"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"
I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"
The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.
Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Rendered evil? Is that like rendered fat? No, of course not, but it makes about as much sense.
It has taken me some time to come to terms with my anger and disappointment with Israel, but I am now an unapologetic critic of Israeli actions. Israel is the one in this conflict that has rockets, jets, helicopters, bulldozers, tanks and an army. Israel is using her military assests to silence, terrorize and punish the Palestinian people not for suicide bombings but for dissenting—dissent which by any account is overwhelmingly justified. If anything, the suicide bombers have played into Sharon's bloody hands, and he has encouraged them every step of the way. I have observed nothing but contempt from the Israeli government toward the Palestinians, whose land they occupy. No rational assessment can conclude from current Israeli actions that the Palestinian people have any hope for the future beyond complete submission without protest, and increased suffering beneath the heel of a boot—until they are exterminated. Israel wants ALL the land.
If there is an evil here, it certainly does not spring from the heart of a child who blows herself up in desperation and rage. Nor does it originate in the heart of a 23 year old boy who has faced the black hole of an Israeli gunbarrel—more often than not pointed by a soldier in a livid rage—every work day for a year. I submit to you that evil is a quality of behavior, not an entity in itself, and the side whose behavior has had the most evil effect is not the side least powerful and most villified. Israel must change, or suffer the consequences of harboring evil, which will not come in the form af a crushing military assault like the one being waged against the Palestinians. The consequences to Israel-the-oppressor will be a godless rot from within its own soul. I think it has begun.
"However many wanted men we kill in the refugee camp... there is still no justification for causing such great destruction," said one of the anonymous officers.