From Occupied Palestine

The lost generation
JON ELMER
FromOccupiedPalestine.org, 28 October 2003

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Jenin, West Bank -- Mohammed is four years-old. As he ran up the stairs to the roof where we were sitting, his chattering noises became louder and louder until his tiny figure came flying around the corner of the stairwell. He ran directly toward me and jumped up on my lap as if we were brothers. It was the first time we had met.

He immediately asked my name, and although Mohammed is only four, he carried the conversation as though we were peers. I simply followed his lead.

"Jon. Bo! Bo!" he said as aggressively and animated as only a four year old might, while clinging to my arm.

"That's what the Israeli soldiers say, it means 'come here' in Hebrew," his uncle explained to me as Mohammed repeated the call.

"Where are you from?" Mohammed asked me, quietly relayed in English by his uncle.

"I am from Canada," I said, making the gesture of an airplane's trajectory with my hand out into the night.

"Oh," he said. "On the other side of the tanks."

Sitting above the refugee camp of Jenin, under a perfect starry night, the Israeli tanks whined in the distance as Mohammed mimicked my airplane gesture with his hands, adding his own noises and sprinkling my arm with spittle.

"Would you like to come to Canada to visit me sometime?" I asked after Mohammed had stopped with the airplane game.

"Do the children in Canada throw stones at the tanks?" Mohammed asked.

"Um, no."

"No," he said matter-of-factly, without missing a beat.

Mohammed's father was one of the 70 people killed in the Battle of Jenin in April of 2002 – a battle that is much more correctly described as a massacre. If it weren't for the Israelis blocking access to all journalists and human rights workers, and the stubborn resistance of less than two hundred Palestinian fighters who held the camp for nearly two weeks until they ran out of ammunition - forcing the Israelis to change commanders no fewer than five times - it would be much more readily called what it was.

From the rooftop of Mohammed’s house, the dim lights of the densely populated refugee camp speckle the view, save for one massive hole of black in the centre of the camp: "Ground Zero," as it's referred to in Jenin. Before April of 2002, that hole was the site of some 400 homes (and 800 families). Today it is a dusty expanse of land encircled by cinderblock houses that have long since replaced the original UNRWA tents of 1948. Ground Zero is now little more than a vacant lot used by the children to ride their bikes or play soccer with homemade balls packed with old socks.

Everyone in Jenin has a story about the invasion of March and April. The F16s, the Cobra and Apache helicopters that launched missiles into their dining rooms, living rooms, bedrooms... Even without speaking the same language I know what they mean when they snap their fingers to show the rate of missiles, "snap, snap, snap, snap".

Every child in the Jenin camp lived this horror. They huddled terrified in a single room with their entire family, too afraid to move, their mothers too afraid to let them walk into the next room to use the bathroom lest they get shot through the window by an Israeli sniper occupying their neighbour's home - as happened on more than one occasion during those weeks.

"We worry about the effect on these children," said Ala, a math teacher at the UNRWA administered school. "We call them 'the lost generation'."

Every child in Jenin has had their school closed for days and weeks on end due to curfew imposed and enforced by 62 tonne tanks. Even walking to school is a gamble - in the two years following the outbreak of the intifada, 2,500 children in the West Bank have been injured walking to and from school, 132 of them were killed.

When they are fortunate enough to be in school, they practice regular "tank drills" rather than fire drills, crawling under their desks (or in many cases chairs, when they have no desks) and curling up foetal, practicing for the time that the Israeli tanks shell their school, as happened to 185 schools in the West Bank in the first two years of the intifada alone. Eleven schools have been completely destroyed, and dozens of others occupied to be used as military bases or makeshift jails by the Israelis (source: Palestine Monitor).

Every child in Jenin knows another child who has been shot by a tank. "I can’t tell you how many children I have seen killed," Mahmoud Bajawi, a Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedic told me. "The boys throw stones, and the tanks shell their tiny bodies into two, three, four pieces."

So far in this intifada, 414 Palestinian children have been killed, according to the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'Tselem. But targeting children it is not unique to this generation. During the first intifada, according to the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights, a child under six years-old was shot in the head on average of once every two weeks throughout the five years.

The other night I had dinner at the home of Doctor Abu George, the director of the Red Crescent in Jenin. Rayad, his two year-old son, was tearing around the house as any two year-old does, a huge smile on his face as he impressed his guests.

Rayad's mother turned to me at one point, and with a grim face said, "Do you know what his first word was? Not momma, not dadda... Rayad's first word was 'Tank'".

This article appears elsewhere
> Palestine Chronicle, "Lost generation", 28 October 2003
> Viva Palestyna (Poland), "Stracona generacja", trans. Beata Nowak