Culture: Hostilities engulf West Bank siblings, who remain close despite their split between Jewish and Muslim faiths.

Los Angeles Times - Sunday - 3/04/2001: PETAH TIKVA, Israel--David Mercier, 52, is a religious Jew who lives in Elon Moreh, a conservative Jewish settlement in the West Bank where residents sometimes talk about expelling Palestinians from Israel.

His half-brother Munther Hafnay, 44, lives a few minutes away in Palestinian-ruled Nablus and is an activist in Hamas, a radical Muslim group bent on the destruction of the Jewish state.

Despite their diametrically opposite beliefs, Mercier and Hafnay are close. And until this month, they had an understanding to never let the Israeli-Palestinian conflict drive a wedge between them--even as their neighbors fought and sometimes killed one another.

But the conflict has now engulfed the brothers: Palestinian security officials arrested them last month on suspicion of collaborating with Israeli commandos who had targeted and killed a local Hamas leader.

NETANYA, Israel (Reuters - 4 March) - Enraged Israelis set upon and seriously wounded a Palestinian in the Israeli city of Netanya Sunday as they attempted to avenge a suicide bombing in which four people were killed, police said.

``After the explosion, a number of minorities (Arabs) fled to the market and some of the people of the market tried to attack them,'' the local police chief, Assistant Commander Aharon Franco, told Israel Radio.

``A police force that arrived swiftly at the scene managed to prevent a lynching...even though one was seriously wounded and taken to hospital,'' he said. There was no suggestion that any of those attacked were linked to the bombing...

A witness to the subsequent beating told Israel's Army Radio: ``There's somebody lying here. I believe they've killed him...He is not moving, he is not breathing.''

Another witness told Israel Radio the man's assailants had kicked him all over his body.

(Los Angeles Times article continued): Mercier, who says he was beaten and tortured for four days by his interrogators, was released last week after the Israeli Defense Ministry pressured Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat's security forces to free him.

Hafnay, a father of eight children, is still in custody. Palestinian security officials have declined to comment on his detention, saying the matter is still under investigation.

"I worry about my brother," Mercier said in an interview at a hospital in this Tel Aviv suburb, where he is being treated for stress and other ailments. "I don't know what I can do to get him out of jail. He is an innocent man."

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often cast as an all-out religious war between Muslims and Jews. The complicated drama involving Mercier and Hafnay is the rare tale in which fervent nationalism plays a secondary role to brotherly love.

The siblings come from a tradition of tolerance, according to Mercier. Their mother, Fawzeya, now 77, had a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, making her a Jew under Orthodox Jewish tradition.

Fawzeya raised her eldest son, Mercier, as a Jew, in the tradition of her first husband.

After she divorced, she and her second husband, a Muslim Palestinian, had three sons. The family settled in the cramped Balata refugee camp near Nablus, alongside thousands of families who had fled or were driven from their homes after Israel's 1948 War of Independence.

Mercier recalled how his mother, who became a Muslim, taught her sons to love one another and to tolerate one another's religions.

"My mother would constantly say that there is only one God, that there is no difference between Jews and Muslims," he said.

In their boyhood days, Mercier and Hafnay developed a strong bond.

The close relationship between Mercier and all his brothers continued even after Mercier left for France to become a pediatrician. Mercier received almost weekly letters from his brothers, thanks to some nudging by his mother.

And his brothers were there to support him at his neediest moments. Several years ago, when he tried to kill himself after a long bout of depression, Mercier woke up to see his brothers watching over him.

"Don't worry. We're here," Mercier remembers Hafnay saying. "If you go, we're all going."

It was because he was "lonely and going through a midlife crisis" that Mercier returned from France five years ago and moved into his parents' hilltop home in Nablus.

Mercier said he noticed that his brothers had become more radicalized in their support for an independent Palestinian state. Hafnay, a successful clothing merchant, also had become a devout Muslim. Hafnay prayed five times a day and had grown a beard, like many of his colleagues in Hamas, according to Mercier.

The brothers, however, held to a family rule of not discussing their religion or politics, Mercier said.

For a while, Mercier worked as a pediatrician in Nablus, but the low pay and decrepit working conditions left him discontented, he said.

Mercier too sought refuge in religion. He began to study Jewish scriptures and even to observe the Sabbath. When some friends asked him if he was interested in "moving to the Jewish side" to work and live in Elon Moreh, he jumped at the offer, he said. His new job allowed him to be among his Jewish friends yet only five minutes from his brothers and parents.

Residents of Elon Moreh and Nablus have not been good neighbors.

Since the Palestinian uprising broke out five months ago, Palestinians from Balata and Nablus have waged bloody battles with Elon Moreh settlers and the soldiers protecting them. Some of the fiercest fighting has taken place around nearby Joseph's Tomb, where Palestinian protesters ousted a group of Elon Moreh settlers who had set up a religious school.

Palestinians--and international law--say Elon Moreh and other Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are illegal because they are built on land captured during the 1967 Middle East War.

Residents of Elon Moreh, a fiercely Jewish nationalist community, believe that they have a biblical deed to the land. They say Elon Moreh is significant because it is where God promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land.

Mercier said his move to Elon Moreh didn't cause any tensions between him and Hafnay or his two other brothers.

"We don't see him as a settler," said one of them, Moataz Hafnay, who has spent the last few days at Mercier's bedside. "He is our brother first. We are one family."

Moataz and his brothers would cross an Israeli checkpoint to visit Mercier's home, which they could see from their parents' house. Mercier would reciprocate.

But their harmonious family life was shattered shortly after Feb. 19, when Israeli sharpshooters killed 25-year-old Mahmoud Madani, a Hamas leader and a close friend of the Hafnays, as he left a mosque in the Balata refugee camp.

Madani's killing was part of Israel's so-called liquidation policy, in which army commandos hunt down and pick off Palestinian militants. The practice has been condemned by human rights groups, the United States and the European Union.

Security forces belonging to Arafat suspected that the commandos were in league with collaborators. A few days later, they arrested Hafnay, whom they learned was with Madani a few minutes before he was killed.

Last week, as Mercier was visiting his parents in violation of an Israeli government ban on Israelis' entering Palestinian territory, about 10 plainclothes security men barged into the house.

Mercier said the men took him to a police station, where they immediately started to beat him.

Mercier, who is only slightly over 5 feet tall and weighs about 120 pounds, said he showed his attackers a long scar on his chest, indicating that he had undergone quadruple bypass surgery only two months before.

"One of the men was small, fat, disgusting and smelly," Mercier said. "He told me he didn't care. He said I was going to die whether I talked or not."

Later that night, the men tied a black hood over his head and handcuffed him to a bed.

On the second day, Mercier withdrew his denials that he knew anything about Madani's killing. He signed a confession, penned by his interrogators, that he was an Israeli spy who had worked with his brothers to plot Madani's assassination.

Two days later, the Israeli Defense Forces pressured the Palestinian Authority to release Mercier. An Israeli army spokesman said the brothers had no connection to Israel's intelligence agencies.

Mercier now fears that his "confession" could help sentence his brother to death. The Palestinian Authority has summarily convicted and executed--by firing squad--several people whom it has accused of collaborating with Israel.

Mercier said allegations that Hafnay is an Israeli spy are preposterous.

As he buried his head in his hands, Mercier sobbed and said he had only one wish: "That there be peace and that my brother comes home safely."