'First freedom, then the future'

Easter this year saw Bethlehem and its neighbouring Palestinian villages at war and pondering the means and cost of resistance. Graham Usher reports
On late Saturday afternoon, around 50 Jewish Israeli peace activists pressed through a chain of Israeli soldiers manning the main northern checkpoint into Bethlehem. On the "Palestinian" side of the barricade, 100 more people rushed forward to greet them, leaving Israeli soldiers scampering like cats.
"We will record this event in the history of the non-violent resistance in Palestine," said George Rishmawi, coordinator of the Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement (PCR), which organised the protest. Veteran Israeli peace campaigner Uri Avnery was also enthusiastic: "We are here today to say the Israeli peace movement has not disappeared, but is with the Palestinian people in its struggle against the war crimes of the Sharon-Peres government."
The Israeli peace movement has not disappeared, even if it has been a little docile of late. Nor have the Italians, Norwegians and others from Bethlehem's many foreign NGOs which turned out to support the rapprochement. It is primarily the Palestinians who had disappeared, save for the handful from the PCR that led the protest.
Those who were around tended to be over 35, married with children or older women from Bethlehem's villages and refugee camps and in rare possession of the Israeli permit card required to pass the Bethlehem checkpoint. To a person, they skirted the demonstration with barely a second glance. "This is not the old Intifada," said Ahmed, a Palestinian from Battir village near Bethlehem. "This is a military Intifada. Peaceful protests are useless now." He has a point.
Battir is a village of 3,000 Palestinians whose ancient stone houses tumble down a gorge that once marked the pre-1967 Green Line. To its north stretches the ever-extending arm of Gilo, home to 30,000 Jewish settlers, built on 675 acres of land expropriated from Battir's neighbouring village of Beit Jala and site of some of the fiercest military battles of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. To its south stands the settlement of Beitar Illit, another concrete pincer that houses some of the most "ideological" settlers in the southern West Bank.
Nuhum Korman lives in Beitar Illit. In November 1996, he beat to death Hilmi Shousha, a 10-year-old boy from Battir's sister village of Husan, for throwing stones at his car. He is currently doing six months "community service" as punishment for the murder. Last December, Beitar Illit settlers joined Israeli soldiers in a raid on Husan that left 25 Palestinians wounded, two of them critically. In response, Palestinian guerrillas fired on Gilo.
"Look," explains a leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement in Bethlehem, "there was never any 'strategic' decision to take up armed struggle. We formed the militia to defend the villages from the settlers and the army. When we hit places like Gilo, these are individual actions, motivated by a mixture of revenge and deterrence."
Has the deterrence worked? In some ways yes, say Fatah leaders. Since the December incursion, the settlers have been warier about entering villages like Battir and Husan. But they concede there is a price for the policy of "armed self-defence."
Beit Jala has paid it. Since the first Palestinian shot was fired on Gilo on 15 October, 40 homes have been destroyed in the village and 220 others damaged by retaliatory Israeli tank and helicopter fire. But the effect of war is felt not so much in the ammo-scarred fronts of houses and charred stone side streets. It is there in the palpable absence of people. It is Easter Friday in Beit Jala but the church doors are shut, the shops closed and the streets empty. "Yes, everyone is gone," says Issa, serving chicken in one of the few open restaurants. "Because of the shooting."
One of the many sources of shooting is an Israeli tank that squats on the village's highest peak. From there its guns command a range over Beit Jala, Bethlehem, the Palestinian village of Al-Khadr to its east, Dehaishe refugee camp and the main Hebron-to-Jerusalem by-pass road.
The day before, soldiers from the tank unit had entered Beit Jala, commandeering a Palestinian house in response to an armed attack on an Israeli checkpoint. The village is supposedly under the Palestinian Authority's "full control," but there was no resistance to the incursion. "We were terrified they were going to reoccupy us once and for all," said Suha, a Palestinian woman who lives on the ridge between Beit Jala and Al-Khadr. The soldiers withdrew.
How does she feel about the turn to arms? "I would prefer it if the youths didn't fire from residential areas like ours," she says. "But less so than before. Once the Israelis started to use tanks and helicopters to fire all the way into the village, I don't think it matters what we do. We are going to get hit anyway."
Rana, Suha's oldest daughter, agrees. "What else can we do? We all know stones are useless against tanks." Rana is 14 years old, nearly fluent in English and with ambitions to become a writer or a doctor. How has she coped with the war? "The worst moment was when the helicopters bombed Al-Khadr, setting one of the homes on fire," she recalls. "My parents were out so I had to look after my two younger sisters. We held each other tight on the floor, far way from the window. We were all crying."
She pauses for a moment, trying to contain the memory. "The firing makes you tense and that affects your studying. On the other hand, the fighting makes you even more motivated to learn so that you can do something for your people. You get used to it. The joke in school is that we need the sound of gunfire to sleep. Silence makes us restless."
And when the war is over, what then? She tussles with the question. "I love English and would like to write but being a doctor is of more use to my people. But all this is about the future. And there is no future without freedom. First freedom, then the future."
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