The Funeral of Salem Musleh, 230th Child Shot Dead by Israelis

By Stephen Sosebee

A white Subaru winds its way through Bethlehem and into Beit Sahour toward Tekoa settlement. The 4 pm curfew that has crippled the West Bank for weeks emptied the streets over an hour ago, but the driver is still forced to stop near Shepherd's Field to move a stone roadblock. Before clearing a path, he fires two shots in the air: an obvious warning to anyone contemplating ambush that he is armed. In a minute he walks back to his car, but before getting in he fires off a long burst from his M-16 at houses lining the road.

Standing in his living room, 14-year-old Salem Musleh looks out the window as his mother warns him about the settler shooting at their house. A second later, a bullet crashes through a window and lodges in the boy's brain. Salem's mother is holding her only son as he dies minutes after being hit. The settler gets in his car and drives away.

I'm on the roof of a three-story house watching Israeli jeeps playing cat-and-mouse with unseen persons in the empty streets of Beit Sahour, home to 12,000 Palestinians. "The army is very active tonight," my 17-year-old friend Jihad, who has been wanted by the authorities for over a year and only last month took a live bullet in the back in an Israeli ambush, remarks with only slight interest. It takes more than a few jeeps to alarm this young fighter.

The unseasonably warm, star-filled February night does little to diminish the tension that the war in Kuwait and Iraq has wrought on the Holy Land. My fatalistic thoughts are interrupted as Jihad's father bursts in to declare that there is a martyr in the town. "Salem Musleh," he says, looking agitated. "He was shot only an hour ago in his home by a settler." It is the first killing by the occupation forces in this Christian Palestinian town, famous for its tax revolt, since Iyad Abu Saada was shot dead by troops in 1988.

From rooftop or by telephone, the news spreads like fire, and a collective sense of rage builds in the curfewed town. "A boy shot in his home, doing nothing," Jihad's father mumbles as he stares at his own two sons. Jihad and his 19-year-old brother Firas, who was shot in the face last year and who has just returned from six months in a desert concentration camp, are both polite, middle-class, educated young Arab men.

Like the strongest Muslim fighters from the Hamas Organization in Gaza, these Christian Palestinians have devoted their lives to struggling to free their homeland. At the news of the killing, however, they become quiet and withdrawn, even as sounds of confrontations in the Tel Az-Za'atar quarter of Beit Sahour pierce the air.

In Tel Az-Za'atar, young men take to the streets, burning tires and building roadblocks. The sound of gunfire and tear gas canisters is soon heard as the Israelis conduct a military assault. It has become a tragic cycle after three years of the intifada: kill, demonstrate, attack, clash, and kill, with no end in sight.

We watch from the roof an hour later as a convoy of relatives slowly returns from Makassad Hospital. The army officer soon arrives at the martyr's home and demands the boy's body to take to Tel Aviv for an autopsy. The family knows how he died and wants to bury him with a proper church service. The officer threatens that if the body is not handed over, troops will search every home in Beit Sahour until they find it. Two hundred soldiers arrive near the home and a helicopter hovers overhead to back up the threat. An agreement is made with the army: three town doctors will accompany the body to Tel Aviv and tomorrow it will be returned to the family for a proper burial. Salem has been dead for only three hours when the family hands him over to the army.

Beit Sahour is under curfew the entire next day, but a British friend and I use a back way over a mountain to return undetected. Foreigners—press or otherwise—are forbidden to be in the town. It seems the whole population is on the roofs or porches waiting for the body to be returned.

We stop at a house on the edge of town for tea. "The arrogance of the Israelis angers us the most," 22-year-old Ayman says as he inhales on a cigarette. "To live on confiscated land, to shoot at houses and kill children: these settlers are the worst Nazis."

The town leaders and relatives meet at the municipality to discuss the funeral. "We are hoping to get the body back by 4 pm," says Hanna Atrash, Beit Sahour's mayor. "But the decision is not in our hands."

Dr. Khader Musleh, a cousin of Salem and a professor at Bethlehem University, observed the autopsy the night before: "I feel that the officer who came to the house and saw the broken window and the blood on the floor felt sorry and was determined to find the killer. We will have to wait and see."

Four o'clock turns to night at six, and everyone still waits for the body to be returned. "I knew they would lie to us," one of the town's mukhtars (elders) says. Air raid sirens sound at 8 pm from nearby settlements. The entire town races to the rooftops. Within minutes, a Scud arches across the northern sky and is clearly hit by two Patriots. It is a brief respite from the tension.

At 10 pm the word spreads that the army has finally brought Salem's body back. We follow Firas' fiery but warm-hearted mother through the dark streets to the church where the funeral is to be held. There, soldiers block the entrance to prevent anyone, even relatives, from entering. Since only 30 persons are allowed in, and they are all coming by bus, everyone else must go home. With our foreign identity still protected by darkness, we hurry to join the dozens of other young men defying the army by hiding in the cemetery. "It is not Israel's right to tell me I can't bury my cousin," Issa Musleh says angrily, as men stand around waiting for the body to be handed over.

The burial grounds are a sloping forested area full of large square cement blocks with dozens of burial slots. The hundreds of potential hiding places in this high ground make it a popular spot for youths to retreat to after stoning Israeli jeeps on the road below.

Salem's relatives and friends mingle cautiously for an hour as soldiers drive around the town announcing that the curfew is still in force and that it is forbidden to be outside. Youths insulting soldiers and praising Salem with a megaphone are heard in the distance. Everyone scatters without noise as a foot patrol enters to clear out the cemetery. My British friend and I haven't decided how to get out of trouble if we are caught.

It is a long and tense wait before the bus is finally seen heading to the church. Young men slowly come out of the darkness as the funeral procession reaches the cemetery gate.

Two bearded priests in long black robes lead a boy with a large cross into the cemetery, followed by somber men carrying a yellow casket overhead. Most of the redeyed relatives appear to be still in a state of disbelief. "He was the only boy in the family," an uncle whispers as a crowd fills the small courtyard.

A Palestinian flag drapes the young martyr's body. Stony expressions on the faces watching the priest perform final rites suggest a collective thought: that could be any one of them in Salem's place; that could be their father roughly seizing his dead son and kissing him goodbye forever; that could be their mother crying and pounding the casket, and their sisters who pull her away. Every young Palestinian at that moment realizes how cheap his life has become under Israeli military occupation, and how quickly it can be taken, even in his own home.

Another Middle-of-the Night Funeral

Salem is the 230th Palestinian child shot dead by Israeli forces since January 1988. Beit Sahour is another town under curfew. This is another middle-of-the-night funeral in which the mourners are at risk. How is it that this can continue for three years without the depth of human suffering that is the intifada being understood outside Palestine? Why is the simple fact that Palestine is a nation so difficult for the West to accept? These questions produced the frustration that led so many Palestinians to support Saddam Hussain's claim to be their champion. The intifada is a courageous and desperate attempt at national liberation, but there is no end in sight. Daily, Israel is making its rule of the territories more permanent, and is undertaking the final stages of the destruction of Palestine as a nation.

Israeli intransigence is certain to force the Palestinians to resort to greater levels of violence to liberate their state. That is not the Palestinians' preference. If it continues to ignore the stateless nation of Palestine, the United States is playing by arrogant new rules devised for the short-term interests of Israel, and contrary to the long-term interests of the United States in the Middle East.

The killing of Salem Musleh is yet more proof that the nation of Palestine and its liberation struggle are slowly being drowned by the forces of war and occupation. For the youth of Beit Sahour, who dream every waking hour of a free Palestine, while waiting for some sign that the world will follow up the liberation of occupied Kuwait with the liberation of occupied Palestine, the future never appeared so bleak.

Stephen Sosebee is a free-lance writer from Kent, OH presently living in Gaza.