Is it Systematic?

The question that I keep asking myself is whether the oppressive, absurd and cruel situations that Palestinians find themselves in are the accidental by-products of decisions that have been taken by the Israeli military and government to solve particular problems; or whether it is a part of a systematic and deliberate attempt to make their life so difficult that eventually they will leave.


Palestinians certainly think it is the latter. We went to Jenin two days ago, where there was a massive amount of fighting in 2003 when the Israeli army made incursions into the city and the neighbouring refugee camp in response to the second intifada. As in Hebron, the events of the last ten years have left a legacy in terms of anger and bitterness. Youssef, who is in charge of the Cultural and Creative Centre, tells us about 'the incursion', the numbers of people killed which he said was 65, the death of a British UN worker at the UNRWA centre in the refugee camp. There is some ambiguity about the facts. I try to think back to the report of the United Nations commission which was set up in response to the fighting. At the time Israel was condemned for initiating 'a massacre'. I remember reading the report which I think specified 22 deaths and some of soldiers.
I ask Youssef why the incursion happened. 'For security reasons', he replies. Everywhere people tell us of acts of oppression and brutality, but there is something missing. The events seem to take place in a contextual vacuum, as if the Israeli army / government just decided to be brutal.
I saw a poster of a young man in the city. Amna, our guide said, 'this boy got put in prison for 20 years'. 'What did he do?', I asked. 'He fought for his country', Amna said. But I want to know more than that, what he actually did. Did he kill a soldier, throw a bomb? It is not that I want to judge him, after all whether someone is a terrorist or a freedom fighter is often a matter of perspective, and I don't want to prejudge the issue. But I want to know more of the facts. The Israeli army went into Jenin, Bethlehem and Ramallah in response to the intifada and suicide bombings. Maybe those bombings were justified from the perspective of the Palestinians. But I want to know more of the facts, and the reasons.
I am being told a lot of what I didn't know, but I keep getting the feeling that I am not getting the whole story. But I was not getting the whole story when I was growing up in the North London Jewish community in the 1960s. I was not told how in 1967 after the 6 day war, Palestinians from the West Bank who fled into Jordan, were not allowed back by the Israeli army, were not counted in the Israeli census and lost their right to live in towns like Abu Dis. I was not told how people who tried to swim back across the river Jordan were shot by Israeli soldiers.
Youssef showed us a slide show which did not go down well with us. It claimed to show parallels between the Nazi holocaust of Jews and what happened in Jenin. There was a series of slides, one half showing Jewish men women and children brutalised by Nazis, the other half superficially similar images of men women and children in Jenin. Again the context was missing, just an assertion, that it was 'exactly the same, if not worse' in Jenin. The kind of thing I might accept as grafitti on the separation wall, or from a first year university student, but not from an information centre. This was not just me being sensitive. All the other volunteers: Simone, James, Mirko, felt the hollowness of the comparison. It doesn't help the Palestinian cause, people react against distortions like these. These assertions, I concluded, are a product of bitterness, and the bitterness is a product of ill-treatment and degrading treatment.
I talk to Amna about her life. She lives in a paradoxical zone, a strip of land near Jenin that is part of the Palestinian authority, but on the Israeli side of the separation wall. Claire, who works for an NGO and is studying law, says that this kind of territory is called a Seam Zone. Seam Zones were declared to be illegal under international law (as was the separation wall). They were created because when the separation wall was built five years ago, it did not always follow the route of the Green Line, the line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank. Large areas of the West Bank were placed on the Israeli side of the wall, including Israeli settlements, some Palestinian villages, areas used by bedouins. In the area that Amna comes from, there are Palestinian villages with a population of 17,000 people. Every day, they have to pass through a checkpoint in the wall to go to work or to see their family.
Claire told me about a Palestinian village in another Seam Zone near Ramallah. There is a village on the Palestinian side of the wall, and one house on the Israeli side. The woman in the single house has the wall separating her from the rest of the village so that she cannot even see or wave to her neigbours. Then there are two side gates, then on the other side of her house is an Israeli settlement. She is completely boxed in. She has a key that allows her to get through the wall to go to the village and go back to her house. But she is not allowed by the soldiers to have any visitors because that would be a security breach. Once when she had a visitor, soldiers soon after came to her house, and that was when she realised that cctv cameras on top of the wall were monitoring her all the time. She reported that the military wanted her to demolish her house, and she had refused, and she reckoned that this regime had been imposed on her as a punishment.