AMMAN, 16 April 2004 — On April 3, the second anniversary of the Israeli Army assault on Jenin in the West Bank, hundreds of Palestinian refugees congregated in the camp’s flattened square. Masked armed men marched into the center of the camp as flag-waving residents cheered them on.

The scene was not too alien to Jenin, nor to anywhere else in the occupied Palestinian territories for that matter. But this occasion is too special and painfully so. It was exactly there, in Alsaha, the camp’s square that this crowded and resilient place stood in ruins just two years ago. More than 800 homes were destroyed here when thousands of Israeli soldiers launched a 12-day assault on Jenin to “uproot militants” and to “destroy the infrastructure of terror”.

Under such pretexts, scores of people perished, while mounds of rubble and human remains desecrated the world’s conscience for two years. No one is yet to stand up for Jenin. However, the camp seems to have risen from its ashes. Hearing the chants, reading the graffiti and watching the fighters march, makes one realize that the camp is once again standing up for itself. It is no coincidence that some of those who constitute Jenin’s new breed of “militants”, who now promise blood for blood, are in fact the brothers, sons and daughters of those who were killed by the Israeli Army in the last few years. In Jenin, there seems to be more of them, and many more are likely to follow suit.

The Arabic word for revenge, or “intiqam”, is too common a term. Israel still refuses to see its Jenin “experiment” an utter failure. Despite its own heavy losses in the refugee camp of 23 dead soldiers, it persistently utilizes the same substandard tactics against the Palestinian intifada throughout the occupied territories, and, imprudently enough, against Jenin itself. No military solution seems to work. Bewilderingly, Israel marketed its disastrous invasion of Jenin — recognized by most Arabs and Palestinians as a massacre and a war crime by various rights group — as a victory. While aid workers recovered dead Palestinians, relying on the stench of decomposed bodies, Israeli officials touted about their success in wiping out terror cells and annihilating terrorists.

Most world governments, including European, rejected the Israeli justification of the assault and offered no congratulations for the bloody “victory”, except of course, the US government. President Bush led the chorus of apologists who argued that, “Israel has the right to defend itself”. Sen. Joseph Lieberman equated Israel’s thrust into the West Bank to his government’s declared war on terror. But the extent of that alliance hardly stopped at verbal validations by the US of Israel’s violence. Washington was so impressed that it deployed members of the US Marine Corps to an area north of Israel; using a mock refugee camp, Israeli military officers trained their American counterparts on how to fight street battles like that in Jenin.

Further, American and Israeli newspapers reported a US Army acquirement of Israeli military bulldozers, D9 and D10 (originally supplied by the US but improvised for army purposes by Israel) that were used to topple Palestinian homes in Jenin with a few strokes.

The US Army hoped to adopt similar methods to that used by the Israeli Army in its foreseen war in Iraq. Much of these tactics have already been used in Iraq. Indeed, the Iraqi town of Fallujah, near Baghdad, is now a new lab for the Israeli experiment.

The scenario of Fallujah and Jenin appears identical. The US Army’s collective punishment of the residents of Fallujah, the nature of the siege imposed on the town, the overwhelming use of firepower against civilians, the ceaseless Apaches strikes, the targeting of ambulances trying to evacuate the wounded, the blocking of journalists and more, were all tactics exploited by Israeli forces in Jenin. This has indeed been the collaboration between the two countries’ militaries that the media warily alluded to.

As of today, the number of Iraqis killed in Fallujah exceeds 600, according to hospital accounts: 150 Iraqis — mostly civilians— for each American bodyguard brutally killed in the town by a small mob of Iraqis a few days before the assault.

The fact that most Iraqis were unified in condemning the killing of the four Americans bore no regard. Nonetheless, the military assault was meant to free the residents of Fallujah from the menacing militias, US officials kept on parroting, even though most media reports indicated that the resistance in the ravaged town consists mostly of the town’s people; No foreign fighters, no remnants of the former regime with a master plan of hindering the reconstruction of Iraq. Just ordinary folks fighting a war that is anything but ordinary.

The US Army’s use of Israeli tactics in its occupation of Iraq becomes more evident by the day, but what the US government fails to realize is that imitating a failed policy shall give rise to nothing but more failure. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem was never popular among Palestinians, but whoever said that winning the Palestinians’ “hearts and minds” was a declared Israeli objective? Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, for one, caters solely to the right-wing element of the Israeli society. Invading Jenin, or razing the refugee camp altogether was not likely to taint his reputation. In fact, it helped him.

But the US war and occupation of Iraq was supposed to be different, at least this is what the US government promised its people and the Iraqis as well. “A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region,” President Bush announced in a fiery speech before a sympathetic audience of the American Enterprise Institute in March, 2003. Bush’s “victory” in Iraq has inspired him to envisage a different future for the region as a whole. One leap from Baghdad to an initiative that will encompasses the “Greater Middle East”. This is what he is expecting to declare in a G-8 summit in Europe in early June.

But Jenin-style carnage in Fallujah can hardly serve his vision. Bush’s policy advisors must have missed the news reports of Jenin’s commemoration of its carnage. Otherwise, they would’ve realized that even flattening entire neighborhoods with its people shall not “uproot terror”, instead, it will augment hatred, calls for revenge and the willingness to die a martyr.

The US Army, with all of its might humbled itself to learn a few Israeli tricks in Jenin. It should be kind enough to re-examine what it learned two years later: Jenin has once again awakened and there are more of those willing to carry arms and battle Israeli soldiers. And if Fallujah is in fact the embodiment of the “power of freedom to transform” that Bush has envisioned for Iraq and now for the “Greater Middle East”, then may God help us all.

— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist.