The daily deadly ritual

By Kesava Menon

RAMALLLAH (WEST BANK), NOV. 10. School's out and as they trudge home at noon Palestinian school boys pause at a junction on the road between this town and the Jewish settlement of Bet El to throw a few stones. An Israeli jeep, its doors and windows shut, is parked by the side a couple of hundred metres down the road from them. Although the stretch in between is littered with stones, charred by smoke and partially blocked by what looks like a burnt out refrigerator turned into a barricade there is something desultory about the whole scene. It could all change in a second if some of those stones come too close to the jeep or if the doors should open and the Israelis inside pop out to fire off a few shots.

This game which may appear harmless, almost like a ritual processed through mutual understanding, can become the deadly affair it really is in the space of a few miscalculations by either side.

Just short of where the jeep is parked is the bullet-pocked facade of the Capital Inn which has been used a firing position in the past.

From elsewhere in this part of Ramallah shots are fired regularly at Bet El and are responded to with an overwhelming blast from the Israeli side. Over the taxi radio comes the news that there was firing earlier in the day in Bethlehem on the far side of Jerusalem from the northern Ramallah. Later in the day an Israeli helicopter fired a rocket at a vehicle carrying Palestinian commanders killing one of them. Ramallah, which shows evidence everywhere of the construction boom that occurred over the time when the prospects for peace looked good, is extremely quiet for a weekday.

There is little work since Palestinians are not allowed to cross the barriers into Jerusalem and so there is little movement about the streets. Except in the crowded heart of Ramallah and here, the traffic is blocked as Palestinian doctors and nurses take out a protest march. Several medics have been killed while trying to rescue youth who were shot and wounded and there is a deep personal touch to the demonstration quite apart from its political overtones. At least in this stretch of the West Bank, Israeli tanks and heavy weaponry are not in evidence. Pickets, consisting of a single jeep load of soldiers, stop traffic on the road which enters the city but they are no longer located in the near vicinity of the populated areas. However, there is a huge military compound near Bet El and the absence of Israel's heavy weaponry does not mean that they cannot be re-introduced in a hurry. ``Why do they need these tanks to stop a few school boys from throwing stones'' is the most common refrain. It is not as if the Palestinians are about to go and throw stones at Bet El if the Israeli troops are pulled back closer to the settlement is the milder argument.

Others, of course, go much further. They want Israel to just pack up and leave the settlements that loom on most of the high ground and surround Ramallah. Just to see the way the settlements, some of them almost fortress-like in appearance, menace the Palestinians in towns like Ramallah is to understand their rage at Israel's occupation.

``We just want them to go. We don't want to see them here. If we just stop seeing them we will be happy. We will not go to Tel Aviv to do something to them,'' is another common refrain.

But there is little hope that the settlements will be handed over to the Palestinian Authority or that the settlers will go home any time in the near future.

The Palestinians are, therefore, in no mood to wind up their displays of defiance either.

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Section  : International
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