Bulldozer relativism

In the wake of this, it seems like a good time to remember one Israeli bulldozer operator's fond memories of his his role in the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp during the 2002 Israeli assault on the West Bank:

They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I come, but I gave no one a chance. I didn't wait. I didn't give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. ...

Many people were inside houses we started to demolish. They would come out of the houses we were working on. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn't see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.

Here's one of the people to whom the Israelis didn't give a chance:

Jamal Fayid was a thirty-seven-year-old paralyzed man living in the Jurrat al-Dahab area of the camp, and his family could not evacuate him in time. Despite the pleas of the family, the IDF bulldozer refused to stop the demolition of the home on April 6. Jamal Fayid was killed in the collapsed building.

I saw the results of the Israeli military's handiwork when I reached Jenin about a week after they'd pulled out.  This was the center of the camp, seen from the minaret of the local mosque:

And the center of the camp, looking back toward the mosque (which gives you a sense of just how tall the pile of rubble was):

I wrote a detailed account of my time in the West Bank and Gaza, and in the not-too-distant future I plan to post it here along with more of the photographs I took.  For now, here's an excerpt that describes these scenes:

___________________

We finally reached our destination: the center of the camp.  An area comprising several city blocks had been completely razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks, every house first torn down, then ground up, and then flattened by tanks.  The Israelis use a modified version of the Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, a hulking monstrosity that has to be seen to be believed.  With a massive blade that comes to a point in the front and a spiked arm in the back used (in this instance) to dig up pavement and churn rubble, it looks like some kind of prehistoric monster—and the Israelis had unleashed these monsters within the center of the camp.  In a preliminary report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that this act was “vastly disproportionate to the military objectives pursued” and suggested that priority should be given to “establishing whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction—or a war crime.”  On the ground, looking at it for myself, there was no question about it: this was terrorism.

We walked up onto the rubble pile.  It was so wide and high that it had a terrain of its own; in places it was as tall as a three-story house.  There was a reason for that, of course: it was made of houses (more than a hundred, according to HRW).  I refer to it as the “rubble pile”, as though there’s rubble in every town and in Jenin it had just been collected in the center of town—but I never forgot as I stood there that I was standing on people’s homes.  You could see their personal belongings crushed and twisted underneath the stone.  The wheels of a mangled baby carriage pointed toward the sky at the top of one rise.  And above all, as you walked on this horrifying monument to brutality, you knew that you were standing on a tomb.  Some people had not been able to escape their houses before the bulldozers came, and they had been buried alive, trapped inside as the walls collapsed in on them.

Comments

[Duncan]

And wasn't Rachel Corrie also killed by a bulldozer?

[John Caruso]

Yes, about a year after I was there. Like me she'd been working with the International Solidarity Movement. At the time I went, internationals had been beaten up by Israeli soldiers and settlers, but none had been killed or even seriously injured. Then they killed Rachel, shot Brian Avery in the face in Jenin, and killed Tom Hurndall in Gaza. I've always felt that it was no coincidence that so much happened in such a short time; I think the Israeli military made a decision to take the gloves off with internationals, to try to prevent more people from coming.