Letter from the war zone

The following letter (abridged) is from Monica, an Arab-American student 
who went to Israel around one month ago to do some volunteer work for a 
Palestinian NGO. She writes from Haifa. Her experience needless to say, was 
not what she expected.

I am so tired all the time these days. I wake up, maybe this nightmare will 
be over. I have no energy, but can't sleep. It's probably the stress ...

So I head down to work, and the first thing I do is check my e-mail. The 
Internet has been both my lifeline to the outside world and my primary 
source of news and information for the past week and a half ... desperate 
for the latest and breaking news.

I'm not the only one with no faith in the international media. We have been 
issuing appeals, news reports, diary entries, personal testimonies, queries 
for more information — you name it, we've e-mailed it.

I have sent out dozens of e-mails a day, and received more than 1000, since 
this crisis began.

Of course, the problem with this addiction to news, the trouble with war in 
this information age, is that there's no escaping reality, no pretending 
this hell has ended and everything is back to normal. I don't know how 
anyone is getting anything productive done.

The first e-mail I opened contained graphic pictures of Issam Hamad's 
charred and bloody corpse. Horrified, I scanned my other e-mails for more 
information.

Issam, was a Palestinian from Um Safa, a West Bank village near Ramallah. 
He was kidnapped by settlers and tortured to death.

His body was found near the Pisgot Z'ev settlement outside Jerusalem. He 
had been electrocuted, burned with a hot iron and attacked with an axe.

As I read on, I discovered that Issam was the fourth Palestinian in the 
West Bank to be killed by settlers over the weekend.

Settlers also attacked some 10 Palestinian towns and villages in the West 
Bank over the weekend shooting into homes, setting things on fire and 
generally terrorizing the population.

All of these town were in zones where the Palestinian Authority has no 
control and therefore there are no Palestinian police to fight back, only 
the local shabab and their stones.

The settlers are also blocking many of the roads between West Bank towns, 
attacking cars and refusing to let Palestinians pass.

Moreover, the settlers have been shooting with live ammunition at 
Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and its environs. And the Israeli 
occupation forces (the so-called Border Police) are helping them.

Eyewitnesses have reported that Israeli police threaten to shoot anyone who 
tries to defend themselves from the settlers' attacks.

Are you hearing about this outside?

Bad news from Nazareth. Some 1000 armed Israelis from Nazrat Elit descended 
into neighbouring Nazareth and started attacking Palestinians there.

Concerned, I called a friend in Nazareth. She was safe, but told me that 
she could see everything and the clashes in the street between armed 
Israeli Jews (protected by police) and unarmed Palestinians. It was almost 
11 o'clock at night.

Yesterday I heard the result of those clashes. At least two dead and dozens 
wounded. One of those killed was shot in the back of his head.

Apparently he was facing the Palestinians who had flooded the streets to 
defend their town and urging them to retreat to avoid more violence.

Blessed be the peacemakers ... in the Holy Land they get shot in the back 
of the head.

There are still five Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in a critical 
condition in hospital. One, a 24-year-old man had to undergo eight 
operations to treat his wounds. I spoke to someone who had visited him in 
hospital. They don't think he will survive. 

And there's more. Violent mobs shouting "Death to Arabs" have been 
demonstrating all over Israel. In Tel Aviv, four Palestinian homes were 
burned down.

Israelis have also been attacking Palestinians in Lod, Megiddo, Wadi Arra, 
Kfar Yuna, Hadar Yousef, Hatikva, Bat Yan, Qaryat Nin, Tzderot, Carmiel and 
Jaffa. All under the watchful eye of the Israeli police and soldiers.

Perhaps as awful as the actual violence is the psychological toll this 
latest Israeli terrorism is taking on the Palestinian population.

Everyone is scared, waiting fearfully for the next attack. And it doesn't 
take much to cause people to panic. 

My room mate just got home. She said a friend's Dad was shot yesterday in 
the doorway of their home in Nazareth. She looks tired and drawn. Will this 
ever end?

I don't know. I think everyone's as tired as I am. Will they have the 
strength to go on? Part of me hopes so. Part of me agrees with my friends 
in the West Bank and Gaza who tell me that it's now or never, that if the 
Palestinians don't keep up the pressure everything will go back to the way 
it was and all this will have been for nothing.

Part of me hopes that this will be the struggle that leads to freedom, the 
war to end all wars.

And part of me is silently urging on the shabab in their brave 
confrontations with Israeli soldiers and tanks, wishing them greater 
strength, greater courage and a resolute will.

I call my own friends almost every day and beg them to stay away from the 
violence telling them it's not worth their lives, urging them to stay safe. 
I guess, in my own way, I am a hypocrite. But I can't help it.

Will there ever be peace?

When I asked one friend this question yesterday he told me that after last 
week, he didn't think so. He said that even during the Intifada he could 
view Israel as an enemy and understand that enemies at war fight each other 
but one day there would be peace.

Someday, he used to think then, Israel could be a partner in peace. Now he 
doesn't think that is possible. Things are different now.

I imagine that if I had the energy I would scream loudly enough for the 
whole world to hear me. I want to tell everyone what is happening here. I 
want to scream that it could all have been prevented.

It could have been stopped even before that first fateful Friday when we 
all thought seven dead was a lot. It need never have happened at all.

It could have been avoided if only the world had listened when Palestinians 
demanded their most basic human rights. If only the world listened when 
Palestinians complained that the "peace process" left them with nothing, 
that an imposed peace could never be a just peace or a lasting peace.

There are those damned words again: "Peace process". 

There are more words that keep appearing everywhere. My Arabic vocabulary 
is growing rapidly, but the words I am learning scare me. Words like "cold 
blood" as in the Israeli occupational forces murder of little Rami al-Dura.

We are hearing a lot about the "musta'aribeen" too. It means those armed 
Israelis who infiltrate Palestinian areas pretending to be Arabs and then 
murder people in "cold blood".

There are other words I have picked up to express my contempt for the 
Israeli soldiers, settlers and mobs who went on rampages destroying 
Palestinian homes, businesses and mosques, terrorizing the population, 
torturing one and killing at least five Palestinians yesterday.

Yesterday was, of course, Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish 
calendar. The Day of Atonement. Can they ever be forgiven for their sins?

Another word I am hearing too often is "rassass". It means bullets. These 
are most dangerous when they are "hiy", "live" as in live ammunition.

"Na'ai" is another word I see too often. It means "death announcement" and 
is usually accompanied by the word "sqoot" which means "fallen in battle".

These two words have been plastered all over the newspapers as friends, 
families and colleagues mourn the loss of some 91 Palestinian "shuhada" 
(martyrs) killed over the last week and a half.

And now I'm too tired to write anymore. So I will turn back to my Inbox 
hoping for some good news. And I will send you this e-mail. And I will 
daydream that this nightmare is over.