Aggiornamenti da Jenin

["Edvino Ugolini" <edvinoug@tin.it>]

 Jenin
 28 Sep 03
 Aaron

    As of this morning, Jenin is, yet again, locked down tight by the
Israeli army.  As far as we can tell, the army isn't actually doing
anything.  The  tricky thing about these lockdowns is that they're even more
disruptive than  their duration would indicate.  That the whole town is
frequently paralyzed  is bad enough, but the worst part is that the timing
is impossible to  predict.  It's incredibly hard to carry on the regular
business of life, or develop civil society, in such circumstances.  Even our
little ISM team has  failed miserably to prepare for the upcoming Olive
Harvest campaign, on  which may depend the very survival of a dozen villages
in the Jenin area.  I  have no doubt that the consequences for more
elaborate business and civil  projects are even more severe.  At any rate,
the concensus among  internationals is that there are probably two reasons
for the current  \"curfew\", assuming that Rosh Hashanah isn't a factor.
    First of all, today is the third anniversary of the second intifada,
and the Israelis are presumably worried about celebratory demonstrations, or
something of the sort.  It's hard to imagine, however, what the
Palestinians might think they have to celebrate, and it appears that
nothing, in fact, has been planned.
    Second, a 19 year old boy (about the upper limit for 'shabab' kids) was
shot through the neck about a week ago while he was throwing rocks at a
tank.  He died four days ago, but apparently the family tried to keep the
death a secret for fear of demonstrations to which the Israeli army would
respond with more killings.  I can't imagine how hard it would be to conceal
the very fact that my son had been killed, out of fear that the the very
vengeance I surely would crave would simply bring more death upon my people.
   At any rate, the news got out after a couple of days (there are very few
secrets in Jenin), and the funeral was held yesterday.  There is a great
deal of anger over the boy's death, particularly because he was not a member
of the armed resistance.  The way one can know this is one of the more
bizarre aspects of the conflict.  Apparently, there is a great value placed
upon not dying as a helpless victim of the occupying forces.  Because of
this, a huge number of older boys and young men get their pictures taken
with rifles, whether they're involved with the armed resistance, or any
other kind, or not.  Whenever a boy/man is killed, or dies in a suicide
bombing, these pictures are used for martyr posters that are put up in
various places around Jenin.  Basically, this means that, while a picture of
a young man with a rifle doesn't necessarily mean he was actually a member
of the armed resistance, a picture of a boy *without* a gun virtually
guarantees that he wasn't.  In
 this case, there's no gun in the picture, so  to speak.
    I got this information from a young fighter in Islamic Jihad with whom
I've struck up a somewhat unlikely friendship.  He seems perfectly
comfortable with my being Jewish, and we've compared notes across religions
a couple of times, although he's minimally 'observant', at most.  Over
coffee, nargilah (a water pipe of flavored tobacco), and juice (mine), he
also described his experiences during the invasion of Jenin, when he was
around 16 years old.  He and a friend were caught in the open by the army.
For some reason, his friend was released, while he was repeatedly beaten and
threatened with death by soldiers pointing their rifles at various parts of
his body.  At least once, a soldier shoved a gun against his genitals and
said that he was going to shoot them off.  Finally, this boy told the
soldiers that they should go ahead and kill him, but they would never make
him afraid (he added to me that this was, of course, untrue).  The soldiers
then took him into a combat
  zone, and forced him at gunpoint to walk ahead  of them, open doors to
houses, and put him to the common uses of a captive  human shield.  At the
end of our conversation, which covered a much wider  range of subjects, as I
excused myself to get some sleep, he stopped me and  asked me to listen to
one last thing he urgently wanted to say.  With great  intensity, he asked,
\"When you have children (I had told him I was married),  don't teach them
to kill Palestinians.  Don't teach them to kill anyone in  the world.  We
need love for peace; with no love, there is no peace.\"  I  told him that I
would teach my children to love, rather than kill, and asked  that he do the
same.  He agreed emphatically, and I returned to our flat to  go to bed.
    While our team is stuck in Jenin, there are roughly 99 young school
children in a nearby village who have been locked out of school for around
five days, now.  They live in the north part of their village (Abad?), and
their school is in the south part, with a checkpoint in between.  We had
planned to give them an escort today, but the lockdown makes that
unrealistic.  Until yesterday, the children were simply turned away at the
checkpoint (and, of course, denied access to their education), but, the last
time, soldiers tried to get them to sing, \"Saddam, Saddam, drop your
chemical weapons on Jenin\".  I assume that the meter is better in Arabic,
or  something.  I should mention that I learned this from our ISM team
coordinator as a simple aside to a largely unrelated conversation.  He
didn't seem to be terribly worked up about it, or to consider it
particularly noteworthy, and I have no reason to doubt his report.

                                                         Shanah Tovah,
                                                                  Aaron

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