I’VE had a real sense of deja vu these past days while watching the violent events unfolding in Jenin refugee camp.
Way back in April 2002, I stood on a hillside overlooking the same camp as Israeli forces began their pummelling of this densely populated West Bank city with a ferocity on a par with that of this week.
Israel’s motive back then – just like now – was to root out Palestinian militants. The “capital of martyrs” as some Palestinians then called Jenin was for the Israeli government a cancer on their doorstep – or as then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon called it, a “nest of cockroaches”.
It was a sanctuary where the most wanted Palestinian bomb makers or “engineers” of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades thrived and recruited. Israel says the same is true of today.
As for the Palestinians who lived, fought, and died there, the struggle for the camp would quickly enter the annals of intifada (uprising) folklore. No doubt likewise the same will happen in the wake of this latest battle of wills.
The stories that emerged from both sides back in 2002 I remember well. One concerned the driver of an Israeli military D-9 armoured bulldozer. His name was Moshe Nissim but went by the nickname “Kurdi Bear”.
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The D-9 is a fearsome machine. Towering 20 feet tall, and complete with armour weighing in at 60 tons, they were bigger than most of the concrete shanty houses they were sent into Jenin to destroy.
Nissim was a self-confessed fanatical football fan and supporter of Jerusalem Beitar, the most politically oriented team in Israel and often associated with the country’s right-wing and anti-Arab sentiments.
As the D-9s ground their way further into the heart of the Jenin camp they levelled an area 200 yards square. Nissim would later jokingly refer to it as building the “Teddy” football stadium, a reference to the ground at which his beloved Jerusalem Beitar played in the Israeli capital.
Tied to Nissim’s bulldozer during his entire 75 hour-long marathon of destruction, was the flag of the Beitar football team. Some of Nissim’s on the record remarks from that time are very telling.
“I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down,” Nissim is on the record as saying.
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I’ve little doubt that some Palestinians would hold a similar resentful view of their Israeli adversaries and occupiers, and I mention this story by way of an illustration. As a way of conveying the deep-rooted bitterness that has always been a hallmark of this interminable struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
Today that bitterness is arguably more acute than it has ever been. Those same far-right Israeli activists – some of whom doubtless are as passionate about Jerusalem Beitar football team as Moshe Nissim – are now also more prominent in Israeli politics than they have been for decades.
As one op-ed in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz recently pointed out this “extremist, messianic right has a single, stated goal, which it doesn’t hide – fulfilling the divine promise of sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel, regardless of the results of annexing millions of Palestinians”.
Add to this the fact that any peace process is dead and Israeli settlements are relentlessly expanding with settler violence against Palestinians mounting and the true gravity of the situation becomes apparent.
That the Palestinian Authority (PA), once the embodiment of hopes for an independent state is weak, riddled with corruption and in the eyes of many Palestinians viewed as little more than in cynical collusion with Israel and you get some idea of the tinderbox atmosphere that prevails right now.
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Even before the latest bloodshed in Jenin, this year was already on course to be the deadliest year since 2005 in the West Bank.
Israel’s announcement late Tuesday that its forces had withdrawn from Jenin means nothing to Palestinians there or across the West Bank. The Israeli military pulling back after an offensive does not lift the occupation that lies at the root of this conflict.
That the use of force on towns and cities like Jenin and Gaza will not compel Palestinians to succumb to Israel’s will has been evident for years. People who have little left but their pride and dignity are not going to give up in the face of mass military power.
Back in 2002 as Jenin’s fighters ran out of ammunition and the Israelis consolidated their grip, I well recall standing one afternoon on the outskirts of the camp watching the last Palestinians to emerge from the rubble being rounded up by Israeli troops. Most were filthy; many were gaunt and haunted looking.
“Same Shit, Different Day”, read the T-shirt of one young Palestinian man as he yanked it up to his shoulders to prove he wasn’t carrying a bomb underneath. That slogan is an apt mantra and has been for so long now for Palestinians while an increasingly indifferent world chooses to look away from their plight.
Every so often when the level of force used by Israel involving air power and large numbers of troops rises exponentially observers are prone to drawing parallels with the second intifada in the early 2000s when Jenin was one of many places that bore the brunt of an Israeli military onslaught.
Those years left some 3000 Palestinians and 1000 Israelis dead.
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Right now, this moment is not yet a third intifada even if it does have echoes of that second Palestinian uprising.
But as long as Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continues to appease his extremist coalition allies and they increasingly call the shots over settlement expansion and “cracking down” on the Palestinians the deeper this crisis will become.
Unofficially, Israel’s military operation this past week in Jenin is said to have been dubbed “Bayit Vegan”, literally Home and Garden, a reference to Jenin’s biblical name. But things are far from rosy in the West Bank garden right now and only likely will get worse.
If events in Jenin tell us anything, it’s that serious challenges loom for both Israelis and Palestinians alike in the immediate future. Whatever way you look at it there’s an inescapable feeling that the spark has been lit and only the most optimistic or naïve would now rule out a third intifada.
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