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By
Ilan Pappe
Prominent Israeli academic and the Director of International Relations
Division, Haifa University
Over a year has passed now, since the Israeli army invaded the refugee
camp in Jenin, destroyed its houses, killed many of its inhabitants and
committed one of the worst war crimes in this present Intifada, Intifada
al-Aqsa. With a successful campaign of distortion and manipulation of
evidence, the Israeli foreign ministry, with the help of the United States,
succeeded in hiding from the world the horrors of Jenin, and even worse, in
intimidating anyone daring to tell the truth about what had happened
there.
This is the great significance and enormous importance of this book.
"Searching Jenin" is the first systematic account, through eyewitness
reports, on the events in April 2002. Two other books appeared in Arabic,
but this is the first one in English. It puts the events in context and it
highlights the true nature of the crime, while not falling into the pitfall laid
by the Israelis who succeeded in drawing the UN inquiry commission into
supposedly academic discussion of how to describe a massacre. As comes
out vividly from this book, Jenin was not just a massacre; it was an
inhuman act of unimaginable barbarism.
Noam Chomsky, in his introduction to the book, puts it in the context
of crimes sponsored by America and he is someone who recorded meticulously
these crimes in the past. Ramzy Baroud, in his preface, notes rightly that
the book will not answer the question of how many people were killed, nor
will it cover every aspect of the crime. But it does convey the message, as
one of the witnesses put it that, `what I have seen are crimes; sometimes
greater than an earthquake'. And this is not just an impression, as this
book makes it all too clear: every aspect of the Israeli actions in Jenin can
easily be identified as war crimes, according to the Hague convention.
Testimonies like the ones presented do not only help to shed light on
many of the chapters hidden by the Israeli screening and news' manipulation, it
also brings forcefully the emotions, sounds and smells of the catastrophe.
The pain is still there in those telling the stories. The book conveys the
lingering agony through the italic interventions of the editors. Through
them, we learn that while witnesses recall the horror of April 2002, like
Hussein Hammad, they have to stop several times – sometimes to repose
and occasionally to weep, before able to resume, like Hammad does, their
stories.
Sometimes the testimonies, at first glance, seem not to tell enough –
as if the survivors wish to repress the horror rather then tell it in
full. But the economy of words reveals quite often, even more about what had
happened. Rafidia al-Jamal is very laconic in a way, in her testimony, but
the full extent of the atrocity comes out in a very short sentence she
utters. This is the case when she describes how she prevented desperately
her husband - who had saved her life a moment earlier – from searching
after his sister. "Don't go,” I told him, "She is Dead". And then she reports
dryly: `my children have nightmares'.
Other witnesses, especially mothers, feel the need to expand when it
comes to their children's nightmares. Each with her own way of coping
with the persisting torment of their children. Mothers all over the West Bank,
and not only in Jenin a year after the massacre, spent sleepless nights with
terrified children who witnessed the brutality at first hand. In Jenin, Farid
and Ali Hawashin are such typical victims of continued nightmares of fear,
that according to their mother, haunt them even during daylight. For them it is mainly the
noise the disturbs their peace of mind: that of the loudspeaker that
arrived near midnight at their home, that of the brutal burst into the house, that of the men pleading with the soldiers before
being thrown out to the street, and then, worst of all, that of shots, the
groaning of wounded and the silence of the dead. Noise and death repeat
themselves in the memories of everyone in this book.
With these memories of sound and vision, the search for Jenin continues
throughout this powerful document. It is a search for truth, but for other
things as well. It is a search for loved ones unaccounted for, long after the
massacre ended, and then there is a search for a remedy to the pain of
the nightmare, and these searches were far more important than the question of how many exactly died in
Jenin. Even without this question being answered, there is a sense that this is the most authoritative report
we will ever get.
Each reader will take something different from this book. For me as an
Israeli, I find the description of the soldiers' conduct the most disturbing
and most convincing part of the evidence. It is a story of the dehumanization that raged in Jenin. This is so well epitomized in the
chronicles of Nidal Abu al-Hayjah as reported by Ihab Ayadi. After Nidal
was wounded and lay crying for help, anyone who tried to come to his rescue
was shot by Israeli snipers. He bled to death as so many others. Technically, he was not massacred, he was tortured to
death. The deadly precision of the snipers as a means of deterring rescue operations is being
reported in other testimonies in this book, such as that of Taha Zbyde,
who was killed eventually by a sniper. This mode of action was and still is
enacted wherever there is an Israeli operation in the occupied territories. It
is part of the vicious repertoire of the inhuman occupation – the daily
physical harassment and mental abuse at checkpoints, the prevention from
pregnant mothers or the wounded to get to hospitals, the starvation and the confiscation of water. No wonder some Israelis felt this brings back
memories from the darker days of the Second World War. I remembered Anna Frank's diary when I read Um Sirri's horrific recollection of how women
tried to swallow a cough that irritated the Israeli soldiers standing above
them, pointing their loaded guns at them.
But there are ways of opposing the inhumanity of the occupier. This is why
mothers in this collection talk proudly of babies born after the massacre.
The expectant young Sana al-Sani decided to call her baby, if it is a girl,
`Zuhur', which means `flowers'. This wish is expressed in the book after
Sana recalls one of the most horrid memories brought in this collection. Her
husband was slaughtered on his house's doorsteps, and yet it is not revenge or retribution that guides Sana, but a dream of having a different
kind of life.
But can flowers such as Sana's daughter flourish once more in the `camp
of martyrs' as the survivors called what was once their home? The flowers
will have to overcome the desolation and bareness. Most of the houses
were destroyed during the invasion. The Israeli army, after it expelled the
resistance forces, located its artillery near the mosque and shelled the
camp indiscriminately. Moreover, for blooming to take place where death
once reigned, the smell would have to evaporate first. An American volunteer, Jennifer Lowenstein, until
today can not sleep as the odor of death still troubles her nights and the nights of those few westerners, who
gave evidence in this book, and who were fortunate enough not to be killed. They helped to
tell the world the truth of what had happened. One of them is Tevor Baumgartner, who is the one who revealed the existence
of mass graves, an allegation that was refuted early on in the Israeli
denial, a denial that was so eagerly accepted by the United States.
This is a must, albeit a very difficult, reading. The campaign against the
continued dehumanization of the Palestinians in the occupied territories
cannot be based on slogans and general accusations. There is a need for
indictments such as one provided here, which will hopefully very soon arise
enough public indignation so as to vie governments around the world to
take acting to save the Palestinian people before it is too late.
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