To claim that the horrors we are witnessing today in Palestine are unlike any other the world has seen is a sad exaggeration. To our great dishonor, this earth has braved such sorrow that an eternity would not suffice to cleanse humanity of the burden of those sins and only God’s infinite mercy will save us. However, to every age there is a pain and I can only describe it as pain, for that is what we feel and see and that is what will remain after all traces of the crimes have been erased. This pain is Jenin, this sorrow in our heart that will haunt us till our death and carve itself into the pages of our history books.
It is not that my people, the Muslims, have been spared in this modern age the terrible agonies of war. No, I grew up listening to the stories of Arab defeats by the Israelis and the loss of our lands. At every Arab school there were always the nominal Palestinians, reminding us of their plight, telling us of the homes they left behind and the memories they treasured. We would sit as children dreaming of a lost land that one day we could, as Arabs, return to, a free and beautiful land as we saw it in our mind’s eye.
No, we are not innocent of this world’s ugly face. We know it very well. It is a daily presence in these parts of the world. We saw it rear its horrible head in Afghanistan when the Soviet Army invaded it, raped its people and left it a desolate land, fit only for the perverse and the desperate. We have seen it also in Lebanon’s civil war, in the Iran-Iraq war, in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in Chechnya, finally in Afghanistan again as though we have been caught in a never-ending nightmare. Every time we think we have seen the ultimate horror that life can provide, we are shown something worse.
For two centuries our Muslim land has been the playground of every conqueror and tyrant. They fought us, pillaged our lands and destroyed them; grief and anger are no longer transitory emotions in us but a state of mind.
Then came Jenin, to break whatever small peace remained in our hearts, to sear us as we thought no other pain could. We foolishly believed we were immune to pain. I do not claim that the suffering of the people of Jenin is less than the suffering of others. What torments me is to see a people, dispossessed of their lands and condemned to live as perpetual wanderers there. Unrecognized by the world and unseen. Forced to live on the sufferance of nations and having no identity to claim for themselves. Other nations have lost and regained their land. Passed through highs and lows, had many designs for their future and even attempted to achieve them. While in this case, the people of Jenin worried for decades about how long they would be able to remain on this land, stolen from their ancestors and then given back to them on sufferance. All the bitterness they saw, all the humiliation they had to swallow was not enough for the enemy. Now, they had to pay for the greatest sin of all in the eyes of the Israelis: the sin of living, the sin of simply existing. They now are paying for reminding the Israelis that this was never their land.
I said before that our eyes had become accustomed to suffering and it is our fate neither to know the taste of our past glories nor to pride ourselves on hopes for the future. However, to every age there is a moment which defines it more than anything else and our defining moment is Jenin. It is a point at which even those most inured to pain feel their souls rage. And the irony is that it is a war where we have seen the smallest number of images of what is actually happening on the ground. In an era where the image is paramount, the Israelis have denied us the only expression left to us to participate in our people’s suffering. Yet this absence of imagery has affected us more than if we had been drowned in pictures. For a people hardened against the image, the word has once again become effective. The reports of the brave resistance fighters and journalists on the ground have fired us much more than any image. The obscenity of the cruelties committed by the Israeli Army and which we will never forget or forgive. We are a patient people and that has been our undoing. However, this latest war waged by the Israelis — and especially the genocide in Jenin — has exhausted our patience. The reports of mass graves, of the wounded being denied succor, of homes being raided and possessions being stolen, of women being raped and molested and children taken off to prison and tortured. All these reports from witnesses on the ground have added to an already explosive situation in the Arab world. I say to the Israelis and any who follow them down this path to hell that they must beware for we will never forgive nor forget. And if after a thousand years, we relate the history of the Crusades as though they had just occurred, do you really think we will forget what you have done to us and are still doing? We were a nation not without means but without a will but now, thanks to Israel, our will is awakened. If nothing else unites the Ummah, its sorrows will.
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(Reem Mohammed Al-Faisal is a Saudi photographer. She is based in Jeddah.)
