Thoughts from Gaza


Articles Gaza and Democracy
> January 27, 2006
>
> Finally, after several years of wanting to go to Gaza, Dunya and I managed
> to spend two days there under the auspices of election observation. It
> didn't take very long for Dunya to observe that the elections in Gaza City
> were far cleaner than those in Ohio in 2004, where she was working at the
> time. Lack of democracy is not Palestine's problem - the democracy here
> is more thriving than I've seen anywhere else. So our two-day trip consisted
> of about a half hour of "election observation" amidst many hours of
> traveling around, talking with people, and photographing everything we
> saw.
> I know the West Bank well enough at this point that nothing seems
> particularly new. But from the moment we arrived at Erez crossing, I
> began to photograph the buildings, the corridors, the Israeli police dogs, the
> wall surrounding the Gaza Strip that looks very much like the wall being
> built now throughout the West Bank.
>
> We stayed in Gaza City with Khaled Nasrallah and his family, one of the
> two  families who had been living in the house in Rafah that Rachel Corrie was
> killed in front of in March 2003. The bulldozer that killed her did not
> demolish the Nasrallah's home that day, but within a year the army
> completed  the task and the family was left homeless. They now live in an apartment
> in Gaza City while a new house is being built for them in Deir Balah. Most
> of the people in Gaza who have been displaced by home demolition in the past
> few years have been displaced at least once before - in 1948 - and some of
> them more than once. They've lived in a constant state of terror for the
> past five years, and according to some, it only got worse after the
> "disengagement". Israeli shelling and other destruction from the air is
> not  entirely uncommon, not to mention the sonic booms that only started since
> the settlers have left. A 9-year-old girl was shot and killed by the
> Israeli army on Thursday in Gaza, somewhere near a border with Israel.
> Probably just a few miles from where we were. Someone from the Gaza
> Community Mental Health Programme told us that they have seen no
> particular change in their work since the "disengagement", whereas a man at the Gaza International Airport explained a building's construction by saying, "In
> the days of the occupation, the Israelis instructed us to build this building
> so they can observe the border. Now there's no occupation, so the building
> is for us."
>
> The Gaza International Airport is really something else. Or not, but
> that's what makes it so remarkable. It looks like any other airport, only with
> more beautiful design than many. And it is deserted. And the control
> towers have been bombed by Israeli Apaches. And the runways have been
> bulldozed every couple hundred meters. According to security at the
> airport, the only employees currently working there, the airport opened in
> 2000, and was forced by Israel to close early in 2001. Israel still
> forbids  Palestinians from even beginning to reconstruct the runway. Palestinian
> Airlines only flies now between Egypt and Amman, and they only have two
> functioning airplanes. Our host is an accountant for the airline.
>
> And then there's Rafah. The row of houses along the border of Gaza and
> Egypt (which arbitrarily divided the community of Rafah in half when the
> border lines were drawn), are shot up thousands and thousands of times.
> That is, the houses that are still standing. More of them are in rubble.
> But the bullet holes through the windows, doors, walls. it looks more like
> war than anything I've ever seen. Our hosts who were displaced from Rafah
> and now live in Gaza City described to us some of the terror of their last
> year or two in Rafah: never knowing which rooms were safe to be in,
> Israeli bullets flying through their windows at all hours, the young daughters
> waking up in the middle of the night and screaming. The girls are still
> affected, their mother Samah told us, but only the oldest, now five years
> old, remembers a specific story from Rafah. The family had been sleeping
> in  the garden because it was safer than the house. At one point they were
> all at slightly different places, someone in the garden, someone in the house,
> someone on the stairs. The shooting started, and young Mariam remembers
> the bullets flying towards their house, hitting a tree, and watching a guava
> fall off a tree and hit her father on the head. Her mother told the story
> laughing, saying "alhamdulillah" - thank god we weren't hurt any more than
> we were. She was in the hospital giving birth to her third daughter when
> their house was finally demolished. Thank god, she said, that nobody was
> in the house. The things to be thankful for in Gaza are incomprehensible to
> me.
>
> Hope looks different, too, as Dunya pointed out during our visit to the
> former settlements. We had hired a driver for the day to take us around.
> At every turn he explained that the Israelis used to be here, and here,
> and here. This is where this person was killed, this is a school that was
> bombed, this is an old checkpoint. And then we entered the old settlement
> of Netzarim. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting a
> scene that superficially looked remarkably similar to me to demolished
> Palestinian homes. The Israelis are good at destroying things, we joked
> to  each other. They destroy Palestinian homes, and they also destroyed the
> settlers' homes (and left a huge mess) upon leaving Gaza. And this is
> hope,  I suppose. Can rubble be hopeful?
>
> Speaking of surprise, Gaza City is bustling. We arrived our first
> evening,  met the family, ate dinner, and then Khaled asked, "Do you want to walk
> around the city?" We were shocked that he would go out at night,
> especially  with two female internationals, but it was completely normal to him. And
> indeed, the shops were open, everyone was buying ice cream at the local
> ice cream parlor, last minute campaigning was subtly happening (campaigning is
> banned for 24 hours before election day, but nobody can be prevented from
> driving their cars, vegetable trucks, or donkeys around the streets with
> party flags on them). Apparently Gaza City is the Ramallah of Gaza, a
> thriving city where poverty is somewhat less apparent than other parts of
> Gaza. We asked if this is recent, since the disengagement. No, he told
> us, n Gaza City people have always just gone about their lives, sometimes
> dodging bullets and shells, but continuing with their lives.
>
> Gaza is beautiful. I've heard statistics about it being the most crowded
> place on earth, so I wasn't prepared for the open space, the parks of palm
> trees, the plazas with monuments and wide roads that are pedestrian
> friendly. But of course, by contrast, while driving south along the road
> with a beautiful beach and the Mediterranean to the right, we would look
> left and see refugee camps that look more like I expected refugee camps to
> look before first coming to Palestine. The camps I'm used to in the West
> Bank have slightly narrower streets than cities and villages, and a few
> more visible signs of poverty, but much of the refugee issue is somewhat unseen
> if just driving by. Some of these camps in Gaza are different, and with
> their tiny buildings and narrowest of streets they certainly look like
> they  could be described as the most crowded places on earth.
>
> The little bit of election observing we did was exciting, if only to see
> the  incredible amount of civic engagement. In fact, you couldn't be in
> Palestine and not be doing some sort of "election observing" during these
> past couple weeks, when all anyone has been talking about has been
> politics.

> I realize that I come from an American context where civic engagement is
> among the lowest in the world, so it excites me to be somewhere where even
> with such difficulty living under occupation, at least 75% of eligible
> voters voted. There is, of course, the knowledge in the back of my head
> that Israel is holding 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners who can't
> vote from Israeli prisons, that the Israeli government only permitted 6% of
> Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to vote in the Palestinian
> elections, and that the 2/3 of the Palestinian population that lives
> outside  of Palestine, mostly as refugees, do not have any say in who will be
> representing them and potentially negotiating away their right to return
> to  their land. Not that negotiations will be happening any time soon here,
> since Israel refuses to negotiate with a Hamas that doesn't disarm. I
> wish  Hamas would refuse to negotiate with an Israel that doesn't disarm. Maybe
> Hamas has already said something to this effect. I don't know, I haven't
> been reading much of the news. Mostly I have just been talking to
> Palestinian people, people who are shocked, excited, worried, and curious
> about what their future may bring. Hamas won on a platform of "change and
> reform" that mostly focused on ending corruption within the Palestinian
> Authority and bringing economic development to Palestine. Apparently they
> did not focus either on religion or resistance against Israel, probably
> realizing that these two points would get them less popular support from
> the Palestinian people. And indeed, they received in votes what people say is
> twice the amount of popular support they actually have. So there is
> shock. Some hope in the possibility of change, but concern about the opinion of
> the international community, and specifically the end or slowing down of cash
> flow from Western governments.
>
> The most common joke I've heard made in the past couple days, if it can be
> called a joke, is that I'll have to start covering myself fully. A man
> joked today that he's already starting to grow his beard. I was in
> Dheisheh refugee camp yesterday where the kids were discussing the election, and
> the  teenage girls unanimously decided they would never wear hijab, even if
> Hamas legislated it. One of the boys we were working with told us he didn't
> want  to eat any sweets that we had brought for our meeting, because Hamas won.
> We had a vote on the title of the exhibit that we're putting together with
> the children about the trips we took them on, with suggestions like "Life
> Within Two Days," "New Life", and "Destroyed Villages". At the end of the
> voting one of the kids said, "Hamas won!" So there is a lot of light
> joking about the situation, while everyone waits to see if Fatah will agree to
> work  with Hamas or not, whether the government will have enough support to
> maintain control over the people, what their relationship with the outside
> world will be, and whether religious law will or will not come into place
> in  some form.
>
> Either way, as I'm reminded daily here, there is still occupation. I was
> able to meet my friend Fatima's mother in Rafah, who hasn't seen her
> daughter since 1997 because people in Gaza can't get out and people in the
> West Bank can't get to Gaza. A 20-year-old man we spent some time with in
> Gaza did not go an hour without saying, "Take me with you to the West
> Bank." He's never been there. Our crossing out of Gaza showed us firsthand for
> the first time what can only be described as indentured servitude.
> Thousands of Palestinian workers - those lucky enough to have permits -
> were  standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting for hours to be allowed to cross
> back home to Gaza after a long day at work in the fields or building
> construction. They would go home for an hour or two to sleep, and come
> back  to the border at midnight to wait until 6 am to cross back through again.
>
> So the occupation and injustice goes on in all of Palestine, regardless of
> its status. In Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Israel, Palestinians do not
> have equal rights. Someone tried to convince us yesterday that while
> Palestinians inside Israel don't have equal rights, at least they have
> some rights. Unequal rights are not rights, Dunya pointed out. It's a concept
> that seems to escape many people in this context, people who in other
> contexts would agree and would be fighting for justice.
>
> I know the Gaza "disengagement" caused people around the world to start
> thinking that occupation is over and everything is okay. I hope the Hamas
> win does not cause even fewer people to work for justice here. I haven't
> been reading newspapers and I don't know what you're being told. But I'm
> pretty confident that I can advise you to be skeptical of both words and
> images that come out of this place these days. I doubt the mainstream
> media has suddenly decided to start telling the truth in the past two days. So
> question, question, question, and know that Palestine still needs all the
> support it can get.
>
> _________________________________________________________________

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