Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [19]
Israeli news wires are trails of gasoline; the bombs are matches. News races, burns, and gallops. Seventeen people died at Megiddo, most of them burned alive. Eighteen, if you count the teenaged bomber, and I think we should. Islamic Jihad bragged that it had carried out the bombing on the “Zionist bus.” The group’s leader, Sheikh Abdullah Shami, said the attack marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Middle East War, when Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem, wresting the land from Arabs. “We say to the enemy, we will continue to destroy the protective shield Sharon talks about,” the sheikh said. “They will never enjoy security as long as occupation exists in our land.”
In that spring of 2002, the second Palestinian intifada was nearing two years old. Suicide bombers came by day, and at night Israeli tanks seized Palestinian turf in the West Bank. Things had gotten out of control. Violence fed violence. Blood washed blood. The Israelis launched Operation Defensive Shield, which later morphed into Operation Determined Path. Behind the names, it meant that Israel was reoccupying the West Bank. It meant that the Oslo Accords, the exhaustively argued framework for peace and a Palestinian state, were lost.
It was late afternoon when I drove back into Jerusalem from Megiddo. By then everybody had seen the pictures of the burned bus and the dead soldiers. Israeli tanks had already groaned into Jenin, the bomber’s hometown. I sat in the car, waiting for a light to change at the edge of East Jerusalem. The heat hummed and buzzed. Hasidic boys in their brimmed hats tripped along toward the walls of the Old City, carrying bottles of soda pop, sweating into long-sleeved oxfords. An older Palestinian man crossed their path and they surrounded him, jeering and taunting. They crunched their features in disgust and threw their shoulders back, unscrewed a bottle of Sprite and splashed the older man’s face and shirt. These are our streets and our city, their stances said. They were poking the Arab and spitting on him. A taxi squealed to the curb; the Arab driver pushed up his sleeves as he ran, shoes slapping clumsily over the pavement. Another Arab man leapt out of another car. They pulled the old worker away with pats on the back, threw glowers and threats over their shoulders. The Orthodox boys shuffled off. Jerusalem rearranged itself. The light changed and I drove away. It was over, except that it was never over.
After midnight, tanks and bulldozers arrived at Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters, the Palestinian government center just over the line from Jerusalem. By first light, the compound had been demolished and Arafat, the crooked president of a country that still doesn’t exist, waddled through the remaining rooms. The walls were blasted off the soldiers’ sleeping quarters, the floors toppled like a fallen layer cake, clothes and wires dripping from the squashed rooms. A skinny soldier shimmied like a child on a jungle gym, sweating and grunting in sock feet, to rummage in the wreckage. Finally he tugged his shoes free of the rubble and held them aloft like trophies; his comrades cheered from the ground below. The summer light came thick and naked, laying it all bare, and Palestinian families walked aghast through the wreckage, silent and stunned, entire clans come together as if on picnic to inspect the broken structure of their national dreams.
Twenty-four hours in Jerusalem spread like a road map to misery.
I knew a Palestinian woman who lived in Jerusalem. She was pretty and slim from living on cigarettes and Nescafé, but her eyes were old and sad. Sometimes she drank iced vodka until she was drunk, leaning over with curses falling out of her mouth, stabbing the night with a cigarette, roaring in broken laughter.
She was still a teenager when Israeli soldiers arrested her for membership in an underground Palestinian political movement. That was back in the bad