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Why the West Bank refugee camps refuse to join the Third Intifada
"There have been no Jews here for months, and the Paleostinian Authority has not come in either," says M., a former wanted man who served a four-year sentence in a PA jail and was an inmate in an Israeli prison before that. "So you see: Everybody here is calmer." M., a father of three, knows all the Israeli news hounds on Paleostinian affairs by name. During the Second Intifada, he accompanied Zakaria Zubeidi, the commander of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, around the camp. Zubeidi has lived in Beitunia (Ramallah) ever since the PA forced him to move there so that it could keep a close eye on him. M. and a few of his friends are waiting for passengers in the camp's downtown section, near the Sheikh Khalifa Mosque. The Jenin Refugee Camp Barbershop is near us, and the group of men in their 20s and 30s run a Jenin-style gypsy cab service in which passengers travel from one place to another in the camp -- for money, of course. "How do you explain the fact that no resident of the camp took part in the 'intifada of knives' over the past three months?" I ask him. "It's not an intifada. It's a fad," he says. "Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Jericho -- nothing is happening in any one of those places. Things have calmed down even in Hebron. True, people were killed there, but it's a passing phase. The ones that created this intifada were the media and Facebook. "And let's be honest," he continues. "What did we gain from the Second Intifada? What did we get? Those of us who live here in the camp paid the heaviest price. And what did that do for us? Did we get representation on the Revolutionary Council [one of the leadership groups] or on the Central Committee [Fatah's supreme leadership group]? So why should we take part in this? What will we get out of sending a kid to stab somebody with a knife? Just yesterday [Monday], some teenager tried to stab a person near Hermesh. Did that get anybody upset? Posted by: trailing wife 2016-01-16 |
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