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April 1-11 2002 Operation Defensive Shield Jenin Massacre |
21 aug 2020
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Mohammed Bakri
When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth. Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighboring refugee camp and terrorized its population. Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants. It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse. The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens. Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks. Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples. For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterize them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone. The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives. These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills. The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court. Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history. Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net. The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland. In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee. |
Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.
Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.
The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.
A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.
Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.
Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.
Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.
Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritized on these digital maps.
Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognized the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.
Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.
Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.
Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.
The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.
But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.
Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.
The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.
A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.
Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.
Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.
Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.
Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritized on these digital maps.
Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.
And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognized the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.
Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.
Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.
Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.
The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.
But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.
14 apr 2020
Palestinian children stand in front of a graffitied wall April 27, 2002 in the West Bank town of Jenin. A United Nations fact finding mission is scheduled to be in Jenin tomorrow to asses the Israeli action within this West Bank town.
Lockdowns come in many shapes and sizes, and the one that millions of us around the world are enduring today is in place for our own protection from the coronavirus Covid-19.
However, there are other forms of isolation which are also imposed upon communities by force, and which serve to protect the powerful while hiding evidence of their murderous activities.
I’m drawing this parallel today because every year at this time I relive a memory so awful that it may well be among the last things I ever remember.
In mid-April 2002, the “Israel Defence Forces” (IDF) scrambled to hide one of its biggest war crimes of this century in the occupied West Bank: Israeli soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp.
Having completed their killing spree between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada, IDF troops would have left but for one thing: how could they cover up the killing of 52 people and hide the evidence of a massacre?
Those in charge of so-called Operation Defensive Shield decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s ring of steel; it was a total lockdown. It lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.
The atmosphere was tense and the UN announced that it was planning to launch an investigation into compelling allegations of Israeli war crimes said to have been committed in the refugee camp. The Israelis did what they do well, and mobilised malleable politicians and government advisers to mislead a gullible media and public.
The then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, moved quickly. Speaking from — ironically — the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb and killed 91 people in 1946, he said that he saw “no evidence” of a massacre.
By 23 April Powell was back in Washington briefing senators: “Right now, I’ve seen no evidence of mass graves and I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.”
He wasn’t lying, of course, because he never went to Jenin, so could not have “seen” the evidence even if he had wanted to. I was one of the first journalists on the scene, though, and was in the refugee camp in Jenin on the day that the former general presented his briefing.
Powell, the man who lied at the UN about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the build up to the 2003 invasion, went on to criticise the “coarse speculation that was out there as to what happened, with terms being tossed around like massacre and mass graves, none of which so far seems to be the case.”
I don’t know how many people have to die before it can be called a massacre, but 52 should be more than enough if previous mass murders thus described are anything to go by.
The Prime Minister of Israel at the time was Ariel Sharon who, as Minister of Defence, had “personal responsibility” for the IDF’s complicity in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982.
He told the world that “only” terrorists had died in Jenin, but I saw the bodies of the dead being pulled from the rubble, including children, women and a man in a wheelchair; they were no reasonable person’s idea of “terrorists”.
In their bid to cover up the massacre, the Israelis buried many of the bodies under buildings demolished by a bulldozer; some were still alive when the bulldozer moved in.
By 19 April 2002, Human Rights Watch gained access to Jenin and spent a week gathering evidence for a 48-page report which left no doubt that war crimes had been committed inside the refugee camp. Around 100 eyewitness accounts were taken by an experienced team of investigators. Unsurprisingly, the Israeli military refused to cooperate.
Sadly, HRW was quick to dismiss allegations of a massacre by Israeli forces in such a way that pre-empted the planned UN investigation into events in Jenin refugee camp. In any case, Sharon’s government blocked the UN move.
The HRW claim that there was no evidence of a massacre was seized on by Israel’s propaganda machine. However, the Israelis chose to ignore the report’s conclusion that, based on the evidence and research undertaken, “During their incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.”
Those crimes included:
* Fourteen-year-old Muhammad Hawashin was shot twice in the face and killed on 3 April as he walked with a group of women and children towards the local hospital.
* Wheelchair-bound Kamal Zghair, 57-years-old, was shot and run over by IDF tanks on 10 April as he wheeled himself down the road to his home, carrying a white flag.
* Afaf Disuqi, an unarmed civilian, responded to a knock on her door on 5 April and was killed by a bomb thrown by IDF soldiers. Eyewitnesses reported that the soldiers were laughing as Disuqi was mutilated horribly by the blast.
* Evidence of summary executions, including that of Jamal Al-Sabbagh who was shot and killed on 6 April, whilst obeying orders to remove his clothes.
* Resistance fighter Munthir al-Haj, aged 22, was brutally killed on 3 April, as he lay severely wounded. For almost two hours, Al-Haj attempted to drag himself into a nearby hospital, before an Israeli soldier opened fire from a tank, killing him instantly.
My few hours in Jenin marks one of the darkest days in my career as a journalist. Every time I recall it, the unmistakable odour of rotting flesh from corpses hidden under mounds of rubble by the Israelis fills my nostrils.
Moreover, I will never forget that my personal account of Jenin post-massacre was spiked by the Sunday Express and replaced by a shocking tissue of lies written by the late Labour peer and former MP Greville Janner, one of Britain’s leading Zionists of his day.
Janner, like Powell, never visited Jenin. I did and I had told the story of Jenin with tears in my eyes, as they are right now, as a tribute to the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation. If I can still remember the massacre of Jenin so vividly, God alone knows what the Palestinians who lived through it are feeling today.
As I walked around the town in April 2002 not one home left standing was without battle scars after the onslaught by F16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters on Jenin’s residential areas.
I can still hear the cries of a man called Marwan who told me how his wife had bled to death in his arms after shrapnel ripped through her jugular vein while she was in her kitchen. She might have been saved but Israeli soldiers laughed and taunted him, and refused to let him take her to the hospital.
If you are finding this coronavirus lockdown a bit tough at the moment, therefore, just thank your lucky stars that you are not doing it under a brutal Israeli siege, with snipers placed strategically to kill you should you dare to step outside your home.
There are no hellfire missiles being fired at you by one of the best-equipped armies in the world; no attack helicopters and fighter jets overhead; and no tanks rumbling down your street, with bulldozers flattening homes as they advance towards you. Be grateful.
The anniversary of the Jenin massacre comes just days after the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre on 9 April 1948. More than 200 men, women and children were killed on that day by the Zionist militias that went on to form the core of the nascent Israel Defence Forces.
Terrorism, death and destruction has been the modus operandi of Israel since its earliest days, and it continues to be so today. As the number of its war crimes and crimes against humanity continues to grow, we cannot let the world forget what happened in Jenin and Deir Yassin.
For the sake of the future of everyone in the region, we cannot allow anyone to forget the past and airbrush the victims of Israel’s occupation from history, not least those who were killed in Jenin, 1-11 April 2002.
Lockdowns come in many shapes and sizes, and the one that millions of us around the world are enduring today is in place for our own protection from the coronavirus Covid-19.
However, there are other forms of isolation which are also imposed upon communities by force, and which serve to protect the powerful while hiding evidence of their murderous activities.
I’m drawing this parallel today because every year at this time I relive a memory so awful that it may well be among the last things I ever remember.
In mid-April 2002, the “Israel Defence Forces” (IDF) scrambled to hide one of its biggest war crimes of this century in the occupied West Bank: Israeli soldiers killed at least 52 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp.
Having completed their killing spree between 1 and 11 April at the height of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada, IDF troops would have left but for one thing: how could they cover up the killing of 52 people and hide the evidence of a massacre?
Those in charge of so-called Operation Defensive Shield decided to enforce a siege so tight that no one, despite global protests, could get past Israel’s ring of steel; it was a total lockdown. It lasted for weeks while the Israeli government did its best to keep journalists and human rights observers away from the Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank.
The atmosphere was tense and the UN announced that it was planning to launch an investigation into compelling allegations of Israeli war crimes said to have been committed in the refugee camp. The Israelis did what they do well, and mobilised malleable politicians and government advisers to mislead a gullible media and public.
The then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, moved quickly. Speaking from — ironically — the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb and killed 91 people in 1946, he said that he saw “no evidence” of a massacre.
By 23 April Powell was back in Washington briefing senators: “Right now, I’ve seen no evidence of mass graves and I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.”
He wasn’t lying, of course, because he never went to Jenin, so could not have “seen” the evidence even if he had wanted to. I was one of the first journalists on the scene, though, and was in the refugee camp in Jenin on the day that the former general presented his briefing.
Powell, the man who lied at the UN about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the build up to the 2003 invasion, went on to criticise the “coarse speculation that was out there as to what happened, with terms being tossed around like massacre and mass graves, none of which so far seems to be the case.”
I don’t know how many people have to die before it can be called a massacre, but 52 should be more than enough if previous mass murders thus described are anything to go by.
The Prime Minister of Israel at the time was Ariel Sharon who, as Minister of Defence, had “personal responsibility” for the IDF’s complicity in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982.
He told the world that “only” terrorists had died in Jenin, but I saw the bodies of the dead being pulled from the rubble, including children, women and a man in a wheelchair; they were no reasonable person’s idea of “terrorists”.
In their bid to cover up the massacre, the Israelis buried many of the bodies under buildings demolished by a bulldozer; some were still alive when the bulldozer moved in.
By 19 April 2002, Human Rights Watch gained access to Jenin and spent a week gathering evidence for a 48-page report which left no doubt that war crimes had been committed inside the refugee camp. Around 100 eyewitness accounts were taken by an experienced team of investigators. Unsurprisingly, the Israeli military refused to cooperate.
Sadly, HRW was quick to dismiss allegations of a massacre by Israeli forces in such a way that pre-empted the planned UN investigation into events in Jenin refugee camp. In any case, Sharon’s government blocked the UN move.
The HRW claim that there was no evidence of a massacre was seized on by Israel’s propaganda machine. However, the Israelis chose to ignore the report’s conclusion that, based on the evidence and research undertaken, “During their incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, Israeli forces committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, some amounting prima facie to war crimes.”
Those crimes included:
* Fourteen-year-old Muhammad Hawashin was shot twice in the face and killed on 3 April as he walked with a group of women and children towards the local hospital.
* Wheelchair-bound Kamal Zghair, 57-years-old, was shot and run over by IDF tanks on 10 April as he wheeled himself down the road to his home, carrying a white flag.
* Afaf Disuqi, an unarmed civilian, responded to a knock on her door on 5 April and was killed by a bomb thrown by IDF soldiers. Eyewitnesses reported that the soldiers were laughing as Disuqi was mutilated horribly by the blast.
* Evidence of summary executions, including that of Jamal Al-Sabbagh who was shot and killed on 6 April, whilst obeying orders to remove his clothes.
* Resistance fighter Munthir al-Haj, aged 22, was brutally killed on 3 April, as he lay severely wounded. For almost two hours, Al-Haj attempted to drag himself into a nearby hospital, before an Israeli soldier opened fire from a tank, killing him instantly.
My few hours in Jenin marks one of the darkest days in my career as a journalist. Every time I recall it, the unmistakable odour of rotting flesh from corpses hidden under mounds of rubble by the Israelis fills my nostrils.
Moreover, I will never forget that my personal account of Jenin post-massacre was spiked by the Sunday Express and replaced by a shocking tissue of lies written by the late Labour peer and former MP Greville Janner, one of Britain’s leading Zionists of his day.
Janner, like Powell, never visited Jenin. I did and I had told the story of Jenin with tears in my eyes, as they are right now, as a tribute to the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation. If I can still remember the massacre of Jenin so vividly, God alone knows what the Palestinians who lived through it are feeling today.
As I walked around the town in April 2002 not one home left standing was without battle scars after the onslaught by F16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters on Jenin’s residential areas.
I can still hear the cries of a man called Marwan who told me how his wife had bled to death in his arms after shrapnel ripped through her jugular vein while she was in her kitchen. She might have been saved but Israeli soldiers laughed and taunted him, and refused to let him take her to the hospital.
If you are finding this coronavirus lockdown a bit tough at the moment, therefore, just thank your lucky stars that you are not doing it under a brutal Israeli siege, with snipers placed strategically to kill you should you dare to step outside your home.
There are no hellfire missiles being fired at you by one of the best-equipped armies in the world; no attack helicopters and fighter jets overhead; and no tanks rumbling down your street, with bulldozers flattening homes as they advance towards you. Be grateful.
The anniversary of the Jenin massacre comes just days after the anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre on 9 April 1948. More than 200 men, women and children were killed on that day by the Zionist militias that went on to form the core of the nascent Israel Defence Forces.
Terrorism, death and destruction has been the modus operandi of Israel since its earliest days, and it continues to be so today. As the number of its war crimes and crimes against humanity continues to grow, we cannot let the world forget what happened in Jenin and Deir Yassin.
For the sake of the future of everyone in the region, we cannot allow anyone to forget the past and airbrush the victims of Israel’s occupation from history, not least those who were killed in Jenin, 1-11 April 2002.
