Jenin has a long legacy as a stronghold of Palestinian armed struggle

As Israeli forces searched for wanted men, weapons and explosives at the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin this week after using aerial drones to blow up what they described as terrorist hubs there, the city undermined its reputation as a center of militant resistance. honor. in the occupied West Bank.

For many Israelis, the city and its environs are a feared breeding ground for terrorism that has claimed many lives over the years. During the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, the Jenin refugee camp was a major exporter of suicide bombers to Israeli cities. Israeli officials say more than 50 shooting attacks have been carried out against Israelis from the Jenin area this year and 19 militants have taken refuge in the camp after carrying out attacks since last fall.

For many Palestinians, Jenin, in the hilly northern reaches of the West Bank, is a heroic symbol of resilience and resistance to Israeli rule and the rule of others who came before it. That reputation was sealed in 2002, at the height of the second intifada, when the camp was the scene of a fierce ten-day battle in which 52 Palestinians, about half of whom the United Nations said could be civilians, and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed. killed.

Yasir Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, coined a new name for the camp that year, “Jeningrad,” in comparison to the World War II battle of Stalingrad.

Since Monday, hundreds of Israeli commandos have taken part in the largest military raid in many years in the area. ransacking the crowded camp and killing at least 12 people. The army says it has discovered laboratories for making explosives and caches of weapons and explosives hidden in buildings, under the narrow roads and even in pits under a mosque.

Israeli leaders indicated on Tuesday evening that the raid was in its final stages and that Israeli commandos would likely withdraw from Jenin within hours. But given the history, analysts say it can’t be long before they’re back.

“Jenin is revered for giving the Palestinian collective memory many examples of not only resistance, but also of popular support and solidarity,” said Nour Odeh, a Palestinian columnist and political analyst based in Ramallah. “It is not a wealthy or industrial city,” she added, but a place with “a sense of common destiny and unity” where normally competing armed factions of a deeply divided Palestinian society and polity fight as one battle.

Jenin was the northernmost of 19 West Bank sites originally established to house some of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in what is now Israel in the late 1940s – when the State of Israel was established and its Arab neighbors waged a failed war to crush it – and have never been allowed to return. The sites are still referred to as camps but have become built-up towns or neighborhoods, albeit with generally substandard conditions.

In the Jenin camp, as many as 17,000 residents are crammed into an area less than half a square mile, adjacent to the town of Jenin with about 40,000 people and only three miles from the border between Israel and the West Bank. So says the United Nations the camp is not only plagued by violence, but also has “one of the highest rates of unemployment and poverty” in the West Bank. In a year of escalating violence in the area, Israel has made regular raids in Jenin to arrest Palestinians suspected of planning or carrying out attacks against Israelis. Many have been killed after prolonged firefights between troops and armed militants.

Jenin has become a bastion in the West Bank of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls the Palestinian enclave on the coast of Gaza, and of Islamic Jihad. Newer, unaffiliated militias have emerged, comprising a new generation of gunmen, some born after the end of the second Intifada in 2005, who act on their own initiative and are not accountable to the established organisations.

Of the Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the camp since early Monday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, at least five have been claimed by militant groups as combatants, including a 16-year-old boy. Israel says all the dead so far were combatants, although the preferences of the other six remained unclear.

Israel’s right-wing government has vowed to crack down on Palestinian violence, while the Palestinian Authority, generally weak and unpopular, has all but given up monitoring the hotbeds of militants in the northern West Bank. signaling loss of control and add to the atmosphere of lawlessness.

“Jenin is actually a rural, rural town,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and co-author of the book “Intifada” about the first Palestinian uprising from 1987 to 1993, in which he the city as ‘a kind of backwater’. It is off the beaten track for most Palestinians, and far from Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, the body established in the 1990s that exercises limited self-government over parts of the West Bank.

Years of neglect by the Palestinian Authority made Jenin an easy recruiting ground for the authority’s rivals in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Mr Yaari said, adding that those groups have recently flooded the area with weapons and money from their Iranian backers.

At least 28 suicide bombers departed from the Jenin camp during the second Intifada, according to Israeli estimates.

Palestinian officials attempted to dismiss the 2002 Israeli attack, part of a larger West Bank offensive, as a “massacre” with hundreds of Palestinian fatalities in the camp, a claim the United Nations investigated and rejected. But the legacy lingered.

Even before Israel existed as a state, Jenin became known as a center of rebellion in the late 1930s, during the Arab revolt against British rule and against Jewish immigration to Palestine. A British official was killed in his office in Jenin and in a retaliatory attack, British troops blew up a quarter of the city.

After the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948-49, the West Bank came under Jordanian control. Subsequently, Israel captured it in the 1967 war and Jordan later relinquished its claim to the territory. In the mid-1990s, the Palestinian Authority nominally took over Jenin and other parts of the West Bank.

Hoping to reduce friction in the area and signal progress toward a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel dismantled four Jewish settlements around Jenin in 2005, the same year it withdrew from the Gaza Strip. Jenin and the northern West Bank were subsequently seen by Israeli, Palestinian and international authorities as a sort of pilot program for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territory, and by some even as a potential prototype for a future Palestinian state. That model has since collapsed.

Israelis would routinely cross the border into Jenin for shopping, car repairs and dental care, but that has become more dangerous. Israel has restricted border crossings for Palestinians, so fewer of them are entering Israel to work every day, according to the United Nations.

Israel has stepped up construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, a major point of friction. Palestinian gunmen often fire at Israeli communities on the other side of the line.

And the proximity to the border has a different meaning for the Palestinian refugees in the Jenin camp, said Ms. Odeh, the political analyst in Ramallah.

“The refugees there can literally look out the window and see where their fathers and grandparents have been driven from,” she said.