Israel's Jenin Raid Created the Terror Attack It Proclaimed to Thwart

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-01-29/ty-article/.premium/what-where-you-thinking/00000185

by Gideon Levy           29 January 2023

Mourners carry the bodies of eight Palestinians during a joint funeral in the West Bank city of Jenin, Thursday.Credit: Majdi Mohammed /AP 

What were you thinking? That the killing of 146 Palestinians in the West Bank in 2022, according to B’Tselem, most of them noncombatants, would be meekly accepted? That the killing of about 30 people in the month to date would pass quietly? 

That residents of the Shoafat refugee camp, who are maltreated every day and every night by police and Border Police officers who invade their homes in strange operations, from tax raids to nighttime arrests, destroying their property and their dignity, will shower their abusers with rice? That someone whose grandfather was murdered by a settler and whose 17-year-old friend was killed last week by the Border Police was not liable to commit an attack? 

And what were the commanders of Thursday’s insane operation in the Jenin refugee camp thinking? What was the point of the operation, aside from a demonstration of power? To suppress terrorism? It only fanned the flames.

They knew that if they raided the center of the camp it would result in great bloodshed. The Israel Defense Forces and the Police Special Anti-Terror Unit can no longer invade this brave, determined camp without spilling a lot of blood. They also knew that no “huge terrorist attack inside Israel” was thwarted by the operation, as the IDF mouthpiece also known as Yedioth Ahronoth proclaimed Friday. They invaded the camp in the morning, while the children were on their way to school – fortunately, at least the UNRWA schools were on strike that day – just because they could. 

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“Had Maj. Gen. Yehuda Fuchs, chief of Central Command, known that this would be the result, he might not have approved it,” journalist Alon Ben-David said on Channel 13 News. And what was the general thinking, that there was another option? After all, everyone knew the Jenin operation would set off a dangerous wave of violence. It’s not possible to invade the Jenin refugee camp without a massacre, I wrote here after my visit about three weeks ago (Haaretz.com, Jan. 12), and no massacre in the camp could pass quietly.

The military leaders may have thought they were thwarting terrorist attacks, but they fueled a new wave of attacks, and they knew it. It follows, then, that not only the blood of the dead in Jenin, but also in Jerusalem, indirectly, is on the hands of those who carried out the operation in the Jenin camp.

Once again, Israel is the one that started it. There is no other way to describe the chain of events. In the Jenin refugee camp today are dozens of young gunmen who are willing to sacrifice their lives. Killing a few of them does not diminish the determination of the rest. Jenin is a special refugee camp, whose equal in fighting spirit can only be found today in the Gaza Strip. The camp’s militancy flourished in the alleys whose inhabitants grew up knowing that their country was taken from them and they were condemned to a life of misery. The ongoing torture in the form of someone being killed almost every day in the past few months throughout the West Bank also had to lead to Neve Yaakov and to Silwan. 

The overwhelming fact that both attacks were in settlements cannot be ignored. There is no difference between Neve Yaakov and the City of David, between Esh Kodesh and Havat Lucifer. All are in the occupied territories, all are equally illegal according to international law, even if Israel has invented its own world of concepts.

What comes next is also in the hands of Israel. It is doubtful that a third intifada is unavoidable, but any grandiose Israeli revenge operation will pour oil on the flames. Any collective punishment will only aggravate the situation, even if it satisfies the right’s lust for vengeance. 

Arresting 42 family members? To what end, other than to satisfy this lust? 

Razing the perpetrator’s home? After all, the previous demolition in Shoafat, which included an invasion of the camp by no fewer than 300 police officers, great destruction and the killing of an innocent 17-year-old boy, must have only spurred camp resident Khairi Alkam to take his pistol Friday evening and go out to kill Jews in Neveh Yaakov, leaving Israel shocked solely by the cruelty of the Palestinians.

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