'They left, we stayed'

Graham Usher reports from the West Bank on Israel's war against the Palestinians
'They left, we stayed'
For 10 days a Palestinian refugee camp in Bethlehem was at the mercy of the Israeli army. It survived. That's its victory
After a 10-day invasion the Israeli army left Bethlehem early Monday morning. During its stay, 23 Palestinians were killed and 150 wounded. The town's two hospitals had been hit by tank shells, as had its one university. Seventeen Palestinian stores had been razed to rubble. The local Chamber of Commerce estimates losses from damage at about $17.5 million.
In all, Israel fired 52 tank shells, hundreds of tank grenade missiles and thousands of machine gun bullets at a lightly armed civilian population in one of the world's holiest cities.
Those are the bare facts. But they are no more revealing than are the crackle of gunfire and clouds of smoke in Bethlehem, always watched for the last 10 days from a distance. The city is closed off by Israeli tanks and the fear of stray bullets. You do not see the devastation close up. You do not smell the fear. We did, Monday.
The Paradise was once one of Bethlehem's premier hotels. Today three of its five floors are husks, eviscerated by rockets fired from tanks and the occasional Palestinian firebomb, thrown to repulse the occupiers. A collapsed lamp post lies before them, buried in a coiling mesh of old Christmas decorations.
Amin's restaurant sits across the road. It opened for business a week before the invasion. Today its black wooden door twists in the breeze beneath the frames of smashed windows. "Bulldozers," explains Amin. "They destroy the resistance, they destroy the economy. They destroy."
And what will you do? "I'll build the restaurant again. In the same place -- it'll take me two months. The Israelis want me to leave? I'm not going to leave."
We enter Beit Jibrin. This is a tiny camp, housing 1,600 Palestinian refugees, squeezed in a fold between the Paradise Hotel and Rachel's Tomb, once a site holy to Muslim and Jews, now an Israeli army garrison. Seven tanks surrounded it during the siege. Three Palestinians were killed. Two homes were destroyed. Seven were gutted by fire.
We stumble into one of them. A bed, a sofa and a dressing table are parked on the camp's main alley. They are there because the house no longer has an exterior, like a stage-set. A three-storey shelter rises before this virtual house, foundations seared by the blast of shells, water cascading from the roof and mixing with the sewage on the street below.
"There are 26 people living there," says Kamal, a camp resident. "I really don't know how they survived. They were hit by tank shells."
Alaa takes us up iron stairs to his apartment. The living room looks like the inside of a furnace. Sandbags spew dirt over the floor. Every piece of furniture or article of clothing is riddled with bullet holes.
"They used heavy machine guns against us all the time," he says. "For 10 days we lived in my brother's flat downstairs. We knew if we went to the window or walked on the street we would be shot." He kicks over the debris. "It took us 15 years to build this apartment. It will take us another 15 years to rebuild it. But we're not leaving."
Raad shows us his apartment. It's the same scene. Bedrooms blackened by smoke, a fridge chipped by bullets, walls gashed by tank shrapnel. "I invested everything in this place," he says. "Now I'm on the street. I don't have a job. And I have a wife seven months pregnant." What will you do? "Stay."
There is a mix of emotions in the camp: relief that the Israelis have gone, anger that they came, and determination to go on, which, for Palestinians, means to remain.
"I wasn't the only one thinking of Sabra and Shatila these last days, not when you have Ariel Sharon as Israel's prime minister and a tank on your doorstep," says Ayman. "The army tried to demolish the camp. For us that means either transfer or a massacre."
He sinks into a guilty reverie. "To be honest, I was going to get out with the wife and kids. But my father refused. He said we should not leave like we did in 1948 and 1967. He was right. Death is better. We can't keep moving from one disaster to another."
There is also a quiet pride: at those who Palestinians loosely call the "resistance," and at themselves. People speak of extraordinary acts of heroism: of young fighters firing homemade grenades to stop soldiers commandeering houses; of women, children and men passing buckets of water to douse the flames of other people's homes; of the poor sharing bread with the hungry; of the rich redirecting electricity to warm the destitute.
"With my own eyes I saw a young guy on his own confront a tank," says Ayman. "That's not easy. That's why we're with the resistance. They express our feelings. Sharon wants us to be slaves. But we're not slaves. We're a nation."
I leave Beit Jibrin and sit on a step, drinking in the clean, fresh, winter sunshine. Opposite me, six boys are bouncing up and down on a horizontal street light, floored by a tank.
No, it was not a massacre. Three Palestinians dead is not the same as 2,000. But there was very little the army did to prevent it becoming a massacre. A young boy sits beside me. He is 12, he says. He is also malnourished, his limbs thinner than they should be. His name is Hussein. "Did you see the camp?" he asks.
"Yes."
"What do you think?"
"I keep thinking of Sabra and Shatila."
Hussein was not born when that massacre took place. But, like every Palestinian, he knows the reference and understands the context. He thinks about my answer.
"There's a difference this time," he says. "This time we fought them soldier to soldier. This time they left and we stayed."
Conquering Beit Rima
Israel said its 24-hour invasion of a West Bank Palestinian village was a "complete success." It was the complete opposite
It was a "successful mission," said the Israeli government. In a pre-dawn operation on 24 October Israeli tanks, infantry and helicopters entered the West Bank village of Beit Rima allegedly in pursuit of the four-man cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine responsible for the assassination of Israeli cabinet minister Rahavam Zeevi one week before.
The Palestinian Authority had been warned about the invasion, said West Bank army commander Yitzak Gershon. But five Palestinian policemen had "fired on us" in an ambush. He wanted to make it clear that "had they not done that, they would not have been killed." Two members of the PFLP had been arrested, together with eight other activists from Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah, all of them "terrorists" according to Israel.
Palestinians had been injured in the raid, admitted another army commander, Yair Golan. But all of them had received the "best medical care possible" by army doctors, ambulances and hospitals on hand to spare civilian casualties. The war is against "terrorism." It is not against the Palestinian people.
All in all, the Beit Rima "operation was about capturing many wanted terrorist suspects, including ... the murderers of Zeevi," summed up army spokesman Ron Kitri on Wednesday night.
The two "captured" cell members were Salah Allawi and Mohammed Rimawi. The other two -- Hamdi Korain and Basel Asmer -- are still at large, admitted a government statement on Wednesday, probably in Ramallah, about 30 kilometers south of Beit Rima. Mission accomplished then, more or less.
Twenty-four hours later we enter Beit Rima on the same road as the tanks. You know this from the tracks ground into the asphalt. There are other scars: a white van leans against a hedge, doors and roof buckled like a squeezed tin can. "Rammed by a tank," says our Palestinian driver.
We reach the PA checkpoint at the mouth of the village. The guard is a fighter from Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, 16 years old and a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He exudes a lot of nervous energy but the tension folds into a laugh when we ask him about the ambush. "Ambush? They were all dozing."
To prove his point he shows us a metal bed frame topped by a mattress where one dead policeman had slept. To prove the point even more other Palestinians take us to the sites where the other policemen were killed. One is an olive grove, 20 metres up a hill from the checkpoint.
"We didn't open fire. We have instructions not to," says a policeman, who was there but refuses to give his name. He shrugs his shoulders. "Anyway what would have been the use. They came in with tanks."
And helicopters. Mudafa Zawawe, 18, takes us to the place where his older brother, Abul Ma'ati, was killed. It is a full kilometre from the checkpoint and is reached by descending terraces of stone crop and olive trees. How did he die here?
"He was running, tracked by helicopters," says his brother. He shows me where Abul Ma'ati's corpse was found. There is a solitary olive tree, broken branches and a shrine of stones covered with his brother's blood. It seems as though he tried to climb the tree for cover. But he might have been shot by helicopters or from soldiers. "People say there were hundreds in the wadi," says Zawawe.
"I don't know if he died instantly or bled to death. The soldiers didn't hand over his body to the Red Cross until Wednesday afternoon." According to an autopsy carried out by Ramallah hospital Abul-Ma'ati was killed or wounded at around 2 in the morning.
We climb out of the valley and back to the village, where the tanks parked after they had ploughed through the checkpoint. Shells have left deep gashes in the police station and town hall and a pristine white mosque has every one of its windows broken. So who was arrested? "At first they arrested 50 from the village but most of them were released later," says Abdel-Salam Rimawi. "The soldiers took away about 10." Local political leaders from the different Palestinian factions, he said.
But Mohammed Rimawi and Salah Halawi were not among them. As the PA first alleged and Israel then reluctantly confirmed, these two were arrested immediately after Zeevi's assassination. So who was the army after? Maybe Bilal Barghouti, allegedly a Hamas activist, but who slipped the Israeli net before it was cast. Anyhow the Israelis didn't find him. They found his house and then destroyed it, placing dynamite so strategically that the roof fell in an avalanche on the floors below.
"The soldiers arrived at five in the morning," says Hana, Barghouti's 45-year-old mother. "They asked me where Bilal was. I said I didn't know. They told me to take my other children and wait beside the jars of olive oil in the basement. They came back several hours later. 'Get out,' they said. I knew what was to happen next. 'Let me first get my things,' I said. 'Get out', they said."
Hana is standing before her things ("furniture, clothes, the olive oil, everything") buried under a heap of fractured stone, twisted steel, crushed tile, glass and masonry. Her eyes are red; she has been crying all night. But she recounts the story of her home's destruction in neither grief nor rage- more in a distraction of memory.
"Do you know what one of the soldiers said when they left?" she asks. "He said, 'Don't worry. We will return Bilal to you. Wrapped in a pig's skin'."
What did Israel gain from the Beit Rima invasion? Five, perhaps more, Palestinians dead, three more Palestinian homes destroyed, dozens wounded and10 more Palestinians arrested, none apparently having anything to do with the assassination of Zeevi.
What did it leave? Four thousand people terrorised, a military occupation more despised and a nation, Palestinian and Arab, outraged.
And where will it go next? Perhaps Ramallah (for which Palestinians think Beit Rima was the dry run)- where Zeevi's killers are reportedly holed up, where there are 50,000 Palestinians, some armed and more ready to fight and where there will be real ambushes.
Maybe, but Israel doesn't need 14 tanks, at least two US-made Apache helicopters and 100 ground troops to go into a West Bank village to prove that it can also go into Ramallah. It is in Ramallah already. It is in six other Palestinian towns. So who or what was the quarry?
"Ahmad Saadat," says a PFLP source. Saadat is the PFLP's new General Secretary. He was elected after Israel's assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa on 27 August. He was the brain, say the Israelis, behind the revenge on Zeevi.
His was among the "very important arrests" Ariel Sharon announced at the height of the invasion on 24 October. Saadat was the one -- 40 days after Mustafa was slain and four days before Zeevi was killed -- who vowed a "head for a head." Ahmad Saadat wasn't in Beit Rima either.
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