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Why the West Bank Palestinian Refugee Camps Refuse to Join the Violence

(Times of Israel) Avi Issacharoff - Even as the "intifada of knives" rages elsewhere, residents of the Jenin refugee camp are enjoying one of the calmest periods they have experienced over the past decade. And many don't want it to end. I asked 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, why no resident of the camp took part in the "intifada of knives" over the past three months. "It's not an intifada. It's a fad," he says. "And let's be honest. 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 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?" "Let us live in peace and quiet," M. says. "We don't want anything. We want to live together with the Israelis. We have no problem with that. They are our cousins. We will live with them in peace." But what about the Palestinian state? Sabr, a friend of M.'s and also a former wanted man, says: "The Palestinian state is nonsense. Talks have been going on here for 20 years without results....So let them open the border crossings for us, let us live normal lives, and that's it." Balata, near Nablus, is where the First Intifada began. There we meet Tayseer Nasrallah, a well-known Fatah official in the Nablus region. He says, "I thought and still think that there's no need to go into a new intifada as long as we don't understand where we're going and what our goal is. In other words, we want a better life for our children instead of them just getting killed....Honestly, there's a feeling in the camp that we're in a situation of ongoing neglect by the Palestinian Authority and that we never received anything from the PA that was worth the sacrifices that this camp made."
2016-01-15 00:00:00
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