Armoured invasion brings no peace to Bethlehem
By Robert Fisk in Bethlehem
03 April 2002
If this is a war on terror, Jesus wasn't born in
Bethlehem. The first to die was an 80-year-old
Palestinian man, whose body never made it to the
morgue. Then a woman and her son were critically
wounded by Israeli gunfire. A cloud of black smoke
swirled up in the Tempest winds from the other side of
Manger Square. A burning Israeli armoured vehicle,
they said, although - running for our lives as bullets
crackled around us just below the Church of the
Redeemer - there was no way of knowing. The air was
alive with the sound of shells and rifle fire, the
rain guttering in waves across the Israeli tanks which
ground between the Ottoman stone houses, smashing into
cars and tearing down shop hoardings. Yes, the little
town of Bethlehem lay still, its dark streets deserted
save for the Israelis, but there was no everlasting
light, no deep and dreamless sleep. As we huddled in
our frightened little room with Norma Hazboun, a
professor of social sciences at Bethlehem University,
the sight of a Merkava tank crashing towards Qutaa
Street, just 600 metres from the place of Christ's
birth, was the symbol of the hopes and fears of all
the years. Oslo, "peace" and "mutual respect" had
brought us to this. A Closed Military Area had been
declared once more by the Israelis. Jesus, one
assumes, also had to deal with the Roman version of
closed military areas, but he had God on his side.
Yesterday, the people of Bethlehem had no one. They
waited for some statement from the Pope, from the
Vatican, from the European Union. And what they got
was an invasion of armour. We watched them all
morning, the Merkavas and APCs stealing their way
through the ancient streets searching for the
"savages" of "terror" Ariel Sharon has told us about.
And all the while, on the television set by the window
of our Bethlehem room, we watched Palestine collapse
around us. The Palestinian intelligence offices had
been attacked in Ramallah. The Palestinians said
hundreds of women and children were packed inside the
besieged and shelled building as well as men. Then
shells started falling on Dheisheh camp. We knew that
already. Dheisheh was so close that the windows
vibrated. The Bethlehem television station was still
operating from a few hundred yards away - the Israelis
hadn't got there yet - and there was Sharon on the
screen. He was offering to let the Europeans fly
Yasser Arafat out of Ramallah, providing he never
returned to the land he calls Palestine. Back in 1982,
Sharon made the same deal with Arafat; back then it
was exile from Beirut with the help of the Americans.
Not this time. Offer refused. More shooting now from
outside our windows. A tank came down the road, its
barrel clipping the green awning of a shop and then
swaying upwards to point directly at our window. We
decamped to the stairwell. Had they seen us watching
them? We stood on the cold, damp stairs then peeked
around our window. Two Israeli soldiers were running
past the house. A second tank shuddered up the street
and swivelled its turret to the south. We knew all
about these tanks: their maximum speed, the voice of
their massive engines. One raced across an
intersection while we stood, in blue and black flak
jackets marked with 'TV' in huge taped letters, arms
spread out like ducks to show we carried no weapons.
Each time we found a smaller street, another Israeli
tracked vehicle would drive past it. By the time we
were close to Manger Square, we had tanks in front of
us, APCs and another tank behind. That's when the
shooting began, the crack-crack of bullets fired from
a few yards away. The Israelis? If it was coming from
Palestinians, they were suicidally close. We ran
across the road, down a narrow passage. It was then
that Professor Hazboun unlocked her iron front door to
us.How snug we felt beside her gas fire, how trapped
in her little home. How powerless to move. The TV
became a monitor of Palestine's disintegration. The
newsreader stumbled on his words. Iran and Iraq might
stop oil exports to force the Americans to demand an
Israeli withdrawal. Arafat's intelligence headquarters
in Ramallah were on fire. An Israeli soldier was dead
in an APC on the other side of Manger Square, hit by
two Palestinian rockets. About 700 prisoners were
bound and blindfolded in Ramallah. Colin Powell, the
American Secretary of State, was insisting Arafat was
"recognised" as the Palestinian leader, and that this
recognition would remain whether he was in Europe or
anywhere else. The smoke still rose behind Manger
Square. The tank up the street backed towards the
pavement and collided with the side of a house. The
television newscaster, unshaven, exhausted and dressed
in a leather jacket, read a statement from the Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade, one of Sharon's most lethal enemies.
These are the wicked, cruel suicide bombers who have
stricken Israel. "We will stand as Abu Amar (Yasser
Arafat) said: For victory of martyrdom, as the enemy
knows." Outside, beside a cluster of lemon trees, two
armoured carriers pulled up, their Israeli crews
desperately trying to pump fuel from one vehicle to
the other before Palestinian snipers picked them off.
The bullets snapped around them within seconds and the
two frightened soldiers threw themselves off the roofs
to the shelter of a shop. Then the mobile phone rang.
An English voice, a lady from Wateringbury in Kent. My
home was once in the next village of East Farleigh.
But Liz Yates was not in Kent. She was only two miles
away, in the Aida refugee camp with nine other
westerners, two each from France and Sweden and five
from the United States. They were refusing to leave.
The voice had that sharpness born of intense tiredness
and fear. "We want to help the 4,000 Palestinian
refugees here. Everyone here believes the Israelis
will come in and we've promised to stay here when they
do. It will be some kind of protection. We are asking
our consulates to pressure the Israelis into
withdrawing." Some hope. Only a day earlier, an
Israeli soldier opened fire on a group of unarmed
western protesters near Bethlehem , wounding five of
them in front of the BBC's own cameras before trying
to shoot television reporter Orla Guerin as well. We
were thinking about that when the bullets flew around
us on the road in central Bethlehem. We thought about
it again when we crept out of the house in the late
afternoon. I had another call before we said goodbye
to Professor Hazboun, from an American woman working
with a Palestinian human rights group in Gaza. She
could no longer reach the Rafah refugee camp, she
said. She was copying the group's computer files in
case the Israelis took the originals as they had in
Ramallah. "Everyone thinks they are coming." Yes, they
thought that at Aida camp as well. The Israelis are
coming. But do the suicide bombers care? We walked
like robots back down those dangerous streets. It had
been like this when the Israelis, having humiliated
Arafat, invaded West Beirut in 1982. Sharon was in
control then too. The Israelis were engaged, he told
us then, in a "war on terror". Civilians died in their
thousands. And then came the massacre of Palestinians
by Israeli allies at Sabra and Chatila. So when, I
asked myself as we made our way back to Jerusalem,
will the massacre start here?
________________________________________________________________________
For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker
at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html
By Robert Fisk in Bethlehem
03 April 2002
If this is a war on terror, Jesus wasn't born in
Bethlehem. The first to die was an 80-year-old
Palestinian man, whose body never made it to the
morgue. Then a woman and her son were critically
wounded by Israeli gunfire. A cloud of black smoke
swirled up in the Tempest winds from the other side of
Manger Square. A burning Israeli armoured vehicle,
they said, although - running for our lives as bullets
crackled around us just below the Church of the
Redeemer - there was no way of knowing. The air was
alive with the sound of shells and rifle fire, the
rain guttering in waves across the Israeli tanks which
ground between the Ottoman stone houses, smashing into
cars and tearing down shop hoardings. Yes, the little
town of Bethlehem lay still, its dark streets deserted
save for the Israelis, but there was no everlasting
light, no deep and dreamless sleep. As we huddled in
our frightened little room with Norma Hazboun, a
professor of social sciences at Bethlehem University,
the sight of a Merkava tank crashing towards Qutaa
Street, just 600 metres from the place of Christ's
birth, was the symbol of the hopes and fears of all
the years. Oslo, "peace" and "mutual respect" had
brought us to this. A Closed Military Area had been
declared once more by the Israelis. Jesus, one
assumes, also had to deal with the Roman version of
closed military areas, but he had God on his side.
Yesterday, the people of Bethlehem had no one. They
waited for some statement from the Pope, from the
Vatican, from the European Union. And what they got
was an invasion of armour. We watched them all
morning, the Merkavas and APCs stealing their way
through the ancient streets searching for the
"savages" of "terror" Ariel Sharon has told us about.
And all the while, on the television set by the window
of our Bethlehem room, we watched Palestine collapse
around us. The Palestinian intelligence offices had
been attacked in Ramallah. The Palestinians said
hundreds of women and children were packed inside the
besieged and shelled building as well as men. Then
shells started falling on Dheisheh camp. We knew that
already. Dheisheh was so close that the windows
vibrated. The Bethlehem television station was still
operating from a few hundred yards away - the Israelis
hadn't got there yet - and there was Sharon on the
screen. He was offering to let the Europeans fly
Yasser Arafat out of Ramallah, providing he never
returned to the land he calls Palestine. Back in 1982,
Sharon made the same deal with Arafat; back then it
was exile from Beirut with the help of the Americans.
Not this time. Offer refused. More shooting now from
outside our windows. A tank came down the road, its
barrel clipping the green awning of a shop and then
swaying upwards to point directly at our window. We
decamped to the stairwell. Had they seen us watching
them? We stood on the cold, damp stairs then peeked
around our window. Two Israeli soldiers were running
past the house. A second tank shuddered up the street
and swivelled its turret to the south. We knew all
about these tanks: their maximum speed, the voice of
their massive engines. One raced across an
intersection while we stood, in blue and black flak
jackets marked with 'TV' in huge taped letters, arms
spread out like ducks to show we carried no weapons.
Each time we found a smaller street, another Israeli
tracked vehicle would drive past it. By the time we
were close to Manger Square, we had tanks in front of
us, APCs and another tank behind. That's when the
shooting began, the crack-crack of bullets fired from
a few yards away. The Israelis? If it was coming from
Palestinians, they were suicidally close. We ran
across the road, down a narrow passage. It was then
that Professor Hazboun unlocked her iron front door to
us.How snug we felt beside her gas fire, how trapped
in her little home. How powerless to move. The TV
became a monitor of Palestine's disintegration. The
newsreader stumbled on his words. Iran and Iraq might
stop oil exports to force the Americans to demand an
Israeli withdrawal. Arafat's intelligence headquarters
in Ramallah were on fire. An Israeli soldier was dead
in an APC on the other side of Manger Square, hit by
two Palestinian rockets. About 700 prisoners were
bound and blindfolded in Ramallah. Colin Powell, the
American Secretary of State, was insisting Arafat was
"recognised" as the Palestinian leader, and that this
recognition would remain whether he was in Europe or
anywhere else. The smoke still rose behind Manger
Square. The tank up the street backed towards the
pavement and collided with the side of a house. The
television newscaster, unshaven, exhausted and dressed
in a leather jacket, read a statement from the Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade, one of Sharon's most lethal enemies.
These are the wicked, cruel suicide bombers who have
stricken Israel. "We will stand as Abu Amar (Yasser
Arafat) said: For victory of martyrdom, as the enemy
knows." Outside, beside a cluster of lemon trees, two
armoured carriers pulled up, their Israeli crews
desperately trying to pump fuel from one vehicle to
the other before Palestinian snipers picked them off.
The bullets snapped around them within seconds and the
two frightened soldiers threw themselves off the roofs
to the shelter of a shop. Then the mobile phone rang.
An English voice, a lady from Wateringbury in Kent. My
home was once in the next village of East Farleigh.
But Liz Yates was not in Kent. She was only two miles
away, in the Aida refugee camp with nine other
westerners, two each from France and Sweden and five
from the United States. They were refusing to leave.
The voice had that sharpness born of intense tiredness
and fear. "We want to help the 4,000 Palestinian
refugees here. Everyone here believes the Israelis
will come in and we've promised to stay here when they
do. It will be some kind of protection. We are asking
our consulates to pressure the Israelis into
withdrawing." Some hope. Only a day earlier, an
Israeli soldier opened fire on a group of unarmed
western protesters near Bethlehem , wounding five of
them in front of the BBC's own cameras before trying
to shoot television reporter Orla Guerin as well. We
were thinking about that when the bullets flew around
us on the road in central Bethlehem. We thought about
it again when we crept out of the house in the late
afternoon. I had another call before we said goodbye
to Professor Hazboun, from an American woman working
with a Palestinian human rights group in Gaza. She
could no longer reach the Rafah refugee camp, she
said. She was copying the group's computer files in
case the Israelis took the originals as they had in
Ramallah. "Everyone thinks they are coming." Yes, they
thought that at Aida camp as well. The Israelis are
coming. But do the suicide bombers care? We walked
like robots back down those dangerous streets. It had
been like this when the Israelis, having humiliated
Arafat, invaded West Beirut in 1982. Sharon was in
control then too. The Israelis were engaged, he told
us then, in a "war on terror". Civilians died in their
thousands. And then came the massacre of Palestinians
by Israeli allies at Sabra and Chatila. So when, I
asked myself as we made our way back to Jerusalem,
will the massacre start here?
________________________________________________________________________
For live cricket scores download Yahoo! Score Tracker
at: http://in.sports.yahoo.com/cricket/tracker.html