Why not listen to some music while you read? This entry's offering, "I Hate the White Man", from Roy Harper's Flat, Baroque and Berserk album. You'll need the free Real Audio player and you can shift-click in Netscape to download the 967K file from here to play from your hard disk if you experience any network congestion. Click on the note to begin.
Some of the students have run ahead to what the Beit El settlers call the "Ayosh Junction" roundabout, while I have been watching others prepare. Now they are tossing stones at passing cars with obviously Israeli occupants. As I arrive at he junction, which includes a new building called the "City Inn" and a gas station, live ammunition from an Israeli settler that is presumably being stoned hums viciously overhead, at what unmistakably feels like just over a meter above my head.
I don't waste time looking for the source, rather I'm first pressing myself to the ground by a nearby parked car then - after a quick flash of realisation - trying to hold myself in midair, in the place between the yawning gap under the car and its thin windows above.
Muraad, a friend of Kifah's says "Hi" at this point. He's just a meter away standing behind the corner of the City Inn. "Yalla, I'm coming through," I say. It's amazing how safe you feel when you have a few meters of marble between yourself and the invisible, unhinging hiss of live ammunition. "Holy cow, man," I hear myself say.
It stops, I run round the other side of the building and cross the roundabout to the other side. After a few more stones, the students notice the impending arrival of some jeeps and take cover in the gas station. "What about the petrol pumps?" someone asked me, horrified, when I recounted the story later. It hadn't even occurred to me at the time to be honest. Every discharge of ammunition after that first experience made me too jumpy to think of subtleties like that.
One jeep has arrived and the soldiers are already at it. So, one hour after leaving the university in a bus with the students (actually 55 minutes according to the auto time function on the video, on the bottom left of each photo, that places the moments in real time) here I am watching some 18-year-old Israeli firing at them. Fortunately, it's with the less-lethal rubber bullets, although the poor gas station owner and any customers still there must be a little concerned.
I mean to say, you pull up for a fill-up of unleaded and a free Magic TreeTM air freshener to dangle from your driving mirror and some Israeli soldier starts shooting at you. That's enough to convince most people to take the bus.
I go behind the jeeps and continue shooting from there. The soldiers are shooting too but it's a little different in their case. Their latest act of keeping the peace was to fire a teargas cannister onto the top of the building, where it is merrily burning away. Another soldier is opening fire, also with "rubber" bullets.
I feel as rested as a cat in a violin factory after hearing that whizzzzz above my head. The soldiers charge towards the gas station, covering their advance with salvoes of rubber-coated metal bullets, which are ricocheting off walls and other hard objects. It's amazing how mad a few stones can get your average Israeli soldier. They disappear around the corner. I figure there's no rush to follow and walk after them. Fortunately there are not too many homes around here for any people to get hurt.
It took the soldiers, after arriving at the scene, only about five minutes in total to clear the students and other stringers-on past the gas station and back along the stone and garbage skip blocked road. The disappointed Magic TreeTM collectors passing by on the way to Beit El might have even smiled gratefully at the boys in green, had anyone still been on the streets to play the rubber bullet pinball game.
I'm finishing these three pages at 7pm on the day, and e-mail news from the Beit El settler radio station Arutz Sheva ("Channel Seven") has just arrived on my desktop. Unfortunately it didn't name the guy who was shooting in my direction:
IDF forces were rushed to the Ayosh Junction between Beit El and Ramallah early this afternoon after Palestinian Arabs began systematically stoning Israeli cars. One Arab was wounded in the leg when an Israeli shot in self-defense after his car was surrounded and attacked by a mob of Arabs. The soldiers who arrived on the scene drove the attackers back into Ramallah, and a battle of stones and rubber bullets ensued.
Arutz Sheva's report isn't wholly accurate. There is a missing part of the story. It was a second year Birzeit student called Yazeed who was shot in the leg, right through the bone, and other Birzeit students witnessed the incident. The settler was backing up in his car - an old beige Renault 9 it seems - away from the students and towards Beit El. He stopped the car at a safe distance away, opened the door, and began shooting. So already, he's on the offensive. Someone was injured in the leg, but the settler's aim was not just at people's legs, which takes it somewhat out of the realm of self-defence. How do I know this? Well, if bullets passed between a meter and two meters above my head... well you work it out.
