MCC Palestine Update #48

MCC Palestine Update #48

28 May 2002

A new permit, or pass, system is being introduced into the occupied territories, one which is rapidly creating a new reality of geographical dismemberment. The past nineteenth months, as we have written repeatedly, have witnessed an increased tightening of the closure, or siege, on Palestinian populations centers in the occupied territories, making movement from town to town for education, health care, work, family visits, etc. difficult at best and dangers at worst. Now the Israeli military government has begun requiring permits from Palestinians who wish to travel from one part of the West Bank to another. Thus, if one lives in Jenin but wishes to study in Nablus, one must obtain a permit.

In the first article below, Amira Hass outlines the ongoing devastation being wrought by this policy of closure and canonization. The viability of any sustainable development projects will, of course, be severely compromised by this new reality. Please keep MCC--and, more importantly, our courageous Palestinian partner organizations--in your prayers as we and they seek to continue to implement projects in the fields of women's development, rehabilitation of persons with disabilities, conflict resolution, land reclamation, and early childhood education.

In addition to the piece by Amira Hass from Ha'aretz, we include three more pieces. Yoav Peled, writing in The Guardian, provides another debunking of the myths surrounding former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's allegedly "generous" offers at the Camp David II summit in July 2002. Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions provides a sobering assessment of the current situation. Finally, MIT professor Noam Chomsky explains why the United States is not a honest broker in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.


1. The Real Disaster Is The Closure
Amira Hass
Ha'aretz, May 21 2002

Half the Palestinians in the West Bank are unemployed, half are in dire poverty, and the economy is sliding into barter.

When the director general of the Palestinian Finance Ministry, Ataf Alaune, returned to his office on April 21, a few hours after the army pulled out of Ramallah, he found that in addition to the hard disks in his computers, the soldiers had taken all the books, reports, and research studies that were in his library. Only one document, 133 pages long, remained. Dated March 18, 2002, it was titled "15 Months: Intifada, Closures, and the Palestinian Economic Crisis - an Assessment" and was prepared by the World Bank.The document was prepared because in the second half of 2001, the donor countries to the Palestinian Authority already wanted an estimate the damage done to the economy during the first months of the intifada, so they could adjust their allotments to the PA for rehabilitation. The initial assessments were that the situation would stabilize and improve, so there were expectations for a quick report. Instead, because of the deterioration in the security situation and the tightening of the closures and sieges on all the Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza, the study grew into a working plan, based on three scenarios:1. A continuation of the closures and the restrictions on freedom of movement for commodities and people2. Political rapprochement that would lead to an end to the hostilities and a lifting of the closure3. A pessimistic scenario, in which the military hostilities would grow even more intense and there would be even more severe disruptions of freedom of movement for goods and people.Each scenario has a ceiling on the money that would be available - from $2.1 to $2.7 billion. A fourth scenario, "the authority collapses," is depicted separately from the other three. That scenario would require a total change in the mode of aid to the Palestinians, from rehabilitation to emergency humanitarian aid, which, in the absence of governing institutions, would be reduced.The report was completed in mid-March, two weeks before the Park Hotel bombing and the military operation in Ramallah and six other Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Palestinian and foreign economists and researchers worked on it, and it was written by two senior World Bank officials, Sebastien Dessus and Nigel Roberts, who has been the World Bank's representative in the country for the past 11 months.The silent destructionIn a conversation with Ha'aretz on March 27, Roberts still hoped that the optimistic scenario of political rapprochement and calm was possible. But the next day, on the night of the Seder, 29 people were killed in the Park Hotel massacre and on March 29, the IDF began Operation Defensive Shield that lasted a month. On May 9, in another interview with Ha'aretz, Roberts said the sieges on the Palestinian towns, then being tightened further, would require the donor countries to consider giving $2 billion instead of the $1.7 billion that was earmarked in case of the "pessimistic scenario." In the same interview, Roberts reiterated four axioms that had become clear during the preparation and writing of the report:1. The ongoing damage to the Palestinian economy from the sieges and closures is much more than the physical damage created by the military operations, including Operation Defensive Shield. In the first 15 months of the intifada, from October 2000 to December 2001, the physical damage to infrastructure and Palestinian institutions was an estimated $503 million. Last week, an estimate of $360 million was published, referring to the physical damage resulting from the military actions in March and April this year. But in the first 15 months of the intifada, at least $2.4 billion in damage was done to the economy, in terms of lost gross national revenues because of the mounting restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israel on the Palestinians in, and out, of the territories. Roberts, who is British, and usually careful with his words, calls the closure policies "the silent destruction."2. The Palestinian public has proved to be very resilient when challenged by the shocks caused by the economic disaster. Palestinian handling of the enormous economic and social difficulties is characterized by intra-community support, family involvement, and mutual help to a degree that is not known in developed, Western countries. Roberts is convinced that developed Western societies would have collapsed if confronted with "an economic disaster of such proportions."3. During all the months of the intifada, major institutions in the Palestinian Authority function "impressively," and dealt well with the challenges posed. "That's the untold story in the tale of this intifada," says Roberts. He says that despite what Palestinians themselves - let alone Israelis and the rest of the world - may believe, the PA, as a complex of institutions providing services to its constituencies, not only did not collapse but rose to the occasion in a number of areas. He makes special note of the education, health and finance ministries as well as the Public Works Ministry and the city halls, which he regards as part of the decision-making structure for initiatives during the crisis.4. The fourth axiom, which Roberts repeated in both meetings with Ha'aretz, does not derive directly from the report on the damage caused by the closures, but rather from a "working paper" published by the World Bank in May 2001 called "Government and the Business Environment in the West Bank and Gaza." That paper's researchers discovered that, as opposed to what is commonly believed, the level of corruption (meaning informal payments to government officials) in the PA territories is much less than in neighboring countries and in other developing countries, where similar studies were done at the same time. Progress toward transparency and accountability, often under international pressure but also as a result of domestic Palestinian criticism, could reduce the anxiety level of those Palestinians worried by the phenomenon of corruption, which in large part is based on the lack of laws guaranteeing equality to all citizens.Make-work jobsThe World Bank report opens with the definition of "closure" as "a term referring to the restriction placed by Israel on the free movement of Palestinian goods and labor across borders and within the West Bank and Gaza. Israel asserts that closure is a response to Palestinian violence. Closure has come to dominate much of Palestinian life over the past 15 months." The Palestinians, the report says, have been required to carry IDF-issued authorizations for travel since 1993 (actually, since 1991 - A.H.). Since October 2000, most of such authorizations for travel into Israel were canceled, Palestinian freedom of movement for goods and people into Egypt and Jordan was drastically reduced, and internal closures and sieges around various Palestinian towns and villages were tightened through physical blockades. Checkpoints are manned, backed up by tanks and armored personnel carriers, to reduce to a minimum any movement of people and merchandise inside the Palestinian territories, between village to village, city to village or village to city.Closures cause a chain reaction of damage that ultimately harms all of Palestinian society. The loss of tens of thousands of jobs inside Israel meant a drop in purchasing power inside the territories that leads to a further shrinking of productive economic activity, and a wave of domestic unemployment paralyzes any possible investment. Thus, in the beginning of 2002, the average real income was 30 percent lower than in 1994, on the eve of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The number of poor, defined as those living on $2 a day or less, grew from 600,000 (in a population of some 3 million) to 1.5 million by the end of 2001. Roberts believes that after the April military operation, three-quarters of the Palestinian population in the territories is now living under that $2 a day poverty line.The gross domestic product dropped 6-7 percent in 2000, as a result of the dramatic drop in economic activity in the last quarter of that year. In 2001, the GDP dropped another 21 percent. Gross national revenues fell 11.7 percent in 200l and another 18.7 percent in 2001. That comes to $2.4 billion, compared to a gross domestic product of $5.4 billion in 1999.There are large gaps in food prices in the West Bank, depending on where the food is purchased, because of limitations on freedom of movement and the internal closures. In areas where food is produced, prices have fallen drastically, since the goods can't reach the markets. In non-agricultural areas, especially the cities, prices have risen dramatically, because of the shortages in supplies. In Gaza, prices have lowered because of a drop in demand, as a result of shrinking household income and purchasing power.Israel takes a cutThe decline in PA revenues, because of the shrinking economic activity, was made even worse since December 2000 when Israel ceased transferring to the PA taxes it collected on goods imported into the PA from Israel, on grounds the PA was paying terrorists with the money. The World Bank mentions that fact at least five times in the report, and emphasizes the monies do not belong to Israel. The current estimate of money Israel owes to the PA, up to December 2001, is half a billion dollars.The report comments negatively on a well-known phenomenon in the PA: the lack of a shared governmental vision of how to manage the crisis. A number of ministries, especially the Planning Ministry, treasury and PEDCER (Palestinian Economic Development Council for Economic Rehabilitation) worked out emergency plans, but they were written separately and were not adopted. No umbrella forum was established to manage the crisis, and inter-ministry coordination, problematic even before the intifada, did not improve. The World Bank report is meant to solve that problem and to propose to the donor countries and the PA an appropriate, coordinated working program for dealing with the crisis (according to all three scenarios mentioned at the outset). The PA, for its part, is committed in the document to adopt a series of steps in the context of internal reforms, both administrative and financial. Those promises came a long time before Israel and the U.S. began insisting on reforms. Some of the reforms were implemented, under the watchful eyes of the International Monetary Fund and the donor countries, before the intifada. Others were done during the crisis, especially all those dealing with economic legislation that would encourage the private sector, as well as a pension fund for civil servants, to guarantee a social safety net.On March 27, Roberts still hoped the action plan would help, to some degree, in reviving the Palestinian economy, on condition the closures, particularly the internal closures, were lifted. On May 9 he was speaking differently. All the signs show, he said, that Israel intends to tighten the internal closures even more, and to limit to an absolute minimum the movement of people and goods from one Palestinian township or village to another. People leaving besieged cities need "authorizations for movement under closure" that only go to a very narrow category of people. Most of the goods going to the cities are transported "back to back" meaning a truck full of goods backs up to an empty truck on the outskirts of the city at the checkpoint, and the goods are transferred from one to the other. It adds time and costs to the entire process.The damage caused by the closures to the Palestinian economy, says Roberts, creates a barter economy that is not appropriate for the private sector and for any vision of economic development. Under such circumstances, he adds, the donor countries are forced - against their will - to become charitable organizations to an impoverished population, without any political framework. Roberts allows himself to say that the closure policy "is more damaging to security in the long run" and says he finds it difficult to be persuaded that a process that is impoverishing the entire Palestinian society - causing damage to stability in the long run - can lead to rapprochement in the future. "Militarily, I have no opinion on the effectiveness of the closures. But strategically, it is clear they are creating an atmosphere that is not conducive to the security of Israel."


2. Was Barak telling the truth?
Yoav Peled
The Guardian, 24 May 2002

The ex-PM's disparagement of the Palestinians began long ago

Astute observers of Israeli politics have been wondering, ever since Ehud Barak was elected prime minister in 1999, whether his "peace offensive" was a real effort to achieve peace with Israel's neighbours or only an attempt to "expose" the Arabs' intention of destroying Israel.

The debate intensified when the failure of the Camp David II summit in the summer of 2000 was almost universally interpreted as a rejection by Yasser Arafat of Barak's "generous" offer to end Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and enable the Palestinians to establish an independent state.

An interview Barak recently gave to Benny Morris - a convert to the cause of the Israeli rightwing - which was published in the New York Review of Books (and reprinted in this newspaper yesterday) allows a glimpse into some of his underlying assumptions.

The controversy over what actually transpired at Camp David is well known by now, and Barak's version of events is disputed (yet again) in the same issue of the New York Review by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha. What is more revealing is Barak's view of the people with whom he was purportedly trying to reach a peace agreement.

"Repeatedly during [the] interview," Morris reports, Barak spoke of the Palestinians as products of a culture "in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't." Curiously, Morris, who did more than anybody to dispel official Israeli lies about the war of 1948, does not record his own reaction to these racist stereotypes.

Polite western society no longer tolerates such characterisations of entire cultures, although I suspect things may have changed, at least in the US, since September 11. But in Israel the public denigration of Arab culture was historically acceptable, since, like all colonial movements, Zionism had to dehumanise the indigenous inhabitants of its country of settlement in order to legitimise their displacement. Thus, as many studies have shown, depictions of the Arabs as conniving, dishonest, lazy, treacherous and murderous were commonplace in Israeli school textbooks, as in much of Israeli literature in general.

For the past two decades, however, Israeli society has been going through a profound and wide-ranging process of liberalisation. A great deal of effort was invested, by the upper-middle strata of Jewish Israeli society (the people who voted for Barak in 1999), in the struggle against the mutual stereotyping of Jews and Palestinians.

A whole industry of "dialogue and coexistence" groups sprouted up. As a result, generalisations such as the ones used by Barak were delegitimised to the point where it became difficult, in classroom situations for example, to make any general statement about a particular group in society. Tragically, all of this was halted by the breakdown of the peace process and the onset of the second intifada.

The question, then, is whether Barak's statements reflect a genuine frustration over the Palestinians' response to his peace efforts; are an effort to cater to changing public opinion; or whether he held this view of the Palestinians all along.

As chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Force, he opposed the Oslo accords, and as minister of the interior in Yitzhak Rabin's cabinet he abstained in the crucial vote on the Oslo II agreement. When he took office as prime minister he reneged on the commitments undertaken by his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the Wye Plantation agreement, to further withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory. And throughout his tenure as prime minister he refused to abide by any clause of the Oslo agreements that mandated further Israeli "concessions" to the Palestinians. This behaviour is perfectly understandable if the Palestinians are all pathological liars and agreements signed by them are not to be trusted.

During Barak's year and a half in office as prime minister, he kept warning that Israel was like a ship heading towards certain collision with an iceberg, and that his peace efforts were crucial for avoiding a catastrophe. Unfortunately, what is revealed in the Morris interview is that the captain of the ship may have been blinded by prejudice, so that instead of avoiding the iceberg he sailed full steam ahead right into it.

Yoav Peled teaches political science at Tel Aviv University. He is co-author, with Gershon Shafir, of Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (CUP).

· Israel/Palestine: The Way Forward, a Guardian discussion with Yasser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin takes place at Church House, Dean's Yard, Westminster, London SW1 on Wednesday May 29 at 2pm. Entrance by ticket only (£10); call 020-7494 5551


3. After defeat, autonomy
Jeff Halper
ICAHD, 15 May 2002

Despite protestations by Sharon, the vote by acclamation of the Likud Central Committee against the establishment of any Palestinian state flowed logically and smoothly from "Operation Defensive Shield." In that ferocious incursion into Palestinian areas, the Sharon government believes it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all, and can thus drop the pretense of even a Palestinian mini-state. It has three good reasons for thinking so:1. Jenin. Although the Israeli attacks of March-April 2002 (disingenuously called "Operation DEFENSIVE Shield") extended far beyond the Jenin refugee camp, Jenin became the focal point and symbol of Israel's thrust to "destroy the infrastructure of terrorism." In fact, it represents for Sharon the final defeat of any Palestinian attempt to resist the Occupation. The Palestinians, in his view, have nowhere to go. Their infrastructure is demolished, and given Israel's suffocating control of the besieged islands of Areas A and B, they will never be able to reorganize.There may be isolated incidents, but the problem of terrorism/resistance has been reduced to manageable proportions.2. Ramallah. Although the Israel assault on Ramallah received far less press and was focused on events around Arafat's compound, it represents nothing less than the destruction of the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. In Ramallah virtually the entire civil infrastructure was destroyed - all the data of the government ministries, hospitals and clinics, the land registry office, the courts and banking system, businesses, non-governmental organizations and research institutes, even the Palestinian Academy of Sciences. What has this to do with the destroying "the infrastructure of terror?" Nothing. But, then, fighting terror was always a convenient excuse for maintaining the Occupation. Into the vacuum created by the destruction of Palestinian civil society the Civil Administration, Israel's military government, is already stepping. Palestinians wishing to leave the country now need a special Civil Administration permit. And we must not miss the "message" of the soldiers left behind: "Death to Arabs" scrawled on walls with excrement, excrement and urine spread throughout offices and homes, wanton destruction of furniture, equipment, artworks, gardens, infrastructure.3. The American Congress. On May 2nd, in the wake of the attacks and in anticipation of Sharon's visit to Washington, Congress overwhelmingly passed a resolution (94-2 in the Senate, 352-21 in the House), supporting Israel's campaign to destroy "the terrorist infrastructure and attacking the Palestinian Authority. The resolution showed clearly why the US Congress is Israel's "trump card," allowing it to defy the international community while thumbing its nose at American administrations. It will stand with Israel no matter what. And it will do so for many reasons that have nothing to do with the issue itself: defense dollars, the influence of the Israeli-American Jewish lobby AIPAC and of the Christian right, perceptions of a common "Judeo-Christian heritage," anti-Arab and anti-Muslim phobia, a common reduction of the world's problems to the fight against terrorism, and plain ignorance. Congress, at this stage, appears unassailable.Believing it has defeated the Palestinians once and for all, the government's task is now to construct a form of occupation dressed in the old but respectable clothes of "autonomy." Autonomy allows Israel to retain control of the West Bank and the settlements while dumping its two million Palestinian residents into a truncated set of disconnected islands. In a worst-case scenario, autonomy resembles apartheid, with the Palestinians exercising some local control over their municipal affairs but still governed by Israel and lacking citizenship. The best such a scheme offers is a mini-state representing the old South African bantustan of Bophuthatswana.Sharon's own grand scheme envisions a three-fold "solution" to the Palestinian problem:First, Arafat will be transferred to Gaza, which will become one large prison for PLO members. At some point, probably when Arafat leaves the scene and a more compliant leader can be found, Gaza will become the Palestinian state as a sop to international demands for Palestinian independence.The West Bank will then be divided into three separate cantons according to settlement blocs and Israeli highways also in place. A northern canton would be created around the city of Nablus, a central one around Ramallah and a southern one in the area of Hebron. Each would be connected independently to Israel, with thin Israeli-controlled links between them. Each canton, whose residents would be denied any citizenship, would be granted local autonomy.Finally, Israel would ensure Palestinian submission through "quiet transfer" and economic cooptation. "Quiet transfer" is the policy, practiced today, to make life so miserable for the Palestinian middle classes that they leave the country "voluntarily." Emigration of the educated Palestinian middle classes to render the society weak, leaderless and easily controlled. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada it has been estimated that 150,000 Palestinians have left the Occupied Territories, the vast majority of them middle class (many Christians from the Bethlehem and Ramallah areas). Those that remain, the working classes, will benefit from seven industrial parks being built on the "seam" between Israel and the Occupied Territories by the Peres Center for Peace. The combination of weak leadership and adequate employment - similar to the Maquiladoras along the US-Mexican border - would, Israel believes, effectively counteract any tendency towards renewed resistance.Fanciful as all this may seem, this is the scenario being pursued by Sharon and Sharon's likely successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, with the acquiescence of Labor. Having struggled all the years since Oslo to transform Israel's concept of a Palestinian mini-state into a viable and truly sovereign one, we find ourselves back in the 1970s when the struggle was to transform autonomy into a semblance of independence. Time is running out. Every day the Occupation grows stronger -another road, another settlement, another barrier, greater repression, greater separation, increased emigration, growing despair. There seems no sense of urgency in the slow pace of international intervention. With few countervailing forces, are we witnessing the victory of occupation over freedom? The answer is still blowing in the wind.

(Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. He can be reached at <icahd@zahav.net.il>)

http://www.icahd.org/eng/articles.asp?menu=6&submenu=2&article=48


4. The solution is the problem
Noam Chomsky
The Guardian, 10 May 2002

The US presents itself as the peace-broker in the Middle East. The reality is different

A year ago, the Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling observed that "what we feared has come true - War appears an unavoidable fate", an "evil colonial" war. His colleague Ze'ev Sternhell noted that the Israeli leadership was now engaged in "colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era". Both stress the obvious: there is no symmetry between the "ethno-national groups" in this conflict, which is centered in territories that have been under harsh military occupation for 35 years.

The Oslo "peace process", begun in 1993, changed the modalities of the occupation, but not the basic concept. Shortly before joining the Ehud Barak government, historian Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote that "the Oslo agreements were founded on a neo-colonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever". He soon became an architect of the US-Israel proposals at Camp David in 2000, which kept to this condition. At the time, West Bank Palestinians were confined to 200 scattered areas. Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth enclave, a small area of East Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian communications. The fifth canton was Gaza. It is understandable that maps are not to be found in the US mainstream. Nor is their prototype, the Bantustan "homelands" of apartheid South Africa, ever mentioned.

No one can seriously doubt that the US role will continue to be decisive. It is crucial to understand what that role has been, and how it is internally perceived. The version of the doves is presented by the editors of the New York Times, praising President Bush's "path-breaking speech" and the "emerging vision" he articulated. Its first element is "ending Palestinian terrorism" immediately. Some time later comes "freezing, then rolling back, Jewish settlements and negotiating new borders" to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. If Palestinian terror ends, Israelis will be encouraged to "take the Arab League's historic offer of full peace and recognition in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal more seriously". But first Palestinian leaders must demonstrate that they are "legitimate diplomatic partners".

The real world has little resemblance to this self-serving portrayal - virtually copied from the 1980s, when the US and Israel were desperately seeking to evade PLO offers of negotiation and political settlement. In the real world, the primary barrier to the "emerging vision" has been, and remains, unilateral US rejectionism. There is little new in the current "Arab League's historic offer".

It repeats the basic terms of a security council resolution of January 1976 which called for a political settlement on the internationally recognized borders "with appropriate arrangements ... to guarantee ... the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the area". This was backed by virtually the entire world, including the Arab states and the PLO but opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US, thereby vetoing it from history. Similar initiatives have since been blocked by the US and mostly suppressed in public commentary.

Not surprisingly, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant humiliation. Israeli plans for Palestinians have followed the guidelines formulated by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labour leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Thirty years ago Dayan advised the cabinet that Israel should make it clear to refugees that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave". When challenged, he responded by citing Ben-Gurion, who said that "whoever approaches the Zionist problem from a moral aspect is not a Zionist". He could have also cited Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel, who held that the fate of the "several hundred thousand negroes" in the Jewish homeland "is a matter of no consequence".

The Palestinians have long suffered torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basic resources, crucially water. These policies have relied on decisive US support and European acquiescence. "The Barak government is leaving Sharon's government a surprising legacy," the Israeli press reported as the transition took place: "the highest number of housing starts in the territories since Ariel Sharon was minister of construction and settlement in 1992 before the Oslo agreements" - funding provided by the American taxpayer.

It is regularly claimed that all peace proposals have been undermined by Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel (the facts are quite different), and by terrorists like Arafat who have forfeited "our trust". How that trust may be regained is explained by Edward Walker, a Clinton Middle East adviser: Arafat must announce that "we put our future and fate in the hands of the US" - which has led the campaign to undermine Palestinian rights for 30 years.

The basic problem then, as now, traces back to Washington, which has persistently backed Israel's rejection of a political settlement in terms of the broad international consensus. Current modifications of US rejectionism are tactical. With plans for an attack on Iraq endangered, the US permitted a UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the newly-invaded territories "without delay" - meaning "as soon as possible", secretary of state Colin Powell explained at once. Powell's arrival in Israel was delayed to allow the Israeli Defense Force to continue its destructive operations, facts hard to miss and confirmed by US officials.

When the current intifada broke out, Israel used US helicopters to attack civilian targets, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, hardly in self-defense. Clinton responded by arranging what the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz called "the largest purchase of military helicopters by the Israeli Air Force in a decade", along with spare parts for Apache attack helicopters. A few weeks later, Israel began to use US helicopters for assassinations. These extended last August to the first assassination of a political leader: Abu Ali Mustafa. That passed in silence, but the reaction was quite different when Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi was killed in retaliation. Bush is now praised for arranging the release of Arafat from his dungeon in return for US-UK supervision of the accused assassins of Ze'evi. It is inconceivable that there should be any effort to punish those responsible for the Mustafa assassination.

Further contributions to enhancing terror took place last December, when Washington again vetoed a security council resolution calling for dispatch of international monitors. Ten days earlier, the US boycotted an international conference in Geneva that once again concluded that the fourth Geneva convention applies to the occupied territories, so that many US-Israeli actions there are "grave breaches", hence serious war crimes. As a "high contracting party", the US is obligated by solemn treaty to prosecute those responsible for such crimes, including its own leadership. Accordingly, all of this passes in silence.

But the US has not officially withdrawn its recognition that the conventions apply to the occupied territories, or its censure of Israeli violations as the "occupying power". In October 2000 the security council reaffirmed the consensus, "call[ing] on Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations..." The vote was 14-0. Clinton abstained.

Until such matters are permitted to enter mainstream discussion in the US, and their implications understood, it is meaningless to call for "US engagement in the peace process", and prospects for constructive action will remain grim.

chomsky@MIT.edu

MCC Palestine Update #47

MCC Palestine Update #47

1 May 2002

Through the East Jerusalem YMCA Women's Training Program MCC is supporting the repairs of the water tanks and solar water heating panels for 160 families in the West Bank districts of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem. During the Israeli re-invasions of these areas during the past year, many families had their water tanks shot up. Palestinian families depend on water in these tanks, as they can only count on running water a few days out of each month. (Illegal Israeli settlements, meanwhile, have running water continuously, with water confiscated from West Bank aquifers).

MCC Palestine's North American staff will be in Egypt for regional meetings and retreat from May 5-20. No MCC Palestine Updates will appear during this time.

Below you will find three pieces. The first, by Ha'aretz journalist Amira Hass, details the way in which the Israeli military targeted the Palestinian civilian infrastructure during the April re-invasions. The second, by Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri, provides an analysis of the present impasse between Palestinians and Israelis. The final piece appeared in the British newspaper The Independent and represents a detailed preliminary investigation into what happened when the Israeli military entered Jenin refugee camp.


1. Operation Destroy the Data
Amira Hass
Haaretz

It's a scene that is repeating itself in hundreds of Palestinian offices taken over by IDF troops for a few hours or days in the West Bank: smashed, burned and broken computer terminals heaped in piles and thrown into yards; server cabling cut, hard disks missing, disks and diskettes scattered and broken, printers and scanners broken or missing, laptops gone, telephone exchanges that disappeared or were vandalized, and paper files burned, torn, scattered, or defaced - if not taken. And it's all in rooms full of smashed furniture, torn curtains, broken windows, smashed-in doors, walls full of holes, filthy floors and soiled bathrooms. Here and there, the soldiers left obscene graffiti or letters full of hatred, but compared to the data that was destroyed or taken, the insults read like poetry. Even the overflowing toilets look more like human weakness compared to the organized vandalism reflected in the piles of smashed computers.

It's not merely the expense of the hardware that has to be replaced. The loss is immeasurable in shekels or dollars. Years of information built into knowledge, time spent thinking by thousands of people working to build their civil society and their future or trying to build a private sector that would bring a sense of economic stability to their country.

These are the data banks developed in Palestinian Authority institutions like the Education Ministry, the Higher Education Ministry and the Health Ministry. These are the data banks of the non-governmental organizations and research institutes devoted to developing a modern health system, modern agricultural, environmental protection and water conservation. These are the data banks of human rights organizations, banks and private commercial enterprises, infirmaries, and supermarkets. They all were clearly the targets for destruction in the military operation called Defensive Shield.

The Israeli public has been spared the sights of the destruction. Here and there, a photo of some demolished office sneaks into the TV news shows. But Israeli TV news doesn't find a few seconds to report on a Palestinian woman or a child of nine who was shot dead from a distance, inside their homes, by an anonymous Israeli soldier, so how can it find time or reason to report on the crazed destruction perpetrated by a unit of soldiers in one office.

The IDF has given up denying that some soldiers looted - money, jewels and video cameras - private homes. That can be explained by officers too weak to impose discipline on their soldiers and by soldiers too weak to fight material temptation. But the systematic destruction of the data banks was not a matter of personal weakness by either officers or soldiers.

Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them. This was not a whim, or crazed vengeance, by this or that unit, nor a personal vandalistic urge of a soldier whose buddies didn't dare stop him. There was a decision made to vandalize the civic, administrative, cultural infrastructure developed by Palestinian society. Was it an explicit order or one given with a wink? Was it an order or was it the result of permission given to soldiers to do what they want? Did the order or wink come down from the battalion commander or from the brigadier?

Was it from the headquarters of IDF forces in the West Bank or from IDF Operations? Did it come from the general in command of the Central Command or from general headquarters?

Either way, the scenes of systematic destruction show how the IDF translated into the field the instructions inherent in the political echelon's policies: Israel must destroy Palestinian civil institutions, sabotaging for years to come the Palestinian goal for independence, sending all of Palestinian society backward. It's so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists, after the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social and economic activity has been destroyed. That way, the Israeli public can continue to be deceived into believing that terror is a genetic problem and not a sociological and political mutation, horrific as it may be, derived from the horrors of the occupation.


2. The Real Aim
Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, 27 April 2002

The real aim of “Operation Defensive Shield” was not to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”.

This was merely a good slogan for uniting the people of Israel, who are angry and afraid after the suicide bombings. It is also a good political device, allowing Sharon to ride on the bandwagon of President Busch’s “war against international terrorism”. Under the umbrella of “destroying the infrastructure of terrorism” one can do practically anything.

If Sharon had really intended to “destroy the infrastructure of terrorism”, he would have acted very differently. He would have given the Palestinian masses hope of achieving their national freedom in the near future. He would have fortified the position of Yasser Arafat, the only effective partner for peace. He would have strengthened the Palestinian security forces and radically improved economic conditions in the Palestinian territories.

But destroying the infrastructure of terrorism is not Ariel Sharon’s aim. His program is far more radical: to break the backbone of the Palestinian people, crush their governmental institutions, turn the people into human wreckage that can be dealt with as he wishes. This may entail shutting them up in several enclaves or even driving them out of the country altogether.

As Sharon sees it, this would be finishing off the job started in 1948: to establish the real Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river; a state inhabited solely by Jews. It was no accident that he openly supported Slobodan Milosevic, the inventor of “ethnic cleansing”. When I wrote this a year ago, it sounded like malicious slander. Sharon was still pictured as a man determined to fight terrorism, not as a person using the fight against terrorism as a means to achieve quite different aims.

No more.

Four days ago I was in Ramallah. I sneaked into the town (Israelis are forbidden by the military commander from entering the Palestinian territories) in order to see it for myself. I visited the Palestinian ministries. A shocking sight, indeed.

Take, for example, the Palestinian Ministry of Education. It is housed in an imposing building, probably going back to British times, a mixture of neo-Classic European and oriental styles. In front of it there was a rose garden – “was”, because a tank has crisscrossed it, for no apparent reason, leaving only one purple rosebush in all its glory. Just so. To teach them a lesson.

On the upper floor, where the archives and computers were housed, the destruction was total. The computers were taken apart and thrown on the floor, the safe blown open, the papers strewn around, the drawers empty, the telephones crushed . Some of it was just plain vandalism. The money in the safe was stolen, the furniture upturned, the papers dispersed. But when one looked closer, the real aim of the operation became clear. All the hard disks were taken from the computers, all the important files taken away. Only empty shells remained. All the important contents of the ministry were taken: the lists of pupils, examination results, lists of teachers, the whole logistics of the Palestinian school system.

The Ministry if Health suffered the same fate. The hard disks that contained all the information, state of diseases, medical tests, lists of doctors and nurses, the logistics of the hospitals had been taken.

Even the people most critical of the Palestinian Authority admitted that these two ministries – Education and Health – had been functioning well. They have been utterly destroyed.

This happened to virtually all the Palestinian government offices. Gone is the information pertaining to land registration and housing, taxes and government expenditure, car tests and drivers’ licenses, everything necessary for administrating a modern society.

The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvious: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian society itself: to push it back with one stroke from the stage of a modern state-in-the-making to the primitive society of Turkish times.

This is true for the civil society, and even more so for the security system. The headquarters of the security services were destroyed, files burned, computers crushed, the information concerning armed underground organizations and all other details pertaining to the war against terrorism were obliterated. There is no better evidence of the aims of this operation: not war on terrorism, but destruction of organized Palestinian society.

By the way, on that day I passed, with a group of Israeli peace activists, through the center of Ramallah – from the mass-grave in the hospital parking lot to the besieged headquarters of Yasser Arafat. We carried Hebrew posters and encountered much sympathy and not a single sign of hostility. Even at this time, the Palestinians know the difference between the Israeli peace camp and those who responsible for this brutal attack. Here, perhaps, lies the only glimmer of hope.


3. Once upon a time in Jenin: What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin?
Justin Huggler And Phil Reeves
The Independent, 25 April 2002

The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counter-terrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode - the nastiest so far - in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?

A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverized under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left - the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings -reeked.

The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of
Israel" - a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins.
"It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said. The Israeli army insists that its
devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always - although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim –it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.

But The Independent has unearthed a different story. We have found that, while the Israeli operation clearly dealt a devastating blow to the militant organisations - in the short term, at least - nearly half of the Palestinian dead who have been identified so far were civilians, including women, children and the elderly. They died amid a ruthless and brutal Israeli
operation, in which many individual atrocities occurred, and which Israel is seeking to hide by launching a massive propaganda drive.

The assault on Jenin refugee camp by Israel's armed forces began early on 3 April. One week earlier, 30 miles to the west in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a Hamas suicide bomber had walked into a hotel and blown up a roomful of people as they were sitting down to celebrate the Passover feast. This horrific slaughter on one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar killed 28 people, young and old, making it the worst Palestinian attack of the intifada, a singularly evil moment even by the standards of the long conflict between the two peoples.

Ariel Sharon, Israel's premier, and his ministers responded by activating a plan that had long lain on his desk. Operation Defensive Shield was to become the largest military offensive by Israel since the 1967 war. Jenin refugee camp was high on the list of targets. Home to about 13,000 people, it was the heartland of violent resistance to Israel's 35-year occupation.

The graffiti-covered walls bellowed the slogans of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad; radical Islamists and secular nationalists worked side by side, burying differences in the name of the intifada. According to Israel, 23 suicide bombers had come out of the camp, which was a centre for bomb-making. Yet there were also many, many civilians. People such as Atiya Rumeleh, Afaf Desuqi and Ahmad Hamduni.

The army was expecting a swift victory. It had overwhelming superiority of arms - 1,000 infantrymen, mostly reservists, accompanied by Merkava tanks, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and Cobra helicopters, armed with missiles and heavy machine guns.Ranged against this force were about 200 Palestinians, with members of the militias - Hamas, al-Aqsa brigades and Islamic Jihad -fighting alongside Yasser Arafat's security forces, mostly armed with Kalashnikovs and explosives.

The fight put up by the Palestinians shocked the soldiers. Eight days after entering, the Israeli army finally prevailed, but at a heavy price. Twenty -three soldiers were killed, 13 of them wiped out by an ambush, and an unknown number of Palestinians died. And a large residential area - 400m by 500m - lay utterly devastated; scenes that the Israeli authorities knew at once would outrage the world as soon as they hit the TV screens. "We were not expecting them to fight so well," said one exhausted-looking Israeli reservist as he packed up to head home. Journalists and humanitarian workers were kept away for five more days while the Israeli army cleaned up the area, after the serious fighting ended on 10 April.

The Independent spent five days conducting long, detailed interviews of survivors among the ruins of the refugee camp, accompanied by Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for the Human Rights Watch organisation. Many of the interviews were conducted in buildings that were on the verge of collapse, in living rooms where one entire wall had been ripped off by the bulldozers and that were open to the street.

An alarming picture has emerged of what took place. So far, 50 of the dead have been identified. The Independent has a list of names. Palestinians were happy, even proud, to tell us which of the dead were fighters for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa brigades; which belonged to their security forces; and which were civilians. They identified nearly half as civilians.

Not all the civilians were cut down in crossfire. Some, according to eyewitness accounts, were deliberately targeted by Israeli forces. Sami Abu Sba'a told us how his 65-year-old father, Mohammed Abu Sba'a, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers after he warned the driver of an approaching bulldozer that his house was packed with families sheltering from the fighting. The bulldozer turned back, said Mr Abu Sba'a - but his father was almost immediately shot in the chest where he stood.

Israeli troops also shot dead a Palestinian nurse as she tried to help a wounded man. Hani Rumeleh, a 19-year-old civilian, had been shot as he tried to look out of his front door. Fadwa Jamma, a nurse staying with her sister in a house nearby, heard Hani's screaming and came to help. Her sister, Rufaida Damaj, who also ran to help, was wounded but survived. From her bed in Jenin hospital, she told us what happened.

"We were woken at 3.30 in the morning by a big explosion," she said. "I heard that one guy was wounded outside our house. So my sister and I went to do our duty and to help the guy and give him first aid. There were some guys from the resistance outside and we had to ask them before we moved anywhere. I told them that my sister was a nurse, I asked them to let us go to the wounded.

"Before I had finished talking to the guys the Israelis started shooting. I got a bullet in my leg and I fell down and broke my knee. My sister tried to come and help me. I told her, 'I'm wounded.' She said, 'I'm wounded too.' She had been shot in theside of her abdomen. Then they shot her again in the heart. I asked where she was wounded but she didn't answer, she made a terrible sound and tried to breathe three times."

Ms Jamma was wearing a white nurse's uniform clearly marked with a red crescent, the emblem of Palestinian medical workers, when the soldiers shot her. Ms Damaj said the soldiers could clearly see the women because they were standing under a bright light, and could hear their cries for help because they were "very near". As Ms Damaj shouted to the Palestinian fighters to get help, the Israeli soldiers fired again: a second bullet went up through her leg into her chest.

Eventually an ambulance was allowed through to rescue Ms Damaj. Her sister was already dead. It was to be one of the last times an ambulance was allowed near the wounded in Jenin camp
Until after the battle ended. Hani Rumeleh was taken to hospital, but he was dead. For his stepmother, however, the tragedy had only just begun; the next day, her 44-year-old husband Atiya, also a civilian, was killed.

As she told his story, her orphaned children clung to her side."There was shooting all around the house. At about 5pm I went to check the building. I told my husband two bombs had come into the house. He went to check. After two minutes he called me to come, but he was having difficulty calling. I went with the children. He was still standing. In my life I've never seen the way he looked at me. He said, 'I'm wounded', and started bleeding from his mouth and nose. The children started crying, and he fell down. I asked him what happened but he couldn't talk.

"His eyes went to the children. He looked at them one by one. Then he looked at me. Then all his body was shaking. When I looked, there was a bullet in his head. I tried to call an ambulance, I was screaming for anybody to call an ambulance. One came but it was sent back by the Israelis."

It was Thursday 4 April, and the blockade against recovering the wounded had begun. With the fighting raging outside, Ms Rumeleh could not go out of the house to fetch help. Eventually she made a rope out of headscarves and lowered her seven-year-old son Mohammed out of the back window to go and seek help. The family, fearful of being shot if they ventured out, were trapped indoors with the body for a week.

A few doors away, we heard the story of Afaf Desuqi. Her sister, Aysha, told us how the 52-year-old woman was killed when the Israeli soldiers detonated a mine to blow the door of her house open. Ms Desuqi had heard the soldiers coming and gone to open the door. She showed us the remains of the mine, a large metal cylinder. The family screamed for an ambulance, but none was allowed through.

Ismehan Murad, another neighbour, told us the soldiers had been using her as a human shield when they blew the front door off the Desuqi house. They came to the young woman's house first, and ordered her to go ahead of them, so that they would not be fired on.

Jamal Feyed died after being buried alive in the rubble. His uncle, Saeb Feyed, told us that 37-year-old Jamal was mentally and physically disabled, and could not walk. The family had
already moved him from house to house to avoid the fighting. When Mr Feyed saw an Israeli bulldozer approaching the house where his nephew was, he ran to warn the driver. But the bulldozer ploughed into the wall of the house, which collapsed on Jamal.

Although they evacuated significant numbers of civilians, theIsraelis made use of others as human shields. Rajeh Tawafshi, a 72-year-old man, told us that the soldiers tied his hands and made him walk in front of them as they searched house to house. Moments before, they had shot dead Ahmad Hamduni, a man in his eighties, before Mr Tawafshi's eyes. Mr Hamduni had sought shelter in Mr Tawafshi's house, but the Israeli soldiers had blown the door open. Part of the metal door landed next to the two men. Mr Hamduni was hunched with age, and Mr Tawafshi thinks the soldiers may have mistakenly thought he was wearing a suicide-bomb belt. They shot him on sight.

Even children were not immune from the Israeli onslaught. Faris Zeben, a 14 -year-old boy, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in cold blood. There was not even any fighting at the time. The curfew on Jenin had been lifted for a few hours and the boy went to buy groceries. This was on Thursday 11 April. Faris's eight-year-old brother, Abdel Rahman, was with him when he died. Nervously picking at his cardigan, his eyes on the ground, the child told us what happened.

"It was me and Faris and one other boy, and some women I didn't know. Faris told me to go home but I refused. We were going in front of the tank. Then we saw the front of the tank move towards us and I was scared. Faris told me to go home but I refused. The tank started shooting and Faris and the other boy ran away. I fell down. I saw Faris fall down, I thought he just fell. Then I saw blood on the ground so I went to Faris. Then two of the women came and put Faris in a car."

Abdel Rahman showed us where it happened. We paced it out: the tank had been about 80m away. He said there was only one burst of machine-gun fire. He imitated the sound it made. The soldiers in the tank gave no warning, he said. And after they shot Faris they did nothing.

Fifteen-year-old Mohammed Hawashin was shot dead as he tried to walk through the camp. Aliya Zubeidi told us how she was on her way to the hospital to see the body of her son Ziad, a militant from the Al-Aqsa brigades, who had been killed in the fighting. Mohammed accompanied her. "I heard shooting," said Ms Zubeidi. "The boy was sitting in the door. I thought he was hiding from the bullets. Then he said, 'Help.' We couldn't do anything for him. He had been shot in the face."

In a deserted road by the periphery of the refugee camp, we found the flattened remains of a wheelchair. It had been utterly crushed, ironed flat as if in a cartoon. In the middle of the debris lay a broken white flag. Durar Hassan told us how his friend, Kemal Zughayer, was shot dead as he tried to wheel himself up the road. The Israeli tanks must have driven over the body, because when Mr Hassan found it, one leg and both arms were missing, and the face, he said, had been ripped in two.

Mr Zughayer, who was 58, had been shot and wounded in the first Palestinian intifada. He could not walk, and had no work. Mr Hassan showed us the pitiful single room where his friend lived, the only furnishing a filthy mattress on the floor. Mr Zughayer used to wheel himself to the petrol station where Mr Hassan worked every day, because he was lonely. Mr Hassan did his washing; it was he who put the white flag on Mr Zughayer's wheel chair.

"After 4pm I pushed him up to the street as usual," said Mr Hassan. "Then I heard the tanks coming, there were four or five. I heard shooting, and I thought they were just firing warning shots to tell him to move out of the middle of the road." It was not until the next morning that Mr Hassan went to check what had happened. He found the flattened wheelchair in the road, and Mr Zughayer's mangled body some distance away, in the grass.

The Independent has more such accounts. There simply is not enough space to print them all. Mr Bouckaert, the Human Rights Watch researcher, who is preparing a report, said the sheer number of these accounts was convincing.

"We've carried out extensive interviews in the camp, and the testimonies of dozens of witnesses are entirely consistent with each other about the extent and the types of abuses that were carried out in the camp," said Mr Bouckaert, who has investigated human-rights abuses in a dozen war zones, including Rwanda, Kosovo and Chechnya. "Over and over again witnesses have been giving similar accounts of atrocities that were committed. Many of the people who were killed were young children or elderly people. Even in the cases of young men; in Palestinian society, relatives are quite forthcoming when young men are fighters. They take pride that their young men are so-called 'martyrs'. When Palestinian families claim their killed relatives were civilians we give a high degree of credibility to that."

The events at Jenin - which have passed almost unquestioned inside Israel - have created a crisis in Israel's relations with the outside world. Questions are now being asked increasingly in Europe over whether Ariel Sharon is, ultimately, fighting a "war on terror", or whether he is trying to inflict a defeat that will end all chance of a Palestinian state. These suspicions grew still stronger this week as pictures emerged of the damage inflicted by the Israeli army elsewhere in the West Bank during the operation: the soldiers deliberately trashed institutions of Palestinian statehood, such as the ministries of health and education.

To counter the international backlash, the Israeli government has launched an enormous public-relations drive to justify the operation in Jenin. Their efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 100 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.

No holds are barred in the Israeli PR counterattack. The army realising that many journalists will not bother, or are unable, to go to Jenin - has even made an Orwellian attempt to alter the hard, physical facts on the ground. It has announced that the published reports of the devastated area are exaggerated, declaring it to be a mere 100m square - about one- twentieth of its true area.

One spokesman, Major Rafi Lederman, a brigade chief of staff, told a press conference on Saturday that the Israeli armed forces did not fire missiles from its Cobra helicopters a claim dismissed by a Western military expert who has toured the wrecked camp with one word: "Bollocks." There were, said the major, "almost no innocent civilians" - also untrue.

The chief aim of the PR campaign has been to redirect the blame elsewhere. Israeli officials accuse UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for allowing a "terrorist infrastructure" to evolve in a camp under its administration without raising the alarm. UNWRA officials wearily point out that it does not administer the camp; it provides services, mainly schools and clinics.

The Israeli army has lashed out at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Palestinian Red Crescent, whose ambulances were barred from entering the camp for six days, from 9 to 15 April. It has accused them of refusing to allow the army to search their vehicles, and of smuggling out Palestinians posing as wounded. The ICRC has dismissed all these claims as nonsense, describing the ban - which violates the Geneva Convention - as "unacceptable".

The Israeli army says it bulldozed buildings after the battle ended, partly because they were heavily booby trapped but also because there was a danger of them collapsing on to its soldiers or Palestinian civilians. But after the army bulldozers withdrew, The Independent found many families, including children, living in badly damaged homes that were in severe danger of collapse.

The thrust of Israel's PR drive is to argue that the Palestinians blew up the neighbourhood, compelling the army to knock it down. It is true that there were a significant number of Palestinian booby traps around the camp, but how many is far from clear. Booby traps are a device typically used by a retreating force against an advancing one. Here, the Palestinian fighters had nowhere to go.

What is beyond dispute is that the misery of Jenin is not over. There are Palestinians still searching for missing people, although it is not clear whether they are in Israeli detention,
buried deep under the rubble, or in graves elsewhere.

Suspicions abound among the Palestinians that bodies have been removed by the Israeli army. They cite the Israeli army's differing statements about the death toll during the Jenin operation - first it said it thought that there were around 100 Palestinian dead; then it said hundreds of dead and wounded; and, finally, only dozens. More disturbingly, Israeli military sources originally said there was a plan to move bodies out of the camp and bury them in a "special cemetery". They now say that the plan was shelved after human-rights activists challenged it successfully at the Israeli supreme court.

Each day, as we interviewed the survivors, there were several explosions as people trod on unexploded bombs and rockets that littered the ruined camp. One hour after Fadl Musharqa, 42, had spoken with us about the death of his brother, he was rushed to the hospital, his foot shattered after he stepped on an explosive.

A man came up to us in the hospital holding out something in the palm of his hand. They were little, brown, fleshy stumps: the freshly severed toes of his 10-year-old son, who had stepped on some explosives. The boy lost both legs and an arm. The explosives that were left behind were both the Palestinians' crude pipe bombs and the Israelis' state-of-the-art explosives: the bombs and mines with which they blew open doors, the helicopter rockets they fired into civilian homes.

These are the facts that the Israeli government does not want the world to know. To them should be added the preliminary conclusion of Amnesty International, which has found evidence of severe abuses of human rights - including extra-judicial executions and has called for a war crimes inquiry.

At the time of writing, Israel has withdrawn its co-operation from a fact-finding mission dispatched by the UN Security Council to find out what happened in Jenin. This is, given what we now know about the crimes committed there, hardly surprising.

(c) Independent