A few pictures

Here are a few pictures that I took in Jenin and in Al-Farah, a refugee camp about fifteen miles south of Jenin. None of this is live because by now I am back in London for over two weeks. So this is not really a blog in the strict sense from here on, though I took notes and the memories are still very vivid.

By now I have given some talks about my 'Jenin experience', one a workshop at the liberal synagogue in Notting Hill where I go sometimes. Last Saturday they held a study day on Israel and Palestine and I gave one of the workshops, showing these pictures and others and talking about a memory that was still very real. Today, I did a couple of sessions with the teenage students who study where I work. I no longer teach them directly, but I did this as a kind of guest speaker. The morning session went down very well. One of the kids, Bengali of about seventeen, was passionate and informed about the issue. He talked about 'ethnic cleansing'. I said that I thought it was a slow motion version of it. I told them that I did not think it was a religious conflict but one about land, although relgion has inflitrated itself into the whole thing. I explained to them about how our borough Tower Hamlets was twinned with Jenin. Two of the students were keen to volunteer there next year, and there was another one from the afternoon class.

The picture at the top I took at night. It was on one of the roads leading up to the camp from the modern avenue with its large cafes and restaurants. Next to Yassir Arafat is a smiling jovial figure of Saddam Hussain. I am used to the fact that he is held in great affection in Palestine. (Can't help remembering though that the Palestinians have been used most of their neighbours for their own purposes, as a moral shield, as a diversion from their own oppressions, as a way of focussing attention away from themselves towards the 'common enemy'.

The middle picture shows a recent shahid, martyr, who was killed at Al-Farah camp two days before I visited it. I heard several accounts of what happened, and checked different media online. Apparently, the young man went to an early morning service in the mosque. Meanwhile Israeli soldiers had come into the camp to arrest three young men. (The fact that Al-Farah like Jenin is Zone A under the Oslo agreement, and therefore fully under the control of the Palestinian Authority, police and army, doesn't stop the Israeli army arriving to arrest people whenever it wants to. Maybe they tell the Palestinian police in advance, who keep conveniently out of the way). On this occasion the young man left the mosque and seeing the soldiers, panicked and ran away. The soldiers shouted to him to stop, and then shot him one bullet in each thigh. The man, bleeding heavily collapsed in the garden of a house. The soldiers did not allow ambulances to come except after a long delay. An artery was severed by one of hte bullets and he bled to death.

Incidents like these are not uncommon. They are not part of large incidents or major crises. At best they might get a small mention in the Arabic version of the bbc news online site.

The bottom picture is Farah camp itself. This woman, who had a child with her, let me take this picture.

Jenin Camp

This horse, at the entrance to the camp, was made by volunteers out of the debris of an ambulance that was blown to pieces by the Israeli army in 2002.

Jenin camp, which is about 1 kilometre outside the town itself along the main road, is not a camp as I imagined it before I came here. Originally when the refugees arrived in 1948, it consisted of tents. Since then concrete houses have been built, some of which are large. There are narrow streets, shops, schools and other public buildings. Two of the other volunteers and I are giving English lessons for local teenagers in a wonderful centre a few yards away from there. It is called the Rehabilitation Centre which specialises in treating people, especially children with physical and also learning disabilities. The staff, physiotherapists, experts in making prosthetic limbs, and other specialists are wonderful. We are shown around by Hisham, who has recently come back from England having studied for a masters degree at Southampton University. The dedication of the staff is amazing and humbling.


I am staying with Mustafa who has shown amazing kindness and hospitality, which I don't know how I can ever repay. He lost the use of his legs during the first intifada, when he was 16 and was shot by an Israeli soldier.

'I was running down the street, a soldier who was on the roof of a neighbouring building shot me in the back'.

He rolls up his shirt and I feel the scar on his back.

'It is funny. I didn't feel any pain. I knew I had been shot when I suddenly lost my sight. I knew that I would never walk again'.

He was in rehabilitation for two years. 'At first I was angry, now I am not'.

In 2002, after the second intifada started, the Israeli army attacked the Jenin camp over a 12 day period. 16 people died then, but incidents since that time, a total of over a hundred have died in the camp. Everywhere on the walls of the narrow streets here, there are pictures of martyrs, shaheeds, young men in their early twenties, some as young as eighteen, posing with guns in their hands. I have seen these all over Palestine, in Nablus and Hebron. But here there are rows of them. Last night Mustafa and I were having coffee with Marwan, the organiser of our volunteer program. He works for the Palestinian Authority. 'I saw my mother and brother killed by soldiers in 2002'. He says this in a tone of sorrow rather than in rage. Despite what he has experienced, he still believes in peace, although he doubts whether the will exists for it in Israel. With him are two colleagues from the ministry where he works. One is an elderly silver-haired man. He sees me studying a picture of a shaheed on the wall above us, a young man of about 26, again posed with his gun, and the date of his death, November 2002. 'That was my son', he tells me. I pass him again today. 'Good morning doctor', he says, courteously giving me an undeserved title.

I have been amazed again and again by the generosity and lack of rancour of people who have suffered so much here. Mustafa lives in quite a large house on one of the main streets (still quite small) of the camp. He has given over to me a bedroom, a bathroom and a sitting room. In the ceiling of the sitting room there is a large crack in the concrete. This was caused by a missile fired from a helicopter.

'There were two missiles fired at our house. And then the soldiers used the roof of our house as a sniping post'. Mustafa is good-humoured, still boyish in his manner. He is a member of a basketball team organised by a local organisation for people who are also disabled.
'I quite admire the Israeli soldiers', he says. 'They are well trained. You know one of them can kill two people with a single bullet'.

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.