As U.S. plans to sell arms to Saudi Arabia make waves in the Middle East, NEWSWEEK’s Kevin Peraino visits a Gaza arms dealer.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Kevin Peraino
Newsweek
Updated: 5:37 p.m. ET July 30, 2007
July 30, 2007 - It is not a fact that he particularly likes to advertise, but, if pressed, Abdel Hamid Bahar will acknowledge that his business is at its best when people are dying. Last Sunday I went to see the black-market arms dealer at his home, a squat, dilapidated structure made of cinderblocks and tin sheeting, in the central Gaza village of Moghraga. We sat on pink plastic chairs in the shade, next to a slightly sickly garden with a couple of banana plants and a slender olive tree. The weapons merchant's business varies widely, of course, depending on how much fighting is going on. Last summer, when Gaza was at war with Israel after the kidnapping of Gilad Schalit, Bahar was pulling in almost $3,000 per month, more than most Gazans earn in a year. How is business now, I asked, with Hamas in power and the streets relatively calm? "Zero," the gun dealer complained, without bothering to hide his frustration.
Bahar nodded to one of his sons, who had been leaning against a cinderblock wall and watching us without saying anything. The lanky young man disappeared for a moment inside the house, and then returned carrying a new-looking semiautomatic rifle, slick with resin and grease. For my notes, I asked for the kid's name and age. The arms dealer frowned. "I don't know how old he is," he said, a little disdainfully. "I have 13 children. I don't even know all their names." He paused for a second, and then added: "All my children, the girls and the boys, know how to use guns." He took the rifle, a Chinese-manufactured Kalashnikov, and slid out the clip. "This is well made," he told me. "Seventeen-hundred dollars each. If you need 50, I'll bring them to you. While you're drinking tea, I can get you 100. I am the No. 1 for weapons in Gaza."
The arms dealer has a rangy, mangy look to him. His head is almost entirely shaved, but he wears a long, scraggly black beard over his gaunt features, which makes him resemble a Palestinian Abraham Lincoln. A net of thick veins bulges from his sinewy forearms. He smiles every now and then, but the desired effect is lost when he reveals a mouthful of yellowed and rotting teeth. He chain-smokes cigarettes from a pack of Royals stashed in his left breast pocket, and keeps a 70-year-old, German-made 9 mm pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans. (He refers to it as a "Hitler.") The arms dealer is 43 years old, and has been selling guns for the past two, since just before Hamas won the territory's legislative elections.
Bahar grew up in Gaza's Bourej refugee camp, and eventually moved to Moghraga, a poor farming village of about 5,000. He married when he was 16 and got a job as a construction worker with his father in Israel for a while. Later he earned a living as a taxi driver and auto mechanic. During the first intifada he fought against Israel as a militant in the Tanzim, the Fatah-affiliated militia. Still, despite his youthful loyalties, it is bad business for an arms dealer to be taking sides; he says he now sells to both Hamas and Fatah. One of his kids had scrawled the word HAMAS in black spray paint on the side of the house. "I started my business in order to feed my children," he told me. As the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah intensified last spring, "all the factions began to buy weapons."
I had come to see Bahar because arms sales were the talk of the Middle East over the weekend. On Friday the Bush administration said it would like to sell Saudi Arabia and its regional allies billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weaponry. Washington has also promised Israel –which, in a sign of its concern about Iran possibly obtaining nuclear weapons, has dropped its traditional objections to U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia—another $30.4 billion in weaponry. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were set to tour the region this week to help work out the details of the proposal. Israel also promised to allow 1,000 M-16s to pass from Jordan to Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank—an effort to prop up the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Against that backdrop, it seemed like a good idea to visit one of the trade's real-world practitioners. In the news stories about American support for proxies in the region, the recipients of such weaponry are usually described as "moderate," while their antagonists are inevitably "radical." Those are cartoon descriptions, of course, and are often carelessly applied. In the four years since I've been working in the Middle East, I've met plenty of radical American proxies, and just as many moderate "radicals." The labels "Islamist" and "secular" don't reveal all that much about character either, although they're slightly better than "terrorist" and "stooge." If I were forced to divide and classify the Gazans I meet, I'd say they tend to be better described as hawks and doves, and there are both of those in all camps. Bahar, the arms dealer, is one of the former by trade.
The frustrating, inconvenient thing about all this is that, when you meet the people up close, it is often the hawks who seem the most shrewd and competent, at least tactically. They sometimes appear a little paranoid, but in the unforgiving Middle East they are also often the most determined survivors, the ones you would want on your side in a street fight. At one point while we talked the other day, Bahar jumped up out of his chair in one quick movement and darted over to his garden. He tore a branch off his olive tree, and then stuffed the whole thing into his mouth—wood, leaves and all. He chewed it and swallowed hard. "I can eat the grass and the trees, but I will never hold the white flag," he said. "There are many here like me who are ready to eat anything." Sanctions against Hamas won't work, he argued. He told me that he considered Abbas feckless and weak, too unwilling to resist the Israeli occupation. "We will never return to Abu Mazen," he added, using the president's nickname. "Israel and America are so foolish." There was some obvious theater in the tree-eating bit, but it was effective all the same. I tried to imagine Abbas—the quiet former schoolteacher—jumping up and eating a tree, but the image would not come.
About halfway through our conversation, my translator, Hassan, pointed out a faint buzzing sound in the air overhead—an Israeli drone. Bahar shrugged. "Before you hear the noise of the plane, I hear it," he said. "I'm sensitive to it." After drinking cups of thick, sweet coffee, Hassan and I eventually got up to leave and walked back to the car. On my way out I noticed that Bahar's front yard was almost entirely scorched. A few lonely blades of grass shot up through the large black stains covering the turf like oil spots. I asked the arms dealer what had happened to his yard. "I burned it," he told me. "So I can see the snakes." He said it without the slightest hint of irony.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20042003/site/newsweek/?from=rss
