Down at the frontline things are pretty much at a stand-off. There are 100 meters between the soldiers and the shebab, with the latter hiding behind the wreck of a burnt-out car that they dragged earlier into the road for cover. When rubber bullets fly, all of those behind the car duck. There is also the possibility of danger from Israeli snipers on the left, a fifty meters towards the jeep but on top of the hill. The geography of here does not favour the stone thrower.
A jeep revs its engine and takes off from the soldiers' side, quickly narrowing the gap between the two sides. A soldier is shooting rubber-coated metal bullets from the roof hatch as if it's some 'cowboy & indians' movie. Which of course it is.
I can't work this out. These people are willing to come out here and some of them seriously risk their lives, yet several hundred of them are fleeing from this jeep. What do you think the jeep would do if no one moved or - even better - ran a little and then suddenly turned back and surrounded the jeep? If you look closely at the picture above, you will see two or three people standing with their arms outstretched trying to stop the needless flow of people. Other things don't make sense. The guy pictured below is about to try and throw back a teargas grenade that has been fired from a tear gas grenade launcher. Too many Van Damme movies have convinced this boy that his arm is going to do something other than send it into the crowd of Palestinians between him and the soldiers two hundred and fifty yards away.
If your trip is the soldiers/stones things, it would seem appropriate to prepare a few leveling measures to address the gross disparity in weapons. Decent catapaults for one, not these crappy pieces of string and material that are made on site. Surgical tubing. Inner tubes from tyres. Contraptions to fire back the teargas cannisters. And get a decent smoke screen burning, the burning tyres have become like the turkey story*. Wires ready on the roads, people to go round the back and block the top road so the snipers don't feel comfortable getting into position above. And half of you have gas masks from the two Gulf crises, bring them and form a team to dispose of the teargas cannisters that are effectively to end this day, but not before Isma'il Shehadeh from Kalandia Refugee Camp gets shot in the eye and pronounced clinically dead. Has life become that cheap here, that you venture into life-threatening situations without any preparation against the lethal weapons the army has? Did all those years of Intifada teach you nothing? This is stupidity in the highest and the fruits of stupidity are being harvested and carried off in basketloads:
I am aware though of a growing sense of rage amongst the Intifada generation, today in their mid-twenties. If I am not wrong the time is coming where these theatrical clashes of the gladiators - where only one side dies - are going to become a little less comfortable for the Israelis. It is one of those dynamic things that you can sense building. Fifty years has brought a lot to bubble near the surface. Quibbling over 13 percent or 9 percent isn't really grabbing the attention of the person on the street like it used to. The handshakers and deal makers are far too concerned with their audience - the international media - to bother to understand what is happening at street level, or perhaps simply just to stubborn to learn that repression will not always contain conflict to a level they feel comfortable with.
*The turkey story - A wife, every time she cooks a turkey cuts one-third of it off and puts on the side of the baking tray before putting it and the rest of the turkey into in her oven. One day, her husband asks her why she does this. "I don't know," she replies, "my mother used to teach me to cook turkey like this." The husband remembers a few similar meals at his mother-in-law's house and agrees. But he's still curious. Next time they're at the mother-in-law's house, the husband pipes up, "By the way, why do you cut off one-third of the turkey when you cook it?" His wife's mother thinks for a while and says, "You know, I really don't know. My mother used to do it like that and I learnt from her." The husband and wife eventually visit the house of the grandmother and, finally, get to pose the same question. The grandmother smiles to herself on hearing the question, and finally answers, "When I was looking after the household and used to cook turkey, we had a very small oven. That's why I always had to cut one-third off it!" The point being, in this particular application of the metaphor, is that today burning tyres are used in clashes because they were used in clashes in the past. Any original point they may have served to reduce soldiers' visibility in open ground has been lost.