JENIN: The first casualty of the US blitz on Baghdad was a Palestinian taxi driver, a cruel twist of fate for a West Bank city which has felt a special kinship with Iraq going back generations.
He perished under rubble caused by a missile strike, shocking relatives in the family hometown of Jenin and adding to gloom in the community at televised scenes of US forces conquering Baghdad exactly a year after Israeli forces seized Jenin in a battle with Palestinians that devastated a central district.
Jenin’s bond with Iraq stretches from a cemetery honouring Iraqi dead in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war to a district renamed last week after an Iraqi suicide bomber who killed four US soldiers. And Saddam Hussein personified the links for decades.
The Iraqi president donated over $2 million to residents of Jenin whose homes were demolished a year ago by Israeli forces crushing the Palestinian intefada launched in 2000.
Locals recall fondly how Saddam allowed financially strapped Palestinians to study free of charge at Iraqi universities and sent cheques of up to $25,000 to families of Palestinians killed in the current conflict with Israel.
Tattered posters of a younger Saddam in green uniform and beret with pistol on his hip adorn the cemetery’s central monument and many living rooms in Jenin. They underline his image among Palestinians as the only Arab leader who consistently championed their protracted quest for independence in both word and deed. With Saddam’s apparent demise, many in Jenin fear that cause will suffer irreparably.
“The Iraqis are in the same boat as us now. They have helped us since 1948 but now we are both under the heel of ultimately the same power, the United States, which serves Israel’s agenda in this region,” said Andeera Harb, a Jenin psychiatrist.
RELATIONSHIP BORN IN BATTLE: Jenin’s connection with Iraq dates from June 1948 when Iraqi troops who joined a pan-Arab war against Israel over its declaration of independence repulsed a superior Israeli force that had seized the town from local irregulars. The small cemetery built shortly afterwards contains the graves of 53 Iraqi soldiers set in four rows between rose bushes and flanked by stately cypress trees.
Recent pro-Iraq banners lie in a heap below the plinth of a monument to which they were affixed. No one has come to put them back up because of Israeli patrols enforcing a curfew.
One reads: “From Palestinian children to beloved Iraqi children: your wounds and your blood are ours. We take pride in the journey of martyrdom. Victory awaits in the long run.”
Iraq rescued the Jenin region again in 1952 when, responding to a prolonged drought afflicting it, sent in trucks of food.
Naim al-Baz’s family was among thousands of Palestinians from the Jenin area of the northern West Bank who migrated to oil-rich Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s in search of a better life.
“Many people from here now have relatives in Baghdad. Many of our professionals especially doctors and dentists were educated in Baghdad,” said Kadoura Musa, the local head of the Fatah movement.
He said the current Palestinian Authority envoy to Iraq was a native of Jenin and that a Jenin businessman had built one of Baghdad’s largest mosques.
After prospering as a shoe merchant in Baghdad, Naim al-Baz’s father tried to move the family back to Jenin in the 1980s but found the way barred by Israel which had captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war.
When US-led forces began bombing Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War, the family fled to neighbouring Jordan and resettled. Naim became a taxi driver plying the desert highway between Amman and Baghdad and was killed at the age of 33 on one of those runs at the outset of the US-led war on March 20, his cousins say.—Reuters
