Jenin Lives!

Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, hit international headlines in 2002 when Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) invaded the city and refugee camp, bulldozed hundreds of house, leaving thousands homeless and hundreds dead causing a massive humanitarian disaster. In early December, Kate and I went to Jenin to do interviews with Palestinians women’s groups and activists.

As we began our journey to Jenin, we discovered that the Border Police were at the front entrance to our village. They had stopped one of the local Palestinian buses and made everyone get off and were checking their hawiyye (ID cards). As we got there all the men were getting back on the bus and we had discovered that they had been there for about a half hour or so.

It is not unusual for Palestinian buses to be stopped for long periods of time by the IOF and having travelled on buses in the last few months, I already knew what had just passed.

Either the driver or one of the passengers on the bus would have been ordered to collect all the hawiyye (ID cards) and then take them to either the Border Police or the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) solider and wait for them to go through them. Palestinian hawiyye are Green or Orange ID cards and identify the holder as Palestinian. Israeli IDs on the other had are blue. The colour coding makes it easy for occupation forces to easily identify who is Israeli and who is Palestinian, with the colour coding of IDs yet another example of the structural and institutionalised apartheid imposed by the Israeli state.

As the hawiyye is being collected and then checked by the Border Police or soliders, in the majority of cases but not all, the rest of the men would also have had to get off the bus and wait, as they had done this morning. Sometimes they would be called up individually and checked, other times they would be told either individually or collectively to raise their shirts to prove they had no bomb strapped to their chests.

Eventually, they would be allowed back on the bus and to continue their journey. How long they would have to wait would be totally arbitrary and depend on the mood of the soldiers or the police officer conducting the check. Recently one of our other team members, J was on her way to Ramallah for her days off, when the bus she was on was stopped for three hours. When she asked what was going on, she was repeatedly told that it was not safe to travel on the bus because the ‘Arabs were all terrorists’.

Eventually, we were on our way, but we were to encounter two more flying checkpoints before we reached Jenin. At the second one, less then 20 minutes from our village and near Tulkarem, the procedure was repeated. The hawiyye and our passports collected, handed to the soldiers and then after 15 or 20 minutes, we were passed through.

It was the third checkpoint that we encountered, however, which was the most disturbing. As we neared the village of Balaa, 6 soldiers were stationed in the valley along the winding road, stopping all traffic.

As traffic banked up, Kate decided to go down to see what was going on. She later told me that when she asked what was going on and why were the IOF there, one of them replied, without censoring himself first, “because we hate the Arabs”, but then realised what he said and quickly said “only the ones who kill us”.

In front of us was a truck carrying live chickens and as its turn came to go through, the first two soldiers spoke to the driver and checked the truck and then waved him through. However, they were then halted by the second set of soldiers who also decided to recheck the vehicle.

From the hill we watched in silence. One of the other passengers in our servicee then broke the tension by saying what we all had been thinking about the pointless rechecking of the chicken truck. Provoking a weary laugh from the rest of us in the servicee, he muttered to no-one in particular, but to all of us….“what are they checking for … exploding chickens?”.

When it came our turn to pass through, we were waved through by the first set of soldiers to the second two. Here the double edged sword of being an international shone threw.

Being an international, we more often then not are able to use our positions to help alleviate some of the more over the top harassment of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces, but on some occasions the presence of internationals can also make soldiers angry and they then take out that anger on the Palestinians. We are always constantly aware that this can happen and as a result we try to gage the situation to ensure that any interactions we have do not escalate a situation unnecessarily.

As we approached the middle set of soldiers, our car was told to stop and we were instructed to get out. In the half an hour we had been waiting, no one else had been asked to leave their vehicles. It was clear from the soldier’s behaviour that Kate and I were the reason for this happening.

The young soldier checking the IDs who would not have been more then 20 or 21 years old was clearly bored and was looking to show that he could do what ever he wanted and to know doubt show the Palestinians they should not be doing any favours for internationals or even interacting with them.

Briefly checking the Palestinian hawiyee, he then focused on Kate and my passports. “Where are you from? Why are you here? Where are you going?”.

"To visit friends", Kate said. To this the young solider replied, “I’m looking for special friend’. Kate replied in a flat tone “well I doubt you will find any here, so perhaps you should go home”. Ignoring Kate’s comment, he continued to recheck our passports.

Kate, who speaks little Hebrew as well as Arabic, later told me that the other soldier, who had a smarmy grin on his face the whole encounter had said to the soldier checking out passports “give her your phone number’. After another few minutes of pointless questioning and sexist innuendo, we were finally allowed to get back into the car and waved through.

As we sat in silence in the car I felt angry, degraded, dirty and powerless. The thought raced through my head, if I felt this way after such a minor encounter, imagine how the Palestine people must feel all the time. Every single day, they are humiliated and degraded by the occupation and the security forces. In addition, to enduring their own humiliation, they must also endure the continuous and ongoing humiliation and shaming of their mothers, sisters, brothers and fathers. Every week here, you see, hear and are told stories of ritual humiliation.

Just a week earlier, the Israeli newspapers carried a disturbing photograph taken by the women from the Israeli human rights group, Maschom Watch (Checkpoint Watch). The photo, reminiscent of the holocaust, was of a Palestinian being forced to play a violin for soldiers before he was allowed to pass through the checkpoint at Beit Iba.

The week prior to that, when visiting with our friend F, her 16 year old daughter S, told me a story about soldiers at one checkpiont thought it was amusing to try and humiliate a young Palestinian man and woman by forcing them to kiss each other.

The soldiers, she said, had refused to let one young man pass through a checkpoint unless he kissed a young Palestinian woman. The young man did not know the young woman, who also just waiting to be passed through. The young Palestinian woman, refusing to be degraded or humiliated by the soldiers, told the Palestinian man that it was okay because to her he was her brother. Later the young man, apparently impressed by the woman’s dignity and kindness, went to her family to ask to marry her.

In the weeks since our trip to Jenin, one of the leading IOF Major Generals, Elazar Stern, told the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) committee for Constitution, Law and Justice that one in five soldiers (around 20% of the IOF) believed that the life of a Palestinian or Arab was worth less then the life of an Jewish person (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/510815.html.). As a result said Stern, Palestinians were regularly degraded and humilated at checkpoints and roadblocks.

We eventually reached Jenin and we met up with Kate’s friend, Y who had arranged for us to meet with some of the local groups and families who had lost land to the wall the next day.

Y told us how he had been working to try and establish a cultural centre for the children both in Jenin city and Jenin camp. From the window of our room, he showed me the camp and where the 2002 incursions into the camp had taken place and where the IOF demolished hundreds of homes and killed dozens of innocent civilians in the process.

Y told me that in the aftermath of the incursion, he and others had organised for the children between the age of 6 and 16 years to do painting and drawing workshops as therapy in response to the trauma they had just been through. The theme which the children had been asked to draw was “a day in your life”. Many of the drawings from those sessions were now in Scotland as part of a exhibition, but he promised to bring some of the ones he still had the following day to show us.

Later that night, Kate and I went our separate ways for an hour or so and agreed to meet back at the unit. Kate, however, got lost. As I waited for her to come back (with the key to get into our room), on the stairs near our apartment, the children from the neighbouring apartment came out to see what this strange woman was doing sitting on the step. They invited me to come in and eventually I agreed. The oldest boy, 12 year M, called me over and lifted the blanket that lay across his lap to show me the plastercast on his right leg and the bandage on his left. I quickly realised he had been shot by the IOF.

Kate soon arrived and was also invited in for coffee. In Arabic, M’s parents explained that he had been shot twice. One bullet had shattered the bone in his right leg and the other had entered the calf of his left leg.

Kate asked why the soldiers had shot him and was he the only one. M told her, he had been throwing stones and the soldiers had shot him and nineteen other young boys that day. In early November, when he had been shot, the IOF had also assassinated four militants in Jenin and had regularly raid house and arrested and detained children and adults.

Later that night, at 1.30am, Jenin once again experience tanks rolling through her streets. The tanks, we were later told, had set up near the camp. A few days, later after we had left the city, the IOF entered the camp and carried out raids once again.

The next day, Y arrived at the apartment. He brought with the drawings and paintings he had told us about the night before. We sat in a circle and he passed each one to us. The paintings, he explained were done be children from his village, while the drawings done in coloured pencil were by the children from Jenin camp. The difference between the two was stark.

While many of the paintings from the children from the village carried images in browns and blacks, tanks and guns, there were also many which depicted “normalcy” with the children using green and red and other bright colours drew their parents, their house, trees, flowers and grass. In contrast, all the drawing done by the children from Jenin camp were dark, full of pain and suffering.

Dark in colour, browns, blacks, dark blue, most of the drawing showed the rolling hills of Jenin camp. The hills and streets, however, were not filled with pretty houses or trees or flowers, but instead they were populated with images of Israeli tanks carrying the Star of David flag, firing on protestors, soldiers shooting people, helicopters firing missiles at houses and buildings, as well as houses on fire, buildings exploding. As I picked up each drawing and looked at the pain that filled them, my heart just broke for the children who drawn them and the horrors they had witnessed.

Y then asked me would I take the drawings with me to Australia and do an exhibition, like the one in Scotland. I was completely dumbstruck and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the request.

I remembered seeing an exhibition in Canberra a number of years ago of paintings and drawing by Jewish children who lived and died in Theresienstadt/Terezin concentration camp and remembered how moved I had been by the exhibition and how important I had thought it was that these children’s testaments had been saved. All I could think was how now can I be responsible for such precious and important documents? How could I be responsible for the testaments of the children of Jenin and his village?

Y, however, was certain it was the right thing to do and that I should take them. And finally I agreed. R and I had been talking about doing a photographic exhibition when we got back to Australia and I had also started collecting anti-occupation posters from the various organisations and towns I had visited. I now had enough of them and thought they too could be used as part of any exhibition we did. Now, it seemed that I also had a collection of precious drawings and paintings to add, as well as a cd with photographs of the drawings that had gone to Scotland.

After carefully packing away the drawings, Y took us to meet the women from the General Women’s Union. Although they were busy organising to ensure women’s involvement in the upcoming Palestinian election, several of them took time out to talk with us. One of the women, H, who agreed to talk with us and to be interviewed by both myself and Kate, had been imprisoned in an Israeli jail.

H had spent two years in an Israeli prison because she had been an activist with Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Hiyam told us that she had been involved in the social and welfare work carried out by the organisation and had been an outspoken opponent of the occupation.

H’s story, was like many of the stories, I had either read about or had heard from others who spent time in the Israeli jails. My friend M had been jailed three times during the first intifada, as a young teenager for simply throwing stones (spending a total of a 2 and half years in prison). He was lucky he told me, because he did not suffer any physical torture, only psychological. H, however, had not been so lucky.

One of the torture techniques favoured by Israeli interrogators is make prisoners stand with a dirty and smelly sack on prisoner’s head, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, to exhaust them, disorientate and isolate them. H, like many other women, was subjected to this abuse.

She went on to tell us how she was burnt with cigarettes and cigars, how she had been electrocuted and how the women had been isolated and beaten. She told us how the women were humiliated and left without sanitary products during their menstruation period. She told us how the Israelis would encourage the Israeli women prisoners in the criminal section of the prison to attack the Palestinian women political prisoners. In particular, said H, the more psychologically disturbed Israeli women prisoners were used to terrorise the Palestinian women political prisoners by letting them roam the Palestinian sections screaming, yelling and physically attacking the Palestinian women.

As she told us her story, H began to cry, the memory of it all was still fresh she told us. As I sat there and listened to her story, I too was on the verge of tears. I tried to image myself in her place, going through what she had gone through. How would I cope? Would I have the strength, both mentally and physically to get through it? What would I do?

As H told us her story, I also thought of Nidia Diaz, the El Salvadorian revolutionary, who too had kidnapped and brutalised in prison but who never gave in to her torturers. I remembered how moved I had been by her story and courage, just as I now was by H’s story.

There were really no words to be able to express our thanks to H for sharing her life with us, but we tried anyway.

With our time in Jenin almost over, Y took us to meet with a family is Suweitat, about 10 minutes from the outskirts of Jenin. The family once had 200 dunum of land (1 dunum = 1000 sq meters) but much of it now lay behind the electronic fence which made up the apartheid wall that ran through the Jenin region. As we drove onto their property, we were greeted by the two destroyed houses. The houses, now just concrete rubble and wire garters, had apparently been a “security risk” and were demolished at the time of the 2002 incursion.

Y took us to meet the family. The women were sitting in the yard, thrashing wheat. Just down the hill a little from where the family had been working was the illegal colony of Ganim, which had been established in 1985. As we looked over the ridge towards Jenin city, we could see the army and a bulldozer clearing my trees to make way for more illegal housing infrastructure.

As we sat and had tea with the family, the told us how the soldiers had come and cut their trees and destroyed their houses. They told us, how even though the soldiers said they could not go to their land to plough, decided to try and go anyway. As the children blew up the balloons that Kate had brought for them, they shared their stories with us and then took us to meet the rest of their family who were ploughing some of the land that they had been able to access.

We soon, however, had to leave and said goodbye to both the family and Y. In the servicee on the way back to Tulkarem, the other passengers in the car were quick to asked if we thought there would be peace soon. When I said, I hope so, but I am not confident, they all agreed.

My trip to Jenin was one which was a mixture of emotions: raw, disturbing, sad, heartbreaking and inspiring. Jenin - A name now so well known, however, embodies within its hills the spirit of the Palestinian people. A spirit of resilience, dignity and resistance and a determination to survive, to remain and to live.