Each Shell Deepens 2 Sides’ Convictions in Mideast Violence

Ibrahim abu Khater, a Gazan chicken farmer, and Eli Moyal, the mayor of the Israeli town of Sderot, live about a mile apart, separated by an electronic fence and an ocean of hatred.

Last week, Israeli-Palestinian violence that has raged unabated for nearly seven months got personal for both men.

On Monday evening, as Moyal sipped coffee on the porch of his suburban home, a mortar shell fired by Palestinians from the outskirts of Beit Hanoun slammed into the ground 100 yards from his gate. By the time the astonished Moyal got to his feet, a second shell had crashed into a field at the end of his block with a deafening boom and a flash of flames.

The sequence of events that followed illustrates how fighting that has claimed more than 450 lives and wounded thousands over the months has created a chasm of bitterness and incomprehension between Israelis and Palestinians, leaving them locked in a cycle of bloodshed each side blames on the other.

Less than 72 hours after the shells landed near Moyal’s house, Abu Khater had a similarly jarring end to a coffee break when Israeli shells hit his fields in Beit Hanoun. In interviews after the attacks, both men vented their frustration and the sense that their lives are being disrupted by events beyond their control.

Israelis such as Moyal find the mortar assaults on their communities, a relatively new tactic in the uprising, an inexplicable gesture of futility by the Palestinians. The Israeli army says Palestinians have fired more than 100 shells at Israeli targets since the end of January. The majority have fallen in or near Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. But some have hit inside Israel, and the government and army have said such targeting crosses “every red line.” Three Israelis have been wounded, a 10-month-old suffering the only serious injuries. The vast majority of shells have landed harmlessly in fields.

But the attacks have united Israelis behind right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hard-nosed military response to the uprising, particularly after Palestinians began firing at targets in Israel.

“These mortars are a terrible mistake by [Palestinian Authority President] Yasser Arafat. This is inside the green line,” Moyal said, referring to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. “We have been here for 50 years. What do these mortars do for the Palestinians?”

But Abu Khater and many other Palestinians see the shelling as a justifiable response to months of measures against their towns and villages, and a reminder to the Israelis that a strong army cannot guarantee safety.

“The mortars are a good thing,” said Mohammed Sarsah, 18, a Gazan who makes a living helping residents skirt Israeli road closures by giving them rides in his horse-drawn cart.

Israel’s closures of Gazan roads, its fierce reaction to every attack and its prohibition against most Palestinians entering Israel to work cannot go unanswered, he said. “If we had heavier weapons, we should use those too.”

Five mortar shells landed on Sderot’s outskirts the night Moyal sat on his front porch. They injured no one and caused no damage. But the attack transformed the southern town of 24,000 residents into a front-line outpost.

The shelling brought a stream of political and military leaders to Sderot and disaster to Beit Hanoun. Within hours, Israeli helicopter gunships were circling above the Palestinian farming community of 25,000, firing at security outposts. Israeli tanks rumbled across fields, destroying crops, firing on homes and crushing outbuildings.

It was Israel’s first reoccupation of land handed back to the Palestinians under the 1993 Oslo peace accords. By the time the army pulled out the next day in the face of U.S. pressure, it left behind a trail of destruction and an embittered community.

A reluctant Abu Khater found himself thrust into the middle of the fighting. His farm, which lies a few hundred feet inside the Gazan fence and just down a dirt track from a Palestinian police outpost, was unscathed during the brief reoccupation. But just hours after the pullout, more mortars were fired on Israeli targets. And on Wednesday night, shells landed in Jewish settlements and over the green line.

The next morning, as he and his son were sipping tiny cups of strong Arabic coffee outside the barn where he is raising 1,000 chicks, Abu Khater saw an Israeli tank shell whistle overhead and heard it slam into the ground nearby. Terrified, he and his son ran into the onion field outside their barn and took shelter behind a berm. Another shell whistled overhead, fired by tanks he could see on a nearby hill just over the Gazan fence. They heard deafening explosions as shells slammed into the nearby police outpost.

“Altogether, there were about five shells,” the 56-year-old farmer said. He and his son returned to the barn shortly after the last one hit. “I had to feed and water the chickens or they will die.”

The farmer lives with his wife and 12 children in a nearby village, Beit Lahiya. Only he and one son venture out to the farm each day to tend the chickens and olive trees. Abu Khater’s goal is to hold out at least 45 days--until the chickens are old enough to be sold for slaughter.

“This farm is my only income,” he said. “For seven months, I have been afraid to raise chickens, afraid that the Israelis will come, but this time, I am determined.”

He and several sons support 40 people. Before the Palestinian uprising began in September, Abu Khater earned about $1,000 a month selling chickens and turkeys that he raised. Since the fighting started, he said, he has earned virtually nothing.

Abu Khater is unhappy about the mortar attacks on the Israelis, but he is convinced that the Palestinian uprising should continue.

“I don’t think we should stop while they keep shooting and bulldozing,” he said, “but I think it is better to throw rocks than missiles, so that the Palestinians keep international support.”

For now, he watches with trepidation the Palestinian flag still flying over the outpost down the dirt road from his farm and anxiously monitors Israeli bulldozing of his neighbors’ orchards and fields, where the army says militants hide to fire on Israeli targets.

“I’m not optimistic,” Abu Khater said. “I think that in Sharon’s era, we will not have peace.”

Back on the other side of the fence, Dov Hartuv said that, after more than 40 years as a member of the Nahal Oz communal farm, he can’t afford to let go of his optimism. In the end, he said, peace must come, “because if you think of the worst, you can’t go on living.”

Nahal Oz, whose cotton and potato fields stretch into Israel from the Karni crossing into Gaza, became a front-line community after a Palestinian shell fell near a military base across the street, slightly injuring one soldier. The kibbutz’s 350 residents are more puzzled than panicked to find themselves under threat of attack from the Gazans, Hartuv said.

“It is hard for me to understand why the Palestinians resorted to violence when we were on the brink of a peace treaty and all the problems seemed to be finding a solution,” the 64-year-old farmer and kibbutz archivist said.

Hartuv lived through shelling by the Egyptian army during the 1967 Middle East War, which forced kibbutz members to take shelter for three days. This time, he said, no one believes that it will come to that.

“It did come as a shock, the mortar, because we never thought that the Palestinians would cross the line and fire on Nahal Oz. What their purpose is, I don’t know. What more could they want? There were going to be two separate nations,” he mused. “Perhaps they are acting on the premise that a nation is not born by being handed to you on a silver platter.”

Hartuv, whose politics lie on the left of the Israeli political spectrum, said he is sorry that the Gazans are suffering harsh retaliatory measures but understands why the government feels that a response labeled “excessive and disproportionate” by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is necessary in some instances.

Speaking on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, when all places of entertainment close and the nation stands at attention for two minutes of silence to commemorate the 6 million Jews who died, Hartuv said trauma continues to haunt Israelis. Even if the mortars do little damage, he said, they stir powerful ghosts.

“For us, it’s not just a mortar falling in a field near Sderot or Nahal Oz,” he said. “Subconsciously, it is linked to the feeling that someone is trying to wipe us out.”

But back in Beit Hanoun, Jamal Mohammed Swelem said it is the Jews who are acting the way the Germans did in World War II. He is convinced that peace with the Israelis now is impossible.

Unlike his neighbor, Abu Khater, the 41-year-old Swelem decided two weeks ago that the shelling and shooting that had riddled the top floor of his two-story farmhouse was unendurable. He and his wife and four children moved out of the home he had built with money earned as a dayworker in Israel. He rented a one-room structure with an aluminum roof in Beit Hanoun.

Swelem said he is filled with rage at what has happened to his extended family of 60 people who have fled their land. But he blames Israel, not the men firing mortars at the Jewish state, for his uprooting.

“The Israelis are lying when they say that all this is because Palestinians shot at them,” he said bitterly. “They started the bulldozing and shooting before anyone shot. Now, of course people have the right to fire mortars after what has happened. Everyone has lost someone, so many people have been killed. People have to resist the Israelis by any means.”