Days 8 & 9 - Jenin & Qalqilya

The group flew back to London on the Sunday and I took a bus up to Jenin in the north of Palestine with a friend. After the busy itinerary of the first week, it was great to wander around aimlessly for a while. It might have been because we were no longer in a large group but the people in Jenin seemed even more friendly and welcoming than in other towns we had been.

When we got out of the bus we were greeted by the sound of gunshots. A train of cars sped up the road with men leaning out the windows firing guns. It was evident from the flags they were waiving that this was just a Fatah demo. Great fun all the same!

I tried out my basic Egyptian arabic on the first policeman we came across and asked if he could direct us to the nearest hotel. He asked me something in Arabic and I nodded without understanding and before we knew it we were getting in a taxi and heading out of town into the surrounding mountains. Me and my friend exchanged glances but said nothing (on the basis we wouldn't have been understood anyway).

Things then took a bizarre turn (as they often do when travelling) as we turned into the entrance of a huge estate. It transpired that I needed to learn the Arabic for 'youth hostel' as we realised this was probably the most expensive hotel in the whole of Palestine. Ironically, when we thought we were getting in amongst the 'real' Palestine, we were going to be sleeping in a 5 star hotel complete with Greco-Roman facades, topiary and room service. Luckily it wasn't too expensive by European standards and we agreed with the manager we would stay for one night before venturing back into the town centre in the morning for somewhere more appropriate to stay. 'The hostel in town is very dirty' he warned us.

We left our bags in the room and took a taxi back into town that afternoon. Jenin is off the usual pilgrim / political tourism route and people here were genuinely surprised and delighted to see us. Although it is a thriving agricultural market town, nobody tried to sell us anything. We would typically be offered free coffee by people in the street and then offered a room for the night in their home! They all wanted to try out their English and have us take photos with them.

We were stopped by one guy in the street who asked where we were from. His english was excellent and he tried to give us a brief breakdown of the current political situation in the West Bank. He had previously been a leader of the Western Jenin Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (a group affiliated to Fatah) and had once been high on the Israeli wanted list. He told us that the resistance groups were being sold out by the Palestinian Authority. Previously wanted individuals were being told to come out of hiding by the PA only to be arrested by Israeli troops. There is widespread suspicion of the PA and its leader Mahmoud Abbas and many believe they act as US/Israeli agents rather than in Palestinian interests.

In the evening we were surprised at how many armed PA guards roamed the streets on foot and in jeeps. The PA is holding onto the failed and hollow peace deal and part of its responsibility under this deal is to police the resistance on behalf of the Israelis. They set up their own Israeli-style checkpoints to search and arrest their countrymen and are effectively on the payroll of the US. Given they themselves are under occupation, they have no real power and would certainly not be allowed to defend their people from Israeli attack. Nevertheless, they seem to enjoy parading around with their 1960s Egyptian issue rifles.

We managed to get in touch with the manager of a French funded NGO (non-governmental organisation) who was able to direct us to the only hostel in Jenin. She also introduced us to one of the girls at the NGO, Islam, who took us round Jenin refugee camp. The camp itself is infamous because of the massacres that were carried out there by the Israeli army in 2002. F16 jets and cluster bombs (which remain unexploded in civilian areas in order to create further injuries and deaths for many months afterwards) were used on the defenceless refugee population. Half of the buildings were destroyed and aerial bombing was used to blow a deep trench down the middle of the camp, literally cutting it in two. Many people were killed and many shot in cold blood in the streets (as has similarly happened in Gaza recently).

Israeli violence is often concentrated against the refugee population. They are an important group in Palestinian society because they represent the memory of the 1948 Nakba in which the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland.

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The Nakba

It is easy to talk about the Nakba ('catastrophe') in general terms without appreciating the scale of the suffering that was inflicted on the Palestinian population when they were ethnically cleansed from their homeland in order to make way for the creation of the state of Israel. For a comprehensive account of the atrocities committed against the defenceless civilian population, Ilan Pappe's 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' is essential reading but I will give some brief examples here for illustration purposes.

Ben Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, was the architect of the ethnic cleaning operations. He was never tried for any war crimes but instead is upheld internationally as a historic Churchill-style national icon. Tel Aviv airport is named after him. His diaries reveal the cold, calculating nature of his intention to rid Palestine of Palestinians at all costs whether by killing or forcibly expelling them. The campaign of terror he waged against the Palestinian people in and prior to 1948 is difficult to comprehend but a couple of examples might give some insight:

The Dawaymeh Massacre
The Zionist troops surrounded the village on three sides, as was standard practice in their cleansing operations and twenty armored cars entered the village. The standard procedure was that they attack from 3 flanks leaving the fourth as an exit point to chase the civilians from their village.

On this occasion the villagers were paralysed by fear so the soldiers jumped from their cars and began shooting indiscriminately (bear in mind there was no resistance). Many fled into the mosque for shelter or to a nearby cave. An eyewitness (the mukhtar of the village) ventured back into the village the next day and the streets were strewn with bodies, men women and children. The entrance to the cave was blocked by bodies. It is thought 455 defenceless villagers were killed in cold blood.

The accounts of the soldiers who took part in the massacre detail babies with their heads blown open, women raped or burned alive in their homes and men stabbed to death.

The Tantura Massacre
Tantura was attacked by Zionist forces at night in May 1948. The offensive unusually came from all four flanks so the villagers had nowhere to escape to. Consequently the soldiers found themselves with a lot of civilians on their hands, all unarmed. They were herded to the beach and the men seperated from the women and children ('men' were classified by the Zionist forces as any male between the ages of 10 and 50). The men were ordered to sit down until an Israeli intelligence officer arrived.

They were interrogated about a 'huge cache of weapons' that had been supposedly hidden in the village and as they knew nothing about this many were executed on the spot. Many villagers were also killed within the village as the soldiers went on a killing spree. A jewish soldier described how soldiers would go up to the commander while the Palestinian men were on the beach and say 'my brother' or 'my cousin was killed in a battle with arab forces' and the commander would order a group of men to be taken aside and shot dead. Other soldiers would approach the commander and more would be taken aside and murdered. They were massacred in groups of between five and ten.

The Deir Yassin Massacre
The village of Deir Yassin had a non-aggression pact with the Hagana (Zionist force) but this did nothing to save it. Jewish forces occupied the village in April 1948 firing their machine guns into the houses which killed many villagers. The remaining villagers were then gathered together and executed. Many of the bodies were mutilated and many of the women raped and then killed.

One eyewitness, who was 12 at the time, survived being shot after being lined up with other children and then sprayed with bullets by the Jewish soldiers. Approximately 170 villagers were killed including 30 babies.

Rapes by Zionist Forces
Obviously many of the victims have never spoken about their experience and many more were killed before they were able but there are some horrific stories about rapes by Jewish soldiers in 1948.

The most disturbing is the case of a 12 year old Palestinian girl who was taken by Israeli soldiers to their base camp. They shaved her head, beat her and imprisoned her. For the next few days she was gang-raped repeatedly by the platoon soldiers (22 in total) and then murdered. The case came to trial after an Israeli newspaper published the story in 2003. The harshest sentence was afforded to the murderer himself, he got 2 years.

Theft and Looting
There has rightly been full compensation paid to the Jewish Europeans robbed of their posessions by the Nazi's. No such compensation has been organised for the Palestinian victims of theft and expropriation at the hands of the Israeli authorities in 1948.

All of the assets of the 1.3 million Palestinians were seized by the invading Zionist forces. This included their farmland, businesses and money held in bank accounts. The first governor of the national Israeli bank had a plan in mind to avoid them being embroiled in international investigations: "Maybe we can send it all to American Jews?" he suggested.

The stolen agricultural land was handed out amongst Jewish settlers (a process that continues today) and any trace of the Palestinian villages that once stood there wiped away. Typically trees would be planted over the ruins to remove the memory of them altogether. On this basis, Israel claims to have 'made the desert bloom'.

The refugees from the 1948 war settled in Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and many other places. Most retain refugee status, as do their descendants, and as such retain their right to return to their homeland one day.

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Jenin refugee camp was the subject of a documentary called 'Visit Palestine'. It has also been the beneficiary of international funding as it hit the headlines for the atrocities committed by Israeli troops there in 2002. This is a typical Arab and Western response to Israel's violent excesses: do nothing to stop them perpetrating their crimes against humanity and then try to patch up the victims afterwards with monetary aid (often with a political tag attached to the aid). The same thing is happening now with aid to Gaza.

After the massacre there in 2002 a German artist created this horse from the twisted metal of cars, trucks and ambulances that had been crushed by Israeli tanks. Jenin also has the Freedom Theater for children in the refugee camp. When we visited, there was a press conference being held by 3 of the directors (one German, one Israeli and one ex-Al Aqsa Martyrs!). They had been accused of indoctrinating the children with anti-religious liberalism and were trying to calm the locals.

Later that afternoon we were invited to our guide's english lesson that she held for the doctors at Jenin hospital and then it was back to the hostel in Jenin town for a long sleep.


Qalqilya
The next morning we set out by bus. We planned to drop our stuff in Nablus at another NGO office and then go on to Qalqilya. On the way to Nablus we had to get out of our bus, pass through a huge Israeli checkpoint and get on another bus the other side. The soldier in the checkpoint feigned amazement as to why I would want to be in the West Bank when I could be in Israel. I decided not to enter into a debate. We were greeted warmly in Nablus as always and given a bed in a nice little flat on the top floor of the offices.

We took a shared taxi out to Qalqilya and were surprised to be stopped at another checkpoint, this time manned by three armed Palestinian men, one in uniform, two in civilian clothes. Clearly PA men. The one in uniform opened the door of the taxi and asked for passes. Me and my friend went to get our passports out but the man said in English 'No, just the Arabs'. I was shocked at this and one of the guys in the back of the taxis was clearly put out as well. 'Just like the Israelis' he said in arabic after we had driven off. I couldn't help agreeing.

Qalqilya itself used to be a thriving agricultural town before the Israelis began building their apartheid wall. The town is now totally walled in and cut off from most of its farmland. The wall is designed to steal as much of their land as possible while keeping the population of Israel as ethnically pure as possible (ie keeping the Palestinians on the other side of the wall).

To see a satellite image of how the town looks from space click here

The people here were more suspicious of foreigners. They are right up against the Israeli wall and are subject to persecution by both Israeli forces and their own Palestinan Authority that effectively does the bidding of the Israelis.

This was the last place we visited in the West Bank and it was fitting that our last memory would be the feeling of claustrophobia and oppression, walled in on all sides in a ghetto.