They Got Ahmad Jarrar, and He Fell as a Symbol and a Martyr

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

From the moment the Zionist entity learned the identity of the man who carried out the operation against the Zionist settler religious figure in the West Bank, its security and military apparatuses have not rested or paused in their search for him. He is Ahmad Nasr Jarrar, son of the martyr Nasr Jarrar, whom the Zionists had already disabled in his legs and hand before his martyrdom, and whose home they demolished. The family built a new home, and it was this home that the entity’s American-made aircraft went on to bomb after the operation Ahmad carried out — an operation the Zionists announced he had been killed in before they later realized otherwise. They killed his cousin instead, who had risen against the Zionist soldiers with his weapon, killing one of their soldiers and wounding others. The Zionists also bombed his cousin’s home, and the home of their uncle. May God have mercy on the martyr and protect our young men who insist on confronting the aggression.

Since then, the Zionist security apparatuses have continued their search, scrutiny, and investigation. They pursued the security cameras available in homes in the area of the incident and in areas far from it, in order to capture the license plate of a speeding car, or record the plate numbers of every car passing on the road at the hour of the incident, summoning their owners for interrogation. They rapidly deployed their forces at various road junctions leading to the village of Sarra and its surroundings in the Nablus area, activated the fixed checkpoints, and nearly closed the roads between the main cities in the northern West Bank and parts of the south. They continue operating these checkpoints to this day, even though the pressure on traveling citizens has eased somewhat, setting up sudden flying checkpoints, scrutinizing the ID cards of travelers, men and women alike, and searching cars, hoping to find someone hiding in the trunk, and so on. The greatest crackdown was concentrated on the Wadi Burqin area and the neighboring village of Burqin. There have been continuous raids on homes, searched savagely and recklessly, with contempt for people expressed through curses, insults, and filthy language. Nor did they spare Ahmad’s relatives, arresting some of them for interrogation, their chief concern being to learn about Ahmad’s friends and the places he usually frequented.

People have suffered many insults and terrifying humiliation over long years, and Trump’s decision to strike at Jerusalem was the greatest of these insults, the most contemptuous of the Palestinian people. The people kept swallowing insult after insult without any response that might soothe their hearts even a little, until Ahmad rescued them from confusion and loss, instilling in them feelings of hope and the capacity for retaliation and deterrence. The Palestinian public became attached to Ahmad because he instilled hope and aspiration in their hearts, igniting within them a feeling of searching for self-assertion in the face of an arrogant, haughty enemy. People grew to hate talk of futile negotiations, grew weary of hearing about the two-state solution, and became certain that the Palestinian cause cannot be resolved through conferences and dialogues, and that there is no escaping resorting to armed resistance to wrest their rights. Over the years of negotiations, people were subjected to every kind of humiliation and insult, and bitter harm befell them and their national cause, and they have come to understand that negotiations hand the Zionists everything they were unable to achieve through the barrel of a gun. And since the Palestinian factions failed to fill the vacuum resulting from the absence of resistance, people found in Ahmad someone to fill that vacuum.

We understood, silently, that Ahmad’s capabilities were very limited against the capabilities of a state armed to the teeth, mobilizing all its energies to hunt him down. From our own experience, we were aware the Zionists would get to him, just as they had previously gotten to many strugglers and fighters before him. The Zionists possess many advanced means of gathering information, and always have the latest Western technology in eavesdropping, listening, and seeing devices, even under the darkest conditions. On top of that, the Zionists recruit many agents and spies on the ground to provide them the finest details about people’s conditions, activities, and even their ways of thinking. These agents may well be more important than the technical tools, because they are present on the ground, at the scene, among the very people making the event happen. Unfortunately, as we have grown accustomed to, Zionist media focused on the Palestinian Authority’s role in providing information about Ahmad’s movements, to the point that one Zionist official said the Zionist army would not have been able to eliminate Ahmad so quickly had it not been for the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority’s apparatuses.

For this reason, and as we have repeated over more than forty years, the first task before Palestinians can be summarized as establishing a Palestinian security system resting on strict security standards, aimed at achieving security fortification for the Palestinian people and the resistance. The Zionists are strongly attentive to their own security, holding to strict security standards, always focused on gathering data and information, classifying it, and making immediate use of it. The Palestinian side, by contrast, is careless about security matters, and has never once been diligent about cleansing the Palestinian arena of agents and spies. Zionist security infiltration of the Palestinian factions and Palestinian society has broken our backs, foiling our efforts over time and bringing down our youth and our fighters. Despite all the cries and shouts, the Palestinian leaderships have never turned their attention to this matter, as though they had no concern at all with the Zionists’ infiltration of our ranks. The security question must be at the top of our list of priorities, and we are supposed to prepare the ground for a security infrastructure, transforming security diligence into a comprehensive national culture whose standards everyone upholds.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “نالوا من أحمد جرار فسقط رمزا وشهيدا” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.