LOOKING AROUND: Jenin in ruins
By Barbara Sofer
April, 25 2002
The so-called massacre in Jenin is a myth, but images of the rubble and corpses which have assailed us all week cause strong reactions in us, as Israelis and Jews.
Our first response is understandably defensive, with a UN team poised to judge our morality as a nation. The dismissive attitude toward both our right to defend ourselves and to our extreme efforts to do so with the lowest possible civilian cost exasperates us.
We're disgusted by the presumption of those who hailed the adeptness of American bombing of Afghanistan to criticize us for fighting terrorism house-to-house. Where were UN inspectors and European soccer associations in Kandahar to determine the worthiness of the US to be part of the world community or to play ball with exalted competitors?
I found myself flipping back to the celebrated photo essay "Kandahar in Ruins," by Gilles Peress, which ran last January in the New Yorker. Kandahar, a town on the plains of southern Afghanistan and headquarters of Taliban head Mullah Omar, was an important war target. The US began bombing the city on October 7. Kandahar fell two months later.
"Kandahar in Ruins" features four photos. The first is the house "which Osama bin Laden once used" reduced to stones, with somber men taking stock. The second is the wall of a prison where several hundred Northern Alliance and al-Qaida members were reportedly held. Prisoners drew airplanes decorated with swastikas, and left graffiti in Farsi and Arabic.
The third shows men coming through a mural-decorated wall of what was Omar's compound. The last photo showed only the bucolic grounds of Mirais Hospital in Kandahar, a single man bowing in prayer. Says the photo caption: "Civilians injured in the American bombing shared space in the hospital with soldiers, including a group of Arab fighters who arrived with grenades strapped to their bodies and established a stand off with authorities."
No victims, no women, no body bags and no children crying outside wrecked houses populate the photos after two months of bombing.
Could the American operation really have been so sanitary?
One photo essay doesn't make a theory, but the New Yorker is a serious magazine, and Peress one of the world's top photographers.
I WAS sufficiently intrigued by the contrast between those bloodless photos and the ones we've been seeing from Jenin to seek out his international cellular phone number. Behold! French born, American-based Peress was in Jerusalem.
The bombing of Kandahar and the fighting in Jenin were incomparable, he said. Circumstances, architecture and fighting were all different. For all its publicity, Kandahar was just a crossroads, not a crowded refuge camp. The US bombing had been amazingly precise.
He was in New York City when the Muslim suicide bombers downed the Twin Towers. Hence he was most interested in Omar's headquarters, for a sense of personal closure. His choice of capturing only the peaceful hospital exterior was practical; the wards were simply too dangerous for a camera-toting civilian.
His own photo essay here wasn't yet complete. He'd taken photos of Netanya, too. Peress warned me against what he called "the globalization of pain." Each war zone was different. In the case of Jenin, it was too early to know if this was or wasn't a scene of "war crimes."
The mention of "war crimes" made me even more defensive, of course. Only after hanging up did I realize that the defensiveness - our need to protest the reaction of our critics - is a distraction from our own feelings about Jenin. The truth is that we're not indifferent to the photos either, not because we felt guilty for rooting out terrorists there or that we doubted the behavior of our forces in the small section of the city they entered. Even while mourning our own dead, we wince at the scenes of death and homelessness. We are taught never to rejoice over the death of our enemies, be they ancient or modern.
Instead of investing in the improvement of daily life, the Palestinian Authority has fostered violence and terror and taught hate, and shows no signs of changing.
Looking at the pictures of Jenin, a friend shook her head and suggested we knock down the whole thing and build decent housing. And this was from a mother whose own son fought in that dismal town.
How interesting that - notwithstanding what they say to CNN - Palestinian parents weren't too frightened of Israeli soldiers to approach military doctors with requests that they examine their children.
We're not responsible for the poverty and the terrorism, but the aerial views showing the crowdedness, the everyday poverty and destitution of the UN-maintained refuge camps even without the destruction, depressingly underscore just how far the reality of the region is from a once-vaunted dream of the land of peace and plenty known as the New Middle East.
We've been so busy justifying our actions that we have yet to confront the depressing reality of being back at war again, tanks rolling, soldiers avoiding ambushes, shoving aside baby cots to reveal booby-trapped cellars, all because the Palestinian Authority refused peace.
We didn't want this war. Israelis know war too intimately to seek or glorify it. Hence, for 18 months - most of that time under the premiership of Ariel Sharon - a reluctant Israeli nation held back from fullscale attacks on Palestinian cities despite the goading terror, seeking every other alternative.
We berate ourselves for making deals with a partner who turned out to be demonic.
We shouldn't. Our bitter losses and the grim images of the innocent killed in the pursuit of our enemies remind us why we have tried so hard to avoid war and were willing to take risks to pursue peace. They explain why we still must explore every avenue of peace, even as our soldiers endanger themselves to hunt down terrorists who use their children as human shields and ours as targets for slaughter.
