The Jenin invasion, as the survivors experienced it.

If human rights and justice are important to you, then put “Searching Jenin” on your reading list and study it. I remember the news reports on Israel’s attack on the Jenin refugee camp. It was brutal, it was thorough, and it was presented as justified. Oddly, the experience of the camp’s residents was missing. Here they are not; they form the core of the book, and, as one might expect, they do not make easy reading. Each of the people interviewed during the investigation that Baroud and his team conducted of survivors of the attack is further evidence of what Jonathan Cook calls “Israel’s experiments in human despair”, the subtitle of his book “Disappearing Palestine” (Zed Books, 2008).

Under the guise of seeking out terrorists in the Jenin refugee camp, the IDF, which describes itself as the world’s most moral army, attacked everyone, killing women, children and men indiscriminately. When a woman glanced out her kitchen window, a sniper shot her. A terrorist? Obviously not, and just as obvious, it did not matter to the sniper. She was a Palestinian, an Arab, and that justified any behavior. It is part of Israel’s experiments in human despair. The accounts given by survivors are beyond what any decent human wants to believe, yet they are true. Too many people, in too many places, have given the same testimony. As I read, these words kept scrolling through my mind as I thought about the invading soldiers: “What shitty, shitty people!” I apologize for the indelicacy of my language, but I cannot think of anything better to say. These people are beasts, and more and more people are becoming aware of it. 

The survivors call the attack a massacre, whereas Israelis recall it, not surprisingly, as “a fair battle.” Interesting to note what one of the attackers, a man nicknamed “Kurdi Bear” had to say about his role: “Many people were inside [the] houses we started to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9 [bulldozer]. And I didn’t see houses falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all” (emphasis added). “A man who has done something, hang him, as far as I am concerned. Even a pregnant woman -- shoot her without mercy, if she has a terrorist behind her. This is way way I thought in Jenin. I answered to no one. I don’t give a damn. The main thing was to  help our soldiers. If I had been given three weeks, I would have  had more fun. That is, if they would let  me tear the whole  camp down. I have no mercy.” The man is a beast and a war criminal. And Israel welcomed him.

“Searching Jenin” is not an easy book to read, but it is a very important one. Ramzy Baroud and his team deserve an award for their work in revealing what happened there.

A definite 5 star read.

Ramzy Baroud: My Father Was a Freedom Fighter

The more I read about the history of the Palestinian people, the more I am reminded of the history of America’s indigenous people since Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola in 1492. In both cases ethnic cleansing with its accompanying genocide were norms, especially when the indigenous peoples fought back. In both cases the indigenous populations were treated with disrespect, contempt and removal. And in both cases, genocide and ethnic cleansing were denied by the conquerors and their friends. In the public discourse, we’re the good guys, they the villains. As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand says “what history does not wish to relate, it omits,” as if omitting it wipes the slate of history clean. It does not. Eventually, liked or not, truth emerges and has to be faced.

For the Palestinians, many people still believe the old story. Just recently I heard someone say “it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them when they spend so much time killing innocent people.” That’s the approved story, and vested interests would like to keep it that way, but with the advent of the Internet and the vocal voice of Palestinian journalists like Ramzy Baroud, this is rapidly changing. It is way past time that we all hear the Palestinian side of the story of what has happened to them since Israel became a nation in 1948 with the blessing of the UN, the U.S., Britain, France and other European powers. The truth, it is said will make us free when we hear and understand it. It is not always a pleasant experience, nor should it be.

Ramzy Baroud’s book, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter is an important book. It is more than the story of his father, grandfather, their ancestral village of Beit Daras, its obliteration and their flight to Gaza. It is the story of the Palestinian people since 1948 when a well-trained army of 65,000 attacked them, making over 700,000 of them refugees. It is the story of their heroic will to live, to educate themselves, and to provide for their families. It is also the story of constant persecution and agony that culminates in the apocalyptic destruction of Gaza during Israel’s monstrously-named “Operation Cast Lead”.

Ramzy Baroud is a fine writer, his book is well-researched, and the story of his family’s experience one that is easily understood. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, nor should it. I came away from it with an appetite to learn more. Pick up a copy, read and reread it, quarrel with it, listen, and do more research on your own. That’s what I do.

The book is available from Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/My-Father-Was-Freedom-Fighter/dp/0745328814/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283669309&sr=1-1)  and The Book Depository http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780745328812/My-Father-Was-a-Freedom-Fighter.