8 - 14 November 2001
Issue No.559
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 8 - 14 November 2001 Issue No.559 |
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Visit to Beit Rima
Abdel-Jawwad Saleh* discovers how long 10 days can last
In the early morning of Thursday 25 October, the courageous and ever-victorious Israeli forces withdrew after a short but destructive invasion of the small village of Beit Rima. I visited the village in the aftermath of its reoccupation. To do so, I had to get a taxi, which took me to the northern outskirts of Al-Bireh. The north of the town was re-occupied after the racist chairman of an Israeli party that promotes ethnic cleansing was assassinated. After leaving the army, he was involved with the Israeli Mafia, but later became minister of tourism in Sharon's cabinet. He was killed in revenge for the assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Today, cars must snake through the town's narrow alleyways to avoid the Israeli tanks, which bear guns longer than the streets are wide. Drivers were asking each other if the tanks were positioned in the passageway they had discovered.
Bet El colony interrupts the contiguity between the northern and southern parts of the West Bank. The first car dropped me there. Then I had to walk about one kilometre north. I could see a cluster of yellow cabs waiting for passengers on the opposite hill. This is a new taxi station, set up under the siege and located between the rocks, on a patch of dirt under the blazing sun. From here, the taxis take passengers from Al-Bireh and Ramallah to the northern villages closed off by the siege. Connecting the two hills is a dirt road. The occupation army ploughed it up, making it impossible for people to cross. Some courageous drivers risked it; without them, it would have been entirely impossible to move, even in the direst emergency. But Israeli soldiers and Jewish terrorists killed many of them.
As I walked, I could see a mother carrying an infant, and holding another reluctant child by the hand. The trip is dangerous enough, what with the rocks and ditches; of course, trigger-happy colonisers lurk nearby, and could decide that some target practice is in order at any time. People trickle across in both directions, under the settlers' avid gaze.
The trip to another bantustan begins by crossing the Jalazoun refugee camp, whose inhabitants have been waiting for 50 years to return to their homes. They are the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns perpetrated during the 1948 War. I passed Jifna village and saw the silent bells of its ancient church. I climbed another hill, overlooking the famous university town of Birzeit. Crossing the bridge of Atara village, I glimpsed an apartheid highway and came to an Israeli checkpoint. It looked empty, and the soldiers did not indulge in their customary harassment tactics.
Leaving Atara, I turned northwest, taking the dirt road, and saw Abboud, a village where Christians and Muslims have lived together for centuries. Two months ago, I visited the village after settlers and soldiers had uprooted 3,000 ancient olive trees. The Israelis oppose Palestinian agriculture, a source of food security that allows the people to resist starvation. The Israeli colonies stand out like wounds. The villages are part of the area's environment; they blend in, looking as natural as the olive trees once did. The highway used to serve 35 villages and three settlements. Now it is reserved for the three colonies; the villagers have to use the dirt road. Ditches and rocks are perpetual hazards.
Entering Beit Rima from a back way, I passed through Qarawa village, where a young boy was killed recently. I turned left and reached the main street of Beit Rima, where the crushed hull of a car stood, chewed up like gum by one of the Israelis' tanks. The driver was on his way to take the wounded to a Red Crescent ambulance, but the Israeli soldiers stationed at the checkpoint near the colony of Halmish prevented him from entering Beit Rima. The wounded were left to bleed, and he was ordered to leave. He had only walked a few metres when he heard the bulldozer mangling the metal of his car; a flurry of bullets forced him away.
The main street connects Beit Rima with its twin village, Deir Ghassaneh. Natives of both villages have gone on to become national leaders, educators and businessmen. A hundred metres from the wreck, a crowd was standing in front of the village municipality building. I joined them, and they led me to the mayor's office. The rooms had been turned upside down, and the windows were stuffed with sandbags. Everything was upside down, and the floors were strewn with broken glass.
This is how the "civilised army" of "the only democracy in the Middle East" treats the people it occupies. They killed or wounded most of the village's police force. Two American helicopters hovered overhead, raining down bullets on the 4,000 inhabitants and the 11 policemen protecting them with antiquated Klashnikovs and one pistol. Each member of the force is provided with a limited number of bullets. Then the tanks moved in. Some of the national guards were killed as they lay sleeping; the rest were wounded. Those with critical wounds were left to bleed to death. One soldier's head was severed from his body by the force of the bullets. Another was hunted down; the villagers eventually found his body hanging from a tree.
The Israeli Special Forces besieged the village, riddling houses with hundreds of bullets. Under the pretext of searching homes, the soldiers confiscated family photo albums and cell phones. Upon finding one house empty (the owners, a young couple, had gone to Al-Bireh, and been prevented from returning), they broke a window and lobbed two bombs through. The house, when I saw it, was a blackened shell. The owners had not yet finished paying the instalments on the furniture. The village children are traumatised now, and will not let their parents out of sight.
After invading the village, the army demolished homes, set fire to the inhabitants' property and imposed a collective arrest. Four families were living in a single two-storey house: 35 children and women were made homeless in seconds. The soldiers, implementing the state of Israel's policies, destroyed telephone and electricity lines. Their tanks crushed 12 private cars, tractors and the municipality garbage truck. The soldiers used the villagers, taking them along as human shields, but also making them vulnerable to accusations of collaboration. They forced a 14-year-old boy to knock on people's doors before beginning their destruction. Later, they detained him and 50 other boys. The Israelis left 35 villagers, hand and feet shackled, in the village's main square. That is how the inhabitants of Beit Rima discovered that the invasion had ended.
What did Sharon achieve? In 10 days, he re- occupied Palestinian cities and villages, and butchered 50 Palestinians. But resistance to the occupation did not stop. Even military operations inside Israel and against civilians, which many Palestinians condemn as immoral and politically unwise, continued.
Does Sharon want to display Israel's power? The Palestinians have tasted it every day for 34 years. Occupation of their homeland is the fruit that power has yielded. Israel's refusal to implement UN Security Council resolutions has left the Palestinians with no option but resistance, and this resistance will continue as long as peace based on the Palestinian right to self determination has not been achieved.
Sharon may gradually be realising that he is not completely free to implement his conception of security (massacre or transfer of the Palestinians). But what is Europe, the cradle of this dilemma, doing? What has become of the right of all peoples to self-determination? Who remembers the Geneva Convention, which, by stipulating the protection of civilians under occupation, makes Israel's policies not only inhuman and immoral, but war crimes and crimes against humanity? Oppressed peoples, sadly, cannot respect the world's most powerful nations; for to do so is to respect hypocrisy.
* The writer is former member of the PLO Executive Council.
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