A Season in Bethlehem; Unholy War... | Buy

Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief Joshua Hammer arrived in the West Bank in October 2000 -- just after Ariel Sharon made his inflammatory visit to the Haram al-Sharif, otherwise known as the Temple Mount. Sharon's trip ignited the worst violence

Joshua Hammer is an internationally renowned journalist who has worked at Newsweek since 1988. Previous to his assignment in Jerusalem, he was the magazine's bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and Berlin. His first book, Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey, was a finalist for the 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Award. He currently lives in Jerusalem with his wife and son.

Contents

Cast of Principal Characters

Key Events in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 19932003

Prologue

1. The Camp

2. The Tribe

3. The Christians

4. The Warlord

5. The Governor

6. The Cell

7. The battle

8. The Siege

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Index

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Chapter One: The Camp He hadn't set out to be a martyr that day, his best friend Sa'ed Ahmad assured me. We were walking through the warrens of Aida refugee camp on a scorching afternoon in July 2002, and I had asked Sa'ed to re-create for me the day that Israeli troops had killed Moayyad al-Jawarish, thirteen, during a clash at Rachel's Tomb, a heavily guarded Jewish holy site located at the northern entrance to Bethlehem. I was investigating the life of a man named Ahmed Mughrabi, one of the most chilling figures in Bethlehem, the leader of a suicide cell that had sent a half dozen teenagers to kill and be killed in Israel. I had traced the story here, to these early days of the al-Aqsa intifada, when Moayyad's death had set in motion a terrible chain reaction of murder and revenge.Sa'ed was a jug-eared boy of sixteen who lived with his parents in one of those indistinguishable alleys found in refugee camps all over the West Bank and Gaza -- a cramped quarter of ugly cinderblock buildings and kids playing with improvised toys such as unspooled reels of cassette tape that they find lying in the dirt. School was out for the summer when Sa'ed agreed to get into my car and head down the Hebron Road to Rachel's Tomb, a half mile away, to tell me about his friend's final hours.With everything that's happened in the region since, it is not easy to remember the atmosphere back in those early days of the al-Aqsa intifada -- Moayyad was killed on October 16, 2000 -- when madness, excitement, and the lure of martyrdom swept up the children of the refugee camps. Nearly every day violent clashes erupted at Israeli military checkpoints thrown up at the border between Palestinian- and Israeli-controlled territory: the New City Inn and Qalandia junction in Ramallah, Netzarim junction in Gaza, the entrance to the Abraham Avinu Jewish settlement inside Hebron. Boys as young as five hurled stones and even firebombs at Israeli soldiers. Palestinian security forces and Fatah activists often stationed themselves at the periphery of the crowds of stone-throwing youths, according to many witnesses, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air in an effort to provoke the Israelis to shoot back into the crowds. At the same time, the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak resolved to squelch the new uprising quickly with an overwhelming use of force. The result was carnage: in the eighteen days between Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Haram al-Sharif -- what Jews call the Temple Mount -- on September 28 and Moayyad's final morning, ninety-one Palestinians were killed, a third of them children.The hours and days leading up to Moayyad's encounter at Rachel's Tomb were especially bloody. Israeli Apache helicopters leveled the Palestinian Authority police headquarters in Ramallah in retaliation for the October 12 lynching of two Israeli soldiers who had made a wrong turn and wandered into the seething city by mistake. Israeli troops injured scores in clashes across the West Bank and Gaza that had erupted in protest over Israel's closure of the territories. Israel sealed off Haram al-Sharif, the third-holiest site in Islam, to Palestinians under the age of forty-five, determined to avoid a repeat of the rioting that had followed Sharon's provocative visit.As Sa'ed remembered it, teenaged street leaders of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, which was then trying to assume command of the uprising, had called for a "scholastic demonstration" at ten thirty in the morning on October 16 at Rachel's Tomb. Sa'ed had been there three times before, once with Moayyad. The fighting had been fierce, he told me: Molotov cocktails and stones met with tear gas, a hail of rubber bullets, and occasional rounds of live ammunition. Moayyad's father, an unemployed pipe fitter, and his mother had begged him not to go down to the tomb anymore, but many of the boys in his school were going, and Moayyad didn't want the