Jenin, Jenin…

My route through the checkpoint to Jenin was surprisingly quick – much faster than the previous occasion, and punctuated only by the sarcastic “if you DO want to go to Jenin…” from the security guard as I tried to find my way out of the terminal. I had reached the terminal by bus, sitting next to Israeli soldiers returning to duty at the base next to Jenin – from brushing shoulders in the morning, we’re now divided by a rather impermeable electronic fence and security barrier, rolls of razor wire, and 7-metre walls (in the vicinity of their base)…

Today I definitely have seen the fruits of the Arabic study – it was a 5% English, 95% Arabic day, whether talking the students at the academic organization where my host father in Ar’ara (Israel) volunteers, or guys in the street near where I am staying, or others. I finally understood the difference between the camp and the city in Jenin, visiting with some of the most pro-Fatah people I’ve ever spoken to – walls plastered with posters of Abu Amr and Abu Mazen (Arafat and Abbas). Jenin is quiet. The municipality is technically Hamas, though people I spoke to joked that people here are just sound businessmen; supporting Hamas in name brought campaign money (from Iran, etc), and the Hamas people now were Fatah stalwarts in the past. There are still posters of young men holding guns (the ‘martyrs’) in a few places, but it seems they remain there more out of sympathy to their families than any support for armed action. One centre for Fatah sympathizers – men in their 40s who told stories of being in prison as a result of actions during the first Intifada, one 5 years, another 3 years, another 6 years, etc – is a garage which wouldn’t look out of place in small-time America, without the bullet-holes littering walls from the second Intifada. I ask the owner what exactly happened, and get a shrugging of shoulders; he was in prison for the second Intifada as well.

I returned with one of them to his home on the edge of the camp in Jenin for the evening, hearing stories from 2002 and the siege on the camp. … many disconnected thoughts, from the Mudaaris Sheaabia “People’s schools” that were run in homes in each neighbourhood for the duration of the curfews and conflict in camps… to the bullet holes in the home next door… to the youngest daughter of Faraaz, Diana, named after the Princess of Wales. She was definitely killed by the Royal Family, he assured me.

I woke early to the sounds and smells of the vegetable market below my window; my the time my alarm went off I was already with friends in a coffee shop. A student who thought I looked out of place in an internet café insisted on being my tour guide for the later part of the morning, and we wandered through Jenin Mall – a surprisingly mall-like place, complete with a risqué lingerie store (presumably for dressing up for one’s husband).

Returning to the hostel in the afternoon, I had a somewhat unnerving experience as I tried to turn on the TV in the communal room, when a man in his late 30s (the son of the hostel owner) with mud on his face resembling a facial mask walked in, helped me turn it on, before smiling and showing me his arm. It took a moment for me to make out the large swastika branded there. Hitler, he said, he loves Hitler. He came back half and hour later, and I asked him when he got the brand. 19 years ago, he said – aged 15 in 1990, during the first Intifada. I asked why he said he likes Hitler. He lifted up his shirt, showing horrifying, disfiguring burn scars swathing the lower half of his chest. When the army came in during protests, he explained, soldiers pushed him onto burning car tyres; he spent the next six months in hospital in Nablus. He loves Hitler because he killed Jews, he said.