This week in rebuilt Jenin | From Occupied Palestine

This week in rebuilt Jenin
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 11 June 2004

Is there any other neighborhood in the universe with streets whose width was adapted to the dimensions of a tank? Is there any other urban planner who took the width of the Merkava Mark III tank into account?

Slightly over two years after Israel Defense Forces bulldozers destroyed the center of the Jenin refugee camp, a white city has arisen from the ruins of "ground zero." Of the 530 residential units leveled by the IDF in operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, about 100 new apartments have already been built. Last week the first families moved into their new homes, and by the end of the summer, the Jenin camp will have a new and well-designed center, the width of whose streets has been especially adapted to the dimensions of Israeli tanks.

There were residents who objected bitterly: Why should they be the ones to make an invasion easier? Others felt it was better to pave streets that were sufficiently wide, so that maybe the tanks wouldn't call on the bulldozers to destroy their homes again. After an internal debate in the camp, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is doing the rebuilding, decided that the Jenin camp wouldn't be a security asset, a defensive shield or a land barrier, and the movement of the tanks should be eased. The original area of each refugee home, which can be seen in the old aerial photographs taken by Israel, was reduced by 15 percent, and about 100 families were relocated in a new neighborhood that was built in the lower part of the camp. A thinning of the population density - in order to enable the paving of service roads for armored vehicles.

Instead of the narrow alleys, some of which were merely the width of a man, there are now arteries of 8-10 meters, more than enough for the steel monsters that sow destruction. Is there any other neighborhood in the universe with streets whose width was adapted to the dimensions of a tank? Is there any other urban planner who took the width of the Merkava Mark III tank into account? Whatever the case, a few days ago, the tanks came again, and one of them has already damaged the foundations of a building under construction.

There were also many in the camp who thought that the new houses should not be better designed and more beautiful than the original ones. They thought that the character of the refugee camp must be preserved, for political reasons. "We've lost the right of return," warned A., a member of the camp committee, sadly, at the sight of the new houses.

They have painted the facades of the new houses in ground zero, the ruined heart of the camp, a fashionable cream color, and used white for the houses in the new neighborhood on the southern border of the camp, for the families who agreed to accept alternative housing a short distance away from their original homes. Light-colored houses with straight lines; some of them even have spacious balconies. Bauhaus in Jenin; Unesco is on the way (Tel Aviv has just been declared a Unesco World Heritage Site because of its concentration of Bauhaus architecture).

A $29 million donation from the United Arab Emirates was handed over to UNRWA to restore the ruins. The work that has been done here is impressive, with finishing that is not typical of refugee camps. Even Saddam Hussein helped: He promised $25,000 to every family whose home was destroyed, managed to pay 100 families, and descended into the pit. These lucky families, together with several others who can afford it because they were adopted by donors from abroad, made all kinds of additions to the standard construction. This week we saw in the Jenin camp, for the first time in its history, some well-designed children's rooms, shiny kitchens, Belgian windows, Italian marble, Spanish tiles, Japanese refrigerators and Mediterranean fountains. In spite of that, there's no great joy there.

A model apartment: The Sabar home. Cream colored facade, two levels, three rooms and a kitchen on each level, blue children's room, yellow living room with an arch in the middle, something the father of the family had always dreamed of. Now Jamal is on the wall, looking at his family's designer living room from the heights of his commemorative poster. During the IDF invasion, he left their house by order of the soldiers who were gathering together all the men in the camp, his bag of medications in hand. He was diabetic. Eyewitnesses said that the soldiers asked him to remove his shirt, and then his pants. When they saw the bag, they shot him. He was 38 at the time of his death, a plasterer, unarmed and not a fighter. For a week his corpse was left rolling around on the sand, tanks running over it, until G. managed to save the remains and bring them to the hospital morgue.

In the house, Nadra and her three children remain. With their house destroyed and their father dead, they received donations, and now their house is the nicest in the camp. "It's very hard for me, we left the house together, and I returned by myself with the children," she sighed in her black widow's weeds. When the bulldozers razed their house, she hid with her children in a storage room on the ground floor, until she managed to flee to neighbors. For a week, nobody told them that the body of their Jamal was in the street. Last week they moved into their gleaming new house. A bouquet of fresh flowers in a vase, a rare thing here, a present from the neighbors. There are new sofas and old sofas that were reupholstered, everything in shades of yellow. Ceramic tiles in matching colors.

When the first missiles hit their house, Jamal still tried to calm them down, says Nadra. "`Why are you crying?'" he asked the children. "`I'll build you a new house, a nicer one.' And in the end he went - he didn't build and he didn't return."

Hassan al-Ruza is a teacher of geography and history. During the summer vacation - which has already begun in the camp - he is trying to add a room for himself instead of the patio that UNRWA set aside for him in the apartment it is building on the ruins of his house. This week he was busy digging the pit for the pillar that will support the fourth room. The teacher, who is now using the knowledge he accumulated as a worker on the scaffolds in Haifa, has 11 children. On the new white facade of the house opposite, there are already bullet holes. At night there were soldiers here.

The windows are opposite one another, and a neighbor complained: "We're not used to a person being able to look into another's home." Now it's possible. An armed man passed quickly in the street, staying close to the walls, wearing a flight jacket in the June heat, a machine gun on his shoulder, swallowed up in one of the houses. All the homeless lived until now in rented houses whose rental was also paid for by the emirs of the Gulf. Nobody remained in the street. Jenin is like an island amid the chaos.

The data: 100 residential units have already been completed, 70 families have already returned to their homes. About 1,000 workers are involved in the construction work, and their wages are NIS 40 per day for nonprofessionals and NIS 70 for professionals, from 6 A.M. until the evening hours, sometimes quite late. Most of the laborers come from the surrounding villages rather than the camp, because of the low wages and the fact that it's temporary work. Work began last June, and was frozen in October for about five months because of the killing of the UNRWA project manager, Ian Hook, by the IDF.

Each family gets three or four rooms, depending on the size of its former home. The present manager, Paul Wolstenholme, is pressing to have the work finished by September, but the Palestinian engineers know that there's no chance it will happen before December.

The Nashrati home: Here everything is standard, with no additions. Two stories, three rooms on each floor, white walls and regulation tiles, like the previous house, only newer. The kitchen and toilets have been upgraded. There is no furniture, only piles of mattresses in the corners of the rooms. Here live Asmahan and Jamal Nashrati and their 10 children. Asmahan is pleased. She has returned home. Her Jamal has another, new wife in the house opposite, who has one son.

"There's sadness in my heart. A new house isn't everything," says the unhappy husband of the two women, who hasn't given up his dream of returning to Zarin, his parents' lost village, 20 kilometers from his renovated home in the refugee camp. Last week they moved into the new house.

There's garlic for luck on the railings of the balcony in the home of the former commander of Islamic Jihad in the camp, the fallen Mohammed Tualba. This house has also been rebuilt now on the ruins of its predecessor. The way to the house passes through the old alleys of the camp, which are the width of a man. "When these alleys no longer exist, the poets won't have anything to write," says A. sadly. He was strongly opposed to paving the roads for the tanks. In the dim light of the new house of the Jihad commander's family sits his father, Ahmed Tualba, looking much older than his 53 years. A former employee of Solel Boneh, an Israeli construction company, he has had a hard life, and speaks softly, in a broken voice. For three months he has been trying to visit his sister, who is a cancer patient in Jordan, but Israel is preventing him from leaving. He is convinced that it's all because of Mohammed. A few days ago, he set out again, and was brought back from the bridge, humiliated. "Because of my son am I to blame? My file is clean. In Israel, an 18-year-old - his father is no longer responsible for him, and he (Mohammed) was already 24. Do I want my son to die? If I want my son to die, I'm crazy."

The new living room, brown ceramic tiles, light brown sofas decorated with three purple and gold ships. Two of them were made by his jailed sons. Two sons in the Megiddo Prison and one in the Be'er Sheva Prison, not including the dead Mohammed. Murad set out for Haifa wearing an explosives belt, apparently inspired by Mohammed, or even under his orders. Three times he was supposed to blow himself up, and changed his mind at the last moment. His father says that the third time was when he saw a woman and a child. He was caught and sentenced to 13.5 years in prison. Ala, his brother, is in prison and his father says he is mentally ill: "Ala only talks all the time and doesn't do anything, he's afraid even of a cat."

"Captain Jamal" of the Shin Bet security services came to arrest him, and Ala wasn't at home. He returned after three days, and his father went to hand him over to the Shin Bet captain. Now he has been an administrative detainee for a year and eight months, without a trial; he's about 18. "My wife and I are not allowed to visit the children. Do you know what Ala wants us to send him? A big teddy bear. We bought and sent him a big teddy bear. That's Ala - he's all talk." And Raad has also been in prison without trial, since the incursion; according to residents of the camp, he's not a fighter either, and is in prison because of the sins of his brothers.

How does he feel in the new house? Tualba's face contorts, trying very hard not to burst into tears in the presence of the stranger. "Maybe you can help me with my sister?"

Topics

Search

Authors

U.S Aid to Israel



>> Most recent articles \| demolitions \| Jenin \| United Nations \| war crimes \| Gideon Levy This week in rebuilt Jenin GIDEON LEVY Ha'aretz, 11 June 2004 Is there any other neighborhood in the universe with streets whose width was adapted to the dimensions of a tank? Is there any other urban planner who took the width of the Merkava Mark III tank into account? Slightly over two years after Israel Defense Forces bulldozers destroyed the center of the Jenin refugee camp, a white city has arisen from the ruins of "ground zero." Of the 530 residential units leveled by the IDF in operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, about 100 new apartments have already been built. Last week the first families moved into their new homes, and by the end of the summer, the Jenin camp will have a new and well-designed center, the width of whose streets has been especially adapted to the dimensions of Israeli tanks. There were residents who objected bitterly: Why should they be the ones to make an invasion easier? Others felt it was better to pave streets that were sufficiently wide, so that maybe the tanks wouldn't call on the bulldozers to destroy their homes again. After an internal debate in the camp, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is doing the rebuilding, decided that the Jenin camp wouldn't be a security asset, a defensive shield or a land barrier, and the movement of the tanks should be eased. The original area of each refugee home, which can be seen in the old aerial photographs taken by Israel, was reduced by 15 percent, and about 100 families were relocated in a new neighborhood that was built in the lower part of the camp. A thinning of the population density - in order to enable the paving of service roads for armored vehicles. Instead of the narrow alleys, some of which were merely the width of a man, there are now arteries of 8-10 meters, more than enough for the steel monsters that sow destruction. Is there any other neighborhood in the universe with streets whose width was adapted to the dimensions of a tank? Is there any other urban planner who took the width of the Merkava Mark III tank into account? Whatever the case, a few days ago, the tanks came again, and one of them has already damaged the foundations of a building under construction. There were also many in the camp who thought that the new houses should not be better designed and more beautiful than the original ones. They thought that the character of the refugee camp must be preserved, for political reasons. "We've lost the right of return," warned A., a member of the camp committee, sadly, at the sight of the new houses. They have painted the facades of the new houses in ground zero, the ruined heart of the camp, a fashionable cream color, and used white for the houses in the new neighborhood on the southern border of the camp, for the families who agreed to accept alternative housing a short distance away from their original homes. Light-colored houses with straight lines; some of them even have spacious balconies. Bauhaus in Jenin; Unesco is on the way (Tel Aviv has just been declared a Unesco World Heritage Site because of its concentration of Bauhaus architecture). A $29 million donation from the United Arab Emirates was handed over to UNRWA to restore the ruins. The work that has been done here is impressive, with finishing that is not typical of refugee camps. Even Saddam Hussein helped: He promised $25,000 to every family whose home was destroyed, managed to pay 100 families, and descended into the pit. These lucky families, together with several others who can afford it because they were adopted by donors from abroad, made all kinds of additions to the standard construction. This week we saw in the Jenin camp, for the first time in its history, some well-designed children's rooms, shiny kitchens, Belgian windows, Italian marble, Spanish tiles, Japanese refrigerators and Mediterranean fountains. In spite of that, there's no great joy there. A model apartment: The Sabar home. Cream colored facade, two levels, three rooms and a kitchen on each level, blue children's room, yellow living room with an arch in the middle, something the father of the family had always dreamed of. Now Jamal is on the wall, looking at his family's designer living room from the heights of his commemorative poster. During the IDF invasion, he left their house by order of the soldiers who were gathering together all the men in the camp, his bag of medications in hand. He was diabetic. Eyewitnesses said that the soldiers asked him to remove his shirt, and then his pants. When they saw the bag, they shot him. He was 38 at the time of his death, a plasterer, unarmed and not a fighter. For a week his corpse was left rolling around on the sand, tanks running over it, until G. managed to save the remains and bring them to the hospital morgue. In the house, Nadra and her three children remain. With their house destroyed and their father dead, they received donations, and now their house is the nicest in the camp. "It's very hard for me, we left the house together, and I returned by myself with the children," she sighed in her black widow's weeds. When the bulldozers razed their house, she hid with her children in a storage room on the ground floor, until she managed to flee to neighbors. For a week, nobody told them that the body of their Jamal was in the street. Last week they moved into their gleaming new house. A bouquet of fresh flowers in a vase, a rare thing here, a present from the neighbors. There are new sofas and old sofas that were reupholstered, everything in shades of yellow. Ceramic tiles in matching colors. When the first missiles hit their house, Jamal still tried to calm them down, says Nadra. "`Why are you crying?'" he asked the children. "`I'll build you a new house, a nicer one.' And in the end he went - he didn't build and he didn't return." Hassan al-Ruza is a teacher of geography and history. During the summer vacation - which has already begun in the camp - he is trying to add a room for himself instead of the patio that UNRWA set aside for him in the apartment it is building on the ruins of his house. This week he was busy digging the pit for the pillar that will support the fourth room. The teacher, who is now using the knowledge he accumulated as a worker on the scaffolds in Haifa, has 11 children. On the new white facade of the house opposite, there are already bullet holes. At night there were soldiers here. The windows are opposite one another, and a neighbor complained: "We're not used to a person being able to look into another's home." Now it's possible. An armed man passed quickly in the street, staying close to the walls, wearing a flight jacket in the June heat, a machine gun on his shoulder, swallowed up in one of the houses. All the homeless lived until now in rented houses whose rental was also paid for by the emirs of the Gulf. Nobody remained in the street. Jenin is like an island amid the chaos. The data: 100 residential units have already been completed, 70 families have already returned to their homes. About 1,000 workers are involved in the construction work, and their wages are NIS 40 per day for nonprofessionals and NIS 70 for professionals, from 6 A.M. until the evening hours, sometimes quite late. Most of the laborers come from the surrounding villages rather than the camp, because of the low wages and the fact that it's temporary work. Work began last June, and was frozen in October for about five months because of the killing of the UNRWA project manager, Ian Hook, by the IDF. Each family gets three or four rooms, depending on the size of its former home. The present manager, Paul Wolstenholme, is pressing to have the work finished by September, but the Palestinian engineers know that there's no chance it will happen before December. The Nashrati home: Here everything is standard, with no additions. Two stories, three rooms on each floor, white walls and regulation tiles, like the previous house, only newer. The kitchen and toilets have been upgraded. There is no furniture, only piles of mattresses in the corners of the rooms. Here live Asmahan and Jamal Nashrati and their 10 children. Asmahan is pleased. She has returned home. Her Jamal has another, new wife in the house opposite, who has one son. "There's sadness in my heart. A new house isn't everything," says the unhappy husband of the two women, who hasn't given up his dream of returning to Zarin, his parents' lost village, 20 kilometers from his renovated home in the refugee camp. Last week they moved into the new house. There's garlic for luck on the railings of the balcony in the home of the former commander of Islamic Jihad in the camp, the fallen Mohammed Tualba. This house has also been rebuilt now on the ruins of its predecessor. The way to the house passes through the old alleys of the camp, which are the width of a man. "When these alleys no longer exist, the poets won't have anything to write," says A. sadly. He was strongly opposed to paving the roads for the tanks. In the dim light of the new house of the Jihad commander's family sits his father, Ahmed Tualba, looking much older than his 53 years. A former employee of Solel Boneh, an Israeli construction company, he has had a hard life, and speaks softly, in a broken voice. For three months he has been trying to visit his sister, who is a cancer patient in Jordan, but Israel is preventing him from leaving. He is convinced that it's all because of Mohammed. A few days ago, he set out again, and was brought back from the bridge, humiliated. "Because of my son am I to blame? My file is clean. In Israel, an 18-year-old - his father is no longer responsible for him, and he (Mohammed) was already 24. Do I want my son to die? If I want my son to die, I'm crazy." The new living room, brown ceramic tiles, light brown sofas decorated with three purple and gold ships. Two of them were made by his jailed sons. Two sons in the Megiddo Prison and one in the Be'er Sheva Prison, not including the dead Mohammed. Murad set out for Haifa wearing an explosives belt, apparently inspired by Mohammed, or even under his orders. Three times he was supposed to blow himself up, and changed his mind at the last moment. His father says that the third time was when he saw a woman and a child. He was caught and sentenced to 13.5 years in prison. Ala, his brother, is in prison and his father says he is mentally ill: "Ala only talks all the time and doesn't do anything, he's afraid even of a cat." "Captain Jamal" of the Shin Bet security services came to arrest him, and Ala wasn't at home. He returned after three days, and his father went to hand him over to the Shin Bet captain. Now he has been an administrative detainee for a year and eight months, without a trial; he's about 18. "My wife and I are not allowed to visit the children. Do you know what Ala wants us to send him? A big teddy bear. We bought and sent him a big teddy bear. That's Ala - he's all talk." And Raad has also been in prison without trial, since the incursion; according to residents of the camp, he's not a fighter either, and is in prison because of the sins of his brothers. How does he feel in the new house? Tualba's face contorts, trying very hard not to burst into tears in the presence of the stranger. "Maybe you can help me with my sister?"	Topics · Issues introduction · al Aqsa intifada · al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades · Zacharia Zubeidi · anti-semitism · apartheid · children · closures · demolitions · ethnic cleansing · Fatah · Marwan Barghouti · Hamas · Abdel Aziz Rantisi · Ahmed Yassin · history · human rights · international law · Islamic Jihad · ISM · Israeli politics · Jenin · media · nuclear weapons · Mordechai Vanunu · Palestinian Authority · peace process · Oslo Accords · one state solution · Road Map · Geneva Accord · 'unilateral disengagement' · PFLP · Abu Ali Mustafa · Ahmed Saadat · political prisoners · primary documents · Rafah · refugees · refuseniks · separation wall · settlements/settlers · suicide bombing · targeting journalists · U.S role · United Nations · war crimes · assassination · water · women · Zionism Search Authors · Uri Avnery · Phyllis Bennis · Noam Chomsky · Alexander Cockburn · Jonathan Cook · Jon Elmer · Kristin Ess · Robert Fisk · Nicole Gaouette · Sa'id Ghazali · Suzanne Goldenberg · Jeff Halper · Amira Hass · Edward Herman · David Hirst · Justin Huggler · Amnon Kapeliouk · Gideon Levy · Jennifer Loewenstein · Chris McGreal · Justin Podur · Tanya Reinhart · Danny Rubinstein · Sara Roy · Edward Said · Graham Usher · Stephen Zunes U.S Aid to Israel $USD since 1949