“I was praying with my wife last night that these terrorists would not turn out to be Arabs,” a taxi driver named Hassan told me as we drove through the alleys of Nablus’s old bazaar district, which was eerily subdued and nearly devoid of shoppers at 4 p.m.
The driver feared that the attack could spark a wave of anti-Arab hatred in the United States and Europe, he said, and prompt a fierce crackdown on Palestinians by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon while the world remained preoccupied with the American tragedy. Indeed, in the predawn hours Wednesday, Israel launched its second incursion into the nearby West Bank town of Jenin in two months, killing at least seven people, including an 11-year-old boy. Said Hassan: “I fear we’re going to have even bigger problems than we have now.”
Many agreed. Most of the Palestinians I talked worried that the dancing, gunfire and other expressions of joy they witnessed by a small minority in the streets of Nablus and other West Bank towns would cast Palestinians in a negative light and weaken any sympathy that the world feels with their intifada. “I did not feel comfortable with this at all,” said Abdu Habib, 46, a taxi dispatcher, who sat with a crowd of other Palestinian men in a shoeshine shop on Victory Square in Nablus’s picturesque old town. Like most of his neighbors and relatives, he had remained riveted to local Arabic television since the first reports of the attack broke in the Middle East around 4 p.m. Tuesday. “I have family in the United States. Twenty people in New York, Washington and Miami. So of course I was worried about them-I was worried about all Americans.”
Even so, there was a grim feeling of satisfaction among some people here that Israel’s staunchest ally and the world’s only superpower had suffered a crushing blow to its illusions of impregnability. “This kind of suffering the Americans are going through is what we live with every day,” said one citrus-juice vendor as he wheeled his cart through the alleys of the old bazaar. A bearded carpet shopkeeper named Abu Mohammed agreed. “In New York, they tasted what we’ve been tasting for the last 50 years,” said the 40-year-old. “We don’t like what happened to them, but maybe they’ll understand what it means to be a Palestinian.”
