Sweet Cakes With a Terrorist
By ROGER COHEN
Op-Ed Columnist
International Herald Tribune
July 8, 2007
The West Bank town of Nablus sits in a valley, baking in its amphitheater, its white apartment buildings climbing hills, its central market a maze of alleys. Carts carry watermelons, cucumbers, green and red tomatoes. From dark interiors seep the smell of falafel frying and the sweet tobacco of hookahs.
Rubble from buildings destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, nourishes rose bushes that somehow rise from the stones. The city's haunting, troubled beauty makes the senses swim. Nablus stays with you. I was there a few weeks back and am haunted still.
Throughout the town, as elsewhere on the West Bank, Palestinian ''martyrs'' and prisoners are remembered. One poster in Jericho showed a young man from the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist group, with the words: ''My enemy, do not think that I will forget the day of my being killed and occupied. If you put me in jail as a prisoner, please know that I am a prisoner in my own house. And in my prison I will find people who will avenge my situation.''
The words chilled me: The gyre of killing keeps widening. A friend suggested she could arrange an introduction to Mahdi Abu Ghazali, the leader of Al Aksa in Nablus.
On the principle that looking someone in the eye is the path to understanding, I accepted. The war on terror is a phrase that has agglomerated terrorists — those fighting for national goals like a state, and nihilists intent only the destruction of the West. It is important to distinguish between them. There are answers to national struggles.
A shoe salesman named Ahmad Hassan Al-Assi led me through the labyrinth of the market. ''I think the West Bank will go to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt,'' he said. ''How are we supposed to make a state?''
We met an Al Aksa operative who took us here and there before climbing a maze of stairs and ushering me into a room with battered chairs. A toy pistol lay on one.
Direct and clean-shaven, with a weary gaze, Abu Ghazali speaks some Hebrew, having spent three years in Israeli jails. He described a life of hide-and-seek in a city plied every night by the IDF. Claiming that more than 1,000 Palestinians have died on the West Bank since 2003, he said: ''Israel calls Palestinians terrorists. But it is a terrorist state. End the occupation, give us what we own, and we'll stop everything.''
Unctuous sweet cakes were served and a rifle brought in for Abu Ghazali. ''The situation in Gaza makes me sad,'' he continued. ''Fatah is divided into an Americanized group and the old guard, and Hamas has an Iranian faction and a Haniya faction'' — a reference to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, whose Hamas-led government has been fired by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. ''We need one umbrella, like the Palestine Liberation Organization.''
Aged 34, he talked about a life lived in its entirety under Israeli occupation. I asked him why he fought. ''It's in the blood,'' he said. ''I opened my eyes to this reality.''
His older brother, Maher, was killed during the first intifada in 1987. ''Three bullets from the IDF,'' he said. But it was not just his brother. The death of friends, and of what he called ''the whole nation,'' produced ''an internal need to fight them.''
And what about suicide bombings, blowing up Israeli women and children? ''The suicide bombing was right,'' Abu Ghazali said, ''because it balanced the fear scale for a while. This was the result of their aggressions. I see a 4-year-old killed and I have to react. They call it terrorism. We call it reaction.''
For now, however, suicide attacks were suspended, he said. ''We fight soldiers on the West Bank. We could do operations in Israel, but we choose not to.''
Abu Ghazali smiled. I was unsure what to make of his claim. Braggadocio? Probably.
In the moment when he justified suicide bombings, I felt a surge of anger. Still, I could not help feeling that if you could just get a group of Israelis and Abu Ghazali in the same room, let the Israelis talk about their fears and him about his slain brother, the Israelis about Zion and him about the olive groves of Palestine, the Israelis about the Holocaust and him the Nakba, the Israelis about a fence that keeps them safe and him about a wall of confinement — in short let them duel it out with their respective pain, more good than ill would come of the encounter.
Email: rocohen@iht.com
Op-Ed Columnist
International Herald Tribune
July 8, 2007
The West Bank town of Nablus sits in a valley, baking in its amphitheater, its white apartment buildings climbing hills, its central market a maze of alleys. Carts carry watermelons, cucumbers, green and red tomatoes. From dark interiors seep the smell of falafel frying and the sweet tobacco of hookahs.
Rubble from buildings destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, nourishes rose bushes that somehow rise from the stones. The city's haunting, troubled beauty makes the senses swim. Nablus stays with you. I was there a few weeks back and am haunted still.
Throughout the town, as elsewhere on the West Bank, Palestinian ''martyrs'' and prisoners are remembered. One poster in Jericho showed a young man from the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist group, with the words: ''My enemy, do not think that I will forget the day of my being killed and occupied. If you put me in jail as a prisoner, please know that I am a prisoner in my own house. And in my prison I will find people who will avenge my situation.''
The words chilled me: The gyre of killing keeps widening. A friend suggested she could arrange an introduction to Mahdi Abu Ghazali, the leader of Al Aksa in Nablus.
On the principle that looking someone in the eye is the path to understanding, I accepted. The war on terror is a phrase that has agglomerated terrorists — those fighting for national goals like a state, and nihilists intent only the destruction of the West. It is important to distinguish between them. There are answers to national struggles.
A shoe salesman named Ahmad Hassan Al-Assi led me through the labyrinth of the market. ''I think the West Bank will go to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt,'' he said. ''How are we supposed to make a state?''
We met an Al Aksa operative who took us here and there before climbing a maze of stairs and ushering me into a room with battered chairs. A toy pistol lay on one.
Direct and clean-shaven, with a weary gaze, Abu Ghazali speaks some Hebrew, having spent three years in Israeli jails. He described a life of hide-and-seek in a city plied every night by the IDF. Claiming that more than 1,000 Palestinians have died on the West Bank since 2003, he said: ''Israel calls Palestinians terrorists. But it is a terrorist state. End the occupation, give us what we own, and we'll stop everything.''
Unctuous sweet cakes were served and a rifle brought in for Abu Ghazali. ''The situation in Gaza makes me sad,'' he continued. ''Fatah is divided into an Americanized group and the old guard, and Hamas has an Iranian faction and a Haniya faction'' — a reference to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, whose Hamas-led government has been fired by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. ''We need one umbrella, like the Palestine Liberation Organization.''
Aged 34, he talked about a life lived in its entirety under Israeli occupation. I asked him why he fought. ''It's in the blood,'' he said. ''I opened my eyes to this reality.''
His older brother, Maher, was killed during the first intifada in 1987. ''Three bullets from the IDF,'' he said. But it was not just his brother. The death of friends, and of what he called ''the whole nation,'' produced ''an internal need to fight them.''
And what about suicide bombings, blowing up Israeli women and children? ''The suicide bombing was right,'' Abu Ghazali said, ''because it balanced the fear scale for a while. This was the result of their aggressions. I see a 4-year-old killed and I have to react. They call it terrorism. We call it reaction.''
For now, however, suicide attacks were suspended, he said. ''We fight soldiers on the West Bank. We could do operations in Israel, but we choose not to.''
Abu Ghazali smiled. I was unsure what to make of his claim. Braggadocio? Probably.
In the moment when he justified suicide bombings, I felt a surge of anger. Still, I could not help feeling that if you could just get a group of Israelis and Abu Ghazali in the same room, let the Israelis talk about their fears and him about his slain brother, the Israelis about Zion and him about the olive groves of Palestine, the Israelis about the Holocaust and him the Nakba, the Israelis about a fence that keeps them safe and him about a wall of confinement — in short let them duel it out with their respective pain, more good than ill would come of the encounter.
Email: rocohen@iht.com
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