Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton Page B

said.
    He ignored her. ‘I am not against Palestinians,’ he shouted. ‘I am against terrorists. All the terrorists here are Palestinians.’
    This was a lecture based on fear, however justified. He called his rifle ‘The Devil’, and then pulled out an unloaded pistol and pointed it, with one hand, at a man in the front row. The man shifted a little lower in his seat.
    ‘If I shoot this pistol now, who will I kill?’
    ‘Joey!’ shouted the girl. Her hand had come down and was now pointing at her brother.
    ‘No!’ screamed the man. ‘I won’t! I won’t! I will hit the person next to Joey! See? The pistol kicks to the left when I pull the trigger!’
    The person next to Joey looked uncomfortable.
    ‘But if I stand like this,’ he shouted, holding the pistol in both hands and legs apart, ‘what happens? Who do I shoot?’ The muscles on his forearms were throbbing.
    ‘Joey!’ shouted the girl again, her pigtails dancing.
    ‘Yes!’ shouted the instructor. ‘I kill Joey.’
    Joey looked upset.
    It continued like this for a while. He bellowed about ‘neutralising shots in the face from close distance’ and how one bullet could kill six people, passing through each person in turn. He screamed that he judged people as terrorists by their actions, not what they looked like. Then he shot the target of the guy in the headdress six times, the bullets clustering in the Arab’s forehead. He called terrorists bastards, and you knew he had killed before.
    The atmosphere was febrile. Guns only increased the intensity, the madness. They seemed to make dialogue impossible, and, despite whatever the trainer was screaming, guns here seemed to reduce everything to kill or be killed. It was claustrophobic. Another man, one with sad and intense eyes, came up to me. He was Steve Gar, a South African instructor who had made Israel his home and who was infused with love for his new land. Steve metaphorically carried his rifle in one hand and the Torah in the other. He was one exam away from becoming a rabbi and had, itseemed, spent half his adult life training for a religious life, the other half in the military. He was a man of strong convictions and convincing strength.
    He did not like the West Bank being called what it was. ‘Why should I define what is Israel in relation to what is west of Jordan?’ he asked. ‘It’s racism.’
    He hated the fact that the place where he lived, deep in internationally recognised Palestinian territory, was called a settlement. And his voice lifted in anger when he spoke about how the Palestinians resented the Jews living in their isolated towns. Beyond us stretched a valley of crumbled rock and clumps of scrub, untouched for millennia, the ground here so dry that it could suck up the blood of a thousand armies, and I looked out at it and wondered what was it about this stony land that inspired such passions.
    It was a deadly passion, though. He had told me how, as an anti-terror team leader whose job it was to protect Jews living in the West Bank, he had been in at least six serious incidents involving terrorism. By this I took it that he had killed and killed again, but he refused to tell me if this was true.
    ‘Our mission is two things. The first is to protect Jewish life. The second is to protect the Jewish way of life. What they have with the Iron Dome means that one in a million rockets will kill someone here,’ he said referring to the air defence system that protects Israel from missiles fired at her territory, ‘so I am not worried about Jewish loss of life. But I am worried about them harming the Jewish way of life, for if we bend to them we let them harm our psyche, our psychology. And I want my children to live . . . I cannot blame the terrorists for killing our children, but I can blame them for turning our children into killers.’
    ‘We have been running away for thousands of years,’ he said, his eyes moist with emotion. ‘But when you look at Judaism there is one