Dear Friends and Supporters,

A few days ago, the Israeli Army came to the office building housing the Palestine Fair Trade Association and demolished an adjacent store.  At about 7pm on Friday, February 2, the IDF came to Jenin City Center with several Jeeps and Hummers, pulled up outside the building and proceeded to take the store apart.  They ripped down the door, smashed windows on the adjoining grocery store, and ripped down the awning on most of the building.  By the time I got to the office the next day, the demolished store was empty, with nothing but a broken door, toilet, and other debris scattered on the floor.  No one here knows exactly what the soldiers were allegedly looking for, or if they found whatever it was, but everyone is in pretty unanimous agreement that no matter what they were hoping to find, it wasn’t on the awning they ripped down, or in the toilet pipe they ripped up, or in the glass of the windows they smashed.

In other news, Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinians in a nearby village yesterday.

I found out about the three murdered Palestinians when I returned from
Ramallah early in the morning.  When I got out of the bus in Jenin, I
was surprised to hear a lot of gunfire in the streets and went to
investigate its source.  There was a crowd of about 400 people, two
ambulances, and a 23-year-old boy wrapped in a flag, being carried down
the middle of the road.  Other young men walked alongside the body,
firing M-16s and Kalashnikovs in the air.  Many in the crowd were
distraught and glancing at their faces, it seemed that all many of them
could do was stare blankly into space.

To an American like myself, perhaps the most surprising part of all of
this was the response of the general population to the news and the
following funeral.  Of course, things like this are not a part of my
life in the United States.  It’s not normal for three kids my age to
get killed by an occupying force or for people with Islamic Jihad
headbands to march through the streets shooting automatic weapons.  And
it shouldn’t have to be a part of anyone’s life.  But when I spoke to
people about the event, who ranged in age from 14-40, all of them told
me “It’s normal”, or, “This happens every day in our lives”.  Which
means that every day three bereaved fathers bend down in the street to
kiss the forehead of their recently murdered son, and five year old
kids, clutched tightly by their mothers, shutter as automatic gunfire
reverberates through the streets and dead bodies can be seen amongst a
crowd of people.  

Growing up surrounded by such events, it’s no wonder that an estimated
90% of children in surrounding refugee camps have psychological
symptoms closely related to those of post-traumatic stress disorder. 
But as many human rights workers in the area are quick to point out,
there is a difference between the situation of young Palestinians with
some form of PTSD and, say, veterans of the Vietnam War.  Whereas
American soldiers know there is a better life than the one they
experience in war and don’t think of the combat situation as “normal”,
for young Palestinians there is no other, more normal daily
experience.  They live through these types of events everyday, until
the events themselves give the situation the sense of “normalcy” it
inevitably takes on.  The battle to take the sense of normalcy away
from these events, to make them more unusual than usual, will be even
more difficult than removing some of the facts on the ground that
catalyze the events in the first place. But it’s a battle worth
fighting and one that doesn’t mean taking lives, as much as it means
giving them back.

Salaam,
Andrew Pappone

P.S.  Please vote.

The House of Fair Trade Newsletter is a weekly email newsletter sent
from the offices of the Palestine Fair Trade Association in Jenin,
Palestine with stories and experiences from the ground in Palestine. 
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The views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Palestine Fair Trade Association.