Jenin: Anniversary of a Battle

Today, March 29, 2005 marks the three year anniversary of the battle of Jenin. If there is one incident that summarizes the war in the Middle East, and the way the terror war is fought in the media, this is it. On this three year anniversary, we have received permission from Natan Sharansky to run the section of his indispensable book The Case for Democracy, in which he relates what happened in Jenin, how it was reported, and why this is crucial to understanding the war we face. -- The Editors Jenin: The Big Lie

Two years before the ICJ's decision on the fence, the moral confusion of the international community reached a nadir during the battle of Jenin.

On the evening of March 29, 2002, in the dining hall of the Park Hotel in Israel's coastal city of Netanya, scores of Israelis were celebrating the traditional Passover Seder with their families, recounting the Jews' exodus from ancient Egypt that marked their journey from slavery to freedom. A suicide bomber walked into the middle of the dining hall and blew himself up, killing 29 Israelis and wounding dozens more. The attack brought the Israeli death toll during that month to 130, by far the most lethal month of terror since the violence began.

The next day, I was called to an urgent government meeting that started at 9 p.m. and ended at 7 a.m. the following day. Members of Prime Minister Sharon's national unity government, then in power for little more than a year, agreed that a change of policy was needed. Instead of merely trying to use checkpoints and roadblocks to intercept suicide bombers heading toward our cities, we would have to enter the Palestinian-controlled population centers from where the bombers were being dispatched. We authorized Operation Defensive Shield, sending our forces into Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, and other cities and towns in the West Bank in order to destroy as much of the terrorist infrastructure as possible.

Jenin would be the most dangerous military operation of all. Fully 25 percent of the bombing and shooting attacks against Israel had been carried out by terrorists from Jenin. In the center of the city of 45,000 people is a refugee camp. More suicide bombers had been dispatched from this relatively small refugee camp in the previous two years than from any other place in the world. Even Palestinian Authority forces, who themselves were no strangers to terrorism, were afraid to enter the camp during the eight years in which it was under their control. The camp was considered a stronghold of Hamas, one of the world's most ruthless terrorist organizations. Our troops knew that a bomb could be hidden underneath any car and that a terrorist could be waiting behind any door. We also realized that just as the terrorists deliberately target civilians, they also intentionally use them as human shields. This exacted a heavy price on much of the Palestinian population who lived in fear of Israeli reprisals for terror attacks, because not even Israel's precision strikes were perfect. In the Jenin refugee camp, the terrorists had holed up in an area where nearly 1,000 Palestinian civilians were living.

Israel's government had to decide what action to take. There were many precedents of other countries conducting military operations in densely populated areas to which we could turn for guidance. Syria's regime, facing resistance from Muslim fundamentalists in 1982, leveled the town of Hama, killing 20,000 people. Russia, confronting a similar situation in Chechnya, flattened Grozny with heavy armaments and killed hundreds of civilians.

For Israel, such indiscriminate action was unacceptable. Still, recent history showed that democratic governments had gone to great lengths to minimize risk to their own soldiers, even if it meant greatly increasing the chances of civilians being harmed. For example, after Serbian forces expelled Kosovars in 1999, NATO pilots bombed Serbia's infrastructure while safely flying at very high altitudes, an operation that lowered the risk to themselves but resulted in over 500 Serbian civilian deaths. Only a few months before the operation in Jenin, American and British pilots in Afghanistan were doing much the same and achieved similar results at a high cost in civilian life.

In Jenin, Israel's government decided to pursue a course that placed much greater risks on Israel's soldiers but that greatly reduced the dangers to Palestinian civilians. We announced over loudspeakers our intention to clear out the terrorist infrastructure in the camp and warned everyone to leave. Then, instead of bombing from the air or using tanks or heavy artillery, our soldiers were sent on a harrowing mission. They painstakingly went from house to house, moving through a hornet's nest of booby traps, bombs, and armed terrorists. After thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed during one mission, we still refused to use our air force or heavy artillery. We pressed on, making tactical changes, such as using armored bulldozers to flatten houses that were being used by the terrorists for cover, that decreased the risks to our troops without increasing the dangers to innocent Palestinians.

But in an environment that lacked moral clarity, one of the finest examples in history of a democracy protecting human rights in wartime became infamous as a horrific assault on human rights. Relying on phony information produced by Palestinian sources and claiming that Israel had killed over 500 civilians,(1) leveled a hospital, deliberately shot children, and executed prisoners, almost all the foreign press harshly criticized the Israeli action. The vilification rang out across the world, but the British press was in a class all by itself. The Independent called the Israeli operation "a monstrous war crime."(2) A. N. Wilson, writing for the Evening Standard, called it a "massacre, and a cover-up of genocide."(3) The Guardian, not to be outdone, ran a lead editorial opining that "Jenin was every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man made, as the attack on New York on September 11."(4)

The truth was very different: At the end of the operation, fifty-two Palestinians lay dead, almost all of whom were armed.(5) On the Israeli side, twenty-three soldiers had been killed by Palestinian terrorists. This extremely high casualty ratio was a function of Israel's willingness to endanger the lives of its own soldiers in order to save the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinian civilians. Indeed, Israeli soldiers died to save innocent Palestinian lives.

Working its way through the Israeli court system today is a lawsuit against the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli government brought by some of the families of the soldiers who died in Jenin. The petitioners contend that the government's primary obligation should have been to defend its own troops, even at the cost of more Palestinian civilian casualties. Whether Israel, unlike every other country facing similar threats, should have imposed such risks on its own citizens in order to save innocent Palestinians is certainly a matter of legitimate debate. One thing, however, is certain: The operation in Jenin was an expression of an unprecedented commitment to the human rights of a foreign civilian population during wartime. It is actions like this that allow the noted legal expert Alan Dershowitz to state confidently that "no country in history ever complied with a higher standard of human rights."

To far too many people, such a statement may seem shocking. In the last few years, Israel has been portrayed, and therefore perceived, as a brutal occupying power that represses Palestinians. The fact that this perception, often fueled by graphic television images with little context, is not true does not make it less real to the people who hold it. Nor are the realities of checkpoints, searches, and closures pleasant ones. The suffering of Palestinians is real and therefore the sympathy for suffering is also real. But moral clarity demands more than sympathy. It demands an understanding of context, of cause and effect. It demands a sense of proportion. Only then will the painful choices that Israel makes, which are nonetheless moral choices, be understood.

[5] The casualty figures are from the U.N. investigative report into what happened at Jenin. In the U.N. report, the number of armed combatants was twenty-six. Israel’s own investigation concluded that only three of the casualties were unarmed.

I just saw this excellent documentary called The Road to Jenin which details the media complicity in this hoax.

..................

Directed and produced by Pierre Rehov -
Co-Produced by Michael Grynszpan
English, Arabic, Hebrew and French with English subtitles
52 minutes

(abstracts from a CAMERA review)

The Road to Jenin by French director Pierre Rehov, depicts a moral Israeli army fighting a just war against armed Palestinians in a hotbed of terrorism which spawned more than half the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. Among the terrorists from Jenin, for instance, was the killer who took 29 lives in the Passover bombing of the Park Hotel days before.

Israel initially took the dangerous step of sending infantry to fight house-to-house so as to minimize civilian casualties. After nearly two dozen of their own men were lost to ambushes, Palestinian snipers, and booby-trapped houses, Israel brought in bulldozers for use in a limited area, a step which led to the surrender of the Palestinian fighters. (No air attacks were involved.) Can these disparate accountsboth in terms of the facts of the specific incidents they describe, as well the bigger pictures they representbe reconciled ?

Among the most disputed and misrepresented facts about the fighting in Jenin was the number of Palestinians killed and the extent of the destruction. Initially, Palestinian officials claimed that hundreds were killed in the "Jenin massacre." For example, then Palestinian Authority Minister of Local Government Saeb Erekat stated on CNN April 10, one week into the eight day operation: "Im afraid to say that the number of Palestinian dead in the Israeli attacks have reached more than 500 now." (See CAMERA On Campus Fall 2002 for an in-depth review of PA misinformation.) Later, when international workers investigated the camp and found no evidence of a massacre, Palestinian officials drastically lowered the death toll to 56, a number consistent with what Israel had estimated (Washington Times, May 1).

Especially inflammatory was a charge by the director of the hospital in Jenin that Israeli tanks fired 11 missiles at the facility, destroying oxygen bottles, water tubes, sewage pipes, hospital wards, doctors rooms and an infirmary. "The whole of the west wing was destroyed," he testifies. "Fighter planes launched their missiles every three minutes." Yet, the only sign of any damage to the building is a piece of glass falling out of a window.

While the casual viewer may suspect that hospital manager Dr. Mustafa Abo Gali isnt being entirely forthright, the extent of his deception becomes apparent in Rehovs Road to Jenin, in which Abo Gali is also interviewed. In that film, the hospital director shows the alleged damage as a result of 11 shellsa tiny hole or scratch on the outside of a building. Moreover, Rehov provides aerial images of the hospital on the last day of the incursionsurrounding trees, the roof and floors are all intact.

Also, in Road to Jenin, Abo Gali claims that the Israeli army prevented all ambulances from reaching the hospital, insisting: "They didnt want people to get medical treatment." Again, the images show otherwise: Ambulances unload casualties by the hospital doors and IDF soldiers are seeing assisting children and the elderly to reach treatment. Dr. David Zangen, the armys chief medical officer in Jenin during the incursion, and Bakris leading critic, describes how the soldiers even treated Palestinian fighters, including members of Hamas. Finally, in Road, Abo Gali recounts that the 500 hospital occupants"wounded, sick, our team, mothers and children . . . we had no food left." Then Rehov cuts to a scene of an Israeli authorizing Abo Gali in person to receive anything hed like for the hospital, all except weapons.

According to Rehov, fabrication is not an anomaly in Palestinian allegations of Israeli atrocities in Jenin and elsewhere. As international journalists made their rounds in the Jenin wreckage, residents often staged moving photographs: An old woman, sitting in the rubble, is coached: "Look at the camera. Look sad. Put your hand on your face to look desperate."

Underscoring the Palestinian penchant for inventing "news," Rehov even manages to capture on film the manufacturing of a fictitious news story. On Jan. 25, 2003, he accompanies Palestinian journalist Ali Smoddi of the PA-controlled Jenin television station as he and his crew set out to interview a Palestinian man and his wife whose baby was just delivered by a doctor.

At the hospital, Smoddis crew does several "takes" of the fathers account of the birth, each with a different spin. In one version, the father claims that the ambulance they intended to meet was held up at a checkpoint for 15 minutes, and he was forced to deliver his infant son in the car, as the ambulance had not arrived. In another telling, the father says: "The soldiers took me down to the ambulance to check my identification and my wife gave birth in the ambulance and went to the hospital." In each account, Smoddi prompts the father and makes suggestions about the events. Smoddi then prompts the new mother: "The tank stops you while giving birth. Youre alone in the car, talk about your feelings."

Rehov also interviews Thaber Mardawi, an Islamic Jihad fighter in Israeli custody, who states: "I dont know why they [the Israel Defense Forces] sent the infantry [into Jenin]. They knew they would be killed. To see a soldier pass in front of me, Ive waited for this many years." He also discusses the kinds of explosives that the Jenin fighters used against the Israelis. (In contrast, Bakri includes only oblique references to armed Palestinians, which serves his agenda of portraying a U.S.-backed Israeli military force allegedly attacking an innocent population in a massacre worse than Vietnam.)

Road to Jenin includes other revealing testimony. Australian Christian humanitarian volunteer Dalry Jones, who had initially been duped by Palestinian propaganda about Israeli action in Jenin, recounts how Palestinians displayed photos of bodies, "gouged and pitted, torn. We were told this is from torture from the Israelis." Later, when she saw a Palestinian child blow up in front of her face, she realized that the ripped apart bodies were the result of human booby traps that the Palestinians used against the Israelis.

Rehovs clear purpose is to expose the inflammatory and defamatory falsehoods spread by a Arab propaganda. As such his film does not attempt to be an overview of the Israeli and Palestinian experience in Jenin or an exhaustive account of IDF conduct.

Nevertheless, the information that Rehov does provide is based on interviewees who use bona fide images and documents to substantiate their claims.

Critical Reviews:

"Rehov continues to make documentaries about the shocking reality he uncovers in the Middle East because no one else does"
(Joseph Farah - World Net Daily)

"Provocative films about the combat between Palestinian militants and Israeli army"
(Greg Myre - The New York Times)

"The most shocking moments of Rehov's films involve blatant Palestinian efforts to manipulate the media"
(Hanna Brown - Jerusalem Post)

"The information that Rehov does provide is based on interviewees who use bona fide images and documents to substantiate their claim"
(Tamar Stenhal - Camera)

"There is only one filmaker who has presented the truth in the matter of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and his nom de guerre is Pierre Rehov"
(Phyllis Chesler - Author of "The new antisemitism")

"In his documentaries, Pierre Rehov demonstrates how our version of the middle east conflict has been corrupted by the Arab use of reporters as propagandists"
(Jack Engelheard - Author of "Indecent Proposal")

"Seeing Pierre Rehov's documentary film 'The Silent Exodus' about the expulsion and flight of a million Sephardi Jews helped me gain a better understanding of the tragedy of a community that was integral and fundamental to Arab society."
(Magdi Allam - Il Corriere Della Serra)

http://www.pierrerehov.com/jenin.htm

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