http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1051842,00.htmlChris McGreal reports on a desire among both Israelis and Palestinians to see the other side suffer.
3,000 dead yet peace remains elusive
It is three years since Ariel Sharon took a fateful walk on the Temple Mount and the Palestinian intifada reignited. Few would have predicted the result: 3,000 Israelis and Palestinians dead, cities wrecked and reoccupied, the prospects for peace seeming to retreat by the day. Amidst the carnage and suffering on both sides, the suicide bombing of the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv by a young man from Qalqilya stands out as symbol of the horror and desperation that mark the conflict. Chris McGreal reports from both cities on how those touched by the attack view the intifada after three years, and on a desire among both Israelis and Palestinians to see the other side suffer
Monday September 29, 2003
The Guardian
The bomber's father - 'My son was not radical, he was radicalised'
The day that Saeed Hotari blew himself apart outside the Dolphinarium disco, his father Hassan said he wished that he had 20 more sons to die slaughtering Israelis. Many others in the West Bank city of Qalqilya celebrated the murderous death of one its sons. But today, Mr Hotari is more troubled. "If it were up to me and he told me he was going to do this, I would have prevented him," he said. "I didn't want him to kill himself. I want him to fight for his rights, but not to kill himself." "But the intifada is like a human being; it is like a man trying to scream loud to get his rights. All this man has is his voice. All he can do is scream. Otherwise he is paralysed."
Mr Hotari will not go so far as to say that what 21-year-old Saeed did was wrong, but there are others in Qalqilya who do, even if it is only because of the price paid by Palestinians. "The suicide operations are a mistake and we have to stop it and resist in another way," said the city's mayor, Maa'rouf Zahran. "The intifada has been a disaster for us. The results have been catastrophic.
"The suicide attacks we have to stop. Stop attacking civilians wherever they are and whoever they are."
<snip>
Israel denies imposing collective punishments, but the curfews and closures have brought mass unemployment and new depths of poverty. And now Mr Sharon is caging most of the Palestinian population behind a vast "security fence" in what, to his critics, looks suspiciously like a move to impose an emasculated state on a powerless people. Qalqilya has the added torture of being encircled by a 9-metre wall and fence that have turned it into a de facto prison for many residents. Israeli gunfire regularly echoes across the city. Mr Sharon's militarist strategy has delivered him a partial victory, but at a cost that could come to haunt Israel. A recent survey by al-Quds university and the Qalqilya municipality revealed that support in the city for suicide bombings has dropped sharply - but for the first time, more people now back Hamas over Mr Arafat's Fatah.
<snip>
Irina Sklyanik stared long and hard at the Polaroid photograph presented by a doctor as she scoured the hospitals in search of her child. And even then she wasn't sure. The picture is of a girl almost unrecognisable beneath the blood cascading from the hole smashed in her head and the tubes twisting into her damaged mouth. One eye stares out, but the child is unconscious. "I could only recognise her by her nose," said Mrs Sklyanik. "I was sure she was going to improve. I just didn't grasp the truth. Even after the doctors told me they had to remove 60% of her brain, I still didn't get it." Fifteen year-old Yael Sklyanik died a day later, one of 21 people - most of them teenagers - murdered by a suicide bomber outside a Tel Aviv disco in June 2001. Her sister, Lior, was on the edge of the crowd making her way to meet Yael. The survivors described how a young Palestinian man seemed to taunt his victims, wandering among them dressed in clothes that led some to mistake him for a Jew from Central Asia, and banging a drum packed with explosives and ball bearings. "Something's going to happen," the bomber repeated. <snip>
But if our children are dying every day, if people are afraid to get on buses, where is the peace? We have to fight them."
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