Between the wars
Israelis and Palestinians spent the first days of war neither scurrying to bunkers nor taking to the streets. They were watching TV, writes Graham Usher in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
As the first British and American cruise missiles lashed Baghdad on 20 March, Israelis opened their gas mask kits and sealed rooms, and Palestinians made one last rush to stockpile food, water and fuel. The first came in response to a government directive: the second did not (Palestinians have no gas masks to unpack nor, actually, a government to issue them). Both were reflexes from history.
In the 1991 Gulf war Israel was hit with 39 Scud missiles, a last desperate throw by Saddam Hussein to draw an Israeli response and wreck the coalition ranged against him. Palestinians were penned in their homes in a curfew lasting six weeks, amid fears (palpable this time too) that Israel would use the war to solve the Palestinian "problem" once and for all by driving them out of the West Bank and Gaza.
Mercifully those histories have not replayed themselves, though both Israelis and Palestinians are aware that they might. By Sunday, most Israelis had sent their children back to school and thousands were walking the Tel Aviv beach armed with dogs and transistor radios rather than anti-toxic syringes. Curfews were slapped on Jenin, Qalqiliya, Hebron and several West Bank villages. But these had more to do with the army's tidal arrest sweeps of Palestinians than any clampdown caused by Iraq.
There was a tight "internal closure", lacerating the West Bank into 65 separate enclaves and Gaza into six. But this too is hardly an exceptional Israeli policy in the occupied territories; it is the rule. So too is the killing of Palestinians. On Monday 14-year old Ahmed Abahreh broke curfew to be shot dead in a stone-throwing clash with Israeli soldiers in Jenin. He was the 214th Palestinian killed this year.
There were other differences between the wars then and now, aside from the numbers of Palestinian dead. In 1991, Yasser Arafat voiced the visceral consensus of his people, averring that Palestinians could not but "be in the same trench as Iraq against Israel and the champions of Israel". This time he has asked the "champions" to shield him against Israel. He has left it to others to spell out the official Palestinian position.
"The Palestinian leadership and people are watching with concerned hearts what is happening to Iraq and its people. We oppose the war like the rest of the Arab nation. We believe it constitutes a danger to the region and seek a peaceful solution," said Palestinian Authority Planning Minister Nabil Sha'ath, on Saturday.
On 20 and 21 March, there were demonstrations in support of Iraq in Gaza City, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Qalqiliya, Khan Yunis, Rafah and East Jerusalem. But these were tame affairs compared to the mammoth protests that rocked the West Bank and Gaza in the fall of the 1990. In Gaza, Hamas called on Iraqis to "prepare explosive belts and would-be martyrs to combat US occupiers", and on the "Arab and Muslim nation" to observe a day of fasting in solidarity with Iraq. In the West Bank, Fatah demanded that "the world" stop the war.
Instead, Palestinians enjoyed the rare spectacle of watching other Arab peoples armed with stones and wrapped in kuffiyas denounce the venality of their leaders, a phenomena one Arab commentator described as the "Palestinianisation of the Arab street".
But, mostly, Palestinians took time out from one war to watch the other on TV, trying to clear through the smoke of the "rapid allied advances" screened by CNN and the "heroic Iraqi resistance" reported by Al-Jazeera. "Only two things are possible," said one Palestinian, after surfing 50 channels in three hours. "Someone is lying or everyone is."
But Palestinians are also torn by the relentless bombardment of Baghdad, Basra and the other Iraqi cities. On the one hand, there is a human as much as national identification with the Iraqi people, victims (like them) of territorial siege, collective sanctions, ferocious military assault and probable reconquest. Palestinians know from experience how easily screams are silenced by sanitised images of buildings going up in orange flame. On the other, there is the hard-nosed political calculation that the longer the bombs fall and the more the Iraqis resist the worst it will be for America's designs for the region and, they say, Israel's designs on Palestine. They want Iraq to fight, not surrender.
"Yes, we want it to end and we want it to continue," said Ibrahim, a Palestinian businessman in East Jerusalem.
And what about Saddam Hussein?
"Saddam has become the embodiment of his people. This is no longer about Saddam. This is about a country. This is about Iraq."
