. 

 What Makes A Massacre? 

February 09, 2003
By Robert Jensen

What is the definition of a "real" massacre?

Imagine that troops from a country that is illegally occupying another land
move into an occupied town, where there are some resistance fighters among
the civilian population. The occupying power uses helicopter gunships,
tanks, missiles, and troops in its attack. Some prisoners taken by the
occupying country's troops are executed in the streets while handcuffed.
The troops use civilians as human shields when entering buildings.
Bulldozers destroy homes, sometimes burying people still in them. And the
occupying country's troops block ambulances and medical personnel from
entering the town to care for the wounded, leaving civilians to die in the
streets.

Would such an attack be a massacre if 63 people died, about half of them
civilians? Or would it be something less, perhaps just a war crime? How
many deaths does it take to turn a garden-variety atrocity into a massacre?

Perhaps the more important question is: How morally bankrupt is a world in
which such arguments about whether such an attack is really a massacre
overshadow the cries of the victims, the demands of justice, and the need
for an international response?

The description above is of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian town of
Jenin in April 2002, part of an ongoing Israeli offensive in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza. Israeli forces won the battle, but just as important
was Israel's public-relations victory for control of what the assault meant.

Early reports out of Jenin, including some from Israelis, speculated about
a Palestinian death toll in the hundreds. The term "massacre" was used by
observers, journalists, and Palestinians to describe the carnage, but after
the attack it became clear that "only" 50 or 60 Palestinians had been
killed. The Israeli spin machine then launched a campaign that emphasized
not the criminal behavior of its military and the massive destruction to
the town, but the early overestimates of casualties: Since the death toll
was lower, it couldn't have been a massacre. And because Israel also
successfully blocked a United Nations team from conducting an inquiry,
that's how the story was played in the U.S. news media.

Subsequent investigation by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International --
both of which concluded the Israeli military committed war crimes -- have
added to the understanding of the attack on Jenin. Now a new book --
"Searching Jenin," published by Cune Press in Seattle -- has supplied
important eyewitness testimony of what happened in those two weeks in
April. Under the direction of editor Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian-American,
teams of journalists interviewed Jenin residents to construct a detailed
picture of the assault as it was experienced by the civilian population.

War is, of course, never pretty, and some aspects of these stories will be
familiar to anyone who has confronted the realities of modern warfare. It
is never easy to read about such horrors, especially when the victims
include the weakest among us -- the sick, children, and the elderly. But
along with those heart-wrenching stories, equally disturbing are the
accounts of what the occupation has done to Israeli soldiers. Several
witnesses talked of how the troops defecated and urinated in homes and
mosques to express their contempt for the Palestinians. Racist anti-Arab
slogans were written on the walls of people's homes. In one incident,
reported by a man who works as a clerk in the Palestinian Ministry of Youth
and Sports, Israeli forces broke into a home and one of the soldiers put
the barrel of his gun to a baby's head and asked, "Should I kill him?" A
woman screamed at the man to let go of the child. Another soldier answered,
"You are a camp of animals. You are not human beings."

This is the consequence of occupation, of oppression. The occupied live
with inadequate resources and suffer most of the violence. But there is a
cost to the occupier as well, not just when suicide bombers are successful,
but also in the loss of their own humanity. One wins land at the cost of
the soul.

This is an issue not simply for Israel and its soldiers, but for U.S.
citizens as well. Those of us paying taxes in the United States are
implicated in the occupation and the attack on Jenin because of the $3
billion a year in U.S. aid that flows to Israel, helping them pay for the
occupation. U.S. political and diplomatic support makes it possible for
Israel to resist the international consensus for a peaceful settlement of
the conflict. When we in the United States do not act to end that aid and
support, and therefore allow the occupation to continue, we share in that
loss of humanity. Morally, we are responsible for those soldiers' actions.

How long can we ignore that? Perhaps more important, how long can the
people of Jenin and Palestine survive while we ignore it?



Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, a member of the Nowar Collective and author
of "Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the
Mainstream." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu

For more information about organizing efforts in the United States, go to
http://endtheoccupation.org.

For information on "Searching Jenin," go to
http://www.cunepress.com/
http://www.palestinebooks.com/
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/

HOME