Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Meet the residents of two Middle East cities -- one Palestinian, the other Israeli. Both share the same concerns about violence and security -- from opposite sides of the conflict.
Oct 25, 2000 | A crane lifts reinforced concrete slabs, each the size of a door, and stacks them upright, side by side, until they form a long wall along the southwestern edge of Gilo, a middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood. A few Jewish residents from Gilo mill around the men at work to catch one last glimpse of the hills and Palestinian villages across the valley before the wall obstructs their view.
"It's more psychological than anything," said Galina Shifrin, out with her husband to inspect the new wall. "The bullets can fly over this easily."
During the past three weeks, the apartment blocks of Gilo, a neighborhood built on Israeli-occupied land, have come under Palestinian gunfire at least a dozen times. Though the shots fired from Beit Jala, a mostly Christian village just across the valley and only minutes from biblical Bethlehem, haven't killed anyone so far, they did leave one policeman severely wounded 10 days ago, and they continue to terrorize Gilo's inhabitants.
"It's a very bad situation," said Shifrin, a 50-year-old Jewish woman who immigrated from Moscow 20 years ago. "It's very dangerous because they are our neighbors, they're very close. There are Arabs on our left and on our right."
The same day the Israeli policeman was shot in Gilo, Israelis and Palestinians agreed at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh to try to implement a cease-fire. But the goodwill was shorter lived than the participants' tans and was followed by intense violence and verbal threats, further entrenching deep resentment and conflicting positions on both sides.
Sunday, fresh violence in a Palestinian town near Bethlehem brought about a heavy-handed reaction from the Israeli army. Two tanks stationed on the edge of Gilo sprayed Beit Jala with machine-gun fire and shot a tank shell into a nearby field while helicopter gunships fired missiles into the village, punching through the walls of several houses, striking a marble factory and disrupting the town's electricity.
"The sound of the bombing was very loud," said Rose Saqa, a 26-year-old Palestinian from Beit Jala. "You cannot figure out where it will fall next." Saqa said her home, a 200-year-old stone house built atop a hill directly across from Gilo, doesn't feel safe anymore. "Wherever you are, you can see my house. It's easy to bomb."
The next day, again, the Saqas and the Shifrins, on either side of the valley, could barely sleep, ducking instinctively, deserting the most exposed rooms, and feeling under siege, as organized Palestinian gunmen and Israeli Defense Forces exchanged lead over their rooftops.
"The Palestinians go 'Tuk. Tuk.' But then the Israelis respond 'Trrrrr-trrrrrr-trrrrrrrrr.' There's no comparison between the two," said Saqa, a travel agent in peaceful times who has now learned to distinguish between the sound of rifles and heavy machine guns.
"You cannot compare the violence of an occupying army with the violence of those resisting it," Phyllis Bennis, a Middle East expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, told CNN recently. But you can compare the feelings on both sides and, surprisingly, at a time when everything else separates them, the feelings on the Israeli and the Palestinian side are often the same: Both sides are terrified; they feel besieged.
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