"West Bank resistance dies amid fears of becoming Israel’s ‘next Gaza’"
"Once known as the ‘martyrs’ capital’ of Palestine, Jenin is now patrolled by Israeli soldiers as weary residents seek quiet life"
Avslutning av artikkel:
"“They don’t deal with us even as animals, they consider us as nothing. So you need to again open that important discussion about how we can be resilient and stay in our homeland,” Sheta said."
Lesverdig ytring i NY Times om IDFs siste operasjon i flyktningeleiren i Jenin. Her får man god innsikt i Israel/Palestina-konflikten av en kjenner av historien.
The Tale of Two Invasions: What the Last Attack on Jenin Tells Us About Israel Now
The Jenin refugee camp near the city of Jenin in the northern West Bank, last week.Credit...Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images -- LightRocket, via Getty Images
By Tareq Baconi
Mr.
Baconi is a former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the
International Crisis Group and the author of “Hamas Contained.”He serves as president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
LONDON — Our screens are filled once again with images of weeping women,
children, and the elderly marching down the street with their hands
raised or waving white garments from slow-moving vehicles. Palestinians
have seen this before, having lived through a long history of expulsions
from their homes and villages under the threat of fire.
The newest images came in last week
during the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied
West Bank. Reporters and ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent,
which struggled to reach the injured, were impeded by military obstacles.
At a Fourth of July event in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said
that the Israeli Army had attacked “the most legitimate target on the
planet — people who would annihilate our country.” He was referring to
months of armed resistance against Israeli settlers by young men in the Jenin refugee camp.
More
than 20 years ago, another right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led
an extensive military campaign against the same refugee camp. It was
two years into the second Palestinian uprising. Palestinian suicide
bombers, some of whom hailed from Jenin, had rocked Israeli streets. In
response, the Israeli Army invaded the West Bank and ravaged the Jenin
refugee camp, then, as now, a center of Palestinian resistance.
A
Palestinian boy inside a destroyed home in the occupied West Bank Jenin
refugee camp on Thursday, following a large-scale, two-day Israeli
military operation.Credit...Zain Jaafar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA 7-year-old Palestinian amid the rubble of the Jenin refugee camp following the Israeli incursion in June 2002.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The two invasions unfolded in vastly different contexts. Between 2002
and 2023, the illusion of partitioning the land into two states
disintegrated. It exists now only in diplomatic talking points, hollowed
out of all meaning, and replaced by a consensus among international and
Israeli human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that Israel is practicing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, vindicating what Palestinians have long believed.
For most Jewish Israelis, this shift is barely perceptible, as they
continue to be effectively sheltered from the cost of their government’s
policies toward Palestinians. The Palestinians, meanwhile, are
experiencing growing despair and fatigue, ground down by the daily
structural violence. With the absence of any hope for statehood, and
with no viable political leadership to lead the struggle, some take
matters into their own hands through armed and unarmed forms of
resistance, others are apathetic or preoccupied with the crippling
effort to support their families, and many live in fear.
In 2002, though round after round of
American-mediated negotiations had faltered, there was still the hope —
and the expectation — that a peace process would resume. The two-state
solution was touted as the only option for peace. The framework of
territorial partition — that Israel would withdraw from the territories
it had occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace with the Palestinians and
its Arab neighbors — was the dominant policymaking approach.
But as the Second Intifada came to an end, Israel intensified practical measures to expand its occupation and undermine
the two-state solution while maintaining the diplomatic pretense of
engaging with peace efforts. With the financing of Western and Arab
donors, Israel pacified the West Bank with neoliberal incentives even as
it hollowed out
the core of its economy and carved up the Palestinian territory with
expanding settlements. It implemented security coordination measures
with the Palestinian Authority, turning the Palestinian government into a
key partner for managing local resistance. The Palestinian Authority,
for its part, initiated an expansive state-building agenda as it sought
to project an image of an authority with control, one that was setting
the foundations of a future Palestinian state.
Under Mr. Sharon, Israel also
unilaterally reconfigured its occupation of the Gaza Strip, dismantling
its settlements and initiating a territorial disengagement that
proponents of the two-state solution celebrated — perhaps genuinely, but
naïvely — as a step toward peace, one that demonstrated the possibility
of Israeli territorial withdrawal paving the way for eventual
Palestinian rule.
Like Jenin, the Gaza Strip also has a history of resistance against Israeli occupation. With Hamas’s rise to power in 2006, Israel, in coordination with Egypt, tightened a hermetic blockade on the strip, effectively severing it from the rest of Palestine, and experimented with military techniques to force the population into submission.Alongside food restriction policies and an economic chokehold, this took the form of devastating military assaults. The military referred to this doctrine as “mowing the lawn,” the approach of using disproportionate military force to
periodically weaken Palestinian resistance and manage a restive
population chafing against Israeli control.
Last
week, Israel turned this military approach, perfected in the Gaza
Strip, onto the West Bank, as it cordoned off the refugee camp in Jenin,
pummeled it from the air and ground and destroyed crucial
infrastructure for water and electricity as a form of collective
punishment.
In the time between the two invasions of Jenin, Palestinians throughout
the West Bank have been systematically funneled — through land
expropriation, home demolitions and expansion of settlements — into
isolated urban centers surrounded by land occupied by Israel. Just like
Gaza, most urban centers in the West Bank can now be, overnight,
entirely severed from the ecosystem around them, as was witnessed in
Jenin.
Today, there is no need for Israeli officials to sugarcoat their
policies for fear of diplomatic reprisal, or to mitigate against the
presumption of eventual partition. The transformation of Israeli
political culture that accelerated after the violence of the Second
Intifada and the impunity Israel enjoys internationally have culminated
in the most right-wing government in Israeli history.
In the two decades between these invasions, Israeli officials have rendered explicit their desire to consolidate what Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has called
“a regime of Jewish supremacy” in all the areas under their control.
Less than two weeks before the most recent invasion, Israel’s national
security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, prodded
the government to launch a military offensive while urging an expansion
of settlements in the West Bank. “There needs to be a full settlement
here,” he said. “We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same
time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate
terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed,
thousands.”
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority, teetering on the wreck of its
plans for a state, has been irreversibly integrated into the structure
of Israeli apartheid, maintaining a Bantustan-like authority that helps
pacify its population for Israeli gains.
Beneath this evolving context is a singular constant: Israel’s ability
to sustain its settlement of Palestinian territory without
accountability, while equating Palestinian resistance to terrorism. That
this framing has long been accepted among the major Western powers is
particularly galling for Palestinians in the aftermath of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, where resistance to illegal occupation is hailed as
heroic and supported by Western weapons and military training.
The international community has left Palestinians in a permanent condition of statelessness,
denied the right to self-determination and self-defense. While Israeli
officials use openly racist statements, like saying Israel should “wipe out”
an entire Palestinian town, the Biden administration is pushing for
Israel’s integration into the region through bilateral peace deals,
building on the Trump administration’s Abraham Accords, with barely a
nod to Palestinian rights.
Residents of the Jenin camp, some of whom
had fled from their homes in what is now Israel in 1948, are refugees
once again. And some of the toddlers who were in the camp in 2002 are
now the young men of the Palestinian resistance. As the history of other
struggles against apartheid and colonial violence have taught us,
today’s children will no doubt take up arms to resist such domination in
the future, until these structures of control are dismantled.
Tareq
Baconi is a former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the
International Crisis Group and the author of “Hamas Contained.”He serves as president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
