Jenin: Imploding the Myths

(Updated May 10, 2002)

What we're seeing here is a repeat of the Taliban's media tactics. It's actually a very consistent pattern for the Palestinians.

Combat is messy - anyone remember Saving Private Ryan? Remember that town they were in? Kind of looked like a wasteland, didn't it? Jenin was like that. In 1943, Canadian soldiers fought the Germans for 8 incredibly intense and bloody days in a small Italian town called Ortona. Go read about the Battle of Ortona, it will tell you all you need to know.

On the one hand, to have an Ortona-type situation and lose only 23 Israeli soldiers is remarkable. On the other hand, they didn't have to lose any. The Israelis could have just bombed from the air or use artillery. As the Israeli corps commander noted:

"I could have finished it all with a whistle. Full-corps fire on the center of the camp and the whole thing would have been over. But we behave differently."

For those who don't know what "full corps fire" is, imagine about 100 tanks and/or an equal number of artillery pieces firing continuously on the camp center and its buildings, possibly backed by air strikes. The aftermath you saw on TV would be about three times worse. As it was recently in Grozny (Chechnya), for example.

The risk would have been nil for Israeli soldiers, and the terrorists would be dead. But hundreds of Palestinians would also have died. Now, Palestinian casualties were heavy regardless. This is normal in house-to-house urban fighting, and I'm sure there are more bodies in the rubble. But there are a lot fewer than there could have been. If the Israelis had really wanted to kill thousands of Palestinians in Jenin they could have done so easily, without risking a single soldier.

So why didn't they do it that way? Why are we listening instead to Israeli soldiers' accounts like this one (Thanks, PejmanPundit) or this report from an infirmary commander (thanks, i330). More to the point, why are we hearing accounts like this one (CNN) and these (various Arab press)? Those are good questions to start with... and there are many more.

"This Really Happened to a Friend of a Friend..."

While organized deception and lies may be responsible for the reports, more charitable explanations are still possible. An Associated Press reporter may have put his finger on things:

"Almost everyone talked freely of having seen mass graves or houses full of bodies - but upon questioning, acknowledged the information was secondhand, from a friend or relative. Many people turned to arriving aid workers and journalists, asking how many had died."

This actually meshes quite well with the experience of a reporter from Canada's National Post:

"A grocery store owner near Jenin spoke in a hushed voice about seeing Israeli troops loading the bodies of massacred Palestinians into a refrigerated truck which he said was still parked on a nearby hill. Asked to elaborate, he declined. "The people that are sitting there are collaborators," he said.

"The refrigerated truck was parked on a grassy hill, where Israeli troops were resting with their tanks and armoured vehicles listening to Alanis Morissette on a stereo. When a National Post reporter inspected the truck, it contained not bodies but apples and other food and supplies for the troops."

This behaviour, too, is perfectly consistent with a mind set and political culture that has at times believed that Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein were Israeli agents. In repressive political cultures where information is restricted and secret societies are a normal feature of the political landscape, conspiracy theories are normal.

Like all conspiracy theories, however, this one has holes. When you listen to the reporting and put the words of the Palestinians together, there are a lot of things that either don't make sense or reveal less than honest behaviour.

Let's pile up some of those incongruous reports and inconsistencies, shall we?

Fleet Street's Poorest Hour

The British papers take a real beating here. Irrepressible Iranian pundit Pejman Yousefzadeh looks at the accounts in those U.K. papers and sees some very odd things. HonestReporting.com finds even more to criticize, and then the great Mark Steyn picks up on these themes and leaves Fleet Street's credibility looking a lot like, well... Jenin. Then again, these are the same British papers who alleged torture at Guantanamo Bay and backed it up with... not much. Those Froot Loops they give out down in Gitmo are hell, I tell you.

What makes this apalling bordering on funny is the fact that the British also went into Jenin back in 1938. Government documents from that time include descriptions like: "Demolishing the homes of Arab civilians... Shooting handcuffed prisoners... Forcing local Arabs to test areas where mines may have been planted..." Of especial note:

"Even after the suspected assassin was captured (and then shot dead while allegedly trying to escape), the British authorities decided that "a large portion of the town should be blown up" as punishment. On August 25 of that year, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose."

And the British government thought this was just fine, despite pesky international criticism about allegations that eyes were being gouged out, etc.

Bruce Hill adds some recollections of his own from 1937 phrasebooks handed out to British officers. Stuff like:

"Have you seen the wanted men?"
"Do you have any weapons?"
"Tell me at once or your family will be punished!"
"Find the mukhtar and bring him before me immediately!"
"You will be taken to Haifa for questioning."

If Fleet Street had any decency, it would be embarassed. Then again, if Fleet Street had any decency, it wouldn't be Fleet Street.

The Truth, Despite Themselves

National Review weighs in with an article that puts Jenin in perspective compared to other battle situations - including the 1970 expulsion of Arafat and the PLO from Jordan. Of especial note, however, is the way the article highlights the way the Palestinians' own spokespeople kept inflating the totals dramatically.

* The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights & the Environment, LAW, reported that 100 residents had been killed in three days of fighting. That was April 8th.

* PA cabinet member Saeb Erekat told Newsday on April 11th that "he received reports of 500 Palestinians killed in the offensive, but said he could not confirm the figure." By this time, the fighting was mostly over.

* By April 13th, the figures being bandied about were in the thousands. The Israelis put the number under 100, but allow that it may rise as the rubble is cleared.

Subsequent reports by Palestinian doctors put the toll around 200, a figure that has since been adjusted downward. Looks like LAW made the gaffe of inadvertently telling the truth.

Which may explain why the Washington Post's reporters found a lot less than they thought. An assessment echoed by the senior UN representative they talked to:

"Everybody was thinking mass graves in the way we think of Kosovo," said Guy Siri, deputy director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. "I don't think we have seen that."

Guess not. and newspapers et. al. are beginning to backpeddle. Even virulently anti-Israel newspapers like The Guardian are noting that:

"...it is increasingly clear from evidence collected by this paper and other journalists, that the majority of those so far recovered have been Palestinian fighters from Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Brigades."

That squares with The Washington Post's earlier reporting that:

"Residents said that the heart of the impoverished camp was home to many of the fighters for militant Islamic groups that put up resistance to the Israeli attack."

As to why it was an impoverished camp in the first place, Damian Penny refers us to a revealing article in The Idler.

Behind the Battle

The Palestinians did indeed put up a very coordinated resistance, using explosives and weapons banned in UN refugee camps and whose possession violates relevant UN agreements. Self-defence arguments collapse in light of the findings of suicide bomb-belt factories, large-scale weapons caches, and other goodies we see on TV reports. This isn't surprising; a large number of suicide bombers had come from Jenin. It wasn't a defensive enclave, but an armed base for terrorism whose closest parallel is an urban Tora Bora. See Col. Miri Eisin's briefing for more details from the IDF perspective.

Now add this bit from the Guardian, which gives the game away:

"Palestinians admit the camp was liberally mined two or three days before the assault. But the strategy failed because Israel had no compunction about razing homes to make roads for its tanks.

"The thing we did not count on was the bulldozer. It was a catastrophe. If the Israelis had only gone one by one inside the camp, they would never have succeeded in entering," said Mr Damaj."

In other words, all that rubble and devastation you see was for a solid military reason. Blogger hero Sgt. Stryker found an even more detailed account, a great interview by Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper with a Palestinian combatant named "Omar the Engineer". It includes this revealing passage re: the use of civilians by the Palestinians...

And what about the explosion and ambush last Tuesday which killed 13 soldiers?
"They were lured there," he says. "We all stopped shooting and the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving." The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area."

Read the whole account, then think back again to the Battle of Ortona to fully grasp what Ali Damaj and "Omar" were planning. Ortona left 1,400 Canadians dead in eight days of fighting.

Another valid comparison for the intended battle is the recent fighting in Chechnya between Islamists and the Russian Army. Looked at in that light, the Israelis seem rather restrained. Compare aerial photos of Grozny, Chechnya, before and after the battles there. Now have a look at similar aerial photos of Jenin, before and after.

Choices Have Consequences

Back to the Washington Post's story:

"Ali Damaj said he peeked through his kitchen window as a bulldozer leveled his entire neighborhood -- first one house, then two, then six. Suddenly, he said, he was watching the wall of his neighbor's house push his refrigerator across the room. "I felt the house shaking back and forth," said Damaj, whose house was left partially standing. "I was in a state of shock. My hair was standing on end."

Hmm, is this the same Ali Damaj the Guardian quoted as being sorry the booby-trap strategy didn't work? The Guardian gives a very similar account from Mr. Damaj in its story, so we can assume it's the same person. Looks like Mr. Damaj was more than a casual bystander in Jenin. Which makes it kind of hard to feel sorry about his ruined house. Or to take statements like "They were shooting everything ahead of them, everything they saw, everything that moved" seriously.

The booby-trap strategy had real consequences in other ways, as the New York Times (April 16, 2002) reported:

"Palestinians returning to this ruined place recovered a wounded man today, skeletal and semiconscious, who said he had been lying in the rubble beside a body and waiting for help for nine days.... There was also ample evidence of the resistance put up here by the Palestinians. An eight foot wide alleyway near where the wounded young man was found was filled with long white wires that Israeli officials say Palestinians used to rig booby traps."

Which might explain why he had been waiting for help for 9 days. It also explains this note from the New York Times (April 18, 2002):

"Teams from the International Committee of the Red Cross have removed only 14 bodies in the last three days and say they are hampered by a lack of bomb-disposal and search-and-rescue teams"

They certainly were, as InstaPundit's harrowing quote re: the fate of Dr. Wael Omari notes. Makes it kind of hypocritical for the Palestinians to complain about the slowness of recovery efforts, doesn't it? I mean, they planted those bombs themselves. But that won't stop their leaders from trying, and too many people in the media will be too lazy to call them on it.

"Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?"

Unlike the Brits, Euroweenies, and of course Andrea Koppel, Canada's National Post put people on the ground and did some real investigative journalism. Their news report (April 15, 2002) had some revealing tidbits:

"The debate over the body count might have been settled yesterday by Israel's Supreme Court, which ruled that the army had to let Palestinians identify those killed in Jenin before they could be buried."

You can read that ruling here. Doesn't sound like a very useful ruling if you're perpetrating massacres.

"Kiffah Moustapha said, on the second day of the fighting, her children were terrified so she made a run for it and the Israeli troops let her go. She walked roughly 10 kilometres to Ramaneh."

Read that again. "Let her go." Pretty sloppy way to do a massacre, just letting people go and all that. Maybe they just wanted to get the males? But then we read this:

As he lay in the shade of the school, one young man described how he had been arrested by troops and taken by bus to a makeshift prison in Salem. The troops held him for hours and then took his photo with a Polaroid camera and released him, telling him not to return to Jenin.

As bloodtirsty killers go, these guys are the 1962 Mets. This account makes sense, though:

"The contorted bodies of four Palestinian men, blackened by decomposition, were found in a living room apparently hit by a missile. Andeera Harb, 34, a child psychologist whose relatives owned the house, said the four men had been eating dinner. However, there was a helmet on the head of one body. What appeared to be pipe bombs were partially hidden under a coat."

We're back to those Taliban media strategies again - military deaths being reported as civilian ones.

Hope Out of the Rubble

The one hopeful sign in all of this comes from the New York Times article of April 16th:

"It's a disaster," said Ruba Al Ruzi, a young woman who watched the scene. "I hope the Arab countries and the Americans who watched us being slaughtered will face the same situation."

Do I detect a note of bitterness at the Arabs' cruel, inhumane, and warmongering "fight Israel to the last Palestinian" policy? Well, it's start... and Allah will probably grant Ruba her wish.

They will indeed face the same situation - albeit from opposite ends.

(N.B. As my May 8, 2002 post notes, that last sentence may prove prescient. The Washington post recently published an article from a U.S. military commander who shares this view.)