By Babatunde Jose
Everyone is crying out for peace, but none is crying’ out for justice. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die (for the rest of Jesus); everybody wants to go up to heaven but none of them, want to die. What is due to Caesar, you better give it all to Caesar, and what belong to I, and you better, you better give it up. Everyone is heading for the top; they don’t know how far it is from the bottom: Nobody knows but everybody is fighting to reach to the top; How far is it from the bottom. Everyone is talking about crime then, who is the criminal. I really don’t see. I don’t want no peace; I need equal rights and Justice. Everyone is fighting for Equal rights and Justice. Palestine is fighting for Equal rights and Justice . . . . . . . . Peter Tosh.
History is the most dangerous product ever concocted by the chemistry of the intellect. It causes dreams, inebriates nations, saddles them with false memories … keeps their old sores running, torments them when they are not at rest, and induces in them megalomania and the mania of persecution. Paul Valéry; ‘Reflections on the World Today’
It is this sense of historical fulfilment wroth from Biblical anecdotal prescriptions that has continued to buoy Israel and its fanatical supporters in its intransigence and waywardness on the very important Palestinian problem.
The recent invasion and massacre of Palestinians in Jenin, located in the occupied West Bank is another act in the ongoing crime against the Palestinians. This time Israel claims the refugee camp has been a haven for Palestinian activists and insurgents.
However, Jenin has been under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War, in 1967. A city in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Jenin houses a crowded refugee camp by the same name with a population of some 14,000. They are descendants of Palestinians dispossessed when Israel was created in 1948, their families coming from areas including Haifa and Nazareth.
Jenin was an Ottoman-German base in World War I. It was an important centre for Jordanian and Iraqi forces in the first Arab Israeli war in 1948; though much of the strategic territory in the vicinity was taken by Israel, Jenin remained in Arab hands.
The recent Israeli air strikes and ground operations in the occupied West Bank targeting the Jenin Refugee camp and killing at least 12 Palestinians may prima facie constitute a war crime, UN experts have said.
UN Sec. Gen. Guterres, angered by Israeli air attacks on Jenin and the danger posed to the civilian population, issued a statement in which he said the assault had left over 100 civilians injured, uprooted thousands of residents, damaged schools and hospitals, and disrupted water and electricity networks.
The UN chief also criticized Israel for preventing the injured from receiving medical care and humanitarian workers from reaching those in need during the military raid.
“Israel’s air strikes and ground operations in a crowded refugee camp were the worst violence in the West Bank in many years, with a significant impact on civilians,” Guterres said.
In their characteristic blatant disregard for world opinion, Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan called the UN chief’s criticism of the Israeli military assault “shameful, far-fetched and completely detached from reality”. Israel’s United Nations ambassador called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to retract his condemnation of Israeli forces for using excessive force and harming civilians during their devastating raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq responded saying that Guterres had conveyed his views on Israel’s operation in the Jenin refugee camp “and he stands by those views”.
The EU envoy also blasted Israel over the raid. Sven Kuehn von Burgsdorff said the Israeli military operation on the Jenin refugee camp violated international law. “There was excessive force used by Israeli forces” in its 48-hour operation, the largest Israel has staged in the occupied Palestinian territory for years.
“The military assault on Jenin was painful. What happened is a violation of international law,” von Burgsdorff said.
Jenin camp has been the site of several large-scale raids by the Israeli military this year, but this was the biggest such operation in the occupied West Bank since the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, of the early 2000s. Since the start of 2023, 64 Palestinians have been killed in Jenin and hundreds injured by Israeli forces.
The camp’s infrastructure was severely damaged during the raid. At least eight kilometers (five miles) of water pipes and three kilometers (1.2 miles) of sewage pipes were destroyed, the UN said. More than 100 houses were damaged, and a number of schools were also damaged. The refugee camp is one of the poorest and most densely populated in the occupied West Bank, with some 18,000 people living in just 0.43 square kilometers.
UN officials made a plea for funds to help rebuild the camp. Algeria announced $30m to “help rebuild the Palestinian city of Jenin after the barbaric and criminal attack” by Israel, and the United Arab Emirates, which normalized ties with Israel in 2020, said it will provide $15m. These are however exercises in tokenism as the plight of Palestinian refugees go beyond that. It is about freedom, justice, and equal rights.
The attack on Jenin was further evidence of the policy of apartheid pursued by a succession of Israeli governments designed, as documented by several human rights organizations, to impose ethnic supremacy in occupied Palestine and to crush Palestinians into ghettos with grinding, inhuman efficiency.
Not a whimper has been heard from the United States on the matter. The role of the United States as a broker for peace in the region has been called into question several times in the past. A role not consistent with social fairness and justice, international law, and the quest for peace and security in the Middle East. US mediation efforts in the Israeli-Arab conflict over the years have been fraught with dishonesty of purpose and insincerity. Most commentators on the Middle East Crisis have labelled the United States ‘a Beacon of Inequality in the world’.
What has happened in Palestine in the last 100 years has been a result of the duplicity and political hooliganism of European powers; chiefly Britain and France, who carved out the old Ottoman Empire among themselves with the blessing of the defunct League of Nations.
Prior to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its defeat during the First World War; and the partition of its empire into mandates to the victorious powers: The League of Nations mandate granted French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon and British Mandate for Mesopotamia (later Iraq) and British Mandate for Palestine, later divided into Mandatory Palestine and Emirate of Transjordan (1921-1946).
It was, however, The Balfour Declaration 1926 which encouraged the international Zionist movement to push for a Jewish homeland in the Palestine region, that started the whole trouble and since then the region had not known peace: It cannot know peace because the whole arrangement is strewn with injustice, unfairness, inequitableness, duplicity, inequality, and political deceit. It is about justice and equal rights:
O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for Allah, as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. Be just: That is next to Piety: And fear Allah. For Allah is well acquainted with all that ye do. (Quran 5:9)
Unfortunately, the issue is bigger than Jenin; it’s about a stateless people who have been forced to live in the largest prison camp in history; a people who have been so traumatized, dehumanised, and cheated of all fundamental human rights and who have no hope of ever getting their rights as their tormentors are very rich and powerful and most important, very well connected.
It is a sad fact that the Arabs states are in disarray, disunited and under the affliction of one crisis or the other: Syria is under the gun, Iraq is under the ashes of American imperialism; Jordan is under the American spell and Egypt is a shadow of its old self; The House of Saud is now an appendage of America and fighting its own war in Yemen; Libya is a smouldering rubble after the despoliation of that country by US and its allies; And worst of all, the United Nations is a disunited organization. Who fights or speaks for the Palestinians? None on the horizon.
Generations of Palestinian Refugees Face Protracted Displacement and Dispossession. Seventy-five years after the mass displacement of Palestinians began, approximately 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees live across the Middle East.
Palestinians comprise the largest stateless community worldwide. One hundred years later, the Palestinian belief in their right to return home is no closer to becoming a reality.
Despite repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine.
One asks what it will take for the world to wake up to the horrendous, unspeakable conditions under which Palestinians are victimized by Israel.
We hope the world will find a lasting solution soon.
Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend
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