From Occupied Palestine

Jenin: A snapshot of an occupied land
JON ELMER
FromOccupiedPalestine.org, 12 October 2003

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Jenin, West Bank -- At the time, I was inclined to think that the walloping the boy got from his mother for being on the street throwing stones with the older boys was as bad as anything the IDF might have dealt him. But hours later I saw what a tank's heavy-calibre mounted machinegun will do to a young child's leg - a red gooey mass of mangled flesh bigger than a softball. I then saw what a mother looks like as she hurries with terrified panic through the hospital doors to see her son who has been shot.

The boy's walloping - with a thin black rubber hose - happened at about 9:30am, two hours into the daily routine of tanks patrolling the main street to enforce curfew. The boy was maybe six years-old, and seemed to know that he was in for it when his older brother followed his mother's barking orders to retrieve him from the street, draping his arm sternly around his little brother's shoulders.

This six year-old was part of the pack of boys that meet the tanks head on, each time they pass, with stones and juice bottles filled with fine white rock-dust. With a little water added, the bottles make a perfectly sized concrete projectile much more solid and easier to throw than a rock, and leave a white splattering on the tank's armour as a calling card.

Still, in real terms, it is little more than a symbolic show of force in the face of a 62-tonne tank that pulls down metal electric poles as if they were twigs, caves in entire storefronts and leaves the paved roads and boulevards as tangled piles of rubble.

With school closed because of curfew for the eighth straight day, there is no shortage of boys to take part in this activity. "What can we do," asked one mother, "tie them to their beds?"

When I saw a mother rushing past me into the hospital hours later, moaning in a horrifying tone with tears streaming down her face, I imagined that tying the boys down to their beds has crossed more than one mother's mind. Her son, 14, was shot by an APC at about 3:30pm that same day, when enforcing curfew had escalated from a single warning shot, as in the morning, to the constant spray of heavy machinegun fire at 15 rounds per second. It was inevitable that at some point one of the thousands of bullets would find its way into human flesh, the only question was which child - and which mother.

This is the routine in Jenin, a city where the crackle of gunfire is constant, and the roar of tanks battle with the crickets for the soundtrack of the night.

Jenin is well known as the fiercest centre of resistance in the West Bank, but it is difficult to see how shooting children regularly and enforcing a suffocating and unrelenting curfew day after day eases that resistance. Intuitively, it seems obvious that such actions only serve to entrench it.

The standard justification - though, of course, one is never necessary for Israel, which has a green light from the Americans and a slovenly silence from the "international community" - is the suicide bombings.

The most recent bombing, in Haifa (where from, incidentally, almost all of this refugee camp was once expelled), was carried out on October fourth by a 27 year-old woman who was a lawyer from Jenin. Perhaps this reasoning works for the eight days of curfew so far in October, but what of the 21 days in September?

I spoke with a civil engineer working on the UNRWA Jenin Camp Rehabilitation Project the other day. The night before our meeting the army burst into his home and told his father that they were taking one of the men in the family. None of them had links to resistance groups, there was no particular reason, no particular target - just one man, aged 18-35 in the home. It was his father's choice, the soldier said, "or else I choose."

The UN engineer explained the army's rationale with a story of his own arbitrary arrest several months earlier. He was manacled, blindfolded, held on his knees for hours, beaten, and taken to the infamous Salem prison where he stayed for eleven days without charge or defence. "They want us only because we are from Jenin. That's all. They even tell us this."

Yet, after almost two weeks of being constantly on the streets photographing, I have still not seen a single Palestinian gunman. Rather, it is the subtle forms of resistance, what the rest of the world might call "life", that seem to be occupying the overwhelming majority of the Israeli military's time and budget.

During the first few days of curfew, the city looked like a ghost town, the population holed up under collective house arrest. But the last few days have seen more and more people moving about.

On the main street, coffee vendors and vegetable carts have begun to reappear and people are emerging from their homes to get food and medicine, drink coffee, and just sit on the sidewalks and talk. Shops are opening one fold of their steel doors to allow a slim entrance, and a small market has even established itself less than twenty feet from the central site of the stone throwing and machine gunning.

In response, the tanks are now enforcing the curfew steadily all day, circling the city, passing up and down the main street firing their machine guns, tearing up the boulevards and spraying the sidewalks and homes with a thick diesel smokescreen that leaves the midday sunshine looking like the densest of maritime fog, taking several minutes to clear.

Before the tanks reach the main street, someone will come running up the road yelling "they're coming!" and the shopkeepers quickly seal their steel doors, the adults scurry down the alleys leaving their coffee cups where they were, the photographers get in position and the children prepare their stones.

The tanks pass, shooting hundreds of rounds and spraying clouds of smoke as the children heave their stones - while some play a terrifying game where they mount the back of the tank and ride the enormous death machine in a way that leaves them oddly untouchable since the mounted gun cannot shoot down at itself.

By the time the clouds of smoke have cleared, the men are back in their seats drinking their coffee, the stores have opened the one fold of their steel doors and the children are crowding around the Palestinian photographers to see if their picture will be sent around the world by the Agence France Press or Associated Press. And so it goes, hour after hour.

I stood on the roof of my "hotel" (we are the only occupants) at sunset last night with the owner, watching the enormous full moon as it rose above the city, dwarfing the buildings in that surreal way that only the moon can. Off in the distance the fields and rolling hills to north were cast in an awesome twilight, the echo of gunfire and shelling and the din of tanks again challenging the crickets. It is a beautiful night, I said to him. Yes, he agreed, using the few words we shared across the language barrier, "a good night in a bad place."

More about Jenin:

Jenin Massacre of March/April 2002

FromOccupiedPalestine photography

This article appears elsewhere:
> Palestine Chronicle, "Snapshot of an occupied land", 12 October 2003
> The Dominion, "Snapshot of an occupied land", Issue 9, October 2003
> Shunpiking, "Reporting from Occupied Palestine", V. 1 No. 5, December 2003
> Viva Palestyna (Poland), "Jenin: Obraz okupacji", trans. Beata Nowak