Blog 12

Jenin

Last Friday I took a bus to Jenin, a town in the far north of the West Bank. The bus trip from Ramallah to Jenin takes about two hours. The bus passes through three main army checkpoints and at one point Palestinian traffic is diverted from the main highway along a small winding backroad so as not to pass too close to a settlement.

The countryside consists of steep hills, rocky terraces, olive trees, Palestinian villages identifiable by their distinctive minarets and hill top settlements, distinctive by their red roofs and modern construction. There is hardly a point in the trip where you cannot see a hill top settlement, standing medieval like with fences watchtowers and roadblocks. Most of the road signs in the West Bank are in three languages; Hebrew, followed by Arabic, then English. Close to settlements, the Arabic script on these road signs is often obliterated by black spray paint. I have yet to see a road sign where the Hebrew or English script has been defaced.

In April and June 2002 when the current Intifada (the second, or Al-Aqsa Intifada) was at its most intense, the Israeli army entered the refugee camp in Jenin with tanks and armoured bulldozers after a number of deadly Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel killed scores of civilians.

A number of the suicide bombers had come from this refugee camp.

During bitter fighting that lasted nine days, around 52 Palestinians were killed, including 22 women and children
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1940913.stm)
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1965471.stm)( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1941504.stm)

During the fighting much of the camp was reduced to rubble.

The camp has since been rebuilt with money donated from the Emirates. The new houses are painted a pale yellow whilst the older houses are concrete grey. This colour distinction gives a clear indication of the scale of the destruction - I would estimate about half of the houses had been destroyed.

During the rebuilding process the IDF ensured that the once narrow twisting lanes were straightened and widened sufficiently throughout the camp to allow their tanks easy access. The natives of Jenin who I was with, told me that Israeli tanks do in fact rumble through the camp most nights. In this occupation, much brutality appears to occur in the night.

The “martyrs” cemetery in the camp contains about 100 graves filled during the current Intifada, mostly in 2002. The stonemason who carves the headstones has his own story. As a boy in the 1990s he was one of seven friends in the camp who took to acting. A theatre had been established in the camp by an Israeli woman and her son, as a therapeutic measure against the constant violence and as a means to build bridges between the two communities. This was just after the Oslo Peace Accords had been signed in 1993 and optimism was high. However, as the occupation continued and the building of new settlements accelerated (during Oslo (1993-2000) the number of settlers in the West Bank doubled in number) the spirit of optimism faded and was replaced by despair. This dispair exploded into the Second Intifada in September 2000. As despair took hold and the level of violence increased, the boys, now young men, left the theatre never to return.

Five of the original seven friends are now dead.

On leaving the theatre, one of the dead boys became a policeman for the Palestinian Authority. He was on duty in the camp police station during the IDF invasion when a tank shell exploded in the school playground next door. He ran to the playground and found a nine year old girl lying on the ground lacerated and bleeding from shrapnel. A short time later the girl died in his arms from loss of blood. Acquaintances of the policeman said he became obsessed by the girl’s death. Ten days later, he acquired an automatic weapon, traveled to Israel and gunned down four Israeli civilians at a bus stop before being killed himself.

The stonemason survived these violent times and carved each of the headstones for his five young friends.

Following this sad tour we visited the theatre in the camp where Palestinian poetry and songs were performed by young women with extraordinary passion to an audience of Palestinians, Israelis and some internationals. Sitting in front of me was an Israeli lawyer with a large, round scar above his right ear. Six months earlier he had been demonstrating peacefully against the Wall in the village of Bi’lin (see Blog 5) when he was shot in the head with a plastic bullet fired by the IDF. The bullet lodged in his brain. His recovery has apparently been remarkable, but whereas before he could speak eight languages, he is now teaching himself to read again (for more details follow the link in Blog 5)

Next to the theatre is a new computer room with 14 computers donated by an American. On the wall hangs a picture of a young boy, 10 to 12 years old, I guess. The computer room is named in his honour. He was crushed to death by a tank in Jenin in 2002. His father also said a few words next door in the theatre.

It is impossible to truly appreciate the pain which many people live with in this part of the world.