WASHINGTON, 3 September 2004 — On our recent visit to the West Bank, a chance luncheon encounter with a Palestinian engineer, Ahmad Khalil, who is working with the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent Society, led to an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. He offered to arrange UN vehicles and escorts to show us the UAE’s major reconstruction project in Jenin. We’d never heard of this effort and desperately wanted to see Jenin.
Once we were allowed out of Ramallah, we drove quickly and effortlessly along super highways built for Israeli use only. Nearly all the homes, fields, orchards and greenhouses we passed were now in settlers’ hands-and it didn’t look like they had any plans to leave.
Massive Abrams tanks and hot, jumpy Israeli soldiers guarded the entrance to Jenin, nicknamed Palestine’s Ground Zero by its residents.
In April of 2002 Israeli forces attacked Jenin (population 75,000) and its refugee camp (14,000), after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in one day by a combination of suicide bombs, snipers and booby traps. After encircling the city, the IDF fired artillery from tanks and helicopter gun ships, then sent in tanks, sharpshooters and soldiers. Because
Jenin’s defenders put up a brave resistance, Israeli vengeance was brutal.
Israeli snipers killed some residents, and used others as human shields. Snipers shot Fadwa Al-Jamal, a nurse, and left her sister permanently disabled. Finally, gigantic armored bulldozers entered Jenin, destroying roads, sewers, water pipes, electric and telephone lines, and hundreds of homes in the heart of the refugee camp. Some residents were buried alive.
For two weeks Israel sealed Jenin off from the outside world, refusing entry to ambulances, journalists, and a UN fact-finding mission. Residents dug frantically through the rubble of smashed buildings to find friends and family members. If they had no shovels they used their bare hands to move lumps of masonry. Although Israel prevented the world from helping Jenin two years ago, today, thanks to a generous $27 million gift from the UAE’s Sheikh Zayed and funds from Britain’s Department for International Development, ground zero is beginning to return to normal.
Rebuilding Jenin has come at a high price, according to project manager Paul Wolstenholme, who led our tour.
From 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Nov. 22, 2002, Israeli snipers attacked the UN compound in Jenin, trapping 28 staff members, including Wolstenholme and Iain Hook, both British ex-military men who had worked together in Bosnia. Wolstenholme described how Hook was shot. The IDF then prevented an ambulance from getting to the compound. By the time the vehicle had managed to sneak in the back way, past the soldiers, Hook had lost too much blood to survive.
An Israeli military enquiry found that, from 35 yards away, the IDF sniper thought the ginger-haired, 6-foot-2 Hook was a militant, his cell phone a pistol or a grenade. There has been no judicial enquiry into Hook’s killing. Another time, Wolstenholme told us, the IDF handcuffed and blindfolded him, invaded his offices and downloaded files from his computer.
“I refused to be bullied out of here,” Wolstenholme said, explaining that he joined this project to improve the quality of life in Jenin. He and his exasperated staff also have tangled with Jenin residents vying for better locations or extras for their new homes.
Eight and a half acres of destruction has been transformed into neat one-story homes or four-storied apartments. Planners used standard municipal guidelines to lay out wider streets and restore utilities to the camp. They’ve rebuilt the school and health clinic, which the IDF used as a command post during the siege. Sheikh Zayed even purchased an extra three and a half acres on the outskirts of town in order to accommodate every family who lost a home.
In the end, the project will have built 435 apartments ($12 million), performed major repairs on 419 homes and 42 shops ($2.2 million), and minor repairs on 173 homes ($1 million). This is no phoenix rising out of the ashes. The miracle has come at a high cost, Wolstenholme said. Closures have wasted weeks, if not months, of construction time. Between May and December 2002, he told us, 51 percent of available work time was lost due to Israeli incursions. Now, under a new Israeli brigade commander, things have improved.
Instead of heavy military incursions, with tanks swerving off the roads to smash into garbage cans and telephone boxes, “the new guy sends in snatch teams,” Wolstenholme said, “so there is no mass collateral damage” to his project. Getting materials through erratic checkpoints is still a challenge, however. Wolstenholme’s staff needs special permission to come and go, even for doctor’s appointments. As is the case everywhere in Israeli-occupied Palestine, permits are granted on a whim.
Every Palestinian UN staff member had a story, and we heard some of them as we dined at a wonderful Jenin restaurant. Asma Ghanem, a New Yorker who returned to help Palestinians at Ground Zero recover, translates and provided links with the community and the press. “It’s good to help your homeland,” she told us.
Architect Hidaya Najmi described her experiences during Israel’s siege of Jenin. The top floor of her apartment house was taken over by Israeli snipers, she said. Her then 6-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter spent 8 days and nights sharing food, water and constant fear with 25 neighbors. Najmi’s daughter got diarrhea and almost died.
“Twelve kids in my building, including a 15-day-old baby, survived the siege,” Najmi told us, “but just barely.”
“They used us as human shields,” she added, “and targeted the camp from the roof of my building.” Anyone who returned fire, of course, risked killing Najmi, her family, and neighbors.
The UAE project has been accomplished with remarkable speed, and virtually no publicity. Sheikh Zayed promised to rebuild Jenin, and he did. And others intend to follow his example: When Israel finally leaves Rafah, Saudi Arabia plans a similar rebuilding project using many of the same seasoned staff. Israel has demolished 1,500 homes in Rafah, displacing 15,000 people. During the second intifada alone, Israel has demolished more than 4,500 Palestinian homes.
We couldn’t help but ask: What’s to stop Israel from demolishing these new homes, and with that, Jenin’s hopes for its children? Not a thing, we were told — unless the world pressures Israel to keep its hands off towns like Jenin and withdraw from the occupied territories.
— Michael Keating is the photographer for Vietnam Veterans of America and does editorial work for The VVA Veteran, a bimonthly tabloid publication. He accompanied a delegation of diplomats to the West Bank and shot more than a thousand photographs. Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
