Jerusalem — I think I understand Israel. Therefore, the very essence of Israel, the heart and soul of the country, tell me it is impossible for Israel to have perpetrated a massacre.
To analyze Israel and not to see that reality is to misunderstand the Holocaust and its indelible power as a backdrop for almost every element of Israel and Israeli society. Even now, even until today, over half a century later.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that it is a soldier’s obligation to refuse an immoral order. It is not, according to the high court of the land merely permissible, but required. A soldier wearing the uniform of the Israeli army is required to refuse an immoral order by a superior officer.
The argument that Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of the Nazi transport of Jews to their deaths, used at his trial in Jerusalem could never be used to justify immoral behavior in Israel. No Israeli can ever say as Eichmann did in his defense, “I was just following orders; I was only a cog in the wheel.” Every tenth grader in Israel knows it and every soldier understands it.
So what really happened in Jenin? A battle that was fought with tremendous intensity on both sides.
The Palestinians have dubbed this battle a massacre. They say that the Israelis murdered hundreds, according to some over a thousand, innocent civilians.
Yet there are no names, no bodies and no graves. Just rhetoric and pictures of destruction.
Most of the bodies that were found were in uniform and armed. There were also several neither in uniform nor armed, about five to ten. The remaining dead, about 50 men, were armed and uniformed, Palestinians killed fighting Israelis.
Massacre or victory?
To read some of the Palestinian or other Arab press, or to talk with the people of the “Palestinian street” is to hear that what happened in Jenin was not battle, but a massacre in a refugee camp.
Another version taking hold on the street and in the Arab press portrays “Jenin” as a miraculous victory. The Palestinian fighters staved off the mighty Israeli army for eight solid days. The street calls it the Palestinian Stalingrad, the Palestinian Masada. Jenin is the place where Palestinians fought until the last man, akin to the American Alamo, where it was better to die fighting than to give up the cause.
How does one make sense of these divergent messages? Massacres and fighting to the death do not exist in a parallel hemisphere. Was it one or the other?
Fighting to the death is not a massacre but the opposite. A massacre happens when an army murders innocent civilians. Fighting to the death is a symbol of national pride.
The true “Battle of Jenin” is a battle not of reality but about myths, about the great stories that peoples and cultures embrace as their building blocks of memory and value. Myths like the Alamo for Americans, Stalingrad for Russians and Masada for Israelis. But the same battle cannot be both.
Of those Palestinians soldiers engaged in battle with the Israelis in Jenin, 150 turned themselves in. In total, there were about 200 Palestinian fighters, so the remaining 50 are probably the dead that were found in Jenin. Fifty Palestinian combatants killed in battle.
I spent the better part of a day interviewing, grilling and listening to Israeli officers responsible for every aspect of the battle in Jenin. I talked to the highest commanders and to lieutenants in the field. One after the other they insisted that to minimize civilian casualties, they put their own soldiers’ lives in jeopardy.
According to the military people I interviewed, they first called for civilians to leave. There was no overhead bombing by planes or helicopters. The only spots targeted were places from where the Palestinians were firing and the destruction was only of things, areas and buildings that were booby-trapped.
The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram had a remarkable interview by Jonathan Cooke who recorded his conversation with a member of the Islamic Jihad from Jenin, who said, “We booby-trapped everything well in advance and we were betrayed by locals who knew where they all were…. Had it not been for collaborators, we would have defeated the Israelis.”
There are no Palestinian military from Jenin with whom I can speak. They are either dead or captured. But I persistently sought out reliable information and reliable sources.
So far, Palestinian sources have been reticent about supplying concrete information about the massacre they say took place in Jenin. They rely on pictures and hearsay testimony. Maybe because there is no proof of a massacre.
Investigators will enter Jenin. They will find evidence of destruction. That is abundantly clear. Newly destroyed homes and homes worn down through years of poverty and neglect.
Jenin is a battle that was waged on the ground. Jenin is a war that will be played out or won in the media.
Micah D. Halpern, originally from Maryland, has lived in Israel since 1987. He is a Jerusalem-based columnist and the founding director of the Jerusalem Center for European Study.
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