THE MIDDLE EAST: The ever-present threat of violence means no one is immune. David Horovitz asks a Palestinian and an Israeli how they cope
The grim statistics are all too well known: More than 1000 Palestinians and more than 300 Israelis killed in almost a year-and-a-half of the intifada confrontation. Thousands of people have been injured on both sides.
But even those who have not been directly hurt, those whose families have not been ruined by the death or injury of a loved one, have been affected. All of the nine million or so Israelis and Palestinians who live between the River Jordan, to the East, and the Mediterranean, to the West, have seen their lives change for the worse: children waking up with nightmares; breadwinners losing their jobs, amid curfews and closures; collapsed industries and rising unemployment. The simplest, most unremarkable aspects of daily life - going out for a stroll, or to do the shopping - have been rendered complex and dangerous by the ever-present threat of violence. No matter where they live, nobody is immune.
One recent opinion poll showed two thirds of Palestinians supporting the suicide bombers who have struck relentlessly against Israeli civilians; a recent Israeli survey showed a majority of Israelis backing an increased use of force against the Palestinians. On both sides, there seems to be a growing sense of "it's them or us," of the impossibilities of co-existence.
On Thursday afternoon, hours after an alert waiter had foiled a Palestinian man's attempted suicide bombing at her favorite Jerusalem restaurant - by overpowering the would-be bomber and cutting the wires that led from his body to the bomb in his back-pack - I spoke to Veevee Merlin-Knopp (40) who lives with her husband Sinai and their three young children in Gilo, a southern neighbourhood of the city, built on land claimed by Israel as part of sovereign Jerusalem, but regarded by the Palestinians as occupied West Bank territory.
That same evening, as Israeli troops continued their largest incursion in 17 months into Palestinian territory, I spoke to Yussuf Barasi (36) who lives with his parents, his wife Fatmah and their four young children in Al-Arub refugee camp outside Hebron.
What they have to say is representative, of course, of no one but themselves. Relatively speaking, both happen to sound particularly moderate - so much so that, perhaps, if all Palestinians and Israelis spoke the way they did, maybe these two peoples would not be at war. But at war they are. And all the ordinary millions, the Knopps and the Barasis and everybody else, feel it more keenly with every passing day.
Asked how the intifada has affected her family, Mrs Merlin-Knopp, a social worker, begins with that day's foiled bombing of Kafit, the restaurant where she had been intending to eat the previous evening. Precisely out of fear of such an attack, a meal to mark the engagement of one of her friends had been relocated to one of their homes instead. "So, yes, it's pretty scary to know how right we were, how dangerous things are," she says. "But the truth is that everywhere is scary nowadays. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv . . ."
On Monday night, a suicide bomber killed three Israelis at a restaurant in the Tel Aviv building where her brother-in-law works; not long ago, the father of a boy in her children's school was killed by Palestinian gunmen when on reserve duty in Jericho.
To live in Gilo has been to live on the front-line, with the neighbourhood intermittently under fire from Palestinian-controlled Beit Jala across the valley. "We've stood at the window and seen the flashes of orange as Israel fired back," says Mrs Merlin-Knopp, whose mother is Israeli but who grew up in the US. "Buildings in our street have not been hit," she says. "But I assume the next step will be missiles. They'll reach us for sure." In the past few days, the whole building shook when Israel targeted nearby Bethlehem. "It's hard to sleep. We're all having war nightmares." Mr Barasi felt the impact of the intifada directly this week, when his 60-year-old mother had a heart attack. "It used to be five minutes from here to Hebron," he says, "but not any more. We called an ambulance, but there's a closure order at the camp - no vehicles allowed in or out. So we had to carry my mother 15 minutes to the main road. And from there, the ambulance had to take dirt roads through the hills to avoid the roadblocks around Hebron. It took more than two hours to get her to the hospital." The delay does not seem to have affected her condition, he says - she has suffered partial paralysis, but is stable.
Compared to most other West Bank districts, the Hebron area has been quiet these past months. But there have been two fatalities in the camp, which is home to 12,000, he says, "one of them a neighbour of mine, a teenager, hit in the head inside his house by a ricocheting bullet, when Israeli soldiers fired back at some other boys who were throwing stones at them."
Mr Barasi used to do plumbing and electrical work inside Israel, even as the intifada raged but it stopped about six months ago. And while he got a permit to do construction work at the settlement of Betar Illit a month ago, that stopped too after about a fortnight, when Israel tightened travel restrictions, citing fears of more suicide bombings.
Mr Knopp is adamant the Palestinians, and specifically Mr Arafat, are to blame for the descent into conflict. "The last Israeli government put a deal on the table. They could have had major progress, relative affluence. But that wasn't good enough for Arafat. They want to push us all into the sea. They don't want peace. They chose the terrorist route.
"I was doing reserve duty in 1994, stationed at the Allenby bridge, and we were giving out guns to the Palestinians (arriving from Iraq, to police Jericho)," Mr Knopp recalls. "I was skeptical, but I also thought we were right to try. Some of my colleagues said at the time that we were insane to be arming them, that they'd turn the guns on us. How much more evidence does anyone need that we tried to do the right thing?" His wife is more ambivalent. "I don't know if I can blame one side for what's happening now," she says. "The Palestinians had lived for so long under such bad conditions, maybe it was too late by the time the Oslo process began. Now they just hate us so much that there's no getting out of the conflict."
Where does Mr Barasi place the blame? "Well, the Israelis blame the Palestinians and the Palestinians blame the Israelis, of course," he says. "And I do blame [Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel] Sharon for what's happening now. He has no political agenda. Every time there's been a ceasefire, he's broken it."
He believes that, at the Clinton-Barak-Arafat summit, at Camp David in July 2000, Israel did seek a genuine territorial compromise, but says Mr Arafat was right to reject an accord that did not guarantee Palestinian refugees the right to choose between returning to today's Israel or accepting financial compensation.
"My father came from Kiryat Gat [southwest of Jerusalem]," he notes. And while surveys show an overwhelming majority of Palestinian refugees would take advantage of a "right of return" to sovereign Israel if it were offered - an influx that would dramatically undermine Israel's Jewish majority - Mr Barasi says: "Personally, I wouldn't want to live there now. There's no room. I'd like the money to try and build a better life."
Yes, he adds, Arab money could have been use to rehouse refugee families like his decades ago. But resolving the issue is the responsibility of Israel, he says, not that of the Arab world.
Mrs Merlin-Knopp and Mr Barasi hesitate longest when asked how this violence is going to end. "I really don't know," says Mrs Merlin-Knopp. "A lot more people are going to die. UN forces? The Palestinians would probably just blow them away. I somehow still have this stupid belief that peace will come. But I used to think that it might take only five or 10 years. Now I think we'll have years of terror."
Says Mr Barasi: "When Sharon falls, we can make peace. It can't carry on the way it is now, that's for sure. It can only work through negotiations. Not with fingers on the triggers."