Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Monday, 8 September 2008
The Fox
The Fox
The sweep was being conducted slowly and I had stopped listening to their progress over the radio. Again I gazed upon the building before me, the crumbling brick structure with the dirty windows sitting in their rusting frames, the occasional balcony with some pot plants growing haphazardly and hands sticking out of windows, along with the occasional swathe of plaster that seemed to be holding the whole thing together. Wait, hands sticking out of windows? I scanned back and saw a window being closed slowly, deliberately, carefully, on a second floor flat. I didn’t say anything I just continued to watch the window being closed through my scope. Firing on the building was a no-no owing to the presence of our own guys inside. To my left I heard "was that what I thought it was?" "Yeah I saw it too!" I said. Tommer transmitted to Levinson inside the building that there was someone in the third floor apartment. He concluded his sweep of the lower floors before moving to the apartment that we had targeted, there was no doubt, it had to be him. The civilians outside had sworn that there was no one left in the building even after being told that if anyone is found inside they would be treated as a threat and dealt with accordingly.
Once they had figured out exactly which apartment we were talking about they went in throwing stun grenades and clearing the rooms by shooting into them. No chances were taken and a grenade was tossed in for good measure. Once this had taken place the guys began to move into the apartment. They found nothing except considerable mess that had been caused by so much carnage going off in a perfectly normal apartment. There was no body and no sign of life. They proceeded to move forward, towards the kitchen, Levinson took out a grenade to throw in but Bull stopped him, pointing out that they probably used gas canisters for cooking; they compromised on another stun grenade, which they threw in and entered the room with guns blazing. Again they found nothing at all that would suggest the Fox was or had ever been in there.
From the kitchen they could hear muffled voices coming from the room that had already been cleared. They seemed to be coming from the wall itself. As they moved in to investigate they could hear that the shouts were in fact coming from behind a cupboard. What confused the guys was that they could hear shouts as in plural, the question as to who was in there with him was answered once the Bull had kicked the cupboard over and they had pulled these guys out of their little hole and thrown them to the ground where they had been cuffed and searched by Forrest and Big Tom. I doubt it was a pleasant experience for them. In there with them were seven mobile phones, a Kalashnikov, colt forty five handgun and enough bullets to kill a lot of people.
The second guy in there was the number three most wanted man in Nablus; Salomon Hirawi. Capturing the Fox was a coup as of itself but capturing both of them was the stuff of legend! Hirawi was a young guy, in his early twenties and in charge of communication with Hezbollah and Hamas in the Gaza strip, we had heard rumors that he was even responsible for bringing some Hezbollah operatives into Nablus to lead and train the various cells in the city.
Tommer had a grin all over his face and I felt the flush of elation that comes with carrying such a successful operation, I cheked my watch, 08:47 they had wanted these two badly enough to bring in extraq blocking forces allowing us to remain in the area well after sunrise. All that was left was to wait for the call over the radio telling us to come back to the vehicle so that we can get out of there. The chances of a riot developing over the capture of these two were high so we had to get to the cars quick. I watched as the squads started picking themselves up one by one and moving back to the front of the building towards our transport. Then the voice came over the radio telling us it was our turn to move. I picked myself up and moved off with Tommer in front and Baby behind me. When we reached the vehicles I saw the Palestinian civilians sitting on the ground outside their homes. Families mostly, I noticed one woman whose son was talking to her but she seemed unable to hear, she simply stared straight ahead seemingly at nothing. The man I assumed to be her husband stood behind her nervously smoking a cigarette refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
When we were safely in the vehicle Tommer leaned over and told me that the Fox was to be travelling with us in the car. "The Fox is coming with us?" I repeated back to him incredulously, "yeah and the boss is travelling with us now!" Wow, I thought, so I was actually going to meet this guy who had orchestrated so many attacks, was responsible for so many dead. The thought intimidated me, suicide bombers were one thing but they were easy, when you turned up on their doorstep they simply gave up without any problems. The Fox was something different; I was surprised that we had even managed to get him alive. Alongside my fear there was also curiosity, what did this boss of the terrorism industry look like? How would he behave around us? What did he even look like?
When the Bull brought him out he was shaking and crying, he was babbling non stop in a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic. He was blindfolded so Bull had to help him get into the car and we pulled him in and sat him on the floor. He was still going on in his Hebric and then he started crying again, shouting one minute that he wanted see an officer and begging for someone to shoot him the next. He went on like that for the whole journey, just crying and begging us for death. I was surprised at my encounter with this overweight balding, crying man. It made feel ridiculous for being intimidated by the thought of him and reminded me not to make assumptions about the people I arrested. Over and above this having to sit there and listen to him begging for death when I knew that several weapons had been found in his hole with him and had remained unused.
As I looked at him during the journey I asked myself what it was that he told others, younger men and women in order to convince them to throw away their lives so callously. Why it was that people paid attention to him, to this man who gave up without a fight, who was crying the aords of surrender at the top of his lungs when the army finally arrived at his doorstep. He didn’t really mean any of what he said about begging for death, he wasn't prepared to do to himself that which he exprted others to do, he was a coward.
When we trundled up to our base all of the commandos from various units were waiting outside it, I could see them all turn and look at us, knowing who we had inside. For that moment I knew that we were the men of the moment, not only had we managed to get the Fox and Hirawi but we them alive! We drove past them and into the base proper, with the Fox moaning the whole time in our ears. We deposited the Fox with a whole load of important looking officers where he cried even louder for someone to shoot him.
The idea that there were soldiers valiantly defending Israel against Palestinians determined to free themselves in persuance of their own state and freedom seemed pathetic now. It was one thing for stone throwers not to care about a free Palestine it was another for the guy who was sending out all of these suicide bombers and causing all of this havoc not to believe in it. He had the tools but he never even tried to take us on, he called on us to shoot him but he could have shot himself and he could have shot at and killed Israeli soldiers. I couldn't help but ask myself over and over "is this really my enemy?" I couldn’t justify my previous fear of this man sitting before me. Was this really the man who preached to suicide bombers, convincing them of the righteousness of the ideal, the one who had spent his entire life either in prison or planning the murder of Israelis and Arabs? Now that he had been caught his true self had been exposed. It was probably as much of a surprise for him as it was for me. Maybe he had thought that he could do it, perhaps that is how he justified sending his pawns off to our cities but when his time came he just couldn’t pull the trigger.
So now what was the point? What was I doing there fighting these idiots? Was there no one who took all of this seriously?
Suddenly the whole thing seemed to be about career hungry Israeli officers chasing power hungry Palestinian psychos. The whole thing would have been funny if the stakes weren’t so high. It made me understand that Palestinian stare that they always seemed to give us. It was the stare of a people who knew that they were beaten, of a people who were represented by nobody, least of all those who claimed to be fighting for them. All of it seemed to be about self interest, what would the Fox have been if he hadn’t been the Fox? A grocer? A butcher? The fact that we were after him had made him into a hero in his clan, a man of power, someone whose life was filled with mystery. The fact was that none of that was based on any substance. It was clear to see from his reaction that he had no intention of killing himself and didn’t really want us to kill him for he had already run away from that fate. He preached hate and destruction to all Palestinians but when it came time for him to actually pull the trigger himself he chose surrender and a lifetime in an Israeli jail. He didn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out and he made me feel that all of the rhetoric was a lie, that none of the higher ranking terrorists genuinely believed what they said but that they said it to entice the gullible members of society into doing that which they had no intention of doing themselves.
The revelation hurt me, it was a world away from my naïve view of the conflict upon entering the army. I had always thought that it would be different to this, that we were fighting them and they were fighting us and all of it was being done for a good reason but it seemed that I was wrong.
The sweep was being conducted slowly and I had stopped listening to their progress over the radio. Again I gazed upon the building before me, the crumbling brick structure with the dirty windows sitting in their rusting frames, the occasional balcony with some pot plants growing haphazardly and hands sticking out of windows, along with the occasional swathe of plaster that seemed to be holding the whole thing together. Wait, hands sticking out of windows? I scanned back and saw a window being closed slowly, deliberately, carefully, on a second floor flat. I didn’t say anything I just continued to watch the window being closed through my scope. Firing on the building was a no-no owing to the presence of our own guys inside. To my left I heard "was that what I thought it was?" "Yeah I saw it too!" I said. Tommer transmitted to Levinson inside the building that there was someone in the third floor apartment. He concluded his sweep of the lower floors before moving to the apartment that we had targeted, there was no doubt, it had to be him. The civilians outside had sworn that there was no one left in the building even after being told that if anyone is found inside they would be treated as a threat and dealt with accordingly.
Once they had figured out exactly which apartment we were talking about they went in throwing stun grenades and clearing the rooms by shooting into them. No chances were taken and a grenade was tossed in for good measure. Once this had taken place the guys began to move into the apartment. They found nothing except considerable mess that had been caused by so much carnage going off in a perfectly normal apartment. There was no body and no sign of life. They proceeded to move forward, towards the kitchen, Levinson took out a grenade to throw in but Bull stopped him, pointing out that they probably used gas canisters for cooking; they compromised on another stun grenade, which they threw in and entered the room with guns blazing. Again they found nothing at all that would suggest the Fox was or had ever been in there.
From the kitchen they could hear muffled voices coming from the room that had already been cleared. They seemed to be coming from the wall itself. As they moved in to investigate they could hear that the shouts were in fact coming from behind a cupboard. What confused the guys was that they could hear shouts as in plural, the question as to who was in there with him was answered once the Bull had kicked the cupboard over and they had pulled these guys out of their little hole and thrown them to the ground where they had been cuffed and searched by Forrest and Big Tom. I doubt it was a pleasant experience for them. In there with them were seven mobile phones, a Kalashnikov, colt forty five handgun and enough bullets to kill a lot of people.
The second guy in there was the number three most wanted man in Nablus; Salomon Hirawi. Capturing the Fox was a coup as of itself but capturing both of them was the stuff of legend! Hirawi was a young guy, in his early twenties and in charge of communication with Hezbollah and Hamas in the Gaza strip, we had heard rumors that he was even responsible for bringing some Hezbollah operatives into Nablus to lead and train the various cells in the city.
Tommer had a grin all over his face and I felt the flush of elation that comes with carrying such a successful operation, I cheked my watch, 08:47 they had wanted these two badly enough to bring in extraq blocking forces allowing us to remain in the area well after sunrise. All that was left was to wait for the call over the radio telling us to come back to the vehicle so that we can get out of there. The chances of a riot developing over the capture of these two were high so we had to get to the cars quick. I watched as the squads started picking themselves up one by one and moving back to the front of the building towards our transport. Then the voice came over the radio telling us it was our turn to move. I picked myself up and moved off with Tommer in front and Baby behind me. When we reached the vehicles I saw the Palestinian civilians sitting on the ground outside their homes. Families mostly, I noticed one woman whose son was talking to her but she seemed unable to hear, she simply stared straight ahead seemingly at nothing. The man I assumed to be her husband stood behind her nervously smoking a cigarette refusing to make eye contact with anyone.
When we were safely in the vehicle Tommer leaned over and told me that the Fox was to be travelling with us in the car. "The Fox is coming with us?" I repeated back to him incredulously, "yeah and the boss is travelling with us now!" Wow, I thought, so I was actually going to meet this guy who had orchestrated so many attacks, was responsible for so many dead. The thought intimidated me, suicide bombers were one thing but they were easy, when you turned up on their doorstep they simply gave up without any problems. The Fox was something different; I was surprised that we had even managed to get him alive. Alongside my fear there was also curiosity, what did this boss of the terrorism industry look like? How would he behave around us? What did he even look like?
When the Bull brought him out he was shaking and crying, he was babbling non stop in a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic. He was blindfolded so Bull had to help him get into the car and we pulled him in and sat him on the floor. He was still going on in his Hebric and then he started crying again, shouting one minute that he wanted see an officer and begging for someone to shoot him the next. He went on like that for the whole journey, just crying and begging us for death. I was surprised at my encounter with this overweight balding, crying man. It made feel ridiculous for being intimidated by the thought of him and reminded me not to make assumptions about the people I arrested. Over and above this having to sit there and listen to him begging for death when I knew that several weapons had been found in his hole with him and had remained unused.
As I looked at him during the journey I asked myself what it was that he told others, younger men and women in order to convince them to throw away their lives so callously. Why it was that people paid attention to him, to this man who gave up without a fight, who was crying the aords of surrender at the top of his lungs when the army finally arrived at his doorstep. He didn’t really mean any of what he said about begging for death, he wasn't prepared to do to himself that which he exprted others to do, he was a coward.
When we trundled up to our base all of the commandos from various units were waiting outside it, I could see them all turn and look at us, knowing who we had inside. For that moment I knew that we were the men of the moment, not only had we managed to get the Fox and Hirawi but we them alive! We drove past them and into the base proper, with the Fox moaning the whole time in our ears. We deposited the Fox with a whole load of important looking officers where he cried even louder for someone to shoot him.
The idea that there were soldiers valiantly defending Israel against Palestinians determined to free themselves in persuance of their own state and freedom seemed pathetic now. It was one thing for stone throwers not to care about a free Palestine it was another for the guy who was sending out all of these suicide bombers and causing all of this havoc not to believe in it. He had the tools but he never even tried to take us on, he called on us to shoot him but he could have shot himself and he could have shot at and killed Israeli soldiers. I couldn't help but ask myself over and over "is this really my enemy?" I couldn’t justify my previous fear of this man sitting before me. Was this really the man who preached to suicide bombers, convincing them of the righteousness of the ideal, the one who had spent his entire life either in prison or planning the murder of Israelis and Arabs? Now that he had been caught his true self had been exposed. It was probably as much of a surprise for him as it was for me. Maybe he had thought that he could do it, perhaps that is how he justified sending his pawns off to our cities but when his time came he just couldn’t pull the trigger.
So now what was the point? What was I doing there fighting these idiots? Was there no one who took all of this seriously?
Suddenly the whole thing seemed to be about career hungry Israeli officers chasing power hungry Palestinian psychos. The whole thing would have been funny if the stakes weren’t so high. It made me understand that Palestinian stare that they always seemed to give us. It was the stare of a people who knew that they were beaten, of a people who were represented by nobody, least of all those who claimed to be fighting for them. All of it seemed to be about self interest, what would the Fox have been if he hadn’t been the Fox? A grocer? A butcher? The fact that we were after him had made him into a hero in his clan, a man of power, someone whose life was filled with mystery. The fact was that none of that was based on any substance. It was clear to see from his reaction that he had no intention of killing himself and didn’t really want us to kill him for he had already run away from that fate. He preached hate and destruction to all Palestinians but when it came time for him to actually pull the trigger himself he chose surrender and a lifetime in an Israeli jail. He didn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out and he made me feel that all of the rhetoric was a lie, that none of the higher ranking terrorists genuinely believed what they said but that they said it to entice the gullible members of society into doing that which they had no intention of doing themselves.
The revelation hurt me, it was a world away from my naïve view of the conflict upon entering the army. I had always thought that it would be different to this, that we were fighting them and they were fighting us and all of it was being done for a good reason but it seemed that I was wrong.
qalqilya
This is an extract from a short story entitled Qalqilia, if you wish to read more simply leave a message with the word "yes"
When I get to 20 yes's I will post the rest!!!
Qalqilya
During the drive into the city we came under fire, not from rifles or machine guns but from rocks. At first I was afraid and barely even looked out the window until I heard a growl come from Gabe. I looked at him and smiled instinctively at which point I looked out of the window to my right and saw…well a regular city. People were walking around, some carrying books, some carrying shopping and some picking up a stone and flinging it at the vehicle. It had been about thirty seconds since a stone had been thrown and I remember making eye contact with the man who threw it.
Then I remember asking myself why he threw it. Surrounded by people going about their daily business why was it that this one guy, indistinguishable from anyone else wandering around on that day, felt the need to throw a stone? It was an impotent gesture, the vehicle could absorb hits from machine guns and mines, a stone was nothing for us. It was when I thought that word ‘nothing’ that I realised what the situation was. They weren’t hurting us and we weren’t hurting them.
It is true that the car in their streets was a symbol of our occupation but had he worried that we were just going to start shooting the moment a stone was thrown the streets would have emptied. The streets had not emptied, in fact no one had even blinked! All that had happened was a couple of ‘the guys’ had thrown some rocks. When I looked at the guy who threw the rock I noticed that the kid with the books looked embarrassed. In the microsecond that it took for my mind to interpret all of this I realised that if they weren’t going to hurt us and we weren’t going to hurt them then the least I could do was pull some funny faces at them. So we drove on with me pulling some of the stupid faces and some people throwing stones.
I remember the surprise on the faces of those passing by, some of them even smiled, some guys dropped the stones they were going to throw and others threw theirs anyway. But the people next to the stone throwers always just appeared embarrassed, knowing that the whole thing was pointless. We moved to the allotted house, retrieved our guys and left without further ado. It was later that night that I was to get my first real glimpse at my ‘enemy’ and perhaps get my first taste of action.
The mission of the evening was not in Qalqilya itself but in one of the surrounding villages. Intelligence reported that there was a wanted man hiding out there and we had been detailed to go and pick him up. I didn’t know what it was that he was wanted for as my Hebrew wasn’t good enough yet to pick up the new words that I was hearing at operational briefings. I kept this to myself for understandable reasons and anyway the ‘why’ wasn’t so important to me as the ‘how’ that was the necessary ingredient and I had that down to a T. Baby and myself were given to Noy, a soldier from the same team as Gabe. I didn’t really know him but it didn’t matter I just resigned myself to doing exactly what he told me to do. The plan was to approach the village all together and then to split up and move to cover different parts of the suspects house. Once we were all in position a squad would move in and clear the place looking for the bad guy.
Simple plan and easy enough to execute, the cornerstone of any good military plan is always its simplicity and in the IDF our plans were nothing if not simple. The vehicles dropped us off a few kilometres away from the village and we walked the rest of the way trying to stay as quiet as possible. We were successful too, no one made a sound and if anyone did the noise of the undergrowth all around covered it up. That was until the village dogs sniffed us out and began barking, the barking was soon followed by cat calls and the game was up, they knew that we had arrived.
When I get to 20 yes's I will post the rest!!!
Qalqilya
During the drive into the city we came under fire, not from rifles or machine guns but from rocks. At first I was afraid and barely even looked out the window until I heard a growl come from Gabe. I looked at him and smiled instinctively at which point I looked out of the window to my right and saw…well a regular city. People were walking around, some carrying books, some carrying shopping and some picking up a stone and flinging it at the vehicle. It had been about thirty seconds since a stone had been thrown and I remember making eye contact with the man who threw it.
Then I remember asking myself why he threw it. Surrounded by people going about their daily business why was it that this one guy, indistinguishable from anyone else wandering around on that day, felt the need to throw a stone? It was an impotent gesture, the vehicle could absorb hits from machine guns and mines, a stone was nothing for us. It was when I thought that word ‘nothing’ that I realised what the situation was. They weren’t hurting us and we weren’t hurting them.
It is true that the car in their streets was a symbol of our occupation but had he worried that we were just going to start shooting the moment a stone was thrown the streets would have emptied. The streets had not emptied, in fact no one had even blinked! All that had happened was a couple of ‘the guys’ had thrown some rocks. When I looked at the guy who threw the rock I noticed that the kid with the books looked embarrassed. In the microsecond that it took for my mind to interpret all of this I realised that if they weren’t going to hurt us and we weren’t going to hurt them then the least I could do was pull some funny faces at them. So we drove on with me pulling some of the stupid faces and some people throwing stones.
I remember the surprise on the faces of those passing by, some of them even smiled, some guys dropped the stones they were going to throw and others threw theirs anyway. But the people next to the stone throwers always just appeared embarrassed, knowing that the whole thing was pointless. We moved to the allotted house, retrieved our guys and left without further ado. It was later that night that I was to get my first real glimpse at my ‘enemy’ and perhaps get my first taste of action.
The mission of the evening was not in Qalqilya itself but in one of the surrounding villages. Intelligence reported that there was a wanted man hiding out there and we had been detailed to go and pick him up. I didn’t know what it was that he was wanted for as my Hebrew wasn’t good enough yet to pick up the new words that I was hearing at operational briefings. I kept this to myself for understandable reasons and anyway the ‘why’ wasn’t so important to me as the ‘how’ that was the necessary ingredient and I had that down to a T. Baby and myself were given to Noy, a soldier from the same team as Gabe. I didn’t really know him but it didn’t matter I just resigned myself to doing exactly what he told me to do. The plan was to approach the village all together and then to split up and move to cover different parts of the suspects house. Once we were all in position a squad would move in and clear the place looking for the bad guy.
Simple plan and easy enough to execute, the cornerstone of any good military plan is always its simplicity and in the IDF our plans were nothing if not simple. The vehicles dropped us off a few kilometres away from the village and we walked the rest of the way trying to stay as quiet as possible. We were successful too, no one made a sound and if anyone did the noise of the undergrowth all around covered it up. That was until the village dogs sniffed us out and began barking, the barking was soon followed by cat calls and the game was up, they knew that we had arrived.
What is a Settler Anyway?
There is no specific story here just a couple of paragraphs about some experiences and thoughts that I had while on various different settlements. I found the experience of being in the occupied territories entirely different to being in Israel proper;
My first experience of meeting with settlers came about five months into my military service when Snake, Itzik, Peanut and I were sent to guard a tiny settlement. There were two reasons why the IDF used new soldiers for this purpose; the first was to give us some experience of being in the territories the second was to make up a shortfall of troops. The four of us were plonked there together with one of our training commanders in a porta-cabin.
It was a little disconcerting to be there as it differed so greatly from my previous experiences up to that point. Only one house there was made of brick, all of the other dwellings were temporary in nature, either caravans or portable cabins such as the one that housed us. The population was around thirty people in total, they fell into two types families or students at a nearby yeshiva. So far as I could tell pretty much every male there had not only been in a combat unit of the army but was from an elite unit, much like the one that I was training for. Since I hadn't yet gained my paratroopers red beret I felt somewhat inadequate around them. I soon realised that my job there was not really to guard the place but to die loudly thereby alerting the residents to danger in order that they could handle it themselves.
As with everything in my army life at that point we quickly fell into a routine of guard duty, usually about four hours of guarding followed by eight hours off. I spent my time there really observing the goings on, not out of any conscious effort, but from the moment I arrived until the moment I left I was doing my best to understand exactly what it was that these people were doing there. Hill B, or Bet in Hebrew, was about as isolated as they come in terms of settlements. There were Palestinian villages around the area on other surrounding hills although hill B was the highest, as you might expect. There was one road leading up to it and no major cities nearby. Everything that I saw of the way that people lived just kept begging me to ask the question "Why are they here?"
Our second day there was a Friday night and we had been invited for Sabbath dinner at the home of one of the residents. For no reason that I could explain I felt reluctant to go, but I had no excuse for not attending since they knew full well that my alternative to the roast chicken that they were offering was a tin of tuna washed down with some warm water. So we went, leaving Peanut on guard, and sat in their two cabins which had been combined together for their purposes. I was surprised when I went in, to find that they had a washing machine and an oven in there as well as other mod cons, it had been made into quite a comfortable living space.
So there we were in our uniforms with our berets on our heads for dinner, naturally we had our weapons with us also. So then we sat down to enjoy the meal, I couldn’t help but appreciate how beautiful our hostess was. She was petite, brunette and seemed to be younger than my twenty three years. Her husband was nice enough and had been in the reconnaissance unit of the Golani brigade which is a very highly regarded unit in the IDF, better than the one that I was training so hard to get into.
I didn’t say very much during that dinner, frankly my whole time there I was just trying to figure out what it meant to be a settler, it made me feel awkward that the question just kept flowing through me constantly. I couldn’t make polite conversation because at the root of it all was the fact that I was bewildered as to what two people who seemed perfectly normal and had not mentioned arabs or Palestinians or the situation in any way were doing living in a portacabin on a random hill in the middle of the West Bank, in need of soldiers to patrol their home to make sure that they were not murdered in their sleep. Snake had told me that the girls father was an influential rabbi who was head of a local religious seminary. I guess that explained a little but I couldn’t get past the lack of hatred that I felt there.
Surely both she and her husband hated Palestinians? Weren’t they there just to aggravate the locals? They hadn’t even said anything about religion, I excused myself and left at some point during dinner to relieve Peanut on guard. I had wanted to ask them questions but so many things semed to be taken for granted both by them and by my friends that I felt that I would be opening up a real can of worms by asking about things everyone else seemed to think were entirely self evident. So I kept quiet for the week I was there.
The most dangerous thing that happened to me while guarding Hill Bet. was a horse that decided to start chewing my webbing. I would slowly walk forward to get away from the beast but the bloody thing kept following me hankering after my equipment. I didn't want to break out in a run because the horse could run faster than me if he chased. So I carried on walking slowly, having my pack chewed by this horse until he had his fill and left me alone.
That was my only contact with settlers during my training, my next would come shortly after I had finished and was in a place called Alon Moreh which sits just outside of Nablus. We were to be operating from there and carrying out operations into the city, it was to be my first time in the Kasbah although not my first time in action. It is a distinction that I make because it was specifically the Kasbah that had been beaten into me throughout my year of training, that the Kasbah was our units’ unofficial home and that it is there that a soldier is truly tested and will do all of their significant work, that if you can survive there then you can survive anywhere.
The settlement was alot more built up than Hill Bet had been. It boasted apartment buildings and nice gardens with many families living there. If memory serves me correctly it even had its own seminary. Alon Moreh had a very permanent feel to it and I loved being there. I loved it because the unit was given its own apartment block to live in and do with as it wished. We had brought our TVs and videos with us and food of all kinds was plentiful, thanks to the army who had given us milkshakes, yoghurt and yellow cheese for our toasties. The fact that the settlement was able to offer up to us an entire apartment building started me asking questions.
Ours wasn't the only empty block, there seemed to be an abundance of them, as though supply had overreached demand. Perhaps an inevitable outcome of the attempt to impose 'facts on the ground'. The government can build the housesnand the apartment buildings but it cannot make people go live in them.
I watched the religious students dance together in joy during a holy festival but it made me feel alienated from them somehow. I knew that I didn't believe what they believed, that I didn't feel what they felt. Yes, I was charged up with my new role as a warrior in an elite unit and I was waiting to enter into the much vaunted Kasbah. But there was the problem, they weren't, they were able to study and dance and carry on with all of the functions of life because of the work that my friends and I were doing. I didn't join the army to protect them and I didn't even have them in mind when I joined up. I joined up for myself, in order to do something of which I could be proud for the rest of my life. But it was in this town, or settlement or whatever you choose to call it, that I realised consciously that my decision to serve in the IDF had nothing to do with the people that I would actually be protecting.
That was the only time I was to go to Alon Moreh, much to my dismay, for I had enjoyed my time there. I was to see many more settlements, some more built up than this one and some even less so than Hill Bet but it was Ariel that really shocked me the most I had been on a weeks leave and was to rejoin my unit in their temporary base near to the settlement. I was told to make my way to Ariel where I would be met by a jeep that would take me to the base the unit was operating from. The bus stop in Tel Aviv was easy enough to find and sits on the main road right next to the central train station. I was waiting for less than ten minutes before a bus with bullet proof glass arrived to pick me up. The fare cost nothing, it cost three times more to travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which is a shorter journey, I figured it was all part of the tax breaks that the government gives to settlers but I could be wrong.
The real shock came during the journey, there wasn’t much to tell me that I had moved from Israel proper into the West Bank. I tried to sleep but the glass was like titanium and every time the bus moved my head would crash against it so I gave up and just stared through this transparent titanium. We moved through rolling countryside for twenty minutes or so, traffic changed from consisting of modern cars with their shiny metallic paint to cars that were on the verge of death, battered and beaten. The license plates were no longer yellow but green. Every time I saw Palestinian vehicles I was amazed that they still moved. Not only did they still move on the roads, somehow their owners were able to make them run on the dirt tracks that sat between the villages.
I wondered if any of the cars moving around us might suddenly blow up, it happened a couple of times in the Sharon area that suicide drivers had been used instead of suicide bombers. They had proven to be very effective at causing carnage and I thought back to the reports of soldiers ammunition exploding in the flames, adding to the misery of those dieing inside while I nervously fingered the magazine attached to my own weapon and the 29 bullets kept inside. While I was daydreaming about death by explosion the bus entered the outskirts of a Palestinian village.
My mind was brought back to the present, I looked around at the other passengers but they were paying no attention to the outside of the bus and were either sleeping or chatting quietly. I was in shock! This was 2003, the second intifada was in full swing, there was a national uprising against Israeli occupation and here I was on a civilian bus moving through one of their villages! I waited for the barrage of stones to hit the window or for a roadblock to be made from burning tyres. I waited for it as we entered, I waited for it while we were driving through and I continued to wait until we were clear of the village and nothing had happened.
I sat back in my seat wondering what had just happened, some of the people in the village had even waved at us! Were these people rising up against Israel or not? I asked myself, where was this nationwide revolution going on exactly? I put it down as yet another experience that perhaps I would come to understand at some point in the future but for the moment lay beyond my infantile grasp of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
The bus arrived at Ariel without incident and I was surprised to find something of a city when I alighted. Wandering around I saw that the settlement had its own shopping centres and business areas, this was not the tiny outpost that I had guarded during training, this was a full fledged town. Walking the streets I heard a great deal of Russian spoken by the residents around me and I later came to discover that almost half of the twenty thousand residents of the town are from the former Soviet Union. That made sense to me as I knew that due to tax breaks and incentives it would be much cheaper for a new immigrant to live in a place like Ariel than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Although Ariel was the most secular settlement the most bizarre settlement would have to be Ofra. A town that welcomed us in with open arms and provided us with families to eat Friday night dinner with and friendly people everywhere. I remember the man who owned the pizzeria, it had one of those huge woodchip ovens, he gave us all his mobile phone number with instructions to call him whenever we wanted pizza regardless of what time of day or night it was. One time I even called the poor guy out of bed at three in the morning when we returned from a mission and he dutifully came down opened up the place and made us our food. There were small little things that disturbed me there though.
I couldn’t forget that dinner I had had there where during a conversation with a new arrival to the settlement it became clear that he had moved all the way over to the Middle East and yet had never really understood where he was moving to. For him there was no thought in his mind about living anywhere in Israel proper, he didn’t mention even Jerusalem as a possible destination for himself and his family. They had come over to be pure settlers as if there were no other option in the 'Land of Israel' rather than the State of Israel and had no interest in visiting anything West of the Wailing Wall.
I could not forget how one day after we had gone out on an arrest the night before and brought back prisoners the residents had turned up, young children in hand, to view the evil men that we had captured. They said nothing, just peered at them as though looking at animals in a zoo, peering at the trophy that the soldiers had risked life and limb to pluck away from their terrorist network and into the prison system.
The strange sight of people in their nice clothes for synagogue walking right past where we were billeted in order to stand in silence and look at the blindfolded Palestinian was embedded in my memory forever.
My experience of settlers has varied almost as much as the settlements that I visited, some didn't even want to know us. They felt that they could take care of themselves or more accurately that God would take care of them. Others, such as at a place called Migdallim had no religious connections, ‘settlers’ were living there for other personal reasons.
Since completion of my army service I have grown to hate hearing people say ‘the Palestinians’ or the ‘the settlers’ because believe it or not they are all different with different motives, opinions and world view.
My first experience of meeting with settlers came about five months into my military service when Snake, Itzik, Peanut and I were sent to guard a tiny settlement. There were two reasons why the IDF used new soldiers for this purpose; the first was to give us some experience of being in the territories the second was to make up a shortfall of troops. The four of us were plonked there together with one of our training commanders in a porta-cabin.
It was a little disconcerting to be there as it differed so greatly from my previous experiences up to that point. Only one house there was made of brick, all of the other dwellings were temporary in nature, either caravans or portable cabins such as the one that housed us. The population was around thirty people in total, they fell into two types families or students at a nearby yeshiva. So far as I could tell pretty much every male there had not only been in a combat unit of the army but was from an elite unit, much like the one that I was training for. Since I hadn't yet gained my paratroopers red beret I felt somewhat inadequate around them. I soon realised that my job there was not really to guard the place but to die loudly thereby alerting the residents to danger in order that they could handle it themselves.
As with everything in my army life at that point we quickly fell into a routine of guard duty, usually about four hours of guarding followed by eight hours off. I spent my time there really observing the goings on, not out of any conscious effort, but from the moment I arrived until the moment I left I was doing my best to understand exactly what it was that these people were doing there. Hill B, or Bet in Hebrew, was about as isolated as they come in terms of settlements. There were Palestinian villages around the area on other surrounding hills although hill B was the highest, as you might expect. There was one road leading up to it and no major cities nearby. Everything that I saw of the way that people lived just kept begging me to ask the question "Why are they here?"
Our second day there was a Friday night and we had been invited for Sabbath dinner at the home of one of the residents. For no reason that I could explain I felt reluctant to go, but I had no excuse for not attending since they knew full well that my alternative to the roast chicken that they were offering was a tin of tuna washed down with some warm water. So we went, leaving Peanut on guard, and sat in their two cabins which had been combined together for their purposes. I was surprised when I went in, to find that they had a washing machine and an oven in there as well as other mod cons, it had been made into quite a comfortable living space.
So there we were in our uniforms with our berets on our heads for dinner, naturally we had our weapons with us also. So then we sat down to enjoy the meal, I couldn’t help but appreciate how beautiful our hostess was. She was petite, brunette and seemed to be younger than my twenty three years. Her husband was nice enough and had been in the reconnaissance unit of the Golani brigade which is a very highly regarded unit in the IDF, better than the one that I was training so hard to get into.
I didn’t say very much during that dinner, frankly my whole time there I was just trying to figure out what it meant to be a settler, it made me feel awkward that the question just kept flowing through me constantly. I couldn’t make polite conversation because at the root of it all was the fact that I was bewildered as to what two people who seemed perfectly normal and had not mentioned arabs or Palestinians or the situation in any way were doing living in a portacabin on a random hill in the middle of the West Bank, in need of soldiers to patrol their home to make sure that they were not murdered in their sleep. Snake had told me that the girls father was an influential rabbi who was head of a local religious seminary. I guess that explained a little but I couldn’t get past the lack of hatred that I felt there.
Surely both she and her husband hated Palestinians? Weren’t they there just to aggravate the locals? They hadn’t even said anything about religion, I excused myself and left at some point during dinner to relieve Peanut on guard. I had wanted to ask them questions but so many things semed to be taken for granted both by them and by my friends that I felt that I would be opening up a real can of worms by asking about things everyone else seemed to think were entirely self evident. So I kept quiet for the week I was there.
The most dangerous thing that happened to me while guarding Hill Bet. was a horse that decided to start chewing my webbing. I would slowly walk forward to get away from the beast but the bloody thing kept following me hankering after my equipment. I didn't want to break out in a run because the horse could run faster than me if he chased. So I carried on walking slowly, having my pack chewed by this horse until he had his fill and left me alone.
That was my only contact with settlers during my training, my next would come shortly after I had finished and was in a place called Alon Moreh which sits just outside of Nablus. We were to be operating from there and carrying out operations into the city, it was to be my first time in the Kasbah although not my first time in action. It is a distinction that I make because it was specifically the Kasbah that had been beaten into me throughout my year of training, that the Kasbah was our units’ unofficial home and that it is there that a soldier is truly tested and will do all of their significant work, that if you can survive there then you can survive anywhere.
The settlement was alot more built up than Hill Bet had been. It boasted apartment buildings and nice gardens with many families living there. If memory serves me correctly it even had its own seminary. Alon Moreh had a very permanent feel to it and I loved being there. I loved it because the unit was given its own apartment block to live in and do with as it wished. We had brought our TVs and videos with us and food of all kinds was plentiful, thanks to the army who had given us milkshakes, yoghurt and yellow cheese for our toasties. The fact that the settlement was able to offer up to us an entire apartment building started me asking questions.
Ours wasn't the only empty block, there seemed to be an abundance of them, as though supply had overreached demand. Perhaps an inevitable outcome of the attempt to impose 'facts on the ground'. The government can build the housesnand the apartment buildings but it cannot make people go live in them.
I watched the religious students dance together in joy during a holy festival but it made me feel alienated from them somehow. I knew that I didn't believe what they believed, that I didn't feel what they felt. Yes, I was charged up with my new role as a warrior in an elite unit and I was waiting to enter into the much vaunted Kasbah. But there was the problem, they weren't, they were able to study and dance and carry on with all of the functions of life because of the work that my friends and I were doing. I didn't join the army to protect them and I didn't even have them in mind when I joined up. I joined up for myself, in order to do something of which I could be proud for the rest of my life. But it was in this town, or settlement or whatever you choose to call it, that I realised consciously that my decision to serve in the IDF had nothing to do with the people that I would actually be protecting.
That was the only time I was to go to Alon Moreh, much to my dismay, for I had enjoyed my time there. I was to see many more settlements, some more built up than this one and some even less so than Hill Bet but it was Ariel that really shocked me the most I had been on a weeks leave and was to rejoin my unit in their temporary base near to the settlement. I was told to make my way to Ariel where I would be met by a jeep that would take me to the base the unit was operating from. The bus stop in Tel Aviv was easy enough to find and sits on the main road right next to the central train station. I was waiting for less than ten minutes before a bus with bullet proof glass arrived to pick me up. The fare cost nothing, it cost three times more to travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem which is a shorter journey, I figured it was all part of the tax breaks that the government gives to settlers but I could be wrong.
The real shock came during the journey, there wasn’t much to tell me that I had moved from Israel proper into the West Bank. I tried to sleep but the glass was like titanium and every time the bus moved my head would crash against it so I gave up and just stared through this transparent titanium. We moved through rolling countryside for twenty minutes or so, traffic changed from consisting of modern cars with their shiny metallic paint to cars that were on the verge of death, battered and beaten. The license plates were no longer yellow but green. Every time I saw Palestinian vehicles I was amazed that they still moved. Not only did they still move on the roads, somehow their owners were able to make them run on the dirt tracks that sat between the villages.
I wondered if any of the cars moving around us might suddenly blow up, it happened a couple of times in the Sharon area that suicide drivers had been used instead of suicide bombers. They had proven to be very effective at causing carnage and I thought back to the reports of soldiers ammunition exploding in the flames, adding to the misery of those dieing inside while I nervously fingered the magazine attached to my own weapon and the 29 bullets kept inside. While I was daydreaming about death by explosion the bus entered the outskirts of a Palestinian village.
My mind was brought back to the present, I looked around at the other passengers but they were paying no attention to the outside of the bus and were either sleeping or chatting quietly. I was in shock! This was 2003, the second intifada was in full swing, there was a national uprising against Israeli occupation and here I was on a civilian bus moving through one of their villages! I waited for the barrage of stones to hit the window or for a roadblock to be made from burning tyres. I waited for it as we entered, I waited for it while we were driving through and I continued to wait until we were clear of the village and nothing had happened.
I sat back in my seat wondering what had just happened, some of the people in the village had even waved at us! Were these people rising up against Israel or not? I asked myself, where was this nationwide revolution going on exactly? I put it down as yet another experience that perhaps I would come to understand at some point in the future but for the moment lay beyond my infantile grasp of the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
The bus arrived at Ariel without incident and I was surprised to find something of a city when I alighted. Wandering around I saw that the settlement had its own shopping centres and business areas, this was not the tiny outpost that I had guarded during training, this was a full fledged town. Walking the streets I heard a great deal of Russian spoken by the residents around me and I later came to discover that almost half of the twenty thousand residents of the town are from the former Soviet Union. That made sense to me as I knew that due to tax breaks and incentives it would be much cheaper for a new immigrant to live in a place like Ariel than Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Although Ariel was the most secular settlement the most bizarre settlement would have to be Ofra. A town that welcomed us in with open arms and provided us with families to eat Friday night dinner with and friendly people everywhere. I remember the man who owned the pizzeria, it had one of those huge woodchip ovens, he gave us all his mobile phone number with instructions to call him whenever we wanted pizza regardless of what time of day or night it was. One time I even called the poor guy out of bed at three in the morning when we returned from a mission and he dutifully came down opened up the place and made us our food. There were small little things that disturbed me there though.
I couldn’t forget that dinner I had had there where during a conversation with a new arrival to the settlement it became clear that he had moved all the way over to the Middle East and yet had never really understood where he was moving to. For him there was no thought in his mind about living anywhere in Israel proper, he didn’t mention even Jerusalem as a possible destination for himself and his family. They had come over to be pure settlers as if there were no other option in the 'Land of Israel' rather than the State of Israel and had no interest in visiting anything West of the Wailing Wall.
I could not forget how one day after we had gone out on an arrest the night before and brought back prisoners the residents had turned up, young children in hand, to view the evil men that we had captured. They said nothing, just peered at them as though looking at animals in a zoo, peering at the trophy that the soldiers had risked life and limb to pluck away from their terrorist network and into the prison system.
The strange sight of people in their nice clothes for synagogue walking right past where we were billeted in order to stand in silence and look at the blindfolded Palestinian was embedded in my memory forever.
My experience of settlers has varied almost as much as the settlements that I visited, some didn't even want to know us. They felt that they could take care of themselves or more accurately that God would take care of them. Others, such as at a place called Migdallim had no religious connections, ‘settlers’ were living there for other personal reasons.
Since completion of my army service I have grown to hate hearing people say ‘the Palestinians’ or the ‘the settlers’ because believe it or not they are all different with different motives, opinions and world view.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
My first mission
This is an extract from a short story that I had published about a year ago:
"So there we all were stuck together in this apartment, the temperature rose throughout the day, it was mid August and the heat was sweltering. Sitting there in full kit I began to feel the sweat seeping through my uniform. "Aren’t you hot in all that stuff?" inquired the British girl sweetly, perhaps too sweetly, was she mocking me? "Oh no I am used to it" I said in as nonchalant a voice as I could manage. "Don’t you ever feel disgusted that you do all this?" asked the British kid, I laughed in genuine surprise. I had come a long way to defend my people, I had passed through tougher training than I had imagined possible in order to arrive precisely at this moment and arrest or kill terrorists attempting to blow up innocent civilians, "No" I said a smile still on my face. "There are people out there who wish to do a great deal of harm to innocent people in Israel, I would rather stop them here in their own city than run the risk of them arriving in Tel Aviv." So began a five hour debate about the Israeli Palestinian conflict which raged back and forth between us, punctuated at times by an American accent shrieking; "Now I really am going to call the embassy". From water supplies "you know that the Israeli government severely restricts the amount of water that Palestinians can have don’t you?" he spat at me. "You know that there is not enough water in the Middle East don’t you?" I spat back, "In 1967 we fought a war and won, had the roles been reversed the argument would be irrelevant as my people would simply have ceased to exist here in the Middle East!"
He either became quiet because I had won or because I had become angry. I am not sure which.. I had not been angry or right enough for the debate to end there and we continued to argue after a short silence, interrupted once again by: "You said five minutes, that time is up and I am calling the consulate!" A hard stare and she stopped and put her mobile phone away. And so I began again with the British kid, the devastation caused by Israeli bulldozers knocking down the homes of the families of suicide bombers, to the amount of time it would take the Palestinians to rebuild their cities in the wake of operation Defensive Shield. My time on guard came and went and still we argued, when Baby came to replace me I told him not to bother, he didn't argue. We continued. In the middle the woman whose flat I had taken over let loose an impassioned plea, the plea of civilians caught in war zones all around the world "we are not terrorists, we are normal people trying to live our lives, why have you come here"? Her appeal would not move me, "the army needs your apartment, were there no terrorists blowing themselves up there would be no army presence here."
The British kid told me that the clinic for which this woman was responsible could not open because we were holding her captive, another problem caused by the IDF! I laughed out loud, this could never compare with the victims that were not to be because of my actions on this mission, we were preventing suicide bombers leaving the city for their targets, "if a handful of people could not get to a clinic today then they will go tomorrow" I said. Inside though, he had given me pause for thought. I could not be sure that what I was doing actually was contributing to stopping bus bombers, I was simply holed up in the apartment. Was anything I was doing actually helping? "The only reason there are terrorists is because you are here!" The British kid said to me "No," I corrected him "The only reason we're here is because there are terrorists"!
I noticed that all of my captives had been sitting on the edge of their seats, attempting to understand this strange dialogue between the British born Israeli soldier and the Oxford undergraduate peacemaker. This was a strange moment indeed. They were used to the sirens and gunshots that provided a constant backdrop of noise, an insight into the mind of an Israeli soldier was something new. I did not mind them listening in. On the contrary I was glad to have an audience; these were the people I wanted to get my point across to. We are not murderers, we do not do this simply to ruin your lives, we have no choice, we must stop the bombers!
As we finished our argument a murmur went through the group, and the pregnant woman started crying again, I told the woman who spoke English to tell her not to worry we would be gone soon, only for a shrill "She can cry if she wants to," to cut me off. I turned to the American girl, but there was very little to say, and anyway Baby came back to relieve me, something for which I was profoundly grateful.
I went into the master bedroom to find the guys making a feast of the bread rolls and tinned tuna we had brought with us. There would not be and never was any taking advantage of the civilians’ food or other possessions. Not feeling particularly hungry but looking for comfort I sat down with my friends and helped myself. As per usual there was not enough ketchup and I had to make do with mustard, which in civilian life I could never stand. Strange thing about the army is that I learnt to appreciate food in a way that as a civilian I never could. For instance during field week, after two days deprived of food our sergeant arrived with a box of tomatoes; "eat up" he said. My whole twenty three years I had never been able to eat a raw tomato, yet somehow when those tomatoes arrived I was clamouring for them along with everyone else, eating them was a wonderful experience.
Once eating was over I sparked up a cigarette and watched the blue grey smoke curl up towards the ceiling, there were sirens going off outside and I wished I could have been there ‘taking care of business’. Instead I was stuck in a flat with a bunch of whiny tourists and some Palestinian civilians. What would I tell my friends back in England?
The commander of the unit hadn't told us specifically when we would be leaving and returning to base, only that it would "depend on the success of the mission". This in itself confused me as I was not sure how to gauge how well the mission was actually going, nor whether success meant that the mission would be longer, in order to kill more terrorists, or shorter, due to them all being killed very quickly. The fact that I didn't know probably reflects the fact that the commander himself wasn't really sure. Rather than anything else, so much about counter terrorism operations seems to depend upon the movement of events on the ground rather than any actual pre-considered time frame, I moved no further with my musings as Snake came to me and it was my turn to guard…again.
I scanned the room. There were still a lot of people in it and I was on my own. What if one of them tried to escape? Would I shoot? Would I shoot to kill? How could I ever justify killing a civilian trying to escape from his own house? So I would not shoot, but I would not let someone get away either, if it came to it I would use the butt of my rifle to down my fictitious enemy. It was then that I noticed that I had my weapon clipped to me rather than on a sling and that I would never have been able to use the butt to hit anyone with so I surreptitiously went about the process of unclipping the weapon and attaching the strap. As I did this I realised that it would make it easier for someone to remove the weapon from me, and then I remembered that that was the reason I had clipped the rifle to me in the first place! What if they did all decide to rush me? There were a lot of them and if they all moved together they could get me, would I kill the civilians then? They did not rush me and if they had one word from me and commandos would have come from left and right and killed everyone in the room in my defence, however I did not think that far as I was tired and when was I being relieved again? and why was there no TV to watch in this bloody place?
It had become more than obvious to all of us in the apartment that everyone outside did in fact know we were there. The Red Crescent had been shouting up to us for permission to drop in medical supplies while I had been eating and Baby had gone to Bubba to ask what to do. With the news Bubba made one of his infrequent forays in to ‘our’ apartment as opposed to the one with the all important window. He surveyed the situation saw the pregnant woman was still crying and I asked him if we could get her out of there now that it was obvious that people outside knew we were in the apartment anyway. He promised to radio the higher ups and see what he could do. In addition to this the British girl was talking about how she needed her medication for a high blood pressure and could she ask the Red Crescent guys to get it for her. This was all a little too much and once again I found myself wishing for some armed enemy to appear so that I could involve myself in a nice fire fight rather than have to deal with being a babysitter for a bunch of spoiled kids. At that moment the American girl decided to come out of the toilet and complain that someone had not flushed it, "probably one of the soldiers, I bet they don’t even know how to use Palestinian toilets" she said with a pointed look at me. Unbelievable! Even in a room in a foreign country, surrounded by men with guns holding her captive, she still found it in her to be condescending! What annoyed me even more was that I had been the last person to use the toilet and no, I did not know how to flush a Palestinian toilet."
Needless to say the majority of us survived that first foray into Nablus, if you would like to know what did happen in the end you can find the book for sale on Amazon just follow the link below
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-Buys-Challah-Other-Stories/dp/1419628550
"So there we all were stuck together in this apartment, the temperature rose throughout the day, it was mid August and the heat was sweltering. Sitting there in full kit I began to feel the sweat seeping through my uniform. "Aren’t you hot in all that stuff?" inquired the British girl sweetly, perhaps too sweetly, was she mocking me? "Oh no I am used to it" I said in as nonchalant a voice as I could manage. "Don’t you ever feel disgusted that you do all this?" asked the British kid, I laughed in genuine surprise. I had come a long way to defend my people, I had passed through tougher training than I had imagined possible in order to arrive precisely at this moment and arrest or kill terrorists attempting to blow up innocent civilians, "No" I said a smile still on my face. "There are people out there who wish to do a great deal of harm to innocent people in Israel, I would rather stop them here in their own city than run the risk of them arriving in Tel Aviv." So began a five hour debate about the Israeli Palestinian conflict which raged back and forth between us, punctuated at times by an American accent shrieking; "Now I really am going to call the embassy". From water supplies "you know that the Israeli government severely restricts the amount of water that Palestinians can have don’t you?" he spat at me. "You know that there is not enough water in the Middle East don’t you?" I spat back, "In 1967 we fought a war and won, had the roles been reversed the argument would be irrelevant as my people would simply have ceased to exist here in the Middle East!"
He either became quiet because I had won or because I had become angry. I am not sure which.. I had not been angry or right enough for the debate to end there and we continued to argue after a short silence, interrupted once again by: "You said five minutes, that time is up and I am calling the consulate!" A hard stare and she stopped and put her mobile phone away. And so I began again with the British kid, the devastation caused by Israeli bulldozers knocking down the homes of the families of suicide bombers, to the amount of time it would take the Palestinians to rebuild their cities in the wake of operation Defensive Shield. My time on guard came and went and still we argued, when Baby came to replace me I told him not to bother, he didn't argue. We continued. In the middle the woman whose flat I had taken over let loose an impassioned plea, the plea of civilians caught in war zones all around the world "we are not terrorists, we are normal people trying to live our lives, why have you come here"? Her appeal would not move me, "the army needs your apartment, were there no terrorists blowing themselves up there would be no army presence here."
The British kid told me that the clinic for which this woman was responsible could not open because we were holding her captive, another problem caused by the IDF! I laughed out loud, this could never compare with the victims that were not to be because of my actions on this mission, we were preventing suicide bombers leaving the city for their targets, "if a handful of people could not get to a clinic today then they will go tomorrow" I said. Inside though, he had given me pause for thought. I could not be sure that what I was doing actually was contributing to stopping bus bombers, I was simply holed up in the apartment. Was anything I was doing actually helping? "The only reason there are terrorists is because you are here!" The British kid said to me "No," I corrected him "The only reason we're here is because there are terrorists"!
I noticed that all of my captives had been sitting on the edge of their seats, attempting to understand this strange dialogue between the British born Israeli soldier and the Oxford undergraduate peacemaker. This was a strange moment indeed. They were used to the sirens and gunshots that provided a constant backdrop of noise, an insight into the mind of an Israeli soldier was something new. I did not mind them listening in. On the contrary I was glad to have an audience; these were the people I wanted to get my point across to. We are not murderers, we do not do this simply to ruin your lives, we have no choice, we must stop the bombers!
As we finished our argument a murmur went through the group, and the pregnant woman started crying again, I told the woman who spoke English to tell her not to worry we would be gone soon, only for a shrill "She can cry if she wants to," to cut me off. I turned to the American girl, but there was very little to say, and anyway Baby came back to relieve me, something for which I was profoundly grateful.
I went into the master bedroom to find the guys making a feast of the bread rolls and tinned tuna we had brought with us. There would not be and never was any taking advantage of the civilians’ food or other possessions. Not feeling particularly hungry but looking for comfort I sat down with my friends and helped myself. As per usual there was not enough ketchup and I had to make do with mustard, which in civilian life I could never stand. Strange thing about the army is that I learnt to appreciate food in a way that as a civilian I never could. For instance during field week, after two days deprived of food our sergeant arrived with a box of tomatoes; "eat up" he said. My whole twenty three years I had never been able to eat a raw tomato, yet somehow when those tomatoes arrived I was clamouring for them along with everyone else, eating them was a wonderful experience.
Once eating was over I sparked up a cigarette and watched the blue grey smoke curl up towards the ceiling, there were sirens going off outside and I wished I could have been there ‘taking care of business’. Instead I was stuck in a flat with a bunch of whiny tourists and some Palestinian civilians. What would I tell my friends back in England?
The commander of the unit hadn't told us specifically when we would be leaving and returning to base, only that it would "depend on the success of the mission". This in itself confused me as I was not sure how to gauge how well the mission was actually going, nor whether success meant that the mission would be longer, in order to kill more terrorists, or shorter, due to them all being killed very quickly. The fact that I didn't know probably reflects the fact that the commander himself wasn't really sure. Rather than anything else, so much about counter terrorism operations seems to depend upon the movement of events on the ground rather than any actual pre-considered time frame, I moved no further with my musings as Snake came to me and it was my turn to guard…again.
I scanned the room. There were still a lot of people in it and I was on my own. What if one of them tried to escape? Would I shoot? Would I shoot to kill? How could I ever justify killing a civilian trying to escape from his own house? So I would not shoot, but I would not let someone get away either, if it came to it I would use the butt of my rifle to down my fictitious enemy. It was then that I noticed that I had my weapon clipped to me rather than on a sling and that I would never have been able to use the butt to hit anyone with so I surreptitiously went about the process of unclipping the weapon and attaching the strap. As I did this I realised that it would make it easier for someone to remove the weapon from me, and then I remembered that that was the reason I had clipped the rifle to me in the first place! What if they did all decide to rush me? There were a lot of them and if they all moved together they could get me, would I kill the civilians then? They did not rush me and if they had one word from me and commandos would have come from left and right and killed everyone in the room in my defence, however I did not think that far as I was tired and when was I being relieved again? and why was there no TV to watch in this bloody place?
It had become more than obvious to all of us in the apartment that everyone outside did in fact know we were there. The Red Crescent had been shouting up to us for permission to drop in medical supplies while I had been eating and Baby had gone to Bubba to ask what to do. With the news Bubba made one of his infrequent forays in to ‘our’ apartment as opposed to the one with the all important window. He surveyed the situation saw the pregnant woman was still crying and I asked him if we could get her out of there now that it was obvious that people outside knew we were in the apartment anyway. He promised to radio the higher ups and see what he could do. In addition to this the British girl was talking about how she needed her medication for a high blood pressure and could she ask the Red Crescent guys to get it for her. This was all a little too much and once again I found myself wishing for some armed enemy to appear so that I could involve myself in a nice fire fight rather than have to deal with being a babysitter for a bunch of spoiled kids. At that moment the American girl decided to come out of the toilet and complain that someone had not flushed it, "probably one of the soldiers, I bet they don’t even know how to use Palestinian toilets" she said with a pointed look at me. Unbelievable! Even in a room in a foreign country, surrounded by men with guns holding her captive, she still found it in her to be condescending! What annoyed me even more was that I had been the last person to use the toilet and no, I did not know how to flush a Palestinian toilet."
Needless to say the majority of us survived that first foray into Nablus, if you would like to know what did happen in the end you can find the book for sale on Amazon just follow the link below
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jane-Buys-Challah-Other-Stories/dp/1419628550
Monday, 1 September 2008
Stay in Touch
Since I posted an extract to Riot in Nablus I have had double the number of hits on the blog, due to this I will be posting extracts from all of the short stories that I have written on here, naturally I would love to hear what you have to say about them no matter how blunt and/or controversial those comments may be.
If you would like to stay informed of new postings on my blog you can join the facebook group entitled marc's blog, there are three groups with this name, mine is the only one without a picture.
I will be posting an extract from each short story that I have written roughly once a week, please keep commenting as I find it both rewarding that you would take the time to share your thoughts with me as well as useful for me in terms of improving my writing.
Thanks very much all of you
If you would like to stay informed of new postings on my blog you can join the facebook group entitled marc's blog, there are three groups with this name, mine is the only one without a picture.
I will be posting an extract from each short story that I have written roughly once a week, please keep commenting as I find it both rewarding that you would take the time to share your thoughts with me as well as useful for me in terms of improving my writing.
Thanks very much all of you
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)