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May 3,
2003
Searching Jenin
The
Most Authoritative Report on the War Crimes We Will Ever Get
By ILAN PAPPE
Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli
Invasion
Edited by Ramzy Baroud
Introduction by Noam Chomsky
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 horrorific 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 can not 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.
Ilan Pappe
is a prominent Israeli academic and the Director of International
Relations Division, Haifa University.
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