Jenin

I had absorbed enough news stories about Jenin that I arrived with a preconception that the city itself immediately began to dismantle. The headlines are about the camp — the 2002 battle, the ongoing Israeli military operations, the militias — and those realities are real and not to be minimised. But the city I walked into on a Tuesday morning was a city doing ordinary things in a very Palestinian key: the market near the centre selling figs and tobacco and cheap plastic household goods, the streets full of school buses and men in work clothes, a barbershop with four chairs all occupied and a television on the wall showing a game show. Jenin, like every Palestinian city I visited, had decided to be itself regardless.

The old city is modest by Nablus standards but has the same DNA: limestone buildings, vaulted passages, a central mosque with a courtyard where old men sat on plastic chairs in the shade. I had coffee in a small café run by a woman who told me, unprompted, that her sons were studying engineering in Ramallah and that she had started the café after her husband was detained in a raid and she needed income. She said it without resentment and with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who had reorganised their understanding of what was normal. I thought about that tone for the rest of the day.

The Freedom Theatre is in the refugee camp, a few minutes’ walk from the old city, and it is one of the stranger and more affecting things I have visited in Palestine. Founded by Arna Mer Khamis, a Jewish-Israeli activist, in the 1980s as a children’s theatre in the camp, rebuilt by her son Juliano after the camp was heavily damaged in 2002, and then continuing after Juliano’s assassination in 2011, the theatre functions as a kind of accumulated argument against erasure. The building itself is not impressive — a converted space with a small stage and tiered seating and a courtyard outside where murals cover every wall. But the programming is serious, the acting school produces graduates who perform in Ramallah and abroad, and the weight of what happened here and to the people who built it is present in the walls in a way that the most carefully constructed museum cannot replicate.

The camp itself, which I walked through with a local contact, is not the rubble field the 2002 coverage might suggest. It has been rebuilt — badly, quickly, densely, with the narrow lanes of a refugee camp that was never designed for permanence now running between three and four-storey concrete buildings. Children play in the alleys. Satellite dishes cluster on every roof. A mural of Yasser Arafat covers an entire side wall near the camp entrance, faded to pastels. The mundane density of the place, and the fact that it still functions as a community after everything that has happened to it, is the thing that stays with you.

North of Jenin the landscape opens into agricultural land — olive groves and wheat fields and the occasional village with its stone houses on a ridge — and the hills here feel different from the compressed drama of Ramallah or Nablus. There is more sky. The road to Zababdeh, a Christian village a few kilometres east, passes through countryside that in spring looks like a child’s drawing of what farmland should be: green, gently rolling, unreasonably photogenic. Zababdeh has an old church with Byzantine mosaic fragments still in the floor and an olive press running during harvest season that fills the whole village with the smell of fresh-pressed oil.

When to go: October and November for the olive harvest and the best agricultural landscape. Spring from March to May for wildflowers and mild temperatures. The theatre’s programming season runs September through June — check in advance if you want to see a performance, as productions sell out among the local audience.