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Thursday
February 14, 2002
The Guardian
I Watched a Soldier Shoot at Children
A passing drama in the daily life of Palestinians under occupation
by Lucy Winkett
Perhaps I have lived a charmed life but I know I have been very
lucky to have rarely felt myself to be in real physical danger in my 34 years. I
can probably remember all of the times I have. In early February I added to their
number as I was standing in a crowd at Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and
Ramallah in the West Bank.
It was about 1.45pm and the crowd waiting to pass through the checkpoint was moving
slowly. Cars were backed up for a mile, traders were calling out the knock-down prices
of the clothes and trinkets they were selling and my throat, accustomed to central
London fumes but not to the dust of the Holy Land, was dry.
I was with a small group of women priests, supported by Christian Aid, visiting different
places and people on both sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. To my English
eyes, the very sight of soldiers with machine guns on either side of us was unnerving;
then we spotted five boys, probably about 13 years old, throwing occasional stones
at the Israeli soldiers ahead of us. We stood and watched from our position in the
crowd, secretly admiring their nerve if not their accuracy. One of the soldiers had
clearly had enough and aimed his gun at them. He can't shoot, we thought; they're
unarmed and they're only boys.
But he did. He took aim and fired directly at them. They scattered, and for a moment
we thought one of them had been hit. Not content with this result, the soldier climbed
up on to one of the concrete posts, clearly visible against the sky, and took slow
aim and fired again, and again.
We took pictures, surreptitiously and with real trepidation before getting into our
taxis and inching our way through the crowded checkpoint and then the streets of
Ramallah. Almost more shocking than witnessing such a violation of human rights was
the reaction of the crowd.
Palestinians were trying to get on with their daily journeys that Saturday as any
other working day. Movements are severely restricted by the Israeli border closure
policy and so a simple journey to work, to school, to hospital, to visit family and
friends turns into a long and humiliating wait at one or more of the around 130 checkpoints
in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The crowd at that checkpoint were resigned; nervous,
but un- responsive to the violence taking place just metres from them. It was, to
my foreign eyes, a sign of the "everydayness" of it all; another checkpoint,
another shooting.
British headlines are full of suicide bombs, raids on Jewish settlements, inter-Palestinian
violence. My experience of the past few weeks, which has included listening to Israeli
F16 bombers flying low over Gaza City for two consecutive nights, is that the real
drama is being played out in the grim day to day existence of Palestinians who can't
travel, whose children wet the bed at night as soon as they hear the planes.
One Palestinian social worker told us how children were asked at a school in Bethlehem
to draw pictures of the olive harvest. The pictures came back of olive trees all
right and even of people picking olives, but above their heads flew a helicopter
gunship, or by their side lay the dead body of a relative. Red blood contrasted with
the black and green of the olives in the distressed minds of children.
We heard stories from Palestinian refugees echoed by Jewish settlers; the same sense
of history, of grievance, of soul-destroying fear. But the difference was that we
heard these words from Palestinians in their bare rooms with no heating and little
food. With unemployment running at 70% in the occupied territories, the birth rate
is soaring and the economic situation is dire. From a Jewish settlement, we heard
the same fear and well-founded sense of physical vulnerability; settlements of large
houses are often built on a hill close to a Palestinian village and children go to
school in bullet-proof buses; a guard stands outside the classroom.
There are traumatised children on both sides and it is invidious to try to quantify
the suffering. There is no helpful measure of fear. But fear and suffering there
is and it will take all of the costly dignity we encountered among ordinary Palestinians
to withstand such trauma. It will take all of the goodwill we encountered among some
ordinary Israelis towards Palestinians to encourage their government to rein in their
well-trained and brutalised army that regularly shoots at children. It will also
take the political will of the British and other European governments to speak bravely
in defence of the human rights of all sides in the Middle East; but particularly
now, to call for the end of the occupation and violation of the Palestinian people.
The Reverend Lucy Winkett is Minor Canon at St Paul's Cathedral.
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