In West Bank, Heartbreak Can Lie Just Around Bend

There are few stories in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to match the tragedy of Daniel Hamzani and his baby, Itai--a story that captures the growing sense of brutality and tension of the Arab uprising and Israel’s response to it.

Hamzani, a Jewish resident of the West Bank settlement of Ariel, recalls being relaxed as he drove the dark, winding two-lane hardtop from his father’s house back to his home in the largest of such settlements.

The cassette tape in his little sedan played lilting Middle East music, and his two boys, Ordan and Itai, lay tangled atop one another, asleep in the back seat.

Hamzani drove slowly as he approached the turnoff to the Arab village of Biddiya. His idyll was broken suddenly. Did he see figures lurking in the terraced olive groves that adjoin the road? A light flashed at about the height of a man, illuminating an outstretched arm. Hamzani’s immediate thought: “It’s an Arab about to hurl a gasoline bomb at my car!”

He slowed and felt around in the side pocket of the car door for a pistol he carried with him. He pulled it out and fired twice at the presumed enemy among the gnarled trees.

“I just wanted to scare them away, just move them back,” Hamzani explained during an interview last week.

But the shadowy figures didn’t retire. Instead, they unleashed a hail of rifle fire in Hamzani’s direction.

“Like firecrackers going off,” he recounted in a whisper.

Hamzani himself fired a third time and sped off crazily, trying evade the bullets. He felt a sharp pain in his back and pulled the car to a stop, blocking the path of an oncoming vehicle and demanding help.

“There are terrorists! There are terrorists!” he yelled at the shocked occupants. The cassette in his car kept playing.

A military jeep skidded onto the scene. The helmeted driver popped out and pointed a rifle at Hamzani. Hamzani tried to direct his attention toward the grove. “There are terrorists!” Hamzani repeated. “But I’m a Jew!”

Screams from the back seat of his car pierced Hamzani’s ears. He looked in. His sons were covered with blood.

Hamzani only learned the next morning, just before going in for an operation to remove bullets that entered his shoulder and back, that 3-year-old Ordan was lightly wounded in the shooting. But his youngest, Itai, just 18 months old, had been hit twice in the head and killed.

Israeli Patrol

There were no terrorists in the shadows that night of Aug. 8. It was, rather, an Israeli army patrol that had set up an ambush for Palestinian stone throwers who harass traffic on the highway. The glow that Hamzani mistook for a bomb was a flashlight.

Hamzani’s tragedy is a cautionary tale about life these days in the West Bank and Gaza Strip where the stand-off of the Arab uprising, or intifada, is into its 21st month. Wherever Arab and Israeli, or their backers, stand close, there exists a front of war. A peaceful winding road may in a minute become a blinding battleground.

For Palestinians, the conflict is no longer solely one of throwing stones at troops or Israeli settlers. In the name of national solidarity, Palestinians are turning on their own, killing suspected collaborators with a frequency that has alarmed leaders of the uprising. Almost suddenly, out of the more than 700 total Palestinian fatalities in the conflict, almost 100 have been Arabs who died at the hands of Arabs.

The body of another young Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israeli authorities was discovered Saturday. Arab journalists said Amen Tayem, 20, was found hanging by the neck in an orange grove in the West Bank town of Qalqiliya.

‘Mistakes’ in Killings

Sometimes, Arab activists now speak of “mistakes” in the killing of their fellows.

For the Israeli army, the assertion of riot control and law and order has given way to systematic stalking of activists in the uprising. Soldiers are permitted to ambush and fire at fleeing Palestinians. Troops and secret agents disguise themselves as civilians not only to apprehend participants in anti-Israeli attacks but shoot them down at close range.

It is a practice kept hidden from public view by censorship of the press, television and radio.

For Jewish settlers, reliance on the promise of the army to protect them has faded. Many take their defense--some say the law--into their own hands because they feel the army has done too little to crush the uprising.

Victims of ‘The Situation’

Hamzani, 31, is living with the deadly results of a growing hysteria. Newspapers remarked later that the father and his baby were victims of “the situation.”

Hamzani, a barrel-chested butane gas distributor, lives in Ariel, a string of townhouses and villas set atop rock-speckled hills 20 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. As a working man, he was attracted to the town not because of any particular devotion to national expansion or Biblical claim to the land, but rather because the housing was inexpensive, perhaps half the price of homes in Petah Tikva from where he had moved four years ago.

“I liked the quality of life,” Hamzani said during the interview. “It was our dream to have a yard and some grass.”

Hazy Government Policy

Ariel, population 9,000, has become a militant and sometimes violent community in the face of threats to its well-being not only from surrounding Arabs but from hazy government policy that sometimes speaks of trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.

Ron Nachman, the mayor, is an untiring booster of the 11-year-old community and its permanence. In his view, Ariel is part of Israel, not a passing feature on the disputed territory of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. “Don’t call us a settlement. We’re a city, like Tel Aviv,” he says.

Residents of Ariel, like many in the other 139 settlements of various sizes in the West Bank and Gaza, complain of the dangers of riding the roads around their home enclaves as Palestinians struggle to upset Israel’s hold on the land.

For a community that is busily trying to attract newcomers and industry, the rock and gasoline attacks on the nearby Trans-Samaria Highway are especially bothersome.

“I tell my friends in Tel Aviv to come out to Ariel to visit, they look at me like I’m crazy,” said an employee in Ariel’s town hall. “They think I live on Mars.”

Taxi Driver Slain

Ariel had been jolted this year by a pair of killings that at once created fear and anger. In the spring, a taxi driver was found slain on a roadside. Army investigators hinted at criminal motives, but Ariel residents viewed that opinion as a cover-up. In June, Ariel resident Frederick Rosenfeld took a lone “nature hike” in outlying hills and met some Arab shepherds at a spring. They took pictures of one another. Then the Arabs stabbed him to death, official reports said.

Both cases set off violent reactions from the residents of Ariel and nearby settlements. Nearby Arab villages were vandalized. At the funeral of Rosenfeld, the hiker, mourners shouted down Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as he tried to deliver a eulogy.

In the meantime, Arab deaths at the hands of settlers have become an issue. For example, hikers shot dead a teen-age girl not far from Nablus, and army officials have hinted that the recent shooting death of a Palestinian-American boy in Al Birah may have been done by settlers.

The Jerusalem Post reported that “there have been several cases . . . in which Jews had fired at (army) ambushes. But in those instances, the soldiers realized the attackers were Jews and held their fire.”

Within this general frontier atmosphere, Daniel Hamzani said he felt caught up in the thick of the conflict with the Arabs. Last December, he was riding shotgun in a gas tanker through the roads of the West Bank. When the tanker passed the southern city of Hebron, youths threw stones and hit the driver in the eye.

The truck came safely to a stop, and the stone throwers fled. A similar ambush in Nablus also ended without damage. The events reminded him of an incident in Nablus 10 years ago, when Hamzani was in the army. A grenade was thrown at a half-track but bounced away before it exploded.

Experienced With Ambushes

“I am not new to these ambushes. I have experience,” Hamzani said.

Hamzani, of Syrian and Tunisian ancestry, and his wife, Orly, of Yemenite blood, sat last week in their modest townhouse looking at the color photos of Itai’s circumcision ceremony, a day they called one of the happiest of their lives. Other shots showed the two children at play.

Hamzani blames himself in part for the death.

“I have a feeling of guilt. I wished I had died instead of my son,” he said.

He excuses the soldiers who fired at him with such vehemence. The commander of the unit sometimes comes by to talk and offer condolences, Hamzani said.

“I was a soldier. When someone shoots at you, you shoot back. I do have a negative feeling about someone turning on the light. Why did they do that?” he asked, running through the sequence of events one more time.

“Mostly, I blame the Israeli government,” he continued. “(Prime Minister) Shamir once made a speech at Ariel. He said clearly that he would end the intifada. Of course, that was before the elections.

“We came here not for ideology, but for a good place to raise our children. Sometimes, the roads out there. . . . “--he gestured out to a view of the boulder-topped hills. “It’s a war zone.”

Hamzani still carries a gun in his car. He explained dispassionately that the pistol is a burden, like an unwanted limb.

“A bother to carry. Uncomfortable. You have to leave it at the door of places. It doesn’t protect you,” he said. “You protect it.”

Good Mortgage, Pure Air

Both Daniel and Orly say they want to continue living at Ariel. The death of their son seems to have sanctified a decision that was once based mainly on a good mortgage and pure air.

“If we leave Ariel we would have to leave Israel,” Hamzani said firmly.

As visitors left, a municipal worker handed them the summer copy of Shalom Ariel, a community magazine. In it, there are articles about the killing of Rosenfeld, the hiker, a beauty contest, the construction of a gem-cutting factory and a full color aerial photo of the settlement set above a written promise of a place “. . . Where Children Run Free.”