Continual violence at Palestine's doorstep

Editor’s Note: Emma Schmautz traveled in the West Bank during the spring of 2007 while she studied at a university in Haifa, Israel.

Ramallah

A shell arcs across the rocky field and explodes in a plume of white smoke and blaze of phosphoresce. The earth shudders.

Less then a minute later, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) launches three more shells that crash into the ground near a concrete apartment complex on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah. On a fifth-story balcony of an adjacent apartment building, Rasha Barghouti surveys the smoke swirling up towards the gray sky and the scurry of small figures in the street below.

Barghouti, the public relations manager for Birzeit University, crosses her arms and frowns in the manner many Palestinians observe when violence arrives at their doorstep.

Ever since the Second Intifada – Palestine’s uprising against Israel that began in September 2000 – little has shocked Barghouti.

During the nearly five years of unrest, Israeli soldiers destroyed large portions of West Bank and Gaza cities, while Palestinian suicide bombers caused explosions in buses and city centers in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Though the extreme violence of the Second Intifada has diminished since 2005, nightly gunfights between the IDF and Palestinians and clashes between Islamic militant groups remain common.

During a shopping trip to buy fruits and vegetables from the wood stalls in Ramallah’s city center, Barghouti watched Israeli soldiers confront a young Palestinian man then shoot him in the head.

“There was blood everywhere,” Barghouti recalls. “But what could I do? He was dead. So I got in my car and drove home.”

Ignoring the nearby explosions of phosphorus shells, Barghouti retreats inside to her meal of Turkish coffee and sesame seed molasses spread over pitas warming on an antique Iraqi stove.

White phosphorus mortars – known as Willy Petes by the U.S. military – are chemical agents that ignite in the air and can cause lethal burns to the bone if they come in contact with flesh. The Geneva Convention bans the use of incendiary weapons in civilian areas, but Israel and the United States, who did not sign the clause on “incendiary weapons,” used the bombs in military operations such as America’s 2004 assault on Fallujah, Iraq, and Israel’s 2006 conflict with Lebanon.

As bursts of automatic rifle fire intermingle with the shelling, Barghouti’s frown deepens. The woman turns to her foreign guest, who is standing still on a Persian rug staring at the white smoke rising from the field, and announces that due to the escalating situation outside, she wants no responsibility for the safety of another. The visitor must leave immediately.

As she quickly ushers me out the door, Barghouti sternly advises, “Do not tell that you are an American. You are Swiss. You are Danish. But in Ramallah you are never American.”

The Mother of All Conflicts

Comprising a complex mix of territorial, religious, economic, political, cultural and historical strife, the problem of Israel and Palestine has gained the title of the “Mother of All Conflicts.”

Plagued by the curse of being the holy land for Jews, Muslims and Christians, the small Middle Eastern region is caught in an unbroken loop of retaliatory violence.

Though strict security has prevented recent suicide bombings, in 2006 northern Israel came under Katyusha rocket attack from Hezbollah in Lebanon. The town of Sderot near the Gaza border also currently faces terrorism from weekly Hamas assaults of small Qassam rockets that damage buildings and occasionally cause injury or death.

For those living in Palestine, though, violence is often a daily occurrence.

The West Bank, while more economically prosperous and containing less radical organizations than its brother, Gaza, is inflicted by mass unemployment, extremist groups, continual Israeli raids and territorial division.

Most Palestinians are banned from entering Israel and face harsh restrictions when crossing the border into Jordan or Egypt.

Palestinians hold little confidence in the region’s weak ruling Fatah party led by Mahmoud Abbas. In some cities, such as Nablus, the terrorist organization Hamas controls much of the police force and local politicians. Like gangs vying for the same territory, this internal power struggle between Hamas and radical Fatah offshoots often leads to violent fights in the streets and city centers.

Despite the conflict between Arab political groups, many Palestinians, such as Iyad Kairm, a doctor at the Nablus hospital who worked in the kidney unit for 17 years, blame Israel and America for all of the West Bank’s woes.

Over 50 of Kairm’s 90 kidney patients come from out of town for frequent dialysis treatments. They are often hours late for their sessions or do not arrive at all due to delays at Israeli-controlled checkpoints or Israeli-imposed travel bans, Kairm said.

“If they miss a couple days, they could die,” Kairm said. “It depends on the patient.”

Kairm views America as the militant head of the policies that keep him prisoner in his own city and that throw great obstacles into his ability to practice medicine.

Intifada

The scar of a bullet hole fills the palm of Shamekh Shaban’s left hand.

The hand feels stiff sometimes, but right now his fingers slide expertly along the neck of an acoustic guitar.

The 23-year-old college student who studies music composition was 17 when IDF soldiers surrounded him and three friends, holding guns to their heads. Two soldiers pulled their triggers and two of the young Palestinians dropped to the ground dead.

“I was shocked,” Shaban said. “I got up and hit the soldiers. They shot my hand.”

Shaban walked three kilometers to a mosque in the center of Nablus that served as a makeshift hospital in 2002, the city’s worst year of violence during the Second Intifada.

Short on basic medical tools, blood units, medicine, food, sanitation and doctors, the “hospital” mosque often took the form of a morgue.

For nine days, Shaban ignored his own exhaustion, pain and hunger to assist doctors in treating the daily barrage of gunshot and shrapnel wounds.

Working with one hand because his other was wrapped in plaster, Shaban stitched wounds, injected needles and once helped a friend use a cigarette and a knife to amputate the finger of a man who had gangrene.

Five years later, the images of the Second Intifada still haunt the young man whose passion is creating music that represents his love for his family and Palestine. Inspired by his experiences treating victims during the uprising, Shaban now works as an EMT and ambulance driver.

His songs – a Hindi-influenced blend of guitar, drums, piano and flute – speak of his desire for peace between Israel and Palestine.

But his nightly job of driving an ambulance through the narrow streets of Nablus to the scene of a gunfight between Islamic militants and IDF soldiers is a stark reminder peace is a distant dream.

Mohammad Rihan, another EMT who has driven ambulances for ten years in Nablus, believes that Israeli policies are suffocating Palestinians and will cause more violence.

During the Second Intifada, Rihan said Israeli soldiers shot at his ambulance numerous times, bullets nicked his fellow crew members and he watched his patients die while waiting for clearance to cross through the many Israeli controlled checkpoints that divide the West Bank into small sectors.

Rihan believes the checkpoints, the increase of Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands and economic sanctions are inciting a fierce anger over a lack of rights that will not long be contained.

“The people can’t tolerate too much,” Rihan said. “Israel doesn’t want the peace, they want everything.”

He predicts intifada will explode once more.

“Even if there is peace for a while, 10 or 20 years, then the war will come again,” Rihan said. “This is what most people think.”

Islamic Jihad

Shaban and I are walking to Nablus’ An-Najah National University when we pass a concrete barrier with graffiti of the Dome of the Rock overlaying crossed assault rifles. The paint is fading but the message written in Arabic above and below the symbol is clear: “Jerusalem is our city forever. Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine.”

Shaban, who is answering my questions about arms trafficking, Hamas and the number of stolen cars in Nablus, abruptly stops speaking.

“The wall, it hears,” Shaban whispers. There will be no more talk of guns or politics.

Islamic Jihad – a militant group sponsored by Iran that uses terrorism and suicide bombing to work towards its goal of destroying Israel and creating a fundamentalist Islamic Palestinian state – has agents throughout the city who have been known to kidnap, harm or kill individuals they suspect are Israeli spies.

We arrive at the university as a graduation ceremony commences. Islamic Jihad’s yellow and black banners adorn the stage and fly as pendants above the crowd in the outdoor plaza.

After a play depicting young Palestinian men being shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, a comedy routine lambasting George W. Bush and a prayer wishing praise to Allah and Palestine, destruction to Israel and America and good luck to the graduates, the cheering students receive their diplomas and throw their black caps to the blue sky.

By sponsoring the graduation, Islamic Jihad hopes to make a good impression upon the community, advertise their cause, and ultimately convince some of the young graduates to join the radical movement.

A boy rushes through the crowd to his brother who recently received his diploma. The graduate removes his Islamic Jihad sash and places it around his brother’s small torso. The boy jumps up and down in excitement and above his head waves a thin arm that holds a black flag with a yellow mosque and crossed guns.

Ramallah

From Barghouti’s balcony, the towers and minarets of Jerusalem stand in the distance. A 13-foot concrete wall topped with barbed wire separates Barghouti from the city where she once made her living.

Called the defense barrier by some, apartheid wall by others – the wall between Israel and Palestine symbolizes the growing division between the two societies.

Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport stands on the land Barghouti’s grandfather once owned but lost in 1948 when the Israeli government seized hundreds of acres of land from Palestinian farmers.

Barghouti is bitter for the losses her family endured and views America and Israel as imperialists who wreak havoc on innocent lives.

Barghouti is a progressive woman in Palestinian society. She doesn’t wear hijab and describes herself as a moderate Muslim; she attended Ramallah’s Quaker high school and Beirut’s American University and her two favorite movies are “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Titanic.”

Barghouti also supports Hezbollah’s war against Israel, believes Hamas is a better ruler for Palestine than Fatah and insists Israel caused the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, which, according to her, was God’s punishment to America for providing Israel with weapons and aid.

Though she desires a Palestinian state, Barghouti said joining Israel or becoming a part of Jordan would be far preferable to living in a constant state of limbo without a government or a land.

“(Palestine is) going backwards,” she said as Al Jazeera’s images of a dead Palestinian boy appear on her television. “Most places progress, move forward. But not only have we stopped, we are regressing.”

She feels helpless, hopeless and powerless to change the current state of Palestine.

“Before there was at least some light,” Barghouti said. “One candle burning in the castle. Now the castle is dark.”

Under the gray sky outside, the Israeli rockets fall.