Israel’s sci-fi assault on Jenin paves the way for new settlements
Palestinians fleeing the Jenin refugee camp following IDF raid, July 2023
Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 5 July 2023:
An army with equipment straight out of a science-fiction film attacking an Indian tribe. That, more or less, is the balance of power, and that is one of the aspects which make the Palestinians of the Jenin refugee camp into heroes.
The civilians are heroes by force. As usual. While those who chose to arm themselves and try to hit the invaders – over the past 23 years their bravery and courage (and also their indifference to death, having no horizon in life since birth) – have not stopped the Israeli master plan, to ensure that most of the West Bank will be annexed de facto to Israel and “cleansed” of Palestinians, while crowding them into bounded reservations. One Israeli government after the next has advanced this master plan, and each passing day reveals to what extent this is a deliberated strategy, conceived by many, with a host of arms to carry it out.
Those in favor of armed struggle rightly say that the tactic of diplomacy and negotiation, to which Mahmoud Abbas adheres, has not reined in Israel’s expansionist lust, and that Israel has, from day one of the Oslo Accords, blatantly disregarded the international understanding that the settlements are incompatible with a “peace process” and that they should cease to be constructed. But what is called the armed struggle has also failed, over the past three decades, to trammel the Israeli voraciousness for Palestinian land and for thwarting Palestinian national aspirations. On the contrary, it has often been used to justify that voraciousness (see the separation barrier, and the immense “seam zone” from which Palestinian presence is banned).
The evacuation of the settlements in the Gaza Strip – which Hamas presents as a victory and proof of the success of the armed struggle – has served another overarching Israeli goal: to continue to fragment the Palestinian population, forcing it into a vice of separate orientalist categories, in enclaves separated from one another.
Concurrent with this is the deepening of settlements in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). The evacuation of the four settlements in the northern West Bank in 2005 didn’t change much; Israel continued to classify the land they were built on as “Area C,” prohibiting the Palestinians from using and developing it in accordance with their needs, even after it was cleared of settlers. These evacuated sites just stood there, waiting, until the right political circumstances could turn back the clock.
It is this context as well – and not only those of Netanyahu’s trial, his political dependence on the settler parties, and the protests against the regime upheaval – that the science-fiction assault on Jenin should be understood. The Netanyahu-Levin-Smotrich-Ben-Gvir government has repealed the Disengagement Law as it pertains to the northern West Bank. The yeshiva-settlement of Homesh is growing and flourishing, under IDF protection, on the lands of Burqa and Silt a-Daher. It was, after all, with the aid and protection of the same army that it terrorized the landowners long before the law was repealed. There are three more sites targeted by the law: the former settlements of Sa-Nur, Kadim and Ganim, all in the Jenin Prefecture.
Accumulated experience allows us to estimate that the high command, meaning the various settlement movements and their many representatives in the government, is already planning the re-population of these sites. At the same time, or perhaps even before that, we are sure to see the supposedly spontaneous loner ranches pop up, with the fat cattle and sheep herds, the private militias and the crowdfunding to allow a few more God-fearing families to perform the commandment of usurpation of Palestinian land. With the familiar stew of tree cutting and burning, crop stealing, road blocking, gunfire and here and there direct pogroms that don’t settle for a lone shepherd or a couple of farmers in the field, but target an entire village.
The thousand soldiers, the choppers, the bomber drones, the war rooms and command centers and the bulldozers, the hundreds of armored jeeps and all the other high-tech goodness which laymen can barely imagine: They were intended in advance to subjugate – kill, wound, arrest, deter, intimidate – those who might try (emphasis on both “might” and “try”) to in any measure disrupt the smooth execution of the repeal of the Disengagement Law.
The immense gap in power manifests, as usual, in the availability of information as well. The spokespersons of the IDF, the Israel Police and the Shin Bet deliver their filtered information in real time. If they wish, they are generous with details; if not, they are stingy with them. The important thing is that the Israeli public treats them as the omniscient narrator, supposedly objective. And when they show photos of fuel barrels and repeat for the millionth time the words “terror infrastructure” and “explosives lab in the heart of a civilian population,” Israelis are certain to ignore the fact that IDF bases and Shin Bet installations are located within clearly civilian residential areas. They are also certain to forget that a single unit of soldiers or Border Police is more heavily armed than the entire refugee camp. They don’t remember, and therefore can’t forget, that Israel is the occupying force, forcing itself on the Palestinians.
And the other information, received from the ground, is partial and minuscule: Because the IDF destroyed the power infrastructure in the camp, and the mobile phone batteries ran out, because people are busy saving themselves and others, because civilians can’t see more right now than the stretch of road that the military bulldozer tore up, because the Palestinian Authority hasn’t established mechanisms to deliver the information it holds (other than the Health Ministry and the Red Crescent and the local councils). We have to collect the information from people who have experienced the bombardments, the destruction and the horror in the flesh, and that will be possible only after the vast Israeli forces, sent to destroy the Jenin refugee camp once again, leave.
We already know that thousands of the camp’s residents were forced on Monday evening to leave their homes. (Some left after the IDF ordered them to, others “chose” to leave because life without water is impossible.) Now, when they are out of the camp – wandering between schools or acquaintances in nearby villages – they don’t know in what state they’ll find their homes when they return to the camp: destroyed, with the doors and walls blown off, with the few valuables stolen, with Grandfather’s photo with the keffiyeh torn, with the TV they sank their savings into shot full of bullets, with their sacks of rice and sugar ripped open, their contents spilled on the ground.
When we’re able to meet with the camp’s residents, at least some of the details will be clarified: Were the 16- and 17-year-olds really armed when soldiers killed them, or were they throwing rocks at an armored jeep? We’ll know how many were arrested and where they are held. We’ll get a more precise idea of the scope of devastation the army left behind. But by then all this will be considered “yesterday’s news,” no longer of any interest to the Israeli public.
This article is reproduced in its entirety