Jenin City and Camp

There are five of us volunteering to work Jenin, which is a large town in the north of the Palestinian territories. Last year and the year before I was part of a group which twinned Camden in London with Abu Dis near Jerusalem. This year we are members of another group, twinning the London Borough of Tower Hamlets where I live, with Jenin. Unlike the Camden - Abu Dis group, which has run volunteer programs for several years, this is the first volunteer program of our Jenin group.

Jenin is a city of about forty thousand people. In addition there is also a refugee camp of fifteen thousand just outside the city. We are staying with families in the refugee camp. There is a lot that I have heard about Jenin, some of the things that have happened here. It has a violent history. The camp was set up in 1948 after Israel set up and refugees fled from the area around Haifa. In 2002 during the second intifada, the camp was brutally destroyed in the fighting between the Israeli army and the Palestinians.

Today is Saturday. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv with two other volunteers Wanda and Bethan on Wednesday. We had little trouble getting in at the airport. The immigration official looked at my passport, all my previous entry visas and and stamped it again without a word. (Two other volunteers Zainab and Sana, who crossed from Jordan across the Allenby bridge and have Muslim names had an altogether harder time. It took them eleven hours to get across the bridge into the Palestinian territory).

The coach set Wanda Bethan and me outside the cinema. We start to talk to Aymen,one of the workers at the cinema, who shows us around. It is a wonderful place. Just opened a few years ago it shows international as well as Palestinian films. It has modern equipment and seating. There is a large space at the back for outdoor performances, a cafe and a small hostel for visitors from abroad, of which there will be more and more.

Actually I already know Aymen. My friend Sef who is a story-teller and activist involved in different reconciliation projects throughout the world, has already been here. Last week he told me about Jenin. He stayed at the hostel and befriended Aymen. It is funny that Aymen is the first person that we meet here.

There are also some differences between the town and the camp. The camp where we are going to stay is about one kilometre down the main road. Sef told me that not everybody in the camp approves of the cinema, its international and maybe liberal slant. I gently try to sound Aymen out about this.
'We have our way of thinking, and they have their way of thinking'. Sef told me that the cinema had a number of volunteers working there from Germany. Aymen told us that they were not there now but maybe were returning in August.

There is something else I am a bit apprehensive about. In the camp there is a theatre called The Freedom Theatre, which was an amazing project started by Juliano Mer Khamis, an actor and director who was half Jewish and half Palestinian Christian. The theatre has been famous for putting on ground-breaking productions of plays dealing with political and social issues, the occupation, the violence the effect on daily life,working with young people. Unfortunately not everybody was pleased to have the theatre here. In February, Juliano was shot dead outside the theatre by unknown gunmen. Nobody has been arrested, but there are a lot of theories about the murder. Some people said it was connected with the theatre encouraged the mixing of young men and women and offended the cultural sensibilities of the people in the camp. Others hint that it was the work of people who want to discourage solidarity between the Palestinians / the people of Jenin / the people in the camp and foreigners.

None of this gels with my own experience which is one where I have experienced amazing warmth and friendliness wherever I have been. I have been wondering around the town and the camp not really very worried. But apparently there are new regulations from the Palestinian police about foreigners living in the camp. Officially it is not allowed now for safety reasons. But Marwan, our contact, who works for the Palestinian Authority has managed to persuade the police to allow us to stay here on condition that we don't go anywhere unaccompanied by one of our Palestinian hosts or other friends. This has imposed a lot of restrictions on our wandering around, which I always like to do, but the intentions are thoughtful, for our safety after all.