The Real Victims of the Withdrawal From Gaza

Hello, the following is an article, found in the online magazine of Ha'aretz (www.haaretz.com). I offer it to you.

the url is: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/617299.html

----------

Ayesha, the widow of Osama Tawafsha, with her children (clockwise from top), Moussa, Lamaa, Muasab, Rewan and Arij. (the description of the attached photo -DB).

The orphans of Sinjil

By Tom Segev

They may have been the victims of a crazy man. Their murderer, Asher Weisgan, has been sent for psychiatric observation. But perhaps Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is the one who is really to blame for their deaths: Weisgan had spoken a great deal recently about the withdrawal plan; dismantling the settlements in Gush Katif made him very upset. Whatever the case, the great, tear-jerking reality show that took place this week in the Gaza Strip didn't leave any room for the tears of the orphans left by the four Palestinian workers murdered last week in the settlement of Shilo - nine boys and seven girls. Within a few days, their story had disappeared from the media as though it had never happened.

Ayesha Tawafsha believes that her husband Osama, his brother Bassam and their two friends, Mohammed Mansour and Halil Walwil, were murdered because the Jews hate the Palestinians. That is what she will tell her children when they grow up and ask what happened to their father, she said this week.Her mother corrected her: Not all the Israelis are like that, but the 26-year-old widow didn't change her mind: She will tell the children all the Jews are murderers. The oldest of the children of the murdered men, Abdel Rauf Walwil, is 21 years old; the youngest, Moussa Tawafsha, was born four months ago. One of the girls, 6-year-old Rewan, turned to her grandmother this week and asked for a shekel, so she could go to Ramallah and bring a new father from there. She is a blond child with light eyes, maybe a scion of the Crusaders.

Their village, Sinjil, perpetuates the name of Raymond de Saint Gilles, the prince of Toulouse, who came to Palestine on one of the Crusades, and established an estate here. The inhabitants followed his religion, until Saladdin came, and then they became Muslims. The village lies in a hilly biblical landscape about 14 kilometers north of Ramallah, and is surrounded by groves of olives and figs. This area was the front line that during World War I separated the Turkish armies from the British army, and the Jewish Legions camped here, too. And how many more wars has Sinjil known since then; the Haaretz archive shows that Israeli settlers attacked the village in the past as well.

A good guy

Osama Tawafsha worked at Ortal Aluminum Industries Ltd. in Shilo for 15 years; his father was among the laborers who built the settlement. But when the intifada broke out, they told him there was no more work for him.

Afterward they called him back. He worked in the manufacture of door and window frames, and he seemed to be proud of his work, since he was often photographed at the plant, and he framed the pictures; he also had his picture taken with his Jewish friends, some of them new immigrants from Russia. Two days before he was murdered, he asked his wife to bake her special pitas in the taboun, with za'atar and olive oil, as well as another favorite dish, at the request of a Jewish co-worker, Asher.

Asher Weisgan, a resident of the settlement Shvut Rahel, a 38-year-old man with a family, had worked in the plant in the past, but left and went to work as a security guard. A few months ago he returned. There were no problems in the relationship with him, recalls one of the workers at the plant, Rawhi Qassab, this week. But as the withdrawal from Gaza approached, he spoke more about politics, how much he wanted to enlist even the Palestinians against Sharon's plan.

"If they took you out of your home, wouldn't it be hard for you?" he asked Qassab. "Of course it would be hard," said Qassab. He thought about the Palestinians who were forced to part from their plots of land because of the settlements, but he didn't say anything. Recently, Weisgan said that he had a large plot of land; Qassab wondered how exactly he had obtained it. Weisgan wanted to plant olive trees, and asked Qassab to get 300 saplings for him. Qassab said he might be able to bring him one or two saplings. Not 300. He thinks that Weisgan managed to plant his olive grove on his own.

The settlement Shvut Rachel is named after Rachel Druck, who was murdered in October 1991 by a Palestinian terrorist, together with Yitzhak Rofeh. Rawhi Qassab, from the village of Qariot, can see the settlement from the window of his home; more than once he was a guest of Asher Weisgan. A good guy, he said this week; the Palestinian workers called him Abu Moussa. Sometimes he would come to work with a weapon. Who are you afraid of, Abu Moussa, the Arab workers would ask him. Weisgan replied that he had to protect his children. Three days before the murder, Qassab noticed that Weisgan was wearing a small, light brown skullcap. The next day, Qassab asked him why he had suddenly become religious. Weisgan replied that he was embarrassed to walk around his settlement without a skullcap.

Aside from that he behaved as usual; no, not crazy, not at all, emphasized Qassab. On Wednesday, Weisgan bought him a package of Noblesse cigarettes, in return for the home-cooked food Qassab had brought him, by request, from Sinjil. But at the end of the day, when they approached the car that was supposed to take them home, Weisgan suddenly said: "I want to die."

Rawhi Qassab asked why, since Abu Moussa had a wife and children, wouldn't it be a shame? Weisgan said: "It's no life this way," and Qassab didn't reply. "That's your problem," he thought, and for a moment recalled that in the morning Weisgan had told him that he was sending his wife and children to her parents, in Jerusalem. "I want to be by myself," he explained. A few minutes later he began firing.

A common grave

As often happens, the details are not completely clear; with what type of weapon did the murderer shoot, how many bullets, from which direction, who was killed first and who next, and where. Rawhi Qassab was wounded in the face. The rest happened as it does everywhere.

The relatives heard about the attack from television. They tried to reach their loved ones on their mobile phones. Bassam Tawafsha's phone kept on ringing, and then stopped. He was killed immediately. Osama was transferred by helicopter to the hospital, but didn't survive. His mother and his wife and his brother Sami rushed meanwhile to the entrance of the settlement of Shilo. They weren't allowed to enter, but photographers surrounded them; they didn't know why. For a while they still believed that things would be all right, because people said that the dead had worked in a plastics plant. They didn't know anything, until an officer who identified himself as Captain Rabia arrived, and asked - who is from the village of Sinjil? Who is Tawafsha? They identified themselves, and the officer said - so it's you. Stand on the side.

Afterward they received permission to come to Abu Kabir to identify the body; they traveled to Jaffa by taxi. Meanwhile, several Hamas activists came to their homes and asked for pictures of the shaheed brothers, in order to enlarge them for mourning posters. They chose old pictures, because in their younger days, brothers Bassam and Osama had sported beards; they were religious, but after the intifada they used to come to work without beards. They were buried in one grave; they lived together and died together, and they will remain together in paradise, said the widow. "Daddy is dead," she says to her son Muasab, and Muasab, not yet three years old, says, "No, he's not, Daddy is sleeping," but she says once again: "Daddy is dead."

Victims

They may have been the real victims of the withdrawal, but I have never known how to interview bereaved children: not in Cambodia and not in Cuba, not in Ethiopia and not in South Africa, not in Israel and not in the territories. With Rawhi Qassab it was easier; when he came back from Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, he slaughtered a sheep.

His employer, Eli Ben Asher, came to visit him in the hospital. You don't have to pay, promised Ben Asher, the government will pay for everything. But before his release, Qassab was asked to pay NIS 6,500 for the hospitalization. At the end the hospital made do with an IOU. Najib Abu Rakia, the research coordinator in the human rights group B'Tselem, advised the families to hire an attorney who would demand what they have coming to them as terror victims.

Rawhi Qassab thinks that Asher Weisgan did not act alone, but was part of an organized conspiracy, whose aim was to prevent the withdrawal. He believes that the Sinjil orphans are the real victims of the withdrawal. He thinks that Weisgan should sit in jail for the rest of his life; he reckons that he'll get two years imprisonment at most, because he is a Jew.

Qassab is aware of the great outcry in the wake of the murder in Shfaram; it happened in an Israeli city, at least part of the quick condemnation was designed to prevent riots in the Israeli Arab sector on the eve of the withdrawal. This week, on the other hand, was the week of self-pity. The tears flowed until they reached foreign countries. The commercial British Channel 4 station broadcast a report by Nurit Kedar that described the settlers as victims of Israeli politics, and Elie Wiesel transmitted the whining of the settlers to The New York Times. A.B. Yehoshua told readers of the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that he cannot escape the eyes of the settlers' children.

The settlers exploited their children to the hilt, lifted them up in front of the soldiers, and some of the children were sent in front of the cameras with their hands raised, like that child in the Warsaw Ghetto. This was an audiovisual show consisting entirely of pictures from other places, from the Temple in Jerusalem to "Fiddler on the Roof," carefully staged political kitsch, with a lot of extras, children. It soon developed into complaints about the quality of room service in the hotels to which the evacuees were taken. But A.B. Yehoshua was beside himself.

"After I turned off the television and wanted to revive my sprit with classical music, the looks and the eyes of the little children continue to haunt me, and I feel that I have to do something to deal with the emotions that are welling up in me," wrote Yehoshua. "Yes, this look of the children is now piercing my heart, and I don't know what to do with the emotion that is awakening within me." I would recommend to Yehoshua that he listen to a little more classical music, but if that doesn't revive his spirit - thinking about the orphans of Sinjil should help.