I have been looking over some photos from our trip to Jenin last Saturday. In the early months of the second intifada, the Jenin Refugee Camp proved to be a major battleground between the Israeli army and the inhabitants of the camp. It is a little known fact that in 2001, Sharon marched 2000-3000 soldiers to Al-Aqsa Mosque during Friday prayers and sealed off the area. It was this incident that sparked the second intifada (Palestinian Uprising), when demonstrations flared in the city and turned violent. Keep in mind that according to the Oslo Accords (the peace agreements drawn up between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 90s), a Palestinian state should have been established in the West Bank by May of 2000. When the deadline came, however, Israel told Fatah that a condition of statehood was that Fatah must declare war on Hamas. This combined with Sharon's siege of Al-Aqsa Mosque sealed the death of Oslo and the ignition of the Second Intifada. When Israel invaded the West Bank again during the intifada, it met the most resistance to its offensive from the people of the Refugee Camp in Jenin. Camp inhabitants took up arms to fight the soldiers and in the end around 300 camp residents were killed. After the virtual destruction of whole sections of the Jenin camp, Israel gave one condition to the UN for rebuilding: that the roads must be wide enough to fit Israeli military tanks and bulldozers. Although it is just one square kilometer with fifteen thousand people, the Jenin camp seems more expansive than the teeming camps of Bethlehem and other cities because of its newly widened streets. As a punishment for the defiance of the Jenin refugees', their camp was rebuilt to better facilitate another invasion.

When I visited the camp, we watched an excerpt of the film "Jenin Jenin" where an old man in a hospital describes an attack from an Israeli soldier. He is weeping as he describes a soldier shooting him in the hand, asking him to get up, and then shooting him in the foot. A guide gave us a copy of the film. It seems devastating. I have yet to watch it. It is also important to note that after the Oslo Accords, Israel expanded settlements in the West Bank and continues to do so.

Jenin is also home to the Freedom Theater. I met a young instructor and filmmaker at the theater who described to me the coming of the Third Intifada. He envisions this cycle of the uprising to consist of an "army of artists", as he put it, with smarter media outreach than the Israel PR machine. Imagining a new generation of Palestinian youth as an organized, cohesive, and unyielding "army of artists" exemplifies a type of undying hope that I have encountered since I've been here..