this city of great religions, a sound that has become as common as Christian church bells, Muslim prayer calls, or the joyous singing by Hasidic Jews in the shadow of the Wailing Wall.
It is the pop and rattle of gunfire.
You hear shots from your hotel balcony as you sip coffee and watch the golden sun sink into the hills. You hear them from the sidewalks of a Jewish neighborhood as men walk busily to pray at a synagogue. You hear them above the babble of a bazaar in a Palestinian town on the West Bank. You hear them in rush-hour traffic, at lunch in a walled courtyard, from your bed as they break the silent hours before dawn.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
In almost every case, the ordinary motion of life seems to pause - but only momentarily. On a sidewalk or amid the alley-like streets of Jerusalem's Old City, people may glance over their shoulders or spin slowly like some sort of human radar trying to detect danger. In restaurants, a customer or two might pause with fork or wine glass midway between plate and mouth. In shops, clerks glance toward the door.
But after a silent, tense second or two, life moves on. Here, gunshots are not viewed as warning signs; they are signs of life.
But what do the signs mean?
Israelis and Palestinians describe their reactions to the daily pop of gunfire in ways that seems to fall somewhere between hard-edged toughness and head-in-the-sand nonchalance.
"We try to be as normal as possible," said a Jewish man who refuses to join his neighbors and add sand bags to his balcony even though he hears shots almost every night from the contentious Palestinian city of Ramallah.
In Ramallah itself one recent evening, machine-gun fire disrupted dinner. "Gun shots? Oh, that's nothing," said a Palestinian woman. "You should have been here last week. We had shooting all night."
Nothing? Normal life?
Like dust or roadside litter, the sound of violence builds slowly, incrementally. But here, it raises this question: Is this a sign of war? And if it isn't, what is it?
An officer in the Israeli army reserve joked to me the other day that most Palestinian gunfire never hits a target. "These guys get about 36 seconds of training when they get their weapons," the officer said, "and then they go out and fire, sometimes at celebrations. Sometimes I think they're trying to prove their manhood. But they usually don't hit anything."
Not hit anything? The officer went on to joke that 12 Palestinians have been killed in the last year by wild shooting at weddings. And perhaps most telling, he didn't mention that 29 Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian gunfire and 313 wounded since the current wave of violence began last September. Nor did he mention that in that same period, some 400 Palestinians, including more than 70 children, were killed by Israeli soldiers.
Such figures seem alarming. But violence here doesn't seem to set off the same alarms that it does in America.
Imagine what would happen if 29 state troopers had been killed since last September in New Jersey, which is about the same size as Israel. Imagine the reaction if 12 wedding guests had died from "wild" gunfire in a year or if 70 children were among 400 people who had been killed by soldiers. Do you think anyone would joke about the training of gunmen who never seem to "hit anything"?
One of the hidden tragedies of life here isn't just the daily violence represented by gunshots, it's the reaction to it - and how it has changed life is so many basic ways.
On the same day last week that Israel's new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, took over the reins of government, a prominent rabbi for the nation's Sephardic Jews banned children from dressing in Arab garb for the holiday of Purim. Normally, Purim is an occasion for children to don all sorts of costumes as they celebrate the victory by Jews over the evil machinations of Haman as recorded in the Book of Esther. And Sephardic Jews - or those Jews who come from Islamic nations - might be more inclined to dress in Arab robes.
But this year brings a special problem, said Sephardic Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu. He said children dressed as Arabs "could mislead security forces" on guard against suicide bombers. The rabbi was obviously issuing a warning to his flock, but in another sense his warning hinted at a deeper, wider problem - that Israel's concerns about suicide bombers are now even affecting how children have fun.
But if the rabbi was saddened by this, he didn't say. Like violence, special security measures are not unusual here; they're just part of life.
The day after Sharon took office, with his promise to restore security to Israel and with predictions by Israeli military of increased violence by Palestinians, the Jerusalem Post editorialized that it was worried about Israel's image to the outside world. But the source of the Post's editorial angst was not the daily reports of gunfire or even the recent increase in car bombs; it was a wildcat strike by baggage handlers at the nation's main airport and how it might dissuade tourists from coming to Israel.
Inevitably, though, war is personal in the ways it forces ordinary people to react, adjust, or give up.
Sayel Kanan, a mechanical engineer, moved from North Bergen four years ago to his family's ancestral home in a West Bank village near Ramallah. Kanan figured that peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians would bring new prosperity to the region. But what Kanan has encountered in the current wave of violence are traffic problems that he never had in car-clogged New Jersey.
The five-kilometer drive to his office requires him to pass three Israeli army checkpoints. What should be a 20-minute trip now takes more than two hours, he said. "I have a lot of projects I can't get to," Kanan said one recent morning. "I don't know what to do."
But will he move back to America? "This is my homeland," he said.
Raziel Frankel, a writer of computer software manuals who grew up in Teaneck and now lives in the Jewish West Bank settlement of Bet El, commutes to his office in Jerusalem in a car equipped with shatterproof windows and a special global-positioning-system device that can pinpoint his location to the Israeli army in case he is attacked by Palestinian gunmen. As if those precautions aren't enough, Frankel's car-pooling partner carries a submachine gun.
But like Sayel Kanan, Frankel hardly yearns to return to America. "This is our Holy Land," said Frankel, 29 and the father of three boys under age 5. He adds, with a note of irony in his voice: "We make an active attempt to go on with normal life."
But normal life and normal news, says Frankel, have taken a strange tone in recent months. Shooting incidents, he says, have become so common that it's no longer a major news story. "If no one gets killed or wounded, it hardly makes the press," he said. "It's almost like a non-incident."
In a larger sense, it's almost a non-war here, too.
Last week, Israel's government proudly announced that crime had fallen by 3.2 percent in 2000 - this, after a 6.6 percent decrease in 1999.
The release of the figures was cause for great fanfare. Rapes were down. So were burglaries. And deaths from traffic accidents were the lowest in nearly a decade - this in a nation where reckless driving seems to be a national sport.
But deep within the report was this piece of news: "Terror attacks" had jumped by 30 percent.
The same week the report was released, police recorded scores of shooting incidents in Jerusalem and on the West Bank.
I heard shots fired each night. Sometimes it was just a pop or two, sometimes the rattle of machine guns. But this isn't war, the people here say. It's something else. Just what, no one is really saying. Not yet anyway.
* * *
"Just Another Day in Jerusalem"
March 4, 2001
Review & Outlook:
Jerusalem, Israel --
In this Holy Land of unholy conflict that never seems to end, the process of counting casualties seems eternally steeped in politics.
Then again, some casualties defy the passion, rhetoric, and even the spin of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sometimes the only word that seems appropriate is surreal.
Consider what happened in just five hours last week on a patch of West Bank territory only slightly larger than Paramus.
Three Israelis were wounded in a roadside ambush. Later, a Palestinian man was killed by a tank shell. In between, two boys, 6 and 14 years old, were hit by rubber bullets.
The three Israelis were hardly making war, or playing politics. Nor was the Palestinian man.
The boys are another story - the surreal one.
* * *
The injured Israelis, two men and a woman, were commuting home in a van with other workers from jobs at the Atarot industrial park on the north side of Jerusalem. Israeli police say that not long after the van crossed the Jerusalem line on the way to a West Bank Jewish community, three Palestinian snipers opened fire, knocking out windows and punching holes in the van's side panels.
In America, this sort of act would be considered a horrible crime that would probably result in a massive manhunt. Here, it's described in terms usually applied to war - an undeclared guerrilla war that sometimes declares a cease-fire in the name of peace negotiations but a war just the same.
In a deeper way, the incident is another footnote in the complicated relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, a relationship steeped in conflict over the tiny patch of land that each side covets with biblical and Koranic fervor. As Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti put it in an interview at his West Bank home: "They are in our stomach, and we are in their stomach."
Sadly, roadside shootings here have become part of everyday life - and strife. To hear such a story is to understand why some Israelis carry guns in their cars and why the entire nation always seems to be on a war footing.
The suspected triggermen were not just criminals; they were described by police as "Palestinian gunmen." That's code here that translates to guerrillas engaging in the practice of trying to kill any Israeli citizen, even one trying to go about the entirely non-military act of commuting home after a hard day's work.
One might ask how the police actually knew the gunmen were Palestinians. After all, no one was arrested and no one claimed responsibility. Police say they found tracks leading to a Palestinian-controlled town and that officers were fired upon when they tried to approach the town. (Two of the officers were slightly wounded, but treated in the field.)
But questions - and precise answers - about who was responsible for such a shooting seem meaningless here. In this war of random acts of violence, each side has plenty of experience in making quick and accurate judgments of who was responsible for the bloodletting. Usually, they're right.
The two Israeli men injured in the van attack were hit by shrapnel and broken glass, police say. The woman suffered a punctured lung and chest injuries. All are expected to live. The story amounted to only 10 paragraphs in one Jerusalem newspaper.
Later that night, a 50-year-old Palestinian man was killed in a similarly senseless way.
Naim Bodarin died instantly when an Israeli army tank fired into his neighborhood near the West Bank town of Ramallah. The next day, at his funeral at a mosque in Ramallah, mourners carried Palestinian flags and declared Bodarin a "martyr" who would be rewarded with an instantaneous passage to heaven in return for giving his life for his country and religion. But the chain of facts leading up to his death was hardly the stuff of martyrdom.
Bodarin, a construction worker, was watching television in his living room as the shell came through the wall.
The Israeli army did not apologize. A military spokesman explained that an Israeli army unit was trying to target Palestinian gunmen who had taken up positions near Bodarin's home and were firing at Israeli homes across a rocky ravine. That the tank missed and killed an innocent man is only one problem here. At the core of this tragedy are two fundamental questions of war and politics that are rarely asked anymore:
Why was an army tank firing into a residential neighborhood? Why are Palestinian revolutionaries seeking cover there?
To find someone who can answer both questions with even a pinch of objectivity is almost impossible. But then, the Holy Land and its unholy conflicts do not inspire objectivity. A half-century of bloodletting does not always inspire cool judgment.
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Which brings us to the story of the boys and the rubber bullets.
Rush hour was in full swing on a rutted road that runs between an airport runway and a Palestinian refugee camp north of Jerusalem. Between the road and the runway lies a hilly patch of vacant land that is home to a rising tide of garbage, abandoned grocery carts, metal cabinets, and scrap lumber.
Here, on any day, you can find Palestinian boys throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers who guard the runway - an act of violence that is at the heart of what has become known as the Palestinian "Intifada," or movement to protest Israel's occupation of the West Bank.
On this day, the soldiers fired back - first a single pop, then volley after volley of rubber bullets that kicked up the dirt and clunked off the storage containers.
What is striking about this moment is not just the stone throwing and gunfire, but the fact that not a single car bothered to stop while the firing was taking place.
Many drivers beeped their horns as they sped past. At one point, a man walked by, nonchalantly carrying a carton of eggs.
Asked if he worried about being hit by a stray rubber bullet, he smiled and answered, "Of course." Then, he turned and kept walking, as unperturbed as anyone walking home from a quick stop at a food store.
The shooting continued for more than an hour. The throng of some 50 boys would run forward and throw rocks or fling them from hand-made slings that they twirled like lassos. The soldiers - one group in a makeshift guard house of concrete blocks and another group 100 yards away - would fire back in staggered volleys.
For the most part, everybody seemed to have poor aim. A few rocks careened off a chain link fence near the soldiers, but most fell far short. In baseball lingo, no one had a "good arm." The soldiers seemed to aim low or high - seemingly oblivious to the fact that rush hour traffic passed by in the background and well within range.
Then a boy was hit.
He was 14, and a rubber bullet struck him in the abdomen. The firing stopped as a Red Crescent ambulance - often, one is positioned nearby at such events - rushed forward and took the boy to a local hospital.
Minutes later, the stone-throwing resumed - along with the shooting.
Then another boy was hit.
He was only 6 and he was struck in the head by a rubber bullet.
Another boy, who gave his name as Mahmoud and said he was 14, carried the wounded 6-year-old down hill, then tripped on a rock.
The ambulance rushed forward, and a man in a Red Crescent uniform cradled the boy, and placed him in an ambulance as blood dripped down the boy's forehead.
As the ambulance pulled away, one sound seemed to punctuate everything else. It was the sound of a child crying in terror.
Traffic stopped to allow the ambulance to pull away. Then it picked up again.
The next day, both boys had been released from a local hospital. The story of how they came to be wounded never made any newspapers.
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