Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2003, pages 83-85

Human Rights

Searching Jenin: Finding More Questions

In a Feb. 6 Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine lecture, Ramzy Baroud, editor of the new book Searching Jenin, described his struggle to reconstruct the Jenin story through the eyes of the Palestinians who survived the assault. In April of 2002 Israeli forces attacked the town of Jenin and its neighboring refugee camp as part of a comprehensive invasion of the West Bank.

Though many Palestinian cities and camps were devastated in the invasion, Baroud said that Jenin became the symbol of Israeli brutality that eclipsed all others. Its resistance fought harder and its fate gave rise to more speculation. Jenin was sealed off from the outside world by the Israeli army for the duration of the battle. But unlike other Palestinian cities and camps, Jenin remained sealed for days after the fighting had ended, while Israeli officials hinted at “hundreds” of casualties in the camp.

The rumors swirling around Israel’s undoubtedly vicious conduct in Jenin led the United States and the international community to demand that an independent fact-finding commission visit Jenin and carry out a thorough investigation. Israel refused to let the United Nations inspectors in, and as time passed it became more and more difficult to determine accurately what had happened in Jenin during its two-week isolation.

Baroud went on to describe his struggle to find out what really happened in Jenin and the book that resulted. His task did not begin smoothly. He recalled that when he tried to enter the West Bank from Jordan, “Israeli intelligence officers at the border told me that I am no longer allowed into my homeland.”

Undeterred, Baroud began to assemble a team of Palestinian reporters who could mingle with the local population and gain their confidence. Many of these defiant refugees had refused to speak to Western reporters. “Within one week,” according to Baroud, his team was “breaking curfews in Jenin, hauling their heavy bags, scrap paper, cameras and recorders” and uncovering the tale of brutality and inhumanity that was Israel’s attack on Jenin. Eventually Baroud had to rely on female reporters, since the Israeli soldiers often arrested or detained Palestinian males.

The recollections of courage, tragedy and terror that his reporters returned with are all detailed in Baroud’s book. It stands as an attempt to assure that “the voices of the victims…be heard.”

The story of Rafidia Al-Jamal, although it is nearly identical to that of dozens of other Jenin survivors, is one that Baroud felt it necessary to repeat. She and her sister Fadwa had gone out to tend to the wounded as the Israeli shelling began. Fadwa was a nurse and was wearing her uniform. As the two sisters stood under a streetlight talking, Israeli soldiers positioned on top of a mosque began to shoot at them. Though the light made Fadwa’s status as a medical worker apparent, the Israeli bullets continued to fall on the sisters “like rain.” Fadwa died in her sister’s arms, and Rafidia is permanently disabled from her wounds.

More than two dozen Palestinian non-combatants were killed by Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp. Many were shot by snipers, some were buried alive as their houses were bulldozed to the ground, some were executed and some were used as human shields.

Baroud was working on a book about the 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon when the Israeli army attacked Jenin. Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was defense minister at the time of that earlier massacre. There were several other similarities to the atrocities of 20 years ago that struck Baroud, including “the American administration’s defense of Israel’s wrongdoing, the virtual silence of the international community, [and] the emotional outburst of the Arab states that quickly faded.”

Baroud recalled being inspired by one Jenin resident he encountered in a Jordanian hospital. His name was Mahmoud Amr and he had been severely wounded defending Jenin from Israeli invasion. When he tried to leave the country to seek medical treatment Israeli personnel detained him at the border for two weeks. He ended up losing half of his bodyweight before finally being allowed to enter Jordan. When Baroud met him Amr could not speak or breathe on his own. But when Baroud asked him what he would do when he got out of the hospital, Amr took a pen and wrote with a shaking hand, “I want to go back and fight for Jenin.”

Baroud feels that he, too, is fighting for Jenin by bringing its story to the public. Mahmoud Amr died on the day the book Searching Jenin was released. But until the world fulfills its responsibility to the residents of Jenin, and all innocent victims of Israeli aggression, his fight is not over.

Searching Jenin is available from the AET Book Club for $13.50.

—Courtesy of Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine

Israel’s “Orwellian” World

West Chester University history professor Lawrence Davidson and Dr. Fouzi El-Asmar, author and political analyst, discussed their visits to Israel and the occupied territories and the recent Israeli elections at a Feb. 4 Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine briefing.

Living in a “controlled information environment,” and afflicted by a heavily government-censored mass media, Israelis have come to believe in an alternate history. At least, according Davidson, that is the only explanation for the complete divergence between the views of the majority of Israel’s citizens and those held by the citizens of the rest of the world on the last few years of the renewed Palestinian intifada.

The point where the alternate Israeli narrative diverges from commonly accepted facts is, in Davidson’s opinion, the end of the trilateral Israeli-American-Palestinian summit at Camp David in July of 2000. Most Israelis continue to believe that at the summit Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Palestinian President Yasser Arafat a “generous” settlement that would assuage Palestinian grievances and offer an end to generations of conflict. Davidson argues that this is simply not true, and points to many published accounts by observers of and participants in the summit, which belie any Israeli claims of generosity.

El-Asmar confirmed this view, singling out a new book by Moshe Amirav, Barak’s assistant at Camp David who was responsible for issues relating to Jerusalem, which places the blame for the collapse of the summit on Barak. Nevertheless, the Israeli left, led by the Labor Party, promoted this myth and in so doing ended up “sawing off the limb they were standing on.”

According to Davidson, Labor’s appeal to the people of Israel was their promise of a peaceful resolution to the conflict. When they discredited the negotiation process, and demoted Arafat from his stance as a partner to a peaceful settlement, they left Israelis feeling that Labor’s path had led them to a dead end. Commenting on Labor’s dismal performance in the elections, Davidson maintained that “they did it to themselves.”

In order for Israelis to believe the mythical version of the Camp David summit and the following renewal of conflict, Davidson argues that massive censorship is required. In fact, he goes even further, calling Israeli society an “Orwellian world” where “offense equals defense.”

If Israel’s world is Orwellian, then the daily existence of the Palestinian people is, in Davidson’s words, Kafka-esque. He describes the occupied territories as an unpredictable place where anything can happen at any time, and where one cannot rationally predict the consequences of one’s actions.

Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is, in Davidson’s opinion, completely random. Arrests, home demolitions, shootings and closures are all carried out with a complete lack of any “rules of engagement,” as they would be understood in any other Western country. He describes seeing many “18-year-olds, armed to the teeth with a license to kill” who are authorized to close the checkpoint where they are stationed at any time and for any reason.

El-Asmar characterized the outcome of the Israeli elections as surprising only in the magnitude of the Likud victory and of the left-wing parties’ defeat.

His visit to Israel was designed to assess Israeli opinion 25 years after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem and two years after the outbreak of the current intifada. He encountered numerous researchers and intellectuals who described an Israeli public exhausted by the conflict in their backyard and disheartened because Israel has not achieved real peace with Egypt, despite more than 20 years of official relations.

El-Asmar reported that many Israelis, despairing of their situation, are lining up at foreign embassies to try and secure a foreign passport. The well-to-do are leaving the country, and foreign investment is a quarter of what it was before the intifada began.

Despite these facts, and the fact that Sharon has miserably failed to keep his campaign promises of restoring security and improving the economy, he is still supported by a majority of Israelis. Those who voted for Sharon are, in El-Asmar’s words, “declaring war for a long time” and accepting “no compromise.”

In the campaign leading up to the elections Labor Party candidate Amram Mitzna was notable, in El-Asmar’s view, because he “got the Arabs to be confused.” He ran on a platform of withdrawal from Gaza and immediate return to negotiations with President Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. To many of Israel’s Palestinian citizens these goals were in line with their highest hopes for Israeli policies, if not the solutions they would ideally desire.

The Palestinian community in Israel knows that their situation is directly tied to the situation in the occupied territories and any amelioration of the two-year-old intifada would be to their benefit as well. El-Asmar recounted that Palestinian citizens supported Mitzna at first because of his public stance. Two of Israel’s most famous and influential Arab members of Knesset (MKs) had been disqualified from running for office in Israel for “denying the Jewish character of the State of Israel” and were only reinstated by a last-minute High Court decision.

After this experience Israel’s Palestinians lent their support to the traditionally Arab parties. El-Asmar describes the feeling of the voters as instead of voting for Mitzna, “let Mitzna,” if he wins, “speak with [Arab MK Azmi] Bishara.” Sharon cannot have a unity government without including Labor or the centrist Shinui Party. But both have refused to join a Likud-led coalition until certain conditions are met.

El-Asmar believes a solely right-wing coalition is unstable and that within a year “this government is going to fall,” and Israel will go to elections again. —Courtesy of Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine

USS Liberty Survivor Answers Questions After Viewing “Dead in the Water”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) sponsored a sold-out showing of the BBC documentary “USS Liberty Dead in the Water” on Feb. 22 at Visions Cinema in Washington, DC. Over 250 viewers from both the Arab-American community and the neighborhood joined Liberty survivors to watch this gripping film, a finalist in the Vancouver Film Festival, which is available from the AET Book Club for $30.

During the Six-Day War, Israel attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans. “Dead in the Water” presents startling new evidence that the Israeli attack was no accident, and that it very nearly caused World War III. The film provides convincing evidence that because the United States believed that the unmarked fighter jets that attacked the USS Liberty were Egyptian, a punishing U.S. response was only narrowly averted when fighter jets were recalled minutes from bombing Cairo. Israel, the film charges, meant to sink the Liberty and blame Egypt, to draw the United States into their 1967 war. That would have pulled in Russia, and a worldwide conflict could have ensued.

In the question-and-answer session after the film, Liberty survivor John Hrankowski, fielded questions from an audience worried that, once again, Israel was drawing the U.S. into a conflict that could inspire World War III. One person asked Hrankowski how American reporters agreed to suppress the story at the time (even President Lyndon Johnson was shocked that the attack on an American ship was only on the last pages of The New York Times!). Others asked why documents that should have been made public 10 years ago remain top secret.

Hrankowski assured the outraged audience that there are a growing number of people in the government who support the Liberty survivors’ call for a congressional investigation. “Some congressmen are talking to us instead of at us,” he said. “It’s time to dig in and find some answers.”

When asked if former Navy man Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is helping the sailors tell their story, Hrankowski noted that McCain’s father helped lead the Naval inquiry cover-up that absolved Israel of responsibility. Asked what veterans associations are doing to help the 250 remaining Liberty survivors, before there are none left to tell their story, Hrankowski said that Vietnam Veterans of America recently published an excellent article in their magazine (see Jan/Feb. 2003 Washington Report), and the American Legion has sponsored legislation and distributed video tapes.

When the audience asked Hrankowski what they could do to help, he told them to go home, write and if possible, hand deliver letters to Congress (not e-mails that never find their way past “gatekeepers”) to ask for a congressional investigation. To contact the Liberty Association write to PO Box 53347, Washington, DC 20009 or call (202) 222-0173 —Delinda C. Hanley