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Thoughts after a Journey to a War Zone
The Way Things Are

By Virginia Baron, Photos by Douglas Hostetter

n January 11, in the fourth month of the new Palestinian uprising called the Al Aqsa Intifada, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israel had raised the designation of the conflict to “one short of all-out war.” Israeli Defense Forces announced a status change from a “formal state of peace” to “armed conflict.”

And they’ll beat their swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords,
And so on and so on, and back and forth.
Perhaps from being beaten thinner and thinner
the iron of hatred will vanish forever.

—From “Sort of an Apocalypse,”
by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai

All pretense of a “peace process” was over. Palestinian youths were still throwing stones and petrol bombs, snipers were targeting Jewish settlements and cars, and the number of car bombs and drive-by ambushes was on the rise, resulting altogether in about 30 Israeli fatalities. Israeli soldiers and settlers had by then fatally shot more than 300 Palestinian children, men and women, including 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel, and wounded hundreds, possibly thousands. The Israeli government had begun its admitted assassination policy of targeting Palestinian leaders it considered enemies of the state. (No trial is necessary in these cases, said then-Prime-Minister Ehud Barak, approving the message this kind of killing sends to those suspected of planning attacks on Israel.) Helicopter missile strikes and rocketing of homes continued, as did home demolitions, destruction of thousands of olive trees (for “security reasons”) and confiscation of Palestinian land for expansion of settlements. Widespread closures and army-built barricades prevented Palestinians not only from entering Israel but from traveling between towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza.

Gaza City demonstration for the Palestinians’ right of return.	In Jerusalem, author Virginia Baron and Gila Swirski of the Israeli women’s peace group, Bat Shalom.

A Chill Among the Peace Camps
One of the significant casualties of this period was the obvious breakdown of many longstanding relationships between the Israeli and Palestinian peace camps. The group I traveled with in January was a small interfaith peace-building delegation to Palestine and Israel sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. We soon became aware of the chill the word “coexistence” aroused, especially among Palestinians. Except among women’s groups, there was a noticeable lessening of cooperative activity between Palestinians and Israelis. The only people keeping in contact were the most radical and dedicated activists on both sides, those who share pretty much the same basic concepts for a solution: ending the occupation, returning to 1967 boundaries (with some adjustments) and sharing Jerusalem. The refugee question is more complicated, but most agree that it need not be an insurmountable obstacle if people approach it with the will to work it out. Of course that will is what is missing. But, as activist-writer (and former Knesset member) Uri Avnery commented at the time:

In the last year and a half, the Israeli public has become used to the idea that Jerusalem will be divided and that the Eastern part will be returned to the Palestinian people. The debate about the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state is over, and the real discussion about the solution of the refugee problem has begun. The idea of an exchange of territory has taken hold. All these are now the starting-point of the next step.

This was before the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel’s Prime Minister, but there is no reason to think these conditions would not return if the low-intensity warfare were to cease. (Of course, by the time this article appears, unpredictable changes may have occurred.)

The Israeli peace movement itself had also split, mostly between those who thought the Palestinians had betrayed them by starting a new Intifada in reaction to Sharon’s claim to the Temple Mount (or Noble Sanctuary), and those who understood the deep frustrations caused by the ongoing occupation and the failure of the peace process to improve the living conditions of Palestinians. Israeli conversations revolved around either the question of Jerusalem or refugees. At a Friday Women in Black demonstration, women disagreed vociferously about the “right of return” claimed by Palestinians.

Anger and Despair
Beyond activist circles, war was in the air in the West Bank and Gaza, and you could sense a feeling of despair, while in Israel the mood was one of apprehension. Israelis were reluctant to travel on buses or go to malls. The streets at night were empty. Palestinian citizens of Israel seemed alternately angry and hopeless about the future. As one Palestinian leader in Haifa remarked, “We don’t know where we are going or even what it is we hope for.” But he also mentioned that for the first time, Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, Israel and Lebanon had met in Cyprus to discuss ways they could cooperate to improve their worsening economic conditions. This was an indication that the longtime psychological separation between Palestinians in and out of Israel was fading.

“The bombardment of Beir Jala and Beir Sahour,” by 10-year-old Nida Abu Aita.

The most seriously (perhaps irrevocably) affected segment of the population is the children in the war zones. Wherever we went in the West Bank, we heard about children who couldn’t sleep at night or who suffered from nightmares, who had reverted to bed-wetting and who couldn’t concentrate at school. We saw the look in the eyes of children in West Bank towns like Beit Sahour, Beit Jala and Bethlehem, whose homes had been bombed, children who clung to their parents and were afraid to leave their parents’ side. We didn’t visit the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo as we had hoped to do, but we heard stories about the fear that persisted there, too. Who can imagine what permanent damage has been done to the older youth of both sides who have learned to hate each other, who have spent their days and nights in constant warfare of stones, rifles, bombs, rockets?

Yet despair was not all-pervasive. When a woman in one West Bank town showed me the bullet-pocked wall of her house, I asked her how often their area was hit. “Only once,” she said. The sniper who had provoked the attack by shooting toward an Israeli target from their street had been identified and told (in no uncertain terms, I gathered) that he was never to do it again. “We don’t want our children endangered,” the woman declared.

The solution sounds so simple when you talk to activists who are the long-distance runners: Israelis who keep rebuilding Palestinian homes after they are bulldozed, Palestinians who keep organizing demonstrations and inviting the other side to join them, women who don’t stop meeting with women on the other side, researchers and educators, doctors and nurses, who refuse to give up or give in to hopelessness. These people know that the occupation must end after 33 years of turmoil and terror, that justice and common sense must prevail someday.

Yet for visitors, it’s easy to be discouraged when you go to homes of humble Palestinian farmers where settlers have stoned all the windows out and ripped out irrigation pipes and cut down olive trees—people who face daily harrassment and have no place to hide from hate and hostility. They tell you their stories and offer you tea and insist that you stay for lunch. And before you leave, they look imploringly into your eyes and ask you if there isn’t something you can do to change your country’s policies. They say they don’t know how long they can last if things go on the way they are.

Virginia Baron, President of the International Fellowship of Recon-ciliation, has traveled in, and written widely about, the Middle East.