arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Read in "DEIR YASSIN REMEMBERED"

Between Jenin and Deir Yassin

By Meron Benvenisti




It has been exactly 54 years since the Deir Yassin massacre and now the Jenin disaster has been added to the tragedy-laden Palestinian calender, with many signs that Jenin will join Deir Yassin as an edifice of the Palestinian national ethos. Most of the Palestinian calendar is made up of national disasters and catastrophes - that, after all, has been the fate of this battered people - but there's nothing special in that. Many other nations use disaster more efficiently than victory to create a flag around which to rally their people. But it seems the Jenin disaster has an extraordinary power - even when compared to Sabra and Chatila, Karameh, or the events on the Temple Mount in 1991 - that puts Jenin almost on the same pedestal as Deir Yassin, the tragic symbol of the 1948 Palestinian disaster called the Nakba.

Seemingly, there is no comparison between a primitive massacre, conducted by Jewish gangs against defenseless Arab villagers, and the full-scale military operation that, in the course of fighting with guerrilla forces, wreaked destruction and killed innocent civilians. But the "objective facts" - which will forever remain controversial - are not responsible for building a national myth. Rather, it is the context in which partial facts and the sequence in which cause and effect are selectively placed that makes Deir Yassin and Jenin comparable; in both cases, the Palestinians identify the intent was to destroy the collective infrastructure of the Palestinian people.

As horrifying as the details may be, it is not the events in Jenin that matter, but rather the significance and the essence of what the Palestinians believe to be the true intentions of the Israelis - beyond rational military goals of control, deterence, and prevention: To smash Palestinian society, forcing it to revert to its condition of two generations ago, after Deir Yassin. The piles of rubble in the Jenin refugee camp will become a memorial that will also commemorate the 1,000-year-old buildings of Nablus that were destroyed, the demolished streets of Bethlehem and the computers and data banks painstakingly accumulated in Ramallah, that were ruined by the "fighters against the terrorist infrastructure." Now, after the infrastructure has been smashed, Palestinians can work at rebuilding their private and collective lives, but they will have to remember that the man with the stick can always, with one blow, destroy the entire anthill.

The comparison between Deir Yassin and Jenin is not limited to Palestinians. Many Israelis won't object to the comparison because they also perceive the events of April 2002 in direct connection to April 1948 and would be happy if the Palestinians repeated their panicked reaction to Deir Yassin by running away after Jenin. And many Israelis would agree that no distinction can be made between the terrorist infrastructure and the collective infrastructure of the Palestinian people because, in their view, the Palestinian collective, represented by its elected institutions, is a terrorist organization. Therefore, the destruction of its data banks serves the purpose of the war against terror.

Erasing the 54 years between Deir Yassin and Jenin strengthens the fear that the rational, optimistic model, which depicted the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a national-ethnic dispute soluble through a "two states for two peoples" arrangement, was never possible, or that powerful forces managed to destroy it. The basic enmity between a settler society and an indigenous society apparently does not enable mutual recognition of equal rights, so separation based on equality is apparently not possible.

The bi-ethnic entity that exists over all Mandatory Palestine has been consolidated as a result of the events of April 2002, and the fiction of Oslo's indirect occupation has faded away with the occupation of the Palestinian Authority's territories and the destruction of its institutions. The reality of this de facto binationalism leaves no choice but to think in terms of a unitarian geopolitical unit and to focus on the campaign to impose humanitarian norms that will not allow a third Deir Yassin.