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A
street fight called Jeningrad
By Paul
Belden
AMMAN - On March 27 last year, in the
coastal Israeli town of Netanya, a bomb exploded in the
Park Hotel as hundreds of people were sitting down to
their Passover seder. Twenty-eight people were
killed and 140 wounded in what turned into the
intifada's bloodiest single day in the bloodiest single
month for Israel, a month that saw 80 people killed in
total from 16 separate suicide bombing attacks.
The response of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, not unexpected, was not long in coming. Two days
later, the cabinet of the government of Israel issued a
communique announcing "a wide-ranging operational action
plan against Palestinian terror". It was the start of
what was to become known as Operation Defensive Shield,
whose goal, according to the communique, was to "defeat
the Palestinian terror infrastructure and to prevent the
recurrence of the multiple terrorist attacks which have
plagued Israel".
That same day, the Israeli
Defense Force (IDF) entered the Ramallah compound of the
Palestinian National Authority (PNA), where they seized
most of the structures and surrounded PNA chairman
Yasser Arafat in his headquarters building. The IDF
quickly followed up with heavy incursions into the
Palestinian cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya on April 1,
Bethlehem on April 2 and Jenin and Nablus on April 3. By
the end of the first week of April, the Israeli military
had occupied six of the largest cities in the West Bank,
along with their surrounding villages and camps.
But then the battle really began. It was fierce,
it was house-to-house and it was bloody. It lasted for
more than two weeks, and ended only with the starving
out of the last resisting Palestinian fighters from a
tiny northern West Bank refugee camp not more than a
kilometer square. It is a battle that is still known
today in Palestine as "Jeningrad". And there are
increasing signs that it is being played out again 500
kilometers to the east.
As US forces embark on
the urban warfare that some are already calling the
Battle of Baghdad, they have so far been largely
following the playbook written by the IDF in Operation
Defensive Shield. Martin van Creveld, a military expert
with close ties to the Israeli army who teaches at
Jerusalem's Hebrew University, recently told The
Guardian newspaper of London that he had met with US
officials at a briefing in North Carolina last
September.
"There were three key things," he was
quoted as saying. "How to clear streets house by house,
particularly using bulldozers. They're very useful in
this kind of war to break houses. How and when to use
helicopters to take out snipers. And when not to - and
I'd say Baghdad is one of those situations. And how to
avoid civilian casualties."
When the battle for
Jenin began, the camp held more than 3,000 families
containing close to 14,000 refugees, of whom nearly half
- 47 percent - were either under the age of 15 of over
55, according to figures compiled by the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the
Near East. Jenin camp is the second-largest refugee camp
in the West Bank, and about a square kilometer in
diameter. Most of the buildings are of two or three
stories, constructed of concrete and brick. The streets
are narrow, and the houses are all connected. There are
no yards, as such - adjacent houses are connected by
common walls.
As described by the government of
Israel in a report to the UN after the operation, "A
heavy battle took place in Jenin, during which IDF
soldiers were forced to fight among booby-trapped houses
and bomb fields throughout the camp, which were prepared
in advance as a booby-trapped battlefield."
Specifically, according to an IDF spokesman, Israeli
soldiers faced "more than a thousand explosive charges,
live explosive charges and some more sophisticated ones.
Hundreds of hand grenades [and] hundreds of gunmen." In
its own UN report, the Palestinian Authority
acknowledged that "a number of Palestinian fighters
resisted the Israeli military assault", but said that
they were "armed only with rifles and crude explosives".
The methods used by the IDF were to first
establish control of the camp by declaring it a "special
closed military area" and imposing round-the-clock
curfews for inhabitants and restrictions on the movement
of humanitarian and medical personnel, human rights
monitors and journalists. This was followed by various
incursions into the heart of the camp by helicopters and
ground forces in the first two days.
According
to Susy Mordechay, an Israeli human rights activist who
was present on the outskirts of the camp at the outset
of the battle, the IDF "followed a zig-zag course into
the center of the city. We called it 'the salami
method', because they would just keep cutting off one
chunk after another. But they were very careful; they
would never move more than 100 yards at a time. They
carried out this part of the operation very slowly."
But on April 9 - one year ago today - something
happened that the IDF had not expected. A booby-trapped
house in Jenin exploded, and 13 Israeli soldiers were
killed. After that, the tactics changed. The army
brought in armored bulldozers and began cutting a new
road into the heart of the city. This road ran from the
north of the camp directly into the central bazaar known
as the Hawashin district. They also began forcing
Palestinians to knock on doors and "walk point" during
house-to-house searches. Loudspeakers required occupants
to leave, and many houses were systematically
demolished.
Although there were reports that the
IDF also had compelled Palestinian civilians to stand in
the line of fire to protect IDF soldiers, the IDF has
denied the deliberate use of civilians as human shields.
Last year, Israel's state attorney's office informed the
High Court of Justice of Israel that "in light of the
various complaints received ... and so as to avoid all
doubt, the [IDF] has decided to immediately issue an
unequivocal order ... that forces in the field are
absolutely forbidden to use civilians as a means of
'living shields'."
It was here, in the Hawashin
district, that the heaviest fighting occurred, as well
as the heaviest physical destruction - destruction that
effectively turned the area into a "moonscape", in the
words of Mohammed Aghawani, a coordinator with the
Palestine Media Center in Ramallah. By the end of the
battle, Hawashin had been effectively leveled. The
battle ended on April 11, when the last remaining
Palestinian fighters surrendered.
There have
already been strategic similarities between Operation
Defensive Shield and Operation Iraqi Freedom. In a large
sense, both operations began with an attempt to cut off
and isolate expected pockets of resistance, and both
operations suffered unexpected setbacks midway through
that had the effect of forcing a change of tactics.
So far, the most obvious tactical similarities
between Jenin and Baghdad involve the likely necessity
of close-in street fighting by coalition troops in
built-up neighborhoods where they face possible
resistance by Iraqi army troops, Ba'ath Party loyalists
and members of the Fedayeen Saddam. According to
current news reports from Baghdad, coalition forces have
yet to engage in house-to-house searches, relying for
the most part on the sort of "reconnaissance in force"
that the IDF started with in Jenin.
But there
are signs that that stage may not be long to last. For
one thing, in recent days, there have been indications
that the Iraqi government has been arming citizens. Last
week, a human rights volunteer who had recently returned
to Jordan from Baghdad told Asia Times Online that guns
were being handed out to anyone who asked. And some are
apparently asking: "I am not afraid to die," one
16-year-old Iraqi boy was quoted as saying in The Daily
Star newspaper on Monday. "I am doing this for my
country."
For coalition troops, the most
dangerous parts of the city remain those that most
resemble the Jenin camp: the small, narrow market areas
of Saadun and Muthana, and the largely Shi'ite Saddam
City slum. If American troops do end up having to fight
house to house, they may utilize Israel's method of
moving not in the street where they are vulnerable to
sniper fire, but from building to building by means of
holes blasted in the common walls.
Jenin is not,
of course, Baghdad. There are important differences,
both strategic and tactical, between how these battle
are being fought, with the most important of these being
strategic. "In Jenin, the IDF weren't even pretending to
try to 'liberate' anyone," says Mordechay. "They weren't
trying to win anybody's good opinion - it was a battle
for resources, pure and simple: the resources of land
and water." In Iraq, as has been stated non-stop, the
goal is liberation rather than occupation, which means
that the US may not have the option of risking a
humanitarian disaster by starving out a millions-strong
urban population.
In Jenin, the early fighting
resulted in the cutting of power, water, oxygen and
blood supplied to Jenin Hospital, after which, on April
4, the hospital itself was ordered sealed, with nobody
being permitted to enter or leave for nine days. To
order any of the main hospitals in Baghdad sealed would
result in almost unimaginable suffering.
Likewise, in Operation Defensive Shield, more
than 2,800 Palestinian "refugee housing units" were
damaged, and 878 homes demolished or destroyed, leaving
more than 17,000 people homeless. Eleven Palestinian
schools were totally destroyed, and 50 were damaged.
Fifteen were taken over and used as military outposts,
with another 15 turned into mass detention centers.
In the matter of the battle for hearts and
minds, the story of a diabetic Palestinian named Jamal
al-Sibagh may be instructive. Al-Sibagh's story was
recounted to UN investigators on June 20 last year by
witnesses who had ended up at al-Urdun hospital in
Amman.
"When the Israeli army asked the men and
young men to leave the houses in order to be searched
and arrested," the witnesses said, "Jamal was carrying a
bag with his medication. When he began to undress on the
orders of the soldiers, the zipper in his trousers
jammed. He tried to unjam it, but the soldiers thought
that he was going to act against them and fired at him.
He was killed, and his blood spattered a young child of
five years who was by his side."
There were
several other similar statements. These were not
intentional killings, and the IDF has been justly
praised for waging battle with so few losses on both
sides.
But again - Israel was not in Jenin camp
trying to win over Palestinian hearts and minds. In
Baghdad, America is doing just that, while it
simultaneously wages war. The image of a blood-spattered
child is not the image of the war that the US would want
to see endure.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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