Revival
October 17th, 2007Day three of my correspondent’s diary
Signs of life—and death—in Jenin
JENIN is jinxed. During the intifada it was known as the suicide bombers’ capital. Israeli tanks flattened part of the refugee camp in a bloody (for both sides) battle in 2002. As the most northerly West Bank city, it’s the one that you have to cross the most checkpoints to get to.
It’s been jinxed for me, too: each time I’ve tried to go, something has forced me to turn back on the way. So I’ve never been there in nearly three years.
To avoid the checkpoints, we drive around the West Bank instead of through it. In some places the Israeli highway runs right beneath the walls, fences and watchtowers of the separation barrier. One town, Qalqilya, is almost completely encased by it, with just one road out.
The most poignant complaint you hear there is not that people can’t get to their fields or visit neighbouring villages, but that the nine-metre-high concrete wall on the western side blocks out their view of the sun sinking into the Mediterranean, a few miles away across the dusky coastal plain.
The highway itself bears another eerie hint of the separation. Its junctions are signposted with the names of Israeli towns and settlements, but not the Palestinian ones next to them. More than once I’ve gotten lost here, trying to find a place that the map says is right next to me but, as far as Israel is concerned, might as well not exist.
After a depressing talk with the head of the chamber of commerce and a fruitless one with a wary former head of the city’s awqaf, the Islamic authorities, we drive into Jenin’s refugee camp.
Expecting unredeemed squalor, I’m surprised. There are the usual slum houses, but also winding alleyways with new, pastel-coloured houses that, if I half close my eyes, make it look like a sleepy Mediterranean village. The mosque is grand, new and gleaming. Someone clearly made the best of the tanks’ destruction.
Ibrahim Jaber takes us into one of the houses. It’s his daughter’s. We sit in the huge, ornately ugly armchairs that seem to be a fixture of sitting rooms all over the Middle East and the Caucasus. Above him hangs a photograph of his 15-year-old son Musab, killed (or as they say it here, istashhad, “martyred”) when the tanks rolled in.
When his son died, Jaber was in an Israeli jail for owning a weapon, and also for being a Hamas member (“I never admitted it”, he says coyly). After being freed five years later, he worked on Hamas-Fatah dialogue. But after Hamas took over Gaza this summer, the PA came looking for him. He fled the few hundred metres from his own house at the edge of the camp to the centre, where he says even the PA forces do not dare enter. He has been hiding out ever since.
He is an engaging, gentle man, who holds my gaze calmly as I glance back and forth between him and the picture of his son. Idly, I try to imagine him planning a suicide bombing. He has been jailed a dozen times, for a total of over nine years. That, on the Israeli punishment scale, means minor offences; I doubt he ever hurt anybody.
Somehow I find this reassuring. We like to think we are good judges of character. But of course, that can be an illusion. A couple of years ago I visited a courteous, bearded gent in Gaza who was one of the leaders of Islamic Jihad; a man who had made a career out of sending young Palestinians out to blow themselves up for the glory of the cause, taking young Israelis with them. I still remember how fondly he played with his grandchildren.