Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Twilight Zone / ‘We saw death a thousand times’ - Haaretz, November 15, 2007

Think of your elderly parents. Imagine them sitting on the sofa, cringing with fear, for a whole night, in their tiny apartment, unprotected. Outside a fierce firefight is raging. The night is a cacophony of gunfire and explosions. Dozens of soldiers are moving through the adjacent alley. Then an order is given to come out. Think of your father opening the door, frightened and helpless, in his pajamas, then calling to his wife to go back inside and bring their ID cards. One glance into the courtyard - and he is hit instantly. Five bullets in the stomach and legs, fired by three soldiers sitting on the steps of the house across the way. He falls, writhing in his blood, as his wife looks on, horrified.

Think of your aged mother, trying with all her strength to pull her husband inside and the soldiers prohibiting his evacuation for long, fateful minutes, until the ambulance arrives. Imagine her pangs of terror, impotence, rage and frustration. “Now I am sorry that I did not pick up a big stone and throw it at the soldiers,” says the widow, Subhiya al-Wazir, whose husband, Abed al-Wazir was killed at the threshold of their home in the Ras al-Ayyin neighborhood in the western part of Nablus.

Al-Wazir was a retired accountant who had worked for the Nablus Municipality. He was also the cousin of Khalil al-Wazir, a.k.a. Abu Jihad, the legendary deputy of Yasser Arafat, who was assassinated by Israel on April 16, 1988, in his seaside home in Tunis. A few days ago, his widow, Umm Jihad, a former Palestinian welfare minister, paid a condolence visit in the small home in Nablus. The manner of Abed’s death made him one of the oldest of the shaheeds (martyrs for the cause), but his widow’s nights of horror have not ended. The Israel Defense Forces continues to enter the neighborhood almost every night, plunging fear into the hearts of Subhiya and her neighbors.