"The events of the escape of Palestinian prisoners from Gilboa prison, and the announcement of the Israeli army's arrest of all of them, once again talked about the privileged position enjoyed by the city of Jenin, and its refugee camp, among the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip."
Thus, the Israeli writer Yaron Friedman reveals in his article on the “Zaman Israel” website, the extent of the Israeli fears regarding a specific Palestinian geographic area, which is the Jenin camp and its city located in the northern West Bank, which always comes to the fore as a front that is resistant to occupation during confrontations and debates, the last of which is an escape incident. The six prisoners last August, two of them have already landed in Jenin.
There is an existing fact that the Israelis themselves cannot deny, which is that Jenin camp made the Palestinian resistance agitate every time the Israelis believed that it had weakened or collapsed, especially in the West Bank, and the camp has always emerged as a way out for dozens of united resistance fighters behind the banner of Palestinian resistance in general. Without affiliation under the banner of a faction or partisan, as happens in other Palestinian areas.
Jenin..a legacy of the historical struggle
The first armed resistance was organized in 1935 under the leadership of "Izz al-Din al-Qassam", who found in Jenin a popular incubator of farmers who believed and supported the revolution.
In 1799, the residents of Jenin, located at the foot of the mountain of fire "Nablus", did not hesitate to burn the olive groves from which they ate, in order to stop the advancing French forces led by "Napoleon Bonaparte" on their lands. The French response to Jenin's resistance came by burning and looting the city. During the First World War, Jenin fell under British occupation like the rest of the Palestinian territories in September 1918, but the governorate did not surrender; It resisted until it organized the first armed resistance in 1935 under the leadership of "Izz al-Din al-Qassam", one of the major resisters to the British occupation at the time, who found in Jenin a popular incubator of farmers who believed in and supported the revolution. Farhan Al-Saadi is a descendant of one of the resistance families. One of the city's most prominent operations against the occupation was the killing of a great British commander in his office in Jenin in 1938.
In the year of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories (1948), when the Zionist gangs killed thousands of Palestinians and occupied their homes, Jenin got rid of a short occupation thanks to the fierce defense of Palestinian volunteers and the Iraqi army, then the city came under the rule of the Jordanian administration in 1949, and in the early fifties Jenin camp was established to house the displaced people whose homes were seized by Israel after their expulsion, and soon the camp located on the outskirts of the city became a stronghold of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation, especially during the seventies and eighties.
The Jenin massacre in April 2002 became one of the most prominent events that demonstrated the ugliness of the occupation and the valor of the resistance in the camp. After a ten-day siege in which water, electricity, food and treatment were denied to the camp, the occupation bombed the camp with F-16 warplanes and artillery; As a result, 52 Palestinians were killed, 150 buildings were completely destroyed, and 23 Israeli soldiers were killed by elements of the resistance in Jenin.
Bilal Al-Shobaki, professor of political science and international relations at Hebron University, says that Jenin is distinguished by several factors, including the fact that the city is based on an extended and long struggle heritage since the thirties of the last century. Since the formations of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, then during the first and second intifadas it was a stronghold for those who carried out martyrdom operations, as well as during the invasion of Jenin in 2002 and the human and material losses incurred by its people despite the losses they inflicted on the occupation at the same time.
Al-Shobaki comments, “All this made the people of the governorate feel that they are a special case in the face of the occupation, and even feel that they have a moral responsibility to form a real incubator for the resistance work, given that the camp is adjacent to the city, as the camp is an intense image of the aggression that the occupation has practiced against the Palestinians for decades, In addition, the governorate is one of the governorates least affected by the social and economic patterns imposed by the post-Oslo agreement period. Jenin remained somewhat liberated from these burdens imposed by the new economic patterns.
The resistance rifle.. united in Jenin
In mid-August, the Israeli occupation forces and their military vehicles stormed the city of Jenin with the aim of arresting a member of the Hamas movement, and this could not have happened without an armed clash with a group of resistance fighters, which resulted in the martyrdom of four Palestinian youths from the city and its camp, before the occupation soldiers left From the camp under heavy cover of live bullets to protect themselves.
The rapid Israeli military operation was a regular occurrence for the resistance fighters in Jenin. The occupation forces never stopped targeting the camp.
Accordingly, the camp chasers only sleep with their hands on the trigger, and they are young fighters between the ages of twenty and thirty years, meaning that most of them were born during the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000), or the Jenin massacre that the camp experienced in 2002.
The most important feature of the resistance in Jenin is the unit of the military wings in the city and its camp, which contain a large amount of weapons and ammunition.
Jenin is inhabited by forty thousand people, most of whom are Muslims with a Christian minority. Jenin is the largest city in the triangle between Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarm. The Jenin resistance fighters have what distinguishes them from other West Bank resistance fighters, as they used to buy weapons from their free money instead of the organizations providing them with them, as is customary in Palestine. Al-Shobaki says that the same Israeli assessments say that there is a unique case of the struggle inside Jenin, and that it is very likely to see a single cell that includes elements from more than one faction. In their case, it is greater than the sense of belonging to a particular faction, and this is a very important feature, especially in light of the internal divisions and fighting in the Palestinian arena.
For his part, Aziz al-Masri, a researcher in the history of the Palestinian issue, stresses that the most important characteristic of the resistance in Jenin is the unit of the military wings in the city and its camp, and its containment of a large amount of weapons and ammunition, with a good percentage of members of the battalions Al-Aqsa Martyrs (affiliated with the Fatah movement) are those who oppose the rule of the authority or object to the methods of the authority's rule. Al-Masri says that the state of national unity between Al-Aqsa Brigades and Al-Quds Brigades (the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement) in Jenin is linked to the camp, commenting: “The members of the factions in Jenin belonged to Jenin camp before it belonged to their parties or factions, so it was not a coincidence that the six prisoners who escaped From Gilboa Prison, members of the Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Brigades are members.
Al-Masry points out that the history of the camp and its heroic battles play a major role in creating the Palestinian national awareness among the generations following the generation of the siege and massacre (2002), especially since most of the camp’s residents come from Haifa and Mount Carmel and suffered from the bitterness of migration and the cruelty of the occupation, and the occurrence of Jenin in the Triangle of Cities The north of the West Bank, and its proximity to the line of contact with the occupied territories, has a role in strengthening the resistance, as its people are in daily contact with the occupation forces.
Al-Masry does not exclude the existence of a spatial difficulty for the occupation forces in controlling Jenin due to the population density and the old buildings, which means that any storming of the camp costs the occupation dearly, not to mention the organizational and military weight of the jihad movement in the camp. “All these factors played a major role in making Jenin the spearhead of the resistance.” Live wasps of occupation," says Al-Masry.
Why not weaken the resistance in Jenin?
“Jenin, which has always been considered the most extreme refugee camp, has been beaten, destroyed, oppressed and bloodied by Israel, and its spirit seems broken these days, everyone faces their own destiny and struggles to survive,” wrote Israeli journalists, Gideon Levy and Alex Levac. In the Israeli newspaper, "Haaretz", in an article entitled "Jenin, the most extremist in the Palestinian refugee camps, once, waves the white flag." It was on June 10, 2016, when the two journalists wanted to highlight the passage of a few years without the camp having any major confrontations with the occupation, which was considered a relative success for Israel.
However, Jenin quickly deprived the occupation of the pleasure of calm, and continued its usual rituals of resistance, while the Palestinians faced the occupation with stones in several areas in the West Bank, the Jenin camp stood alone, aiming its firearm at the occupation soldiers, and then the armed response to the occupation forces caused great terror in Israel over the past years. For its part, the Palestinian Authority security forces have not dared to send armed police inside the camp for a long time, in anticipation of reactions, and the Palestinian Authority does not even enter the camp in order to impose order, which doubles the fears of the occupation, which depends on security coordination with Authority to rein in the Palestinian resistance.
Atef Daghlas, a Palestinian journalist residing in Nablus, says that Jenin camp has constituted an exceptional case among the Palestinian areas since the camp's resistance emerged after the Israeli invasion of 2002, in which dozens of Israelis were killed and injured, as Palestinian resistance flocked to it to turn into a landmark in the resistance's march.
Despite the emergence of the Al-Quds Brigades (the military wing of the Islamic Jihad) and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (the military wing of Fatah), there is a great bond between these two factions about the state of the resistance in Jenin that goes beyond the usual partisan differences in other parts of Palestine, which contributed to the formation of a joint resistance room after The process of escaping Gilboa prison prisoners.
The small camp in its size, dense in its population, stubborn in its resistance, unitary in its transcendence above partisan conflicts, has become a fortress as well, side by side with the Gaza Strip.
We also spoke to Jamal al-Huwail, one of the leaders of the factional action in Jenin camp, who pointed out that the occupation believes that the security solution and killing and arresting the resistance fighters can achieve his desired security. However, the resistance generation in Jenin always delivers its own message: There is no security and no Peace without a political solution, without a Palestinian state and without the right of return. Al-Huwail says that "the culture of resistance in the camp indicates that the occupation will continue to pay a heavy price as long as it practices its terrorism on an organized and daily basis against the Palestinian people." Al-Huwail refers to the courage of the camp residents in embracing any resister as if he were one of his sons, without fear of the occupation measures.
In addition, the camp’s resistance to confrontation and resistance is a model for the rest of the governorates of Palestine, which makes the occupation under moral and psychological pressure, trying to deter the resistance in Jenin to deliver its messages by subordination to any other party that wants to resist, which means that the occupation’s policy towards Jenin has its reasons at the level of Moral war, too. "The occupation wants the case of Jenin not to spread to all parts of Palestine. But this has not been achieved as evidenced by what we are witnessing now, as Jenin camp remains a torch to the rest of the West Bank."
In the end, Jenin camp, in which dozens of Palestinian gunmen roam its streets and alleys day and night, will remain clinging to the weapon of the unified resistance, its long history and its rich legacy of steadfastness in the face of its successive occupiers. in other areas of the West Bank.
And it seems, then, that the small camp in its size, dense in its population, stubborn in its resistance, unitary with its transcendence above partisan disputes, has become a fortress as well, side by side with the Gaza Strip, and one of the few remaining flames carrying the banner of the Palestinian cause with weapons inside Palestine, and an obstacle in the way For years, it has been paving the way for the liquidation of the Palestinian cause and the silencing of its people completely, irreversibly.