Information InFiltration. Pronounced: "Discordia r us."

front page???E.A.Dobbsreview-a-rama

secret room upstairsFilterItYourselfwhatever
[- Voices from Jenin
whatever
By AnaValdes, Section whatever...
Posted on Wed Oct 15th, 2003 at 04:41:42 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
Hi, I was in Jenin last year and saw with my own eyes the mayhem and the destruction of the city. I assume its very similar to what happens in Rafah today, in the Gaza Stripe.

 

[ --------------------------------------------- ]

Jenin



Voices From Jenin

A young boy arrives at the bombed out school building. The boy's face is covered with a mask against the dust. He carries a brown plastic grocery bag in one hand and with his free hand takes off his surgical gloves. He has come to hand over what he carries in the bag: the remains of a human being. He believes it is what remains of the hand of Mohammed Toul, who has been active in the Jihad movement. The photographers take pictures of the bag and then go away to new places. The bag is left under the table. I ask one of our guides if the remains will be sent to some laboratory where they can be analyzed. A place that confirms the dead, that identifies the bodies. He shakes his head and says, "Here we know each other well. We know what kind of clothes our friends had, what kind of caps or bandanas they wore, which T-shirt they wore that day. This is how we, the Palestinians, make our DNA analysis. It's not very sophisticated but that's the only way we can afford."
This school building is in the Jenin refugee camp (since l948, when the state of Israel was proclaimed, this camp has served as temporary housing for about 15,000 Palestinians). Now the school functions as a provisional gathering place for persons who want to report their missing relatives or friends. The camp's patient Palestinian clerks, who list the long rows of names, used to work in a building that until some days ago was Jenin's City Hall. But it has been destroyed--as have all of Jenin's official buildings--by Apache helicopters.
The center of Jenin is ruined. It is just a hole, full of debris, as big as three football fields. Once there were houses, schools, other buildings here. From the hole comes a sweetish smell of corpses. Nobody knows for sure how many are buried under the remains of the houses because all the bulldozers in the City Hall's garage have been destroyed, except one, which the driver took home.
Jenin is Palestine's Ground Zero. Around this hole hundreds of people gather. They are paralyzed watchers. Peace movement monks from Tibet. Swedish politicians. American peace activists. French medical doctors. Italian teachers. Japanese filmmakers. Some have climbed up the mountain the day before, while the Israelis still held the siege around the camp. Others have arrived today, driving old cars and walking several kilometers over the fields. When I climbed the nearby hills, I thought that this must be quite similar to 1936 when Ernest Hemingway and many others walked the length of the Pyrenees to fight against the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War.
We sleep in a flat that functions both as an office and sleeping quarters. My traveling companion, the visual artist Cecilia Parsberg, and I have been given two narrow beds with new sheets that still reek of detergent. When we wake in the morning and go to the living room, we meet the others staying there: an Indian pathologist on a couch, an anthropologist on a mattress on the floor, and an Irish pathologist in the bathroom. They belong to the Physicians for Peace and have been previously to Kosovo and Sebrenica digging out bodies, taking samples to confirm the sex and age of the dead. Now they are afraid they have arrived too late in Jenin.
We talk with Doctor Walid who was confined in Jenin's hospital for twenty days, almost without water and with very little food. When the hospital's electricity went off after a few days, the Israelis allowed the Red Cross to go in with two generators. Without them, there would have been no way to preserve the dead bodies (the majority being civilians--women and children). The Israelis, as one of the hospital nurses explained, were especially afraid of an epidemic. The head of the Palestinian Red Crescent was murdered on the second day of the invasion, while another doctor died as the result of an explosion. The latter was driving in his own car, transporting an oxygen tank to the hospital. A sniper shot at the tank and the car exploded. The doctor died slowly and screamed for an hour before he died. Doctor Walid recalls how no one dared to go and help him, since the snipers were aiming at everyone. Now the hospital is dealing with new victims. Yesterday two small children got wounded by a mine while playing in the background of the hospital. We hear that one of them has just died.
Of the fifteen thousand people who once lived in this camp, five thousand of them escaped (mostly women, children, and the elderly). Now they are slowly coming back, going home to their demolished houses, sitting among the debris of what once were their living rooms.
We climb a staircase that opens towards nothing. Only two walls are intact. An older woman wearing a white scarf on her head and dressed in typical Palestinian dress, of beautiful ochre color, talks to us in Arabic. She wants to tell her story. Her house has been destroyed, her pots and pans smashed. The soldiers destroyed closets, which she has not paid off. At first, she does not want to be photographed. She says she has not been able to herself for twenty days. We compare our dusty clothes, and find that hers are cleaner than ours. At last, she agrees to a photo. Then she invites us to share her food--the little she has--with her family. When we try to contribute to the meal they look at us as if we have insulted them.
We leave things behind. Mementos. A watch, pens, pictures. We will travel away but in these momentos we are still there, in Jenin, which means in Arabic, "the place with the beautiful gardens."


Ana Valdés, writer
Cecilia Parsberg, visual artist

[ --------------------------------------------- ]



Sort:
Display:
Voices from Jenin | 1 comments
[new] Jenin: Looking into the garden (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#1)
by JonYazell on Sun Feb 22nd, 2004 at 07:54:10 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
(User Info)

Thanks for a vivid and detailed personal account, with clarity amidst most agonizing strife.
It is difficult to assess a situation from great distance but your writing presents a bolt of enlightening and awakening perspective that has filled a void in my understanding of the scene there at Jenin.
News reports are mostly rattled off facts and statistics that bounce off but your story has created a needed empathy for the people in the place. Hopefully, Cecilia may share graphic views that also affect the qualities of this written piece.




 
Voices from Jenin | 1 comments
Menu

[- how to post and vote
[- faq (discordia q&a)
[- faq en español
[- search
[- send feedback

[- sick of english?
[- multi-lingual babelfilter

Login
[- Username
[- Password


Make new account >>

Stories, articles, images and comments are owned by the Author. The Rest © 2003 The Discordants under the Gnu Public License

submit story | create account | faq | search