2023-07-05 22:57:17
Jenin 21 years ago, Jenin today. In 2002, military helicopters hovered over the refugee camp in the northern West Bank city during a week of brutal fighting. Now, the protagonists of the new offensive have been drone attackswhich reduced the center of the refugee camp to rubble as Israeli soldiers entered the town.
To this day, scenes of those combats that occurred two decades ago are still remembered. Journalists standing among the olive groves on the outskirts of the camp, watching a helicopter that, from above, fired into the streets. A woman sitting in the room on the first floor of a house whose façade had been demolished. A man in a wheelchair trying to cross a debris field.
By the time the smoke cleared from the confrontation known as the Battle of Jenin, more than 50 Palestinians and 23 Israeli soldiers had been killed; 13 of them, in a single ambush when they tried to cross the streets full of explosive devices.
This week’s Israeli military operation has been described as the largest in the West Bank since troops entered Palestinian cities during the second intifada (2000-2005), when they besieged Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Those were violent days in the West Bank, with Israeli tanks rolling through streets as gunfire rang out, followed by furious funerals.
But Jenin and the West Bank, in general, have changed in the past two decades, with Israel’s continued marginalization of the Western-backed Palestinian National Authority (PNA). That marginalization has given way to a new generation of uncontrollable militants. On this occasion, Israeli sources assured that the assault with 2,000 deployed soldiers would last a few days and they now consider it over.
Similarities and differences
If it looks familiar, it’s because it is. Once again, armored bulldozers are making their way into the camp, with snipers on the rooftops, in a military operation that was approved 10 days ago. Then, as now, the Jenin refugee camp was a place where the mandate of the Palestinian security forces was considered weak.
The 2002 assault came just days after a Palestinian suicide bombing during a mass Passover gathering that killed 30 people. Meanwhile, the current raid comes two weeks after another violent clash in Jenin and the army saying a rocket had been fired from the area last week.
“There has been a dynamic around Jenin for the last year,” says Israeli spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, defending Monday’s tactics: “It has gotten more and more intense.”
If there is any difference, it is that during the second intifada, Palestinian security forces and fighters associated with leading Palestinian figures became involved in the escalation of violence. On this occasion, the absence of ANP security forces has contributed to the recent escalation.
The level of armed resistance inside the camp in the last major Israeli incursion, on June 19, caught Israel off guard, which saw an explosion wound seven of its soldiers and deployed helicopters and drones to rescue the wounded troops. That has led Israeli politicians to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government partners support settlers in the West Bank, to carry out a “large-scale operation” across the occupied region.
An internal distraction
The incident exposed Netanyahu’s weakness. Years in which his cabinets have discredited and marginalized the Palestinian National Authority as a plausible peace partner and a viable Palestinian government, along with his association with emboldened far-right settler groups, have contributed to a growing vacuum. in the Palestinian society of the West Bank.
That, in turn, has bolstered armed groups in Jenin and other cities, such as Nablus, while a new generation has distanced itself from the PNA.
But Netanyahu has been weakened in other ways, and perhaps that explains the timing of this offensive, in the face of protests over the resumption of parliamentary processing of his controversial judicial reform bill. The prime minister may be hoping that a show of force will also be a distraction, as some politicians call for a halt to anti-government demonstrations during the Jenin operation.
One thing is clear: returning to large-scale violence in Jenin and other Palestinian cities—as the Gaza experience has amply demonstrated—will not solve the longstanding and toxic problems associated with the occupation and settlement construction of the West Bank.
Translation by Julian Cnochaert.
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