Maha Nassar
(The
Conversation) – Just two days after a shaky ceasefire took hold in the Gaza
Strip, Israel on Jan. 21, 2025, launched a large-scale incursion of the Jenin
refugee camp in the West Bank.
Soldiers raided
hundreds of homes in the West Bank city in what the Israeli military called a
“counterterrorism” operation, aiming to reassert control there. Many analysts
have suggested the raid is an attempt by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to appease far-right members of his coalition who oppose the
ceasefire deal.
Whatever the
motive, the offensive has been devastating for many of the camp’s residents.
The Israeli military has destroyed infrastructure, closed entrances to local
hospitals and forcibly displaced about 2,000 families, according to reports on
the raids. As it was, life for inhabitants of the densely populated camp – home
to some 24,000 Palestinian refugees – was hard. The West Bank director of
UNRWA, the U.N. agency overseeing refugees, recently described camp conditions
as “nearly uninhabitable.”
The focus of the
latest Israeli operation is not new. The Jenin refugee camp, on the western
edge of the town of Jenin in the north of the occupied West Bank, has often
experienced violence between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants.
That violence
has escalated since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, when Hamas gunmen led an
incursion into Israel in which around 1,200 people were killed. The camp has
faced repeated large-scale military operations by Israeli forces, including
drone strikes, ground raids, and airstrikes that have caused widespread
destruction. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have torched Palestinian cars and
properties, with 64 such attacks in the Jenin area alone since Oct. 7, 2023.
Last December, the Palestinian Authority, which coordinates with Israel to
oversee security in parts of the West Bank, also attacked local militants.
These events
have deepened political tensions and worsened the economic and humanitarian
crises in the West Bank. According to the U.N., more than a quarter of the
800-plus Palestinians killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7 attack have come
from the Jenin district; several Israeli civilians have also been killed in the
West Bank during the same period.
As a scholar of
Palestinian history, I see this recent episode as the latest chapter in a much
longer history of Palestinian displacement and defiance of Israeli occupation.
Understanding this history helps explain why the Jenin camp in particular has
become a target of Israeli offensives and a center of Palestinian militant
resistance.
Camp conditions
Jenin, an
agricultural town that dates back to ancient times, has long been a center of
Palestinian resistance. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Arab fighters
successfully pushed back Israeli attempts to capture the town.
At the end of
that war, the town became a refuge for some of the hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from lands that became part of
Israel. Jenin, along with the hilly interior of Palestine known as the West
Bank, was annexed by Jordan.
The U.N. Relief
and Works Agency established the Jenin camp in 1953, just west of the city.
Since then, the agency has provided basic services to the camp’s residents,
including food, housing and education.
Camp conditions
have always been difficult. In the early years of the camp, refugees had to
stand in long lines to receive food rations, and for decades their cramped
homes lacked electricity or running water.
The Jenin camp
soon became the poorest and most densely populated of the West Bank’s 19
refugee camps. And given its location near the “Green Line” – the armistice
line that serves as Israel’s de facto border – camp residents who were expelled
from northern Palestine could actually see the homes and villages from which
they were expelled. But they were prevented from returning to them.
The rise of
militancy
Since 1967,
Jenin, along with the rest of the West Bank, has been occupied by the Israeli
military.
The Israeli
occupation of Jenin compounded the difficulties of these refugees. As stateless
Palestinians, they couldn’t return home. But under Israeli occupation, they
couldn’t live freely in Jenin, either. Human rights groups have long documented
what has been described as “systematic oppression,” which includes
discriminatory land seizures, forced evictions and travel restrictions.
Seeing no other
path forward, many of the camp’s young refugees turned to armed resistance.
In the 1980s,
groups such as the Black Panthers, which was affiliated with the Palestinian
nationalist Fatah organization, launched attacks on Israeli targets in an
effort to end the occupation and liberate their ancestral lands. Throughout the
first intifada – a Palestinian uprising lasting from 1987 to 1993 – the Israeli
army raided the Jenin camp many times, seeking to arrest members of militant
groups. In the process, Israeli forces also sometimes demolished family
members’ homes and arrested relatives. Such acts of apparent collective
punishment reinforced the idea for many Palestinians that the Israeli
occupation could only be ended by force.
The Oslo peace
process of the 1990s – which consisted of a series of meetings between Israeli
government and Palestinian representatives – led some former militants to hope
that the occupation could be ended through negotiations instead. But Jenin’s
camp residents remained marginalized in the West Bank and sealed off from
Israel, seeing little improvement in their lives, even after the transfer of
administrative powers from Israel to the Palestinian Authority in 1995.
Independent
projects like the The Freedom Theatre provided some relief to the camp’s
refugee children, but it was not enough to overcome the grinding poverty or the
violence they faced from Israeli soldiers and settlers. By the time the second
intifada broke out in 2000, many of the camp’s teenagers joined militant
groups. That included Freedom Theatre co-founder Zakaria Zubeidi, who joined
the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Like the youth of the 1980s,
they, too, concluded that only armed resistance would bring an end to the
occupation.
A cycle of
violence?
In April 2002,
the Israeli army invaded the Jenin camp, hoping to put an end to such armed
groups. There were fierce clashes between Israeli soldiers and young
Palestinian men in the camp, solidifying Jenin’s reputation among Palestinians
as “the capital of the resistance.”
The lack of
progress on peace talks since then, Israel’s settlement building on occupied
land – deemed illegal under international law – and the inclusion of hard-line
Israeli politicians in the government have exacerbated resentment in the camp.
Polls show Palestinians increasingly support armed resistance.
Seeking to
protect the camp from Israeli incursions, in 2021 a group of local residents
formed the Jenin Brigades. While its founder was affiliated with Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, the group quickly drew in militants from various political
factions. Members acquired weapons, patrolled the streets and fought off
Israeli military incursions. By 2022, they had declared parts of the camp to be
“liberated” from the Israeli occupation.
Seemingly
alarmed by the increase in militancy and the stockpiling of weapons in the
camp, Israel dramatically stepped up its raids in 2022. It was during such a
raid that Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an
Israeli soldier.
On July 3, 2023,
the Israeli military again invaded Jenin, withdrawing after two days of heavy
aerial bombardment and a ground invasion that killed 12 Palestinians and
wounded over 100.
The latest
offensive could well surpass that death toll, with at least 10 killed in the
first day of fighting. But the militancy associated with the camp was built on
decades of resistance and defiance to occupation that Israel has had little
success in extinguishing. Similarly this time, I believe, such militancy within
the camp will only increase with the latest deaths and destruction.
No comments:
Post a Comment