A prayer for Middle East peace
YOU WILL PROBABLY have read how, in late June, a former Prime Minister of Israel, Edward Olmert, threatened to take Israel's government to court if they didn't alter their policy on the West Bank. I wept. No truly. Bingo. A break at last in the seemingly never ending madness.
I've been going to the Mid East since I was a child of fourteen, and more recently as an eccentric freelance journalist with no pals to please in the media but plenty in the battle zones who are anxious to invite me back in the hope that some might read my eccentric copy.
On one such occasion about twenty years ago a philanthropist picked up the airfare of myself and a snapper to go and stand in the virtually empty desert in the West Bank whilst several hundred pretend protesters marched around in the desert pretending they were in the city. As they did so, a couple of dozen of us watched them. I'm sure some gossiped how some do-gooder had even brought in a tame journalist. Sad bastard.
Sounds madness? Listen buster – tattoo this on your leg: All war is madness, I'm seventy four, I've see enough blood and crying Mothers to know. Let me tell you about one. Over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since 2000 and they all had mothers.
I think it was the next day after the mock march (at seventy four you trust fewer and fewer of your memories) that I was dragged into the desert and told to stand by some congregated iron sheds and wait.
I claim no war correspondent status. If I had been the crossword editor of a sixth form magazine from Bournemouth they would have sent me.
Soon they arrive with the dawn. A squad of Israeli troops, average age twenty and no doubt shitting themselves with fear. There to wake up the contents of one of the shanty huts and demand that they deliver the teenage son of the house, correction, shed, within two minutes or they would knock down and crush all who slept within. Evidently the boy had been video recorded throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.
Exaggeration? Naw, I wish it was. Just standard procedure. And I can't blame the soldiers, or indeed the stone throwers. If I was going to arrest someone I had been told was a proven terrorist I wouldn't have been too chummy either.
This bit I remember clearly. I didn't actually see it, but I soon heard enough identical reports to believe it. The wife who came to the door in her grey pencil skirt and all glammed up for her day at the office, opening the door and saying to the soldier who was just about to kill lher son that her wee boy was no terrorist and the young officer grabbling her wrist, both probably terrified, and twenty seconds later the wee boy arriving fresh from his bed in what passed for his jammies and pushing the officer in the chest with the flat of his hand. But the officer had a pistol in his other hand and fear of his own imminent death in his mind so he fired the pistol close into the laddie's head and the curly hair that the mother might well have shampooed the previous day was soon mingling in mid air with the mince of his mnd as it headed for the breasts that had once suckled him, where it formed a blood red pattern on a freshly washed and irone white blouse that would never be worn again.
I arrived at themurder scene a few minutes later and she was screaming ;like a pig being slaughtered and her women friends were trying to hug her and being thrown off.
When I arrived I didnt know what to do. It seemed a little early for interviewing and photographs seemed undignified so I just started to scream and scream and scream.
I can't really remember much what happened next. I think I was jostled to the ground and my camera snatched. A lot of noise in a foreign language. People asking who I was. I scarcely knew myself. Then I remember running and running.
Such is war. Nothing to do with nobleness or medals.We should support Edward Olmert, even if he had sinned himself in his time.
When my father was twenty he fought in the trenches of the world war one and saw a good deal of killing. Later he became a pacifist. I once asked him why. He said it was the best option. As a child I didn't understand. I do now.
As I left the scene. I noticed they were bulldozing the house. Seemed a little unnecessary. Later the Jerusalem Post reported that a terrorist had been killed resisting arrest
Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem. And for Edward Olmert.
MAXWELL MACLEOD
