Crossing the line / politics

[prozak at anus.com]

Over sugary coffee and hot mincemeat sandwiches, the young men 
gathered here to plot revenge. 

They were all in their 20's, an age that might lead such a group to 
talk about soccer or romance. But as Israeli forces once again 
scoured the casbah for militants, representatives of the "military 
wings" of several main Palestinian factions relaxed on overstuffed 
sofas in a living room elsewhere in the city to talk strategy, 
politics and death. 

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Each of the seven men had a pistol at his belt and a mobile phone 
close at hand, in case their lieutenants outside spotted soldiers. 
One had had to make an escape from here over the rooftops before; the 
walls of the hallway downstairs were pitted with bullet holes from 
that unwelcome Israeli visit.

"If anything happens," one of them said, holding up his gun, "we're 
not going to be arrested." 

Viewed from Israel or abroad, the Palestinian factions can present a 
crimson continuum of violent means and aims. But although more than 
two years of conflict and a shared nationalist impulse have blurred 
the distinctions, divisions of ideology endure — even in Nablus, 
which Israel calls the center for terrorism in the West Bank. 

Even the cellphones of these men mapped their varying politics. The 
liquid crystal display on the phone of a bearded representative of 
Hamas showed a picture of Osama bin Laden beside an image of the Twin 
Towers. The representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of 
Palestine, a group with Marxist roots, displayed a picture of Ché 
Guevara and a single English word: freedom. A leader of the Aksa 
Martyrs Brigade, a militant group of Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, 
had chosen a picture of a semiautomatic rifle. 

But all these men presented themselves as backed into a corner by the 
Israelis and compelled to fight together. "We're not occupying Nablus 
— they are," said a member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades. "We're 
pushed to do this. We don't like blood, but we have no other choice." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/international/middleeast/21MIDE.html
?th-- 
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