We're 12 hours into Operation "Home and Garden," a planned 48-hour military operation to wipe out the "terrorist infrastructure" of the Jenin refugee camp and restore Palestinian Authority control over it -- in other words, to eliminate one of the last vestiges of armed resistance to the Zionist/Israeli project of Judaizing Palestine and, as in Apartheid South Africa, handing the pacified population of the Jenin bantustan back to the collaborationist warlords of the Palestinian Authority.
The Israeli army assaulted the Jenin camp -- and don't forget, its a REFUGEE camp of more than 20,000 people living in a squalid pressure cooker only 0.42 km2 (or 0.16 sq. mile) large, refugees that Israel created in 1948 and has persecuted for the past 75 years -- in the early morning hours with (American-supplied) jet fighters, artillery, drones (both weaponized and for surveillance and 1000 heavily-armed soldiers in armored vehicles. Reports are of 10 dead, but the number will certainly be higher.
Although I presented my monthly update for ICAHD a few days ago, before the attack began, it comes after major assaults on Palestinian camps, villages and town both by the army and masses of settlers, the latter being what even the army calls programs, and my brief presentation tries to put it all in political perspective.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions calls on the international community to stop the attack on Jenin and other Palestinian communities (which we know it will not do). We call on the UN to despatch a Protection Force to defend a vulnerable and oppressed Palestinian people (which we know will not happen). We call for the international community to enforce its own laws; if only the Fourth Genevan Convention was enforced, the Israeli occupation would collapse by the weight o its own illegality. And we call not only for the end of the Occupation but for the transformation of Israel and the Occupied Territory into a single democratic state of equal rights for all -- including refugees returning from outside the country and, finally, an end to the persecution of the Palestinian people by a brutal colonial regime.
In the meantime, we stand in solidarity with the people of the Jenin camp.
Jeff Halper, 3 July 2023