Palestinians Debate Cost of Bombings

RAMALLAH, West Bank — On the wall of Hisham’s Barber Shop hangs a photograph of the owner’s brother, shot to death in September in clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police.

The nephew of the Ramallah “martyr” stood at the shop Thursday, dispassionately discussing the Jerusalem market bombings the day before that killed 13 Israelis and two suicide bombers and wounded nearly 170.

Moatsam Nowara, 18, told a group of friends that he did not support the wave of suicide bombings in early 1996, when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process seemed to be inching forward. But a lot has happened since then, he said.

First, his uncle died in the clashes that followed Israel’s decision last fall to open a tunnel door in the disputed Old City of Jerusalem. Then, he said, Israel “took” Jabal Abu Ghneim, a hill near East Jerusalem where a new Jewish housing project called Har Homa is to be built.

Nowara expected Islamic extremists to respond with violence. When he heard that two men had blown themselves up in the Jerusalem market Wednesday, he admitted: “I was happy.”

His friend Belal Hamad did not agree. “What happened yesterday is killing innocents. It’s wrong,” said the 18-year-old Hamad. “I think it’s haram, forbidden by God, to kill these people. People who work in a vegetable shop are poor and simple people.”

Such debates took place Thursday in cafes and refugee camps, on street corners and in barbershops throughout the West Bank, where Palestinians were divided on what they see as the costs and merits of violence against Israelis in the fight for a Palestinian state. While there was clearly no love lost for Israelis among those interviewed, many still harbored some hope for the peace process. But there were also many voices of lost faith and fading patience.

Israel responded to the bombings by sealing off Palestinian-ruled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, blocking travel even between villages and cities. Unable to go to work, plenty of Palestinians had time on their hands Thursday.

They saw the events as part of a familiar and vicious cycle of political setbacks, extremist violence, military closures and widespread unemployment.

The closure, with Israeli army checkpoints surrounding Ramallah, made Nowara three hours late for work and cost him his job installing air conditioning. But he seemed as unfazed by the firing as by the loss of life, which he explained as an eye for an eye.

“Our reaction is that if they kill some on our side, then some of them should be killed also. It’s just natural that if you get hurt and killed by the other, the other also will be killed,” Nowara said.

“Most people do not want these attacks,” insisted Hamad.

Another youth walked over with a Palestinian newspaper to point out the picture of a Nablus man shot to death--”in cold blood,” he said--by Israeli soldiers a few days earlier. The soldiers said the man had stabbed one of them first, a claim that prompted the Ramallah teenagers to shake their heads. The Palestinian was getting married, they said. Why would he pull a knife against Israeli soldiers on his wedding day?

The front page of the newspaper, Al Quds, showed the ruined Jerusalem market after Wednesday’s blasts, with broken watermelons and spilled blood on the ground. The headlines reported the news without comment.

“When you look at the pictures you imagine that it could happen to your people, your relatives,” Nowara said. “I felt pity for the children, but not for the older people because they support [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

The one point on which Nowara and Hamad could agree was in placing blame squarely at Netanyahu’s feet.

“Netanyahu’s policy is the direct cause of this attack,” Hamad said. “The Israeli army is taking land and provoking Palestinians and, therefore, they are provoking these actions. . . . Israel will use this to implement what it wants, to expand settlements, to pave bypass roads and, in the end, Israelis will benefit from this attack. Palestinians will suffer.”