Israelis try to
bottle up hatred in Nablus
by by Stephen Farrell • Monday
October 07, 2002 at 09:49 AM
Maybe the Israelis should go home and stop stealing other peoples' lands. (www.whatreallyhappened.com)
Israelis try to bottle up
hatred in Nablus
by Stephen Farrell
200,000 Palestinians are blockaded by troops trying to stop
suicide bombers getting out
“THEY will suffer until they understand. This is the price of terror.”
In wraparound sunglasses and olive green Israeli uniform, Colonel Noam stands at the entrance to Nablus, a city of 200,000 Palestinians sealed off by his soldiers.
More than 100 days into the tightest city-wide containment on the West Bank no Palestinian, including doctors, children and cancer patients, can leave without Israeli permission.
A simultaneous 24-hour curfew remains in force, but has degenerated into an uneasy limbo in which hundreds of residents defy the orders, peering over their shoulder for an approaching tank turret.
On a fast track to the top — he trained with the US Marines and attended Harvard — the 40-year-old colonel insists that the restrictions are a harsh necessity to stop the flow of suicide bombers from a city regarded by Israel as a nest of Palestinian militancy.
Suddenly, two Palestinian boys appear in front of Colonel Noam’s armoured jeep. He clambers out, firing questions. Ages? Identities? Destination? “These are the type of people that can become a terrorist easily,” he says in heavily-accented English. “These are two innocent boys that are coming back from school. How do you know if you don’t check them? How will they not hate you if you check them. This is the daily dilemma, not of a brigade commander but of any soldier.”
The decision was arbitrary. Minutes earlier the colonel, who does not want his surname revealed for security reasons, ordered his men not to stop Muslim schoolgirls near by because he knew the sight of Israeli soldiers confronting them was a likely flashpoint.
In a city where two Palestinian boys were shot dead this week alone he concedes he is fighting an “ugly war”. But he justifies the cordon by saying that, during his two months in charge, five bomb factories have been located in Nablus, and 15 would-be suicide bombers caught.
“Everyone is suffering in Nablus because this is the capital of world terrorism,” he asserts, claiming that telephone calls are made each night from Nablus to Damascus and Iran. “My job is to stop bombers getting to Tel Aviv and I am determined to do it,” he says. His strategy, he explains, is to target the four “bottlenecks” of the “terrorist” networks: money, materials, families and Palestinian society.
While the roadblocks stop bomb-makers getting material to make explosives, he seeks to “create a gap between Palestinian society and terror” by demolishing bombers’ houses as a deterrent, and leaning heavily on vulnerable families under pressure to “donate” a son to the cause.
Inside Nablus, however, there is universal scorn for his belief that harsh measures will stop inhabitants resisting occupation. Amid the rubble of buildings and roads dug up by Israeli bulldozers many dismiss the “security” argument as a pretext used by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, to destroy any chance of a Palestinian state rising from the ashes. The Palestinians accuse Israeli soldiers of shooting at ambulances, and of killing water and electricity repairmen even when they had arranged their movements in advance with Israeli forces.
Ghassan Shakah, the Mayor, says: “When you put pressure on people like me who are 50 or 60 years old, they use their minds to survive. But when you put pressure on a 17-year-old he will react with bitterness and anger. The reaction will be to make bombs and commit suicide because young people are losing hope.”
In Nablus’s Balata camp, which houses 60,000 Palestinian refugees within one square kilometre of breezeblocks and back alleys medieval in their width and stench, youths wear portaits of dead “martyrs” around their necks.
It was here that the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the most militant offshoot of Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement, was founded two years ago, and it is here that Husam Khader, a member of the Palestinian parliament, says that the Israeli tactics will never work.
“All the Israeli collective punishments increase the desire to fight among the Palestinian young generation,” he says. “They don’t care if Israel demolishes their houses or even deports them. What they care about is killing Israelis and fighting against the occupation. They believe this is the price of independence, and they will be in heaven.” Support for radical Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah had soared among the young, he said.
“My 11-year-old daughter Amani is real Hamas,” he said sadly. “She wrote to her friend saying they wanted to make a military operation (suicide bombing). I spent two or three hours a day saying ‘you should become a doctor, it will be better for your people, you are a child’.”