The dance of death

Faced with a ruthless army of occupation, Palestinians seem to have accepted that the suicide bomb is all they have left. Khaled Amayreh reports from Hebron
(t)Israeli police investigators look at the remains of a Palestinian who exploded himself in Jerusalem, (b) Abu Ali Mustafa murdered by the Israeli army last week
(photos:AP)
In Palestine, death begets death, in a grisly dance of the macabre. On Tuesday, a Palestinian dressed as an ultra-orthodox Jew exploded himself on the streets of West Jerusalem. He died instantly; 15 Israelis were injured. One, a policeman, is critically wounded. Another policeman, who confronted the bomber before his suicide, says he died smiling.
No-one has yet confessed to the attack. But Israeli sources suspect the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose leader, Abu Ali Mustafa, the Israeli army murdered in Ramallah, on 27 August.
Despite the repression that Israel will now almost certainly unleash, Palestinians seem to support the suicide-bombers. According to a survey published last week by the Palestinian Centre For Public Opinion Studies, in Beit Sahur, close to 80 per cent of respondents condoned suicide bomb attacks against Israelis.
In many ways, they have been driven to it. As the Israeli occupiers continue to narrow peoples' horizons, and turn Palestinian towns, villages and even small hamlets into detention camps, the sense of powerlessness mounts. Now most Palestinians believe that until Israelis feel real pain they will continue to be deaf to Palestinian cries for freedom and justice. Their sense that their way of life is being pitilessly strangled to death, and which is likely to continue as long as Ariel Sharon is in power, can only lead to a massive drift towards favouring "martyrdom operations" as the Palestinians' last weapon, and hope.
The suicide bombings have grown out of Israel's brutal flaying of Palestinians since the Intifada began. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has recently resorted increasingly to armoured incursions into densely populated residential Palestinian areas.
In the last few weeks, such incursions have happened daily, and in a familiar pattern. Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles rumble into PA-controlled neighbourhoods, destroy private and public buildings, and kill and wound with abandon, before finally returning to base. And when, as often, the outnumbered and scantily-armed Palestinians resist, the Israeli army unleashes its awful fire-power, machine- gunning whole areas, with a staggering contempt for human life.
Following the Israeli army's re- occupation of Beit Jala on 28 August, Israeli troops made as many as 10 incursions into Hebron and various parts of the Gaza Strip, killing 10 Palestinians, resistance fighters and civilians alike. In Hebron, the most serious incursion took place on 30 August, when Israeli troops advanced through the Wadi Al-Hairriya neighbourhood in order to "clear terrorist hideouts" and prevent firing upon settlers in the Jewish enclave in downtown Hebron. The Palestinians resisted. Young men, determined to defend their homes, returned fire; and all hell broke loose. The Israeli army began shooting indiscriminately in all directions. Israeli soldiers then seized rooftops overlooking downtown Hebron and rained bullets on to shops, markets, motorists, and anything moving in the streets.
At one point they killed a doctor who was helping an injured child. According to eyewitnesses, Hussein Ikdeimat, 50, was blasted to death as he rushed from his clinic to help a child casually gunned down by an Israeli bullet.
Then, after a brief hiatus, Israel attacked Hebron again. On 3 September, the Israeli army fired several heavy artillery shells at the Abu-Senineh neighbourhood in Hebron, killing two Palestinians, Amjad Al-Jamal, 17, and Isam Batash, 25. That brings the death toll in Hebron to six, in three days.
Attacks were not confined to Hebron. On the same day, the Israeli army advanced through the Yibna refugee camp near Rafah at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip. There, true to form, Israeli forces destroyed six more houses, bringing to 25 the number of houses destroyed in Rafah in under 48 hours.
Rafah and its surrounds have suffered more than any other Palestinian locality since the beginning of Al-Aqsa Intifada last September. Hundreds of houses are now rubble, vast tracts of farm land lie desolate, families have had to bury a hundred young men and children, and hundreds of others will carry the mutilations and injuries of Israeli bullets and bombs as long as they live.
The machine-gunning of huge swathes of the occupied territories, suggests that Israel is not merely after "terrorists" but is intent on killing, maiming and cowing the bulk of ordinary Palestinians, many of whom fear even walking the streets lest an Israeli bullet turn them into a statistic. In such a climate, Palestinians have begun to think that fear is the only weapon they have with which to fight fear.
And so the stakes increase. If the PFLP turns out to be behind Tuesday's attack in Jerusalem, it will herald a ratcheting up of the violence. The PFLP, and other Palestinian leftist factions, are not known for suicide bombings, something that so far has been the preserve of Islamists. If the PFLP is responsible, it will confirm that human bombs had won popular support. A day earlier, the PFLP had claimed responsibility for four car-bomb explosions in occupied Jerusalem in revenge for the death of their leader. If it was responsible for the recent bombing, it will be up to the world to convince the Palestinians that they have another choice; a world whose efforts in that direction have so far been close to nil.
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