In the rehabilitation facility’s crowded ward, Ziyad al Samara grimaces and shifts uncomfortably in his bed. A metal brace runs down his right leg, where an Israeli soldier’s bullet tore off his kneecap. He will never walk normally again.
Al Samara was a teenager when he was sent to an Israeli prison for 10 years for stoning soldiers during the last Palestinian uprising. Without an education or skills, he went jobless for more than a year after leaving prison. Then one day recently, al Samara, who looks at least 20 years older than his 28 years, joined another stone-throwing clash with Israeli soldiers and was shot.
He insists he is not remorseful about his misfortune. He even hopes, he says, to return to the demonstrations, though he admits it will be harder to flee from the bullets.
“Everything for Jerusalem is easy,” he says, wrapped in a blanket in the noisy ward.
Since rising up against the Israelis in an unprecedented show of fury, Palestinians have been swept along by a swirl of emotions. Some, like al Samara, see no limits to their sacrifices. Some fear what lies ahead but are elated by the defiance shown toward Israel. And some are terrified and confused by a warlike situation seemingly spinning out of control.
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More often, Palestinians publicly embrace a mood of defiance. It is hard for them to do otherwise in the five weeks since the uprising began, leaving more than 160 dead and 5,000 wounded, mostly Palestinians.
Palestinian news media flood them with images and voices that nurture this mood. The Voice of Palestine’s television station endlessly carries pictures of Palestinians fighting and dying and speeches about the victory they seek. Palestinian newspapers are full of photographs of the fighting and the injured. Hourly reports on Voice of Palestine radio are war updates: so many dead, so many hurt, so many still suffering.
Bathed in outrage that has grown with the surge in casualties, some Palestinians look at the mostly young men who have thrown themselves in front of Israeli soldiers and say there is no way to stop them. Those from the teeming refugee camps say they have nothing to lose anyway.
Palestinians also say that whatever else bothers them–problems with their families, problems with corrupt and bureaucratic Palestinian officials, problems making a living in a dead economy–is pushed aside temporarily and replaced by their rage toward the Israelis.
At Ramallah Hospital, where he has worked almost constantly treating the wounded in the past five weeks, Dr. Fawzi Salama is familiar with the price paid by demonstrators. Still, he says he could not prevent his own children from joining the demonstrations.
Standing on a hillside staring down at young rock throwers pitted against armed Israeli soldiers, 19-year-old Ismail weighs whether he wants to plunge into such violence. Down below is the daily dance of blood enraged and blood spilled.
Teenagers, their faces covered with masks or scarves, dance in front of Israeli soldiers, throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at them.
Teenage girls help from a distance, carrying buckets of stones. The soldiers crouch, taking careful aim at the youths.
Every so often there is a burst of gunfire from an empty building on the Palestinian side of the tiny war front, and the Israelis respond to it. That sends the crowd watching the battle racing backward, fearful of ricocheting bullets.
Ismail, who did not want to give his full name, comes to the demonstration almost every day from his work as a mechanic at a Jewish-owned business in West Jerusalem.
He never tells his family about it because he knows they would worry. He was shot in the stomach when he was 9 in a demonstration against Israelis, and his parents have asked him to stay away from the fighting.
But he doesn’t, though today he is worried about Israeli snipers in the building behind the site of the conflict.
As for fighting the Israelis, it makes no difference, he explains, that he has close relations with his Jewish friends at work who he thinks want to live in peace with Arabs.
The battle, he says, is between him and the soldiers at the bottom of the hill.
“They are my enemies. I’m here to reject the Israelis,” he says.
“And if I die, then I’ll be a martyr.”
Not every Palestinian is driven by such certainty.
At a mental health clinic in the Gaza Strip, psychologist Hasan Ziyadeh has seen a surge in family conflicts and in depression and despair.
Many people held high hopes for the future when Israel signed the peace treaty seven years ago with the Palestinians, he says, but those hopes vanished with the collapse of the peace talks and the start of fighting.
The most troubled ones, he adds, are the “people who blame themselves. The injured and the ones who spent years in Israeliprisons. They say they struggled and life is not any better for them.”
A few weeks ago his clinic opened a telephone hot line amid some uncertainty whether Palestinians, normally reluctant to seek mental health support, would call in.
It has been flooded, he says, and the callers have been mostly parents of young children.
“They say their children are nervous and sad and afraid to go out. They wet their beds. The pictures they see on the television terrify them,” he says.
Sharing their doubts about the future is not easy for some Palestinians, who feel as if they are deserting the communal cause if they do so.
After boasting about the satisfaction he gets from seeing the effect the uprising has had on Israelis, a well-to-do East Jerusalem businessman who asked not to be named suddenly shifts into a different mood.
“I feel like my whole life has been wasted. My plans, my dreams, everything I expected to happen is on hold,” he says slowly, then abruptly halts the conversation and walks away without uttering another word.
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Jaber Wishak, 49, a silver-haired, soft-spoken deputy director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in the Gaza Strip, is one of those caught up in the swirl of broken hopes and conflicting feelings.
He was once a physics lecturer at a university in Gaza, but he went to an Israeli prison for 14 years because he had been a leader of the military arm of a radical Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He left prison 14 months ago and decided to devote himself to human-rights work.
While in prison, he broke with his group and declared his support for peace with the Israelis. “I said, `Let’s give peace a chance,'” he recalls. Today he says he sees that those who opposed peace were right. That failed hope, he says, frustrates him.
“I always used to say that if we have hope, peace will come,” he said.
But he sees little chance of peace on the horizon: “The situation is bad and it is getting worse.”
One of his firmest beliefs always was that whatever risks he took and whatever problems he endured, he was making the world better for his children.
Now his daughter, Hanin, 15, has been asking to take part in the demonstrations, and he worries about what could happen.
“I try to stop her and she says, `How can you when you fought and you were in prison?'”
Much to his dismay, he admits he doesn’t have a good answer.