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A gauge of youth mentality in Palestine.
QALANDIYA CAMP, WEST BANK -- They call themselves the Lion Cubs, a gang of Palestinian boys who hang around the entrance to the Qalandiya refugee camp, about 200 metres from the main Israeli checkpoint on the road to Ramallah.
If they don't know you're looking, they seem like any other group of Tom Sawyers, full of innocence and mischief, kicking around the neighbourhood looking for something to do.
Fix your gaze on them, and suddenly they are ready for action, rocks and iron bars in their hands, and what they must think are valiant expressions on their faces.
"We come to liberate Palestinians and protect Yasser Arafat," said 10-year-old Ibrahim in his most serious tone.
The boy's main preoccupation is attacking Israeli army vehicles. "We're waiting for the tanks," said Ahmed, a 12-year-old in a baseball cap. "We will throw stones. We will throw pipes."
"Molotovs," added another boy. "And paint," said another. "When we hit them on the window with paint, they cannot see."
One boy brandished the group's latest trophy, what looked to be the metal grating that protects the windows of Israeli army jeeps. The boys said they knocked it off with rocks. It may seem mock heroics and prepubescent male fantasy until they point out the posters of martyrs, as everyone here calls them: Palestinian boys shot dead in clashes with the Israelis, some of them obviously very young.
Several of the boys in the posters are cousins or brothers of Lion Cubs.
Thirteen-year-old Omar is the leader of the pack, despite his shyness.
"He hit a soldier with two stones," a boy said of Omar, as others nodded. The darkly handsome Omar didn't want to talk about it.
Like all children in the Ramallah area, the boys have been out of school since Israeli troops and tanks moved in more than a week ago. There have been frequent breaks from school since the Palestinian uprising began in September of 2000, but even when school is in session, the gang gets together after hours.
Asked about missing school, a boy named Ayoub replied brightly: "I'd rather be in school; education is the best weapon."
But 13-year-old Salah, the boldest and most gregarious of the bunch, wasn't so sure.
"I don't miss our teachers," he said. "It is wartime and they still hit us."
Salah, who said he tells his mother he is going to his brother's home when he hangs out with the gang, led the group down one of the camp's narrow alleys, hoping to show off another of their haunts: an Internet café.
But no one was surfing the Web this day. Boys were playing video games on one of the computer terminals. A shekel (about 30 cents) buys 15 minutes of game time.
About a dozen children were there, every one of them playing the same game, one called Arab and Jew. It is a graphic war game portraying street combat. The player is armed with an M-16, and the object is to kill the Israeli soldiers (who pop out of doorways) before they kill you. When a soldier is hit, he explodes in a vivid ball of red gore.
"They're training to fight Israel," the proprietor commented.
Around the corner from the café, Salah's family have a small bakery. The boy shares his father's passion for breeding pigeons and proudly showed off the coop they maintain together.
Before the intifada, his father, Abu Ali, worked at the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, for 12 years, tending the rose garden.
When asked how he feels about his son hanging around with the Lion Cubs, Abu Ali reacted with startling swiftness, slapping Salah across the face with the back of his hand.
"He won't listen to me," complained Salah's mother, as he looked on with a slight smirk on his face. She said he had already been picked up and roughed up by Israeli soldiers three times. "I know he's going to get shot. I beat him all the time. What else can I do?"
Inside the family's small concrete home, however, there were other signals of the family's feelings about Salah and his precocious militancy.
One photograph shows him holding a Palestinian flag; in another, he holds a full-scale model of a Kalashnikov rifle in his arms as he stands before a backdrop of the World Trade Center in New York.
"I can't wait to be 20," Salah said happily when his parents were out of earshot, "so I can blow myself up." |
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