The children's crusade

Charles Glass

CRY PALESTINE: INSIDE THE WEST BANK by Said K. Aburish Bloomsbury, £9.99, pp. 205 In a passage destined to chill the con- science of every loyal supporter of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Said Aburish asks teenage Palestini- ans, who despise his generation for years of failure and incompetence, where they acquired the discipline to sustain their intifada, their uprising. One youngster answered, 'The Israelis, we learned our dis- cipline from the Israelis.'

Said Aburish is a Palestinian exile, born in Mandate Palestine in 1935, who told the story of his ancestors in Children of Bethany (LB. Tauris, 1988). In the shadow of the war to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, he returns to his native West Bank, with his American passport as a permeable shield, to observe a new generation of his family and friends. He finds children whose brav- ery in risking prison, torture and death is as much a reproach to their fathers as it is a challenge to the Israelis. As these boys and girls have learned discipline from their Israeli masters, Said Aburish learns courage from them — courage his genera- tion rarely exhibited during defeat after defeat at Israeli hands.

`Over the past three years more than 1200 Palestinian children have been killed and more than 8,000 have been wounded,' he writes. The toll of the intifada no longer makes headlines in Europe and America, but the uprising of Palestinian children goes on. The statistic of 40,000 youngsters detained takes on meaning for Aburish and his readers when he attends the trial of his nephews, Nasser and Amer. The trial is a farce in which the accused have no right to Confront their accusers and need not be present in court. Said sits with the boys' mother, Hala, as Nasser is led into court with two of his four co-defendants. His brother Amer and another defendant are not among them. Nasser's Palestinian lawyer, Mr Assali, explains the agreement he has concluded with the prosecutor:

In return for your acceptance — admission --- of two charges — throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at a unit of the Israeli security forces and participating in organising activities against the welfare of the State of Israel — the advocate-general is willing to drop the charge of belonging to a terrorist organisation.. .

Said continues:

Nasser speaks to his group, confirming that the lawyer's statement is understood. . . When Nasser finishes, his two co-defendants, who though older accept his leadership, say a few words, then nod approval. He stands up. Silence reigns.

`The bargain struck by the advocate-general and Mr Assali is not acceptable to us. We deny participating in attacks against Israeli patrols. We do not consider belonging to a Palestinian nationalist organisation to be a conspiracy against anyone. All we want is the right of self-determination... We are ready to have the court sentence us on the basis of the false accusations of the advocate- general.'

As Cry Palestine went to press, Nasser and Amer Aburish were in detention await- ing sentence, the advocate general having demanded nine years for each boy, with a tenth year if they refused to pay a fine. Nasser is 15, Amer 13. Amer's mother explained his non-appearance in terms of the authorities' reluctance to expose child- ren with the visible marks of beatings or torture to public view. She told Said:

One time, soon after his arrest, they beat up Amer so badly they shredded the sweater on his back. Another time they beat them in front of each other, because they know how close to each other they are.

To which Said adds, knowing the whole family is powerless to protect the children:

We cry our hearts out for ten minutes with- out anybody saying a word; only the muffled sound of despair is heard.

Said talks to Israeli friends and to Pales- tinians, observing the occasional absurdity of confrontation between occupier and occupied — as in this exchange between his taxi-driver and an Israeli sergeant at a roadblock:

Sergeant (noticing the driver's hand is ban- daged): What happened to your hand?

Driver: A jackass bit it.

Sergeant: Why? Driver: What do you expect from a jackass?

Said watched as the sergeant 'turned to one of his colleagues and said, "Check with headquarters whether jackasses bite people."' As a portrait of Palestinian life under occupation, Cry Palestine is one of the best to appear in years. Although the author occasionally slips into dialogues that fall flat because they seem merely to sum- marise various interviews, this book com- plements and brings up to date the excel- lent Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation by Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman (1.B. Tauris, 1989) and Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari's Intifa- da: The Palestinian Uprising (Simon & Schuster, 1989), as well as bringing a per- sonal view to bear that is both powerful and fair. A former businessman and a novelist, Said Aburish is at his best in analysing the language of the occupation. He explores through the use of words the intellectual and moral environment in which his people dwell:

As a result of this brief stay, people might think I have become somewhat demented, speaking as I do in terms drawn from the morbid realms of criminology. It is a vocabu- lary of fear, hate, violence and death, but these are the things people talk about in the West Bank.. .

As awful as the occupation is, Said reserves his severest criticism — his own, and through the voices of his people — for the Arab leadership, both in Arab govern- ments and the PLO. He accuses some local PLO officials in the West Bank of corrup- tion, and he condemns Saddam Hussein, the Saudi monarch and other Arabs for abusing the Palestinian cause and their own people. But somehow he manages to conclude this moving book on an optimistic note, insisting that

the West Bank is not only Arab in nature, but it is run by Arabs as efficiently as any Arab state. . . In short, the infrastructure of a Palestinian state is in place and function- ing, which means that an important question as to the viability of such a state has already been answered.

While Said roamed the West Bank speaking to traitors, tax-resisters, farmers fighting in vain to keep their land and his extended family — he and the other Pales- tinians listened to the news that the west- ern and a large portion of the Arab world were at war to end another military occu- pation. Iraq was forced to withdraw from Kuwait within six months, while Israel has been in the West Bank and Gaza for 24 years. Palestinians could be forgiven for believing the world practises a double stan- dard.

Postscript: The Sunday Telegraph food and drink section on 16 June praised a new Israeli wine 'that has not only transformed the Israeli wine scene but also gained inter- national honours'. The paper tells its read- ers where to order this delicious wine, mentioning in passing that the grapes are cultivated and bottled on land occupied by Israel in 1967. Would any newspaper out- side Iraq have published a similar paean to a new date wine harvested from the lush palms of Iraq's Nineteenth Province? Said Aburish writes that the world will honour its commitment to end the military occupa- tion of the West Bank, just as it did that of Kuwait. Reading about the new Israeli wines, I am not convinced.