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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Displaced reality - impressions from a visit to the
Jenin Refugee Camp by an Indymedia-Israel team </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>By Yulie Khromchenko, Indymedia-Israel First
published May 16 </FONT></DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV><BR>Translated by Natalie Rothman </DIV>
<DIV><BR>The whole article is at: <A
href="http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/28056.html">http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/28056.html</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>"When they came in they blasted the door open.
Three hundred soldiers in my house, and they put us, twelve people, in one room.
They brought a dog and took a man with them to serve as a human shield to walk
between the houses. Then they took me. I won't forget this. It was a Bedouin
soldier, named Haitham. I will recognize him among a hundred soldiers. He
grabbed me by the right hand and made me walk in front of him so that they would
shoot me instead of him. I walked with him to four houses like that. And in the
end they bombed my house from the air. Without warning. I was at home then, and
flew outside. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>The soldiers took 100 dinars from my brother, I
didn't believe they would take money like that, and they also took the camera I
brought from Saudi Arabia. From all the houses they took cameras, money, jewels,
computers, put them in the tanks…" </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Before we entered the Jenin Refugee Camp we had
been told by Farhan, a resident of Jallame, a village which has recently become
a journalists' and humanitarian aid teams' launching point on their way to the
camp: "You will not be able to perceive what you'll see." He then made a general
gesture with his hand. As someone who was raised on the fetishization of
Holocaust imagery, a scary excess of action movies and close-up shots of victims
of terrorist attacks on TV, I immediately tried to fit in my mind one of these,
or a combination of them all, to what we would soon be seeing. But Farhan was
right. After a day of walking in the sun in the dust-stricken streets of the
Camp, and many conversations with men and women, the mind still refuses to
concede that it is faced by something never seen before, and that it cannot
really situate it. Something eerie and troubling, like a blind spot in the eye,
like a scratch on a camera lens. As if part of the worldview has suddenly been
taken away, blurred and erased, and the mind keeps insisting, trying to situate
the missing object in its right place. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>In Jenin reality is partial. As if together with
the Camp's homes the D-9's of the Israeli army have also flattened one of its
dimensions. The hustle and bustle of life in the Camp, the running children, the
vocal conversations, the cars and trucks, all this semblance of business as
usual only makes it harder to perceive what is going on. For after walking up
the street for a few minutes, a street which is actually a dusty gravel road, a
strange panoramic view opens up: the houses framing the street are suddenly
gone, and instead, at the center, there is wilderness. The eye refuses to
perceive the nothingness, and instead searches desperately for something,
anything - the remainder of a roof, a shred of wall, pieces of a blanket, a
table's leg. Few identifiable shapes poke out of this enormous mound, which was
once hundreds of two- and three-story buildings. Most of them were ground and
covered by layers of thin, yellow dust. The weeks that have elapsed since the
fighting ended have turned this moon-like landscape to a particularly distraught
part of life in the Camp. Cars have paved a road on it, people cross it as a
shortcut to their destination. But these neither reduce its size nor the
inability to perceive it. As if the houses that used to stand there still exist
in some dimension, and will not accept their own non-existence. As if the
concept of nothingness, the philosophical absence, has found its physical
materialization in the crazy, horrifying reality of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>On Saturday morning, May 11, a group of independent
Israeli journalists reached Jallame, a village in area C. At the village exit,
next to a big truck, were lying in rows, piled up, boxes of aid supplies -
beans, lentils, flour, oil, with the Red Cross symbol on them, on their way to
the Refugee Camp....</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>