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,
> in 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.
>
> _________________________________________________________________




                               






            © 2005 Comcast Cable Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
            Privacy Statement  Terms of Service  Contact Comcast