ROGER COHEN: Sweet Cakes With a Terrorist

[kevinmc]

The West Bank town of Nablus sits in a valley, baking in its amphitheater, its white apartment buildings climbing hills, its central market a maze of alleys. Carts carry watermelons, cucumbers, green and red tomatoes. From dark interiors seep the smell of falafel frying and the sweet tobacco of hookahs.

Rubble from buildings destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, nourishes rose bushes that somehow rise from the stones. The city's haunting, troubled beauty makes the senses swim. Nablus stays with you. I was there a few weeks back and am haunted still.

Throughout the town, as elsewhere on the West Bank, Palestinian ''martyrs'' and prisoners are remembered. One poster in Jericho showed a young man from the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades, a terrorist group, with the words: ''My enemy, do not think that I will forget the day of my being killed and occupied. If you put me in jail as a prisoner, please know that I am a prisoner in my own house. And in my prison I will find people who will avenge my situation.''

The words chilled me: The gyre of killing keeps widening. A friend suggested she could arrange an introduction to Mahdi Abu Ghazali, the leader of Al Aksa in Nablus......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/07/roger-cohen-sweet-cakes-with-terrorist.html