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And the Tanks Rolled into Nablus
Matti Friedman
One reservist�s account of April�s military activities in the West Bank
THE ARMY�S MARCH 29 call-up of reserves caught me, of all places, in the army, at an outpost overlooking Nablus. Anyone familiar with military logic will not be surprised that someone already in uniform was called up anyway, a 24-day stint of routine reserve duty now upgraded to Tzav Shmoneh (Order Eight) mobilization status, as the anti-terror offensive in the West Bank gathered momentum.
On the first day of my "normal," non-emergency reserve duty two weeks earlier, as a bus took my company from Kiryat Gat, in the northern Negev, to a base at nearby Beit Guvrin, I had seen a tattered sign on the side of the road: "Conquer the territories, destroy the terrorists." I scribbled that down in my notebook as an indication of the mood of the nation, little imagining that the slogan would essentially be translated into action two weeks later, and that I would be close enough to smell the gunpowder.
The army had changed the name of our three-day training period from the usual "pre-operational training" to "pre-combat training." That evening I began a short course on a more accurate, long-range model of the standard issue M-16 rifle, given by a chirpy 19-year-old. "To hit the forehead from 100 meters," she told us cheerfully, explaining the gun�s ballistic curve, "aim for the chin." She pointed at her chin.
I had spent a total of two uneventful weeks in the West Bank in my regular service, from 1997 to 2000. For my Nahal Brigade anti-tank unit, anything less than five kilometers inside Lebanon was beneath our dignity. For most of the soldiers in my reserve unit as well, the frame of reference was Lebanon, and everyone anticipated that our upcoming stint was going to be as dangerous.
From Jerusalem, where I live, and certainly from Hebrew University, where I study, the situation vis-�-vis the Palestinians had seemed bitterly complex and divisive. The day before reporting for duty, I had a long conversation with Nir, a university friend who was an officer in an elite unit and is now one of the organizers of the controversial "officers� petition" calling on soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories. He had done things he was ashamed of there, and would not do them again, he said, arguing that this dissent would strengthen the army in the long run, by forcing it to pull out of the territories into a more tenable strategic position. My roommate Yoni, also a combat reservist, disagreed. He believes that weakening the army causes irreparable damage to Israel and hurts our long-term prospects of achieving peace, and that the army should not be the arena for political campaigns. Whatever my misgivings about the occupation, I fully agree with that.
At Beit Guvrin, the arguments faded and preparations began. No more "if," only "how," and a feeling very close to relief: As a civilian, the constant threat of suicide bombings, the "situation," got in the way of my life -- I was afraid to go out to eat, to ride the bus. As a soldier, the situation is my life, and somehow that makes it easier to deal with.
I glanced around as the whole company sprawled out among the wild flowers and boulders of Beit Guvrin, waiting for an exercise to begin. We certainly were a disparate bunch: one guy with long dreadlocks, one with an enormous elephant tattooed on his shoulder, a rotund contractor from Jerusalem, a yarmulke-wearing accountant from Ramat Gan. Students, moshavniks, businessmen. Some of us had mixed feelings, but we were all going to Nablus.
THE TEL A-RAS OUTPOST SITS on Mt. Gerizim, with Nablus spread out in the valley below to the north. Staring through binoculars at the crowded, bustling concrete jumble of the Balata refugee camp to the east, I could see women on some roofs hanging out laundry. On another rooftop, a small boy in a blue soccer jersey tried to get a large brown kite airborne.
I watched this through the concrete slit of the lookout post, with a low babble on a few army radio frequencies in the background: Kids with slingshots had been sighted
near the road going into Nablus. A bomb exploded near the settlement of Elon Moreh; no casualties. A soldier at a roadblock wanted to know if he could let someone through, and Battalion HQ replied, "Humanitarian vehicles only."
Thick fog came and went, as did fierce bouts of earsplitting thunder and freezing rain, interrupted one misty night by the most beautiful yellow moonrise I have ever seen, over the lights of Elon Moreh to the north. A ferocious three-minute hailstorm at 2:00 a.m. stopped as abruptly as it had started. I had been studying "Macbeth" before my semester was interrupted, and I knew portents of doom when I saw them.
The following night, I was sitting on my bed reading when I heard a few small pops followed by a loud, frantic string of rapid shots as a machine gun opened up from one of the guardposts. We were under fire. I threw my webbing and helmet on, grabbed my rifle, and sprinted up to take a position in the concrete trench that runs along the top of the earth embankments around the outpost. We heard a few more shots, and the soldiers manning machine guns along the trench raked the area around us in a massive, deafening barrage.
I scanned the trees near the outpost and the first houses of Nablus, a few hundred meters away, everything appearing in shades of green in my rifle�s night-scope, but saw nothing. I placed the red dot of the night-scope on a vague black shape in the trees and fired. More shots were fired at us, this time from even farther away.
Someone identified the source of the shooting: one of the nearby houses. A few meters away from me in the trench, a heavy machine gun opened fire, and I saw tracers bouncing crazily off the walls and roof of the house. There were families huddled inside those houses, children crying, parents praying for the shooting to stop, and gunmen using those families as shields as they fired at us. In this instance, no one was hurt: not the gunmen, not the civilian residents, and not any of us.
A few days later, March 27, was the eve of Passover. I was a bit depressed about missing my family�s Seder, but army Seders have a certain chaotic Jewishness that sums up much of what I like about Israel. Fantastic smells were emanating from the kitchen: stuffed potatoes, spicy Moroccan fish, vegetable soup. Then three shots rang out close to the outpost, followed by the deep thumping of one of our machine guns.
Within a minute, I was up on the embankment, resting my rifle on a wet sandbag. The fog lifted a bit, and I saw a tracer bullet race toward the outpost from Balata and pass overhead, and then heard the accompanying shot. Then more shots were fired, this time closer to us. I could see nothing, but every few minutes someone on the base would open fire at a shape in the fog, at a bush or a rock that might or might not have just moved. Soldiers along the trench to my left were shouting something: 16 people had been killed by a suicide bomber at a Seder in Netanyah. (The number has since risen to 27.) This at once reminded us why we were there and made us feel completely helpless.
When there was a lull in the shooting, some of us were rotated down for a few minutes to eat. The food the cooks had been preparing for days was gobbled down in seconds. I did not open a Haggadah, drink a cup of wine, or ask even one question, let alone four. Said Livneh, a cynical kibbutznik a few years older than me: "We left Egypt, came to Israel, and things have been great ever since."
THE TZAV SHMONEH ARRIVED two days later, on Friday. The army took Ramallah that day, then moving into Qalqilyah, Tul Karm, Bethlehem and Jenin. Nablus was next. Overnight, our little outpost went from being Binghamton, New York, to midtown Manhattan. Towering communications trucks appeared out of nowhere and reservists, looking stunned to find themselves in the midst of a war, set up dozens of strange-looking antennas. Mobile command posts arrived on flatbed trucks. Important-looking guys with lots of cell phones materialized. Our dining room was commandeered.
As evening approached on April 3, officers huddled over aerial photographs, while others stood on the embankments with maps, planning the final details of the invasion. Tanks had moved up to positions near the city, and buses had disgorged hundreds of infantry soldiers into the twilight. On the bed next to mine Fisch, a 34-year-old caterer from Givatayim, was on the phone with his wife, gently asking her if the kids were asleep.
An hour or so later I was sent out on a routine patrol. We could hear helicopters above us and the clanking of tanks on the move. Dark shapes materialized in the mist about 100 meters from us. "Identify yourselves!" one of our soldiers shouted. "IDF, IDF," came the reply. The mist lifted, to reveal a line of infantrymen, descending into a ravine towards the houses of Nablus. The line went on for 10 or 20 minutes, and then the last man disappeared. About half an hour later light-weapons fire erupted inside the city.
A tank brigade made up of reservists, called up only a few days before, rolled into Nablus from two directions, sealing off the city and its satellite refugee camps. Dozens of bombs were detonated in the path of the tanks as they rumbled through the streets and Palestinian gunmen fired from windows and roofs; the crews returned fire from tank-mounted machine guns, leaving shattered windows and walls pocked with bullet holes.
While the tanks took up position, regular infantry troops like the ones I had encountered earlier, from the Golani and Paratroop Brigades, approached on foot, under cover of darkness. The order was to "touch the houses" -- or enter the city itself -- at midnight. Led by reconnaissance teams, they occupied strategically located buildings, including some homes, overcoming light resistance; most of the gunmen had already fled to the intricate, crumbling maze of the city�s Casbah. The terrified Palestinian families who answered the knock on the door in the middle of the night (in the cases I am aware of, the soldiers did knock), to find jumpy Israeli troops demanding entrance, were generally confined to one floor, while the soldiers set up sniper posts on the roof and in windows facing the street. Accompanying the troops were small engineering crews, equipped with saws and hammers for breaking through walls, an innovative if destructive tactic of recent operations that allows soldiers to move from house to house without being exposed to Palestinian fire outside.
Throughout the night we heard the clatter of machine guns and the powerful booms of tank cannons. At 3 a.m., an enormous explosion shook Mt. Gerizim -- a bomb planted by Palestinians to stop approaching troops near the city jail, just down the hill from us.
On the morning of April 4, I climbed the steps up the outpost embankments and looked out over the city. There were no signs of life. The streets showed the white scars left by the treads of the tanks and APCs. Tanks were parked at intersections and along the main thoroughfares. Hundreds of armed Palestinians were surrounded in the Casbah.
The next day, infantry soldiers began a four-day advance through the alleys, eventually isolating the gunmen until they surrendered, in their hundreds, or were killed (up to 70, according to reports).
The army�s goals were being achieved, and the soldiers at my outpost unanimously agreed that the invasion was justified -- the Palestinians� psychopathic, almost compulsive acts of violence having left us no other choice. But many of us also agreed that armor and infantry could not vanquish fanatic hatred.
As I write this, I am home for a few days of leave, looking at what could be another month of reserve duty. Fighting has been heavy in Jenin where my reserve brigade lost 16 soldiers in the space of a week. My roommate Yoni is in Tul Karm; other friends are in Bethlehem and Jenin. University is on hold. And the image that stays with me is of us in the rain on the embankments of Tel a-Ras on Seder night: Israel, a country mad with pain, shooting at shadows in the fog.
l
(May 6, 2002)
Israel
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