August 27, 2001

Another "ordinary" school day. Marthame was at home preparing for classes (and sleeping late, truth be told) when he heard the bell from the Anglican Church tolling for a funeral. Funerals usually happen the day of or the day after a death, and this is how they are announced to the village. He hurried to get ready to go to church when the Latin Church tolled for a funeral as well. Something was clearly up.

Political marches are a familiar part of the Palestinian landscape.

Young men were gathering in trucks, red flags flying, shouting into megaphones laden with feedback. Abu 'Ali Mustafa had been assassinated just a few minutes earlier in Ramallah, and word spread like wildfire. He was the leader of the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organization - their offices often contain images of Che Guevara. Last year, Abu 'Ali Mustafa had spent time in Zababdeh, and in October there was a PFLP march in Zababdeh. Apparently, compared to other political parties in Palestine, PFLP has a high proportion of Christians.

One teacher at school said that this assassination was sending a message of Israeli prowess to Christian Palestinians (as if the destruction in Beit Jala/Beit Sahour/Bethlehem were not enough). This assassination, shocked and angered the people we talked to here. And us too. The PFLP, once known for its hijacking of Israeli airliners, has - in the current Intifada and siege - focused its military efforts on Israeli military targets within the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. From what we have heard, they consider attacks on civilians, the bread and butter of Islamic Jihad and Hamas, as a wrong-headed strategy. However, the distinction they draw in tactic, the distinction many define as between freedom fighting and terrorism, is lost as a blunt equation is drawn between terrorism and any violent Palestinian resistance. And so there were the Israeli spokespeople on TV, defending his murder by calling him a terrorist, whose "resume was soaked in the blood of Israeli and Jewish women and children." Spokespeople who did their best (and judging from the world's response, it was a good job) to defend their illegal extrajudicial assassination of a political leader. Unbelievable.

Stores closed immediately. We then heard on the news about the re-occupation of Beit Jala, in particular the Israeli army's use of the Lutheran Church as a military outpost. Despicable.