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For the past three years, the Brighton Trust (of which I am the trustee) has been raising funds for the Tafak Children’s Centre in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the occupied West Bank, along with activists from the British National Education League.
The center is run by local volunteers and is the only center of its kind in the camp. It accommodates approximately 14,000 Palestine refugees who were homeless due to the founding of Israel in 1948. It provides games, education, food, and a warm welcome to approximately 120 children between 3 and 16 years old.
This is their only source of entertainment in the bleak environment of the camp. During the second uprising in 2002, the camp lost dozens of residents in a massacre by the Israeli army and lost in another cruel bulldozing movement. More than 400 houses Israel collectively punished Palestinian civilians. Since then, the camp has been frequently invaded by military forces.
The Al-Tafawk Children’s Center, established in 2010, largely escaped the attention of the Israeli military—that is, until recently. The first sign that the Israeli army was concerned about the center came in January, when the manager of the center was detained for 24 hours and suffered severe trauma.
Then, after protests in occupied Jerusalem over the Israeli attack on worshipers of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the brutal bombing of Gaza, the Israeli army strengthened its reign of terror against the historic Palestine. It also extends to the occupied West Bank, where more than 25 Palestinians were killed by the end of May. Like other Palestinian cities, Jenin also held demonstrations against Israeli violence.
On the evening of May 15, the Israeli army raided the Jenin Tafak Children’s Center and completely destroyed it. Their excuse was that they were looking for weapons, but of course, they did not find them.
An eyewitness said:
“Last night they attacked the center. First, they started shooting from outside the center. Then they blew up the front door and entered the center. They threw everything away. Destroyed everything of value.”
In addition to damaging furniture and equipment, the soldiers deliberately destroyed the infrastructure of the center, making the building unsafe and unusable. They destroyed water pipes and taps, cut off the water supply, destroyed the electric safe, cut off the electricity, damaged the stairs and doors, and forcibly closed the handles. All in all, the losses amounted to thousands of dollars.
They didn’t even let go of children’s books. According to another witness, a soldier who was doing this exclaimed that Palestinian children do not need to study because they will become murderers and be killed when they grow up.
This attitude of total racist contempt for Palestinian children — believing that they don’t need education because they will die soon, anyway — reminds me that as a Jew, the Nazis’ attitude towards Jewish children.
Obviously, the Al-Tafawk Children’s Center—or any Palestinian civil society organization related to it—is a threat to the Israeli occupation regime. This is because the center and similar initiatives try to give Palestinians a glimpse of the normal life in their lives.
However, a displaced and traumatized population marked as thorough ethnic cleansing cannot take root and experience normalcy. It must remain tense at all times, often deprived and oppressed, so as to stop making demands on its own land.
This is why Israel often uses bulldozers or bombs to destroy Palestinian houses; destroy Palestinian infrastructure, whether it is water treatment plants in Gaza or solar panels in the occupied West Bank; harass and attack Palestinian Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem.
The destruction of the Al-Tafawk Children’s Center and many other civilian buildings made Israel’s claim that it was engaged in self-defence false. When the evidence of Israel’s genocide intentions is so clear, it is a lie that fewer and fewer people in the West are ready to buy.
When we started fundraising to repair the center and open it again for refugee children, I decided to write to Tzipi Hotovely, the far-right Israeli ambassador to London, asking Israel to pay for the damage and to provide compensation for the injured children. Wounded what happened. I did not get a reply.
Dear reader, if you are willing to contribute, you can do it HereYou can also help politicians in your country stop turning a blind eye and take action by propagating and putting pressure on politicians in your country. Now is the time for Israel to take responsibility for its numerous violations of international law, including the murder, detention and deprivation of Palestinian children, and attacks on civilian houses and infrastructure.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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