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.  You are receiving this email because you or someone you know asked me to put you on the list.  If you do not wish to receive these updates, please let me know.  If you know of anyone who would like to subscribe to this email list, please have them email me with the word "subscribe".   I welcome any questions or comments.
For past issues please contact me or visit auphr.org.

The views expressed in this newsletter are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Palestine Fair Trade Association.

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