The Arab disappointment at the UN report on the April killings in the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp is extremely deep. Here is a report that would have been different had the United Nations been able to force Israel to cooperate with the team it had got together to investigate the killings immediately after they occurred. Israel refused to cooperate then, and, as so many times in the past, it has been rewarded for its obduracy and contempt with a certificate of good conduct by the same organization. Israelis said then that the report would be against them. They were right. They were also right in assuming that they would be able to get, at the right time, a report that would exonerate them.
There are a number of issues here that demand closer attention. The report covers the events surrounding a pitched battle between the Palestinians defending their camp and the Israeli Army trying to occupy it between April 2 and 12. When Palestinian sources claimed that a massacre had taken place, the Israelis maintained an effective lock down on the whole Jenin area. Little effort seems to have been made by the UN to investigate Palestinian claims that once the Israelis realized that they had the makings of an international public relations disaster on their hands, the military sought to clean up and conceal as much evidence as possible of their barbarity, before outside eyes were permitted to visit the scene of the crime.
Given that much of the Jenin camp became a free fire zone in which artillery, attack helicopters, mortars and tank rounds were deployed to blast large areas to smithereens, the number of Palestinian dead given by the UN seems suspiciously low. However, it has to be said that the Palestinians may not have helped their own cause. It ought to have been possible to produce a relatively accurate list of the names of the 500 Palestinians they believed had been massacred. Such a definitive list has not yet been forthcoming. Maybe, in the emotion and fury of the early hours of the incursion, an inaccurate figure was given. If that was the case, the Palestinian authorities should have issued a revised figure the minute they realized the error. However, no such revision emerged.
Unfortunately, the UN repudiation of the idea that 500 people were massacred in Jenin effectively conceals the fact that there was terrible bloodletting by the Israeli military. The dictionary gives no specific number of dead that is required to constitute a massacre. The mathematics of such murder merely increases the horror and revulsion.
Something has clearly gone wrong with the Jenin investigation. However, in rejecting the UN’s findings, the Palestinian Authority should be careful to maintain its relations with the organization as a whole. Nothing would please Israel’s hawks more than a seriously damaging row between the UN and the Palestinians. It would be tragically ironic if a report that the Sharon regime once announced that it would reject outright emerged as another potent weapon with which to harm the Palestinians.
The Israelis can afford to ignore the UN and its views, thanks to the American veto. The Palestinians cannot. They need to keep the UN on side.
