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I Was a Human Shield
by
Billie Moskona-Lerman
The death of human rights activist Rachel Corrie,
crushed to death
while
trying to stop an IDF bulldozer, was reason for
Billie Moskona-Lerman
to go
to the Rafah Refugee Camp and to spend 24 hours at
the most miserable
place
in the Gaza Strip. A place where shooting never
stops, where shells
whistle
by the windows, the walls are covered with
bloodstains,
houses
turn into ruins and people walk the streets
barefooted and desperate.
She
came back a different person. In a rare human
document she describes
her
encounter with death.
With the above words, the weekend supplement of
Ma'ariv newspaper
(28/3/03)
introduced to its readers a report, giving a
glimpse of Palestinian
daily
life which is very rare in the mainstream Israeli
press.
I visited hell and I came back in one piece. It
happened on the night
between Thursday and Friday last week [March 20-21]
when I accompanied
Joe and
Laura, two 20-year old human rights activists, in
acting as a human
shield
facing the IDF. When they asked me do I join in and
I
answered "yes," I did
not fully realize what I was getting myself into.
It was my first
experience
under fire: so close to death, so anonymous, my
life so easily
abandoned in
somebody else's hands. Never did I feel so weak, so
defenceless. I
did say "I
am coming," and we set out. It was 7.30 PM. We
walked through the
main street
of Rafah, a town which is in fact just a big refugee camp. We walked
in
darkness, through ruins, pot-holes and puddles,
torn bits of nylon
and
plastic, barbed wire and piles of rubbish. Here and
there some stores
were
open. Groups of young boys were walking around us,
shouting "Sa'lam
Aleikum,
Sa'lam Aleikum." Suddenly, one of them picked up a
stone and threw it
at us.
It flew through the air and fell near us. Joe and Laura were not very disturbed. "We represent for them the American culture which they hate," said Laura. I vaguely knew that we were walking towards Rafah's border with Egypt. We walked towards the last house in the last row of Rafah houses. The home of Muhammad Jamil Kushta. At a certain stage, after ten minutes of fast walking in empty alleys, we went aside into a long and narrow alley at whose end I could see a big pillar. When we came near I could see it was a tall guard tower.
When we came near the tower, Joe and Laura raised their hands high and signalled to me to do the same. I did as they asked and walked towards the IDF guard tower with my hands high above my head, walking quickly - but not too quickly - through the empty alley. Our clothing was fluorescent orange, with silver strips to make it even more conspicuous in the night. Joe held a big megaphone in one hand and a big phosphorescent sheet in the other.
Twenty metres from the tower we could see, even in the utter darkness, that we were facing a major fortification - an Israeli strong point at the exact border between Rafah and Egypt. A few steps before the tower Laura abruptly pushed me into a small, dark entrance and whispered "Quick, it's here." I went over the doorstep, feeling the way with my foot, with the eyes gradually getting used to the sight of a high, dark corridor.
Five steps, and my brow hit strongly against a concrete block. Passing under it, I went up ten winding stairs at whose end was a door. A short ring and the door opened to reveal the smiling face of Muhammad Kushta. Standing in the door, smiling back, I felt relieved that the damned walking was over and that we got to somewhere looking like a hospitable house. I did not realize what kind of night was waiting for me. I had not the slightest idea.
Muhammad Jamil Kushta, whose house we have come to defend, opened the door to see two young human rights activists who had been spending the nights in his home for the past few weeks, plus a woman introducing herself as a French journalist. The French journalist was me, at that moment nobody knew I was actually an Israeli from Tel Aviv.
"Tfatdal, Tfatdal," he said as he opened the door, the greeting joined by his young wife Nora holding little Nancy in her hands. It was already a quarter past eight when we all sat down on the floor by the little heater when suddenly it started. A noise which to my ear sounded very very close, a rolling noise, an ear-shattering noise, a noise which sounded like hell. It was the first time that night that the house came under fire, and the first time for me to be under fire. I started shaking. My entire body was shaking.
The noise was rolling by my ears like a series of giant fireballs. Shooting, shooting, shooting. I understood this is how an encounter with death looks. With the first burst Jamil moved his tea glass slightly. Up and down, up and down. Nora held Nancy tightly. Joe and Laura went to the baby Ibasan who slept in the corner and her brother the young Jamil and crouched over them. It lasted half an hour, and for an hour and half afterwards my body was still shaking. But I did not yet realize it was just the beginning.
I watched Jamil without words and he said: "It goes on like this every night. For two and a half years."
"What are they shooting at?" I asked.
"In the air," he shrugged.
"Why?"
"Out of fear," he said simply. "They are also afraid, alone there in the dark. They are very young."
"Why aren't you taking your children elsewhere, away from here?" I asked after getting my voice under control.
"I have no money," he answered.
"I have no money
for
another house, every penny I had was invested in
these walls, and I
got into debt even so."
A Dangerous Game
It is not by chance that over the past few weeks,
Laura and Joe are
spending
their nights in Jamil's house. It is the last house
in the row of
houses
fronting the Egyptian border. Some twenty metres
from this house,
perhaps
less, the IDF built a high fortification, destroyed
all houses to the
right
and left and stationed guns, tanks and mortars
targeting the city.
That is
why Laura and Joe are sleeping over in Jamil's
home. This is the next
house
in line to be demolished.
There is no way for Jamil and the human rights activists to know in advance when the army would come at this house with tanks or D-9 bulldozers - and it will be the job of Laura and Joe to try preventing the IDF from approaching the house. Laura and Joe are members of ISM, International Solidarity Movement, a group of human rights activists who oppose the Israeli occupation through direct non-violent action.
They are young, politically motivated university graduates - very extreme and determined pacifists. Their purpose is to prevent the army from harming civilians. Every night, with the beginning of the curfew, they are spreading in Palestinian homes on the first row, which are exposed to shooting from the military positions. They wear phosphorescent clothing and megaphones. In the midst of firing, or in the face of IDF bulldozers, they emerge to call out in English the text of international conventions and block the soldiers when they come in, shoot, bomb or demolish homes. Until a week ago it worked.
They were calling out, warning, shouting, blocked the bulldozers with their bodies - and the army turned back. On Sunday, March 17, all bets were off. What happened found its way to the media of the entire world, causing a storm. A young woman, human rights activist, was killed by an IDF bulldozer which ran over her. Her name was Rachel Corrie, she was 23 years old, and Joe Smith recorded her last moments.
He saw her facing the bulldozer, as was her habit, trying to establish contact with the soldier driving it. A second later she was not visible any more. A cat and mouse game is how members of the human rights group call the dangerous game they are playing with the IDF D-9 bulldozers. When a bulldozer approaches a house marked for destruction, they sit down in their phosphorescent clothing on the mound of earth carried on the giant bulldozer extended front, addressing by megaphone the soldier behind the windows of opaque, reinforced glass.
Standing on the front of the bulldozer requires maintaining a very delicate balance, and there comes a moment when you can overturn and fall off. Until the day Rachel was killed, the soldiers did not push things to far. They would always stop and turn back one minute before this could happen. But on that Sunday, the soldier driving the bulldozer did not stop at the critical moment, and Rachel was killed.
Joe Smith's photos document, stage by stage, Rachel's folding into death. Like a big strong bird which flies in the sky, gets a blow, squeezes itself and slowly falls down to become a small crumpled heap on the ground. There is a photo of Rachel standing determined in front of the bulldozer, there she stands on the mound of earth. And there she disappears, she lies on the ground, her mouth open as if trying to say something.
Alice crouches over her (later, Alice would quote what she said with her last strength: "My back is broken"), she draws in her two legs, the body lies like a lifeless sack.
Rachel is dead. After her death Rachel became a Shaheed (martyr).
From all
over the world, media was called upon to interview
the group of young people,
which had numbered eight and is now reduced to
seven. So it was that
I also
arrived there. A short phone call from my editor, a
contact person at
the
Erez checkpoint, a taxi, a Palestinian photographer
from Gaza, and an emphatic instruction from the contact person:
"Nobody must know that
you are an Israeli. From now on, you are a French
journalist - period."
A Bad Death
I lived with the group for 24 hours. Crazy hours,
very frightening,
hours of
fear and apprehension in which I felt at my nerve
endings, a wildly
beating
heart and wet underwear. I understood what it means
to live with
death for 24
hours a day. A bad death. With guns, tanks and
bulldozers targeting
your
home, your bedroom, your kitchen, your balcony,
your living room. No
way of
defending yourself, nowhere to run to. At midnight
in Jamil's home,
facing the
shooting tanks and feeling that these may really be
my last moments,
I
decided to open my cards. I threw aside the instructions not to
expose myself
because of Hamas and Tanzim and all the others who
may murder me at a
moment's notice.
With a feeling of profound finality I suddenly said: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I must tell you the truth. I am an Israeli journalist from Tel Aviv.
There was a moment's silence, then Jamil smiled and started speaking in fluent Hebrew: "Welcome, Welcome, Ahalan Ve'sahalan [Arab greeting which became part of colloquial Hebrew]. I lived for four years on Sokolov Street in Herzlia, I was the shawarma cutter in the Mifgash Ha'Sharon Restaurant. I have also worked on Abba Eban Street in Netanya and at the Hod Hotel in Herzlia Pituach. What I liked most was to eat cherry ice-cream at the Little Tel-Aviv Restaurant. Is it still open?"
Rains of bullets came down on us on that one single night. A single night, for me. The shooting went on continuously from 1.30 to 4.15, near the first light. Only then it calmed down. My teeth did not stop chattering. "Its' verrry near," was the only thing I managed to say for four consecutive hours. Jamil and Nora, with their three babies, tried to calm me.
"The soldiers know us, they know we're clear. You hear it so close, because they are shooting at the wall near us."
"So they never hit your house itself?" I ask him with an enormous burst of hope.
"Oh, sometimes they do. Look at the bullet holes." I raise my head and look to the sides. The ceiling is full of holes, the side walls are cut up. So is the kitchen wall near the tap, near the table, in the toilet, one centimetre from the children's beds. Some of the holes have been filled up. Every night, once the shooting ends, Jamil closes the bullet holes with white cement.
The walls are patchwork, and if you dare approach the window you can see that Jamil and Nora's home is surrounded by ruins on all sides. Everybody escaped, only he remained because of having no money to take his family away from here. The bullets are whistling and Jamil makes for his family salad and omelettes and bakes pita bread on a traditional tabun oven. The bullets whistle and we are eating. With a good appetite. We bend down whenever the shooting seems to come closer. It is incredible what human beings can get used to, I think. A week ago, Jamil took up a big black marking pen and wrote on a piece of cardboard: "Soldiers, don't shoot please. There are sleeping children here."
He wrote in big Hebrew letters, and Rachel Corrie
had climbed on the
building's outer wall to hang it. Now Rachel's face
appears on a
Palestinian
martyr's poster which hangs on the living room
window. Jamil smiles
sadly and
tells me and my chattering teeth and my clenched
hands and my wildly
beating
heart: "What can we do? When Allah decides our time
has come to die,
we die.
It is all in Allah's hands." It does not reassure
me.
A Stranger Among Us
24 hours I had lived in the ruined and beleaguered
city of
Rafah. "Rafah
Camp," as both inhabitants and internationals call
it. Most of the
time, the
people I met did not know I was Israeli. It
is important to
note this,
because the words I heard and the conversations I
conducted were not
part of
an Israeli-Palestinian pingpong. Nobody tried to
accuse me, to
convince me or
to make me understand something which I did not
understand before. As
far as
they were concerned, I was a European journalist.
During these 24 hours I did things which could be described as taking a terrible, irresponsible risk, unfitting for a person my age. Still, I am glad I did it. I feel now that I am not the same person which I was before entering Rafah. A person can grow considerably older in just 24 hours. Now I also understand better the fascination war has for many men. No other human experience, however ecstatic, can make so much adrenalin flow through your veins. But I was mostly concerned trying to understand how it is to live there for more than one day. My trek had began in Tel-Aviv at 8.30AM, with the nice friendly taxi driver Yehuda Gubali offering me water and a chewing gum as I got in.
He was curious to know what I was looking for at the godforsaken Erez Checkpoint, on such a nice morning. I told him the truth: I was on my way to meet the ISM people. "Oh, I read in the paper about that girl who was killed, what's her name, and let me tell you the truth, I was glad she was killed. Who is that little busybody from America to come and interfere in our affairs? Standing on the bulldozer, really! No wonder she was run over. Let these people learn a lesson. Is this their country?"
The sky was grey
when I crossed
alone the
border crossing at Erez, after signing the Army
Spokesman's document
stating
that I take full responsibility for my decision to
cross and
absolving the
army from any responsibility for what may happen to
me on the other
side. I
crossed past the last bunker, waved back to the soldiers, and stood
near the
rolls of barbed wire to wait for my Palestinian
escort, Talal Abu
Rahma.
Abu Rahma has taken the photo which symbolizes the
current intifada
more than
any other: the death of the child Muhammad Al-Dura
in the arms of his
father, during the exchange of fire between Israeli
soldiers and armed
Palestinians. Nowadays, Abu Rahma is a very busy man who lives in
Gaza and works
for
foreign networks. He is my official guide, and the
first thing he
says is:
"From this moment, not a single Hebrew word. Even
the photographer
must not
know that you are Israeli. From this moment you are
a French journalist."
With these words in mind I get into a car heading for Rafah Camp, an hour and half drive from Gaza. We race along the broken Gaza coastal road, in the direction of Khan Yuneis and Rafah. "You see these hotels and restaurants? Once they were all merry, full of life. Now everything is neglected, broken, abandoned." At the "Abu Huly" checkpoint, near the Gush Katif Israeli settlements, we stop. We wait for the soldiers' permission to proceed. Abu Rahame is an intensive person, i.e. nervous. He lights one cigarette with another. This IDF checkpoint must not be crossed by a car with less than three persons in. On both sides there are children waiting at the roadside.
They take one shekel from drivers who take them in their car to fill up the required number, then on the other side they get another shekel from another driver to go the other way. This is their way of of surviving this collapsed economy.
We wait. "Sometimes you have to wait here for three days. Depends on the situation." But this time, we get the permission after half an hour. We go through a beautiful, neglected road, lined by ancient eucalyptus trees. And then we are at Rafah Camp. A big, ruined place. You can hardly call this place, with 140,000 people, a city. Palestinians are unanimous that it is "the poorest, most miserable, most damaged place of all: 250 inhabitants killed in the Intifada, more than 400 houses destroyed. Half of those killed were children." When I enter the apartment used by "The Internationals" I start feeling that here, especially, I should not identify myself as Israeli.
Israeliness, for these young people, represents the worst evil they know: demolition of homes, brutal killings, bulldozers, shooting, tanks, humiliations, hunger and poverty. The young people in the room are not quick to communicate with the French journalist which they think they are meeting. They are tired of the media, they have not yet completely come to terms with the death of their friend, they are not eager to answer questions and they don't particularly care that I have only two hours. I watch the nervously tapping foot of my escort. "Come back for me tomorrow," I suddenly ask him.
After a short debate, in which I promise to take
very much care of
myself, he
bids me goodbye with a disapproving look on his
face. Joe Smith, the
only
member of the group really willing to talk to me,
offers to go
together to
the internet cafe a few steps away, and on the way
he tells me how he
had
come to join the ISM.
Seeping Fear
Smith is a 21-year old guy from Kansas City. While
in high school he
read a
book about peace activists and became enthusiastic
with the idea. In
a
political science course he met with Prof. Steve
Naber, read Marx and
realized his status as a white male, with
privileges at the top of
the
pyramid. He went to Slovakia, joined
anti-globalisation groups and
decided
that what he most wants to do with his life is to
devote it to the
weak, to
those who don't have the privileges he has.
Especially he wants to
challenge
the dictatorship of the strong which is enforced by
his own
government, which
is how he got to the Rafah group.
While talking we get to the internet cafe in the city center, where I meet Muhammad who does not want to tell the French journalist his full name "because there is very much trouble around here," but who insists that I sit by him and read from the screen his online diary and look at the photos he had placed at www.rafah.vze.com.
Muhammad is 18, he has a delicate face and studies English in the university. I decide to gamble and suggest to him to be my interpreter and escort in Rafah. I leave Joe behind the computer and walk with Muhammad through Salah A-Dn Street, Rafah's main street. I notice a bit of discomfort in Muhammad's look and ask him what is the matter. "You better buy a keffiya and cover your hair. That way, you will be less conspicuous, and people will feel that you identify with their suffering."
I immediately take his advice. We stop at the first stall, buy a keffiya, stop a taxi, haggle a bit and agree upon 50 shekels for half an hour and start going around the city. Already on the first moment he asks if I am the foreign journalist who had come to visit the internationals.
Rumors spread swiftly here. The driver tells me
that it was him who
had taken
Rachel Corrie to her death on that fateful morning.
The first site
Muhammad
chooses to show me is at Block G on the northern
edge of the city,
where 400
houses had been destroyed. As we come near,
inhabitants living in
tents warn
us not to come close to the tanks with their guns
directed at
us.
"When they see something moving they shoot," a woman on a donkey warns Muhammad. The rest of the way we do half crawling among the ruins, through the narrow alleys, careful not to raise our heads. The tanks are some 200 metres away, their guns at the ready.
It is important to Muhammad to show me the site of the mass house demolition. He had photographed house after house and entered the houses into his internet site, which is daily visited by 900 people from all over the world. Row after row of destroyed houses, with personal belongings scattered and strewn around. Dolls, furniture, bicycles, books. We crawl through the alleys to avoid the threatening guns of tanks.
"They can shoot at any moment, just at any suspicious movement," he says and leads further in. The fear comes crawling up my feet and legs. Finally, when we come closer and closer to the tanks and the ruins become deeper and deeper, I raise my voice: "Enough!" Muhammad yields to the French journalist, and we get into the taxi and move on. The next destination is the al-Ubur Airfield which had been destroyed by F-16 airplanes, then the ruined house beside which Rachel Corrie was killed, then a small hospital whose two ambulances are running around constantly.
Most things we watch from a distance of no less than 100 metres "since shooting can start at any moment." After two hours I insist on calling a halt. We enter a small restaurant and order large pita bread with humous, tehina and coca cola, all for four and a half shekels [About one dollar, less than half the Tel-Aviv price.] "Where do you live?" I ask. "I moved with my parents to a different house. Two months ago they destroyed our home. I came from the university and found everything ruined.
The computer, the books, the notebooks, my study
materials. Nothing
was left.
They came and destroyed everything at a moment's
notice, did not give
any
chance of taking things out. We were just thrown
into the street. Me,
my
father, my mother, my three brothers, my
grandfather. And believe me,"
he says
to the French journalist, "they had no reason. We
are just an ordinary
family,
not involved in anything. They just destroyed our
life in one hour."
I look
at Muhammad talking. Only now, after I saw the 400
destroyed houses,
do I
really understand his grief. Muhammad leads me back
to the
internationals'
flat just as they are about to go pay a condolence
visit to the
families of
people killed on the same day as Rachel. To my
surprise, they don't
object to
my joining them. The seven of us squeeze ourselves
into a single
taxi, and we
go the water tower at the edge of the city. One of
the group's duties
is to
guard the water and electricity workers who repair
the water pipes or
electricity wires damaged in the shooting. While
they do their work
Joe,
Laura, Alice and Gordon form a circle around them,
to defend them
from the
soldiers' shots.
A Faceless Enemy
In the bereaved families' houses, where I sat with
the others on the
floor,
drank bitter coffee and ate dates, I hardly ever
heard the word "Israelis."
Even the word "soldiers" was only rarely used. What
the Palestinians
usually
say is simply "they."
This is not by chance. During the 30 hours that I lived there I never saw a flesh-and-blood Israeli soldier. From the Palestinian point of view the enemy has no face, no body, no human form. The enemy is hidden behind giant D-9 bulldozers, monsters as big as a house themselves, at whose top there are squares of opaque reinforced glass.
The enemy is hidden behind bunkers, guard towers, metal tanks. The enemy has no face, no expressions which could be interpreted. The enemy is hidden behind tons of khaki-coloured steel. Massive steel, frightening, belching fire without warning. For the man in the street the enemy is virtual, sophisticated, unhuman, inaccessible.
And facing this enemy are the Palestinians I see walking in the dirty streets. Many with torn clothes, some barefooted, neglected, manifestly poor. You can see the traces of sorrow, apprehension, suffering, inadequate food. At 45 they look old. They walk from one side of the city to the other, seeking some kind of a job. Men walk in groups, hither and fro. They have no jobs and nowhere to go.
They live squeezed - men, women and children - in narrow houses and small pieces of land. On the way back from the condolences visit, we encounter a massive group of marching men. At the front a car with enormous loudspeakers, blaring music and ten masked young men holding swords and calling out slogans against the Iraq War. "A demonstration, a demonstration," the internationals call out, stopping the taxi and joining right in among the fiery men.
Willy-nilly, the French journalist also walks with the march, keeping constant eye-contact with the three women of the group - Laura, Alice and Carol. There are no Palestinian women to be seen. It is one of these demonstrations which look very frightening on TV. Guys with black rags covering their eyes, blaring loudspeakers, swords and knives between teeth. The direct human contact, at close range, diminishes the drama.
I look at the fiery men and toy with imagining how they would have reacted if they knew that there is an Israeli identity card right there in my pocket. In their sweating faces I can see how young and desperate they are, looking for action. Alice, Laura and Carol join the heated chanting of slogans against the Americans and Israelis, taking out a large colour poster, with the face of Rachel in her role as a martyr.
Alice, a 26-year old Londoner, takes up the megaphone and delivers a fiery speech on what Rachel had done for the Palestinians and how she was killed. Alice speaks in English and the Palestinian men listen in admiration. I feel that Alice is the stongest woman in the group. She is young, charismatic and determined. I had to watch my chance for ten hours before she consented to peel off her tough exterior, soften a bit her Jeanne d'Arc image and exchange some words with me.
Alice, who prefers not to mention her family name, grew up in London. After high school she studied computer programming, had a nice job and rented a good apartment. "I lived a bourgeois life and I found that it leads nowhere. Going to an expensive restaurant with a new boyfriend, and on the way passing homeless people sleeping on the pavement. I started to be interested in how the strong exploit the weak, and for a time I went to work in a factory. Afterwards I became more and more political. I started to give an account to myself for everything I did, what did I eat, what entertainment did I enjoy, what does it mean to live in a capitalist society. I went to demonstrate in Prague and got arrested. I put my courage to the test, until I finally trained myself to come here. Here it is the most difficult. What is most interesting to me is to analyze the tactics of force used by the strong against the weak. Only here, when I help the Palestinians to face the Israelis, do I feel that my life has a meaning."
We
walked for 20
minutes with
the stormy march, then we moved aside and started
shopping for the evening: preserved meat, noodles,
rice, sugar,
cookies and
tea. The group is financed by contributions and
lives as a commune.
Every
spent Shekel is carefully noted down.
Nowhere to Escape
At Six PM, a last team meeting ahead of the night.
The small commune
is
conducted by strict rules. Every morning at 8.30
they meet at the
apartment
after having spent the night at threatened
Palestinians homes. They
discuss
the experiences of the past night, hear from
Palestinian friends on
developments on the ground, and divide tasks for
the coming day.
They stand as human shields at electricity installations and water wells, collect testimonies, and take footage on small video cameras. They face the hostile lumps of steel with their megaphones and try to establish dialogue with the soldiers inside.
These seven people are taking up an enormous load in this chaos. But who is to take care of these young people themselves, who sleep two hours per night and had not yet time to come to terms with having intimately witnessed Rachel's death? They spare themselves nothing. They had insisted on wiping the blood from Rachel's face, touching her broken back, taking the body to the morgue with their own hands, wrap it with shrouds, and accompany it in the ambulance to Tel-Aviv, sharply debating with the soldiers who stopped them for hot hours at the checkpoint despite the fumes which started to arise from the body.
The mother role is
played by Carol
Moskovitz, who joined the group with her husband
Gordon a week ago.
Carol is
61 and Gordon seems a bit younger. They are
artists, they live in
Canada, and
have been travelling the world for the past three
months. When they
heard of
what happened to Rachel they decided to cut their
trip short and come
to
offer their help. Since Sunday, they act like
parents to the younger
members
of the group: preparing tea, asking questions,
trying to address the
shock
and disbelief which Rachel left behind. Carol and
Gordon have three
daughters
in Canada. An hour ago Carol got a phone call from
her eldest, 30
years old,
with warm greetings for Mother's Day. Carol and
Gordon conceal from
their
daughters the fact that they are in Rafah Camp.
They don't want to
make their
children and grandchildren worry.
It was at 7.30 that I went with Laura and Joe to
stay the night in
the house
of Muhammad Jamil Kushta, the first house fronting
the IDF position
on the
Egyptian border, an ill-fated house. There, in
Jamil's house under
the
ceaseless shooting, guns, missiles, rockets and
only the devil knows
what
else, for four consecutive hours, truly feeling
that these might be
my last
moments, I gambled and revealed my identity as an
Israeli from
Tel-Aviv.
Then I said that my own sons might be among the soldiers shooting at us, not knowing that I was there in the house they were shooting at, or it might be one of my sons' friends who had visited my home. And that was the moment we started to look at each other and laugh. Three babies, two Americans, a Palestinian couple and an Israeli woman all sitting around a big bowl of salad, with bullets whistling through the air, we started to laugh.
A laughter of despair, of apprehension, of relief at the human closeness which we suddenly found. I knew that with some luck I would get through the night and run for my life, but Jamil and Nora had no escape, that they were doomed to raise their three babies under live fire.
And
then Laura opened
her mouth
to reveal that she was Jewish too, and rather an
observant Jewess
too. And it
turned out that the fiery Alice, the group's
"Jeanne d'Arc," the
Israel-hater, was Jewish too. "And the soldiers,"
said Jamil. "They too
are
just 20-year old children who have to stand out
there, alone in the
dark,
shaking, within the cold steel." We all agreed:
life is short and
human
beings are silly creatures.
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