A marvelous facilitator, who does support groups for children, invited me to a group she runs for 5 year olds who lost their homes—and more—in the bombing. I sat in the circle with the children as they chose happy or sad faces to represent how they felt. One girl said she took a sad face because her grandfather was killed by a bomb. Others took sad faces because they had bad dreams. The facilitator told me that her own 10-year-old daughter pleaded with her during the war, “Don’t leave me alone. I want to die together.”
So, there’s more than enough stress, grief and sadness to go around, but there is also an undeniable quality and remarkable amount of love, generosity, and samud (steadfastness). Ramadan, who translated for me at a workshop and who is working on a Ph.D. in psychology, pointed out that just as lots of folks may only appreciate their health when they become sick and no longer have it, Palestinians may feel the lack of a homeland more intensely, having so brutally lost it. “Others have a physical homeland, a place they live in or visit. Our homeland lives in our hearts,” Ramadan explained over coffee to the sound of the waves beating on the shore. “It’s the smell of our grandparents.”
While walking through the devastation of Khuza‘a, witnessing homes, apartment buildings and a school totally leveled, I was approached by a middle-aged man who politely offered me a large manuscript covered with the dust of blown-up homes. When I asked him what it was and why he wanted to give it to me, he motioned for me to follow him across the street to a huge mound of debris. As we climbed up the pile, he pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of quite an attractive home—his home. He explained that we were standing on that home and that absolutely everything had been destroyed except for the manuscript, his doctoral dissertation, which was a literary critique of the works of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. This professor, who had lost it all, was insisting that I take what remained of a life. I’ll never know for sure why. Maybe it was Palestinian hospitality that required him to give this guest something, and that was all he had to give. Perhaps he wanted me to take it to a safe place as he well knew that nothing was safe in Gaza. Possibly this professor was saying that in spite of all the destruction the Israelis could unleash at will, there is one thing they can never destroy: ideas—not only about Pound and Eliot, but also about the restoration of justice to a people who have suffered unimaginable levels of brutality and dispossession.
I’m struggling with many things now, not the least of which is finding words to express the intensity of the experience of getting to know, in some small but profoundly meaningful way, a number of unforgettable and beautiful people in Gaza, and catching a glimpse into the harsh reality of their lives.
It’s difficult to make sense of how the occupation and siege of Gaza which is slowly but steadily crushing the life of 1.85 million people can be happening and how the world is doing so little to stop it. But Imad’s question, “What can we do?” echoes in my head often. Some of what I can do is clear: a stronger commitment to 1) as Arundhati Roy says, speaking out, asserting the Palestinian struggle more broadly and more often, as we Americans are so deeply complicit in the ongoing Nakba (Arabic word for catastrophe which historically has referred to the ethnic cleansing of 1948); and 2) BDS, or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, a growing civil society non-violent movement similar to the one that helped to bring down apartheid in South Africa. More of what I can do will surely emerge with time as I continue to think about Walaa, Yasser, Rawya and all the other incredible people I met who want nothing more than to live.
In Gaza, I left behind friends and more than a piece of my heart.
We Shall Live to Tell the Stories of War Crimes in Gaza
Hana Baalousha
In all Hollywood action films, when the enemy uses a civilian as a human shield, the policeman drops his gun and lets the enemy go in order to save the civilian. The innocent person’s life is always depicted as more important than the enemy’s death.
Clearly these morals are only for movies. The morals on the ground in Gaza, however, are totally different. Israel shoots and bombs children and young people, leaving them to bleed to death in front of their parents while bombarding ambulances that try to reach them.
In this horrendous aggression against Gaza, every Palestinian is a target and age isn’t an issue. As I hold my three-month-old Jolie close to my chest, I recall the pictures of babies her age with face injuries that hide their beauty and innocence, and others dead with amputated limbs, heads emptied from their contents, or burnt bodies.
As I squeeze her little defenseless body between my arms, I hear the voice of my cousin’s husband saying, “I found the leg of my son coming out of the wreckage.”
He lost his pregnant wife and two sons, four and six years old. I recall the picture of a man carrying the parts of his son’s body in a plastic bag, a human body that he raised and cherished had been turned—in a blink of an eye—into a pile of flesh gathered from under the rubble by an army that justifies it by saying “mistakes happen.”
“We’re sorry for any accidental civilian deaths but it’s Hamas that bears complete responsibility for such civilian casualties,” Benjamin Netanyahu has said.
Since July 7, there have been more than 1,650 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Approximately 1,300 civilians slaughtered by Israel—not Hamas.
Does anyone seriously believe that these deaths were accidental?
No Safe Place
I recall the pictures of the four Baker family boys, all aged between nine and eleven. Killed by an Israeli missile on July 16, their bodies were thrown all over the beach in front of a hotel mainly populated by journalists. The kids were playing on the beach in an attempt to take some time out of this chaos and enjoy their childhood. But they were not allowed to do so.
Resistance fighters aren’t stupid enough to launch rockets in front of a hotel where every single person carries a camera around the clock. In Gaza, there is no safe place.
As I comb my baby’s hair with my fingers, I imagine the three kids feeding their pigeons on the roof of their house the next day (July 17). They were killed along with their pigeons.
The voice of a boy about ten years old—or so it appears from his voice in a video clip—echoes in my ears: “Yemma, wen shebshebi?” (“Mom, where are my slippers?”). He shouted this while paramedics searched his house in an attempt to evacuate the family along with any others injured.
With the Israeli warplanes loudly hovering overhead, randomly hitting everywhere and the family fearfully trying to leave the targeted neighborhood in which he lives, his main concern was his slippers. He did not want to run in the street barefoot, and he repeated his question again. He is just a child.
Holiday in Gaza
Two years ago, I started a new job teaching Arabic to native speakers of English in the United Kingdom. My icebreaker on the first day was a question. I asked the students what they did that summer. Some said they spent the holiday visiting family in Jordan or Egypt. Others went on holiday in Europe.
Others even said they went on tour from Jordan to London to Paris. I had to hide my surprise.
I thought, “Who are these people?” Definitely not Gazans. This is not how we holiday in Gaza. The best we can do is go to the beach. Not this summer. We get killed there.
Today, I’m trying to imagine what memories of this summer the students I know in Gaza will have to recount. One has lost an arm, and the other has lost a brother. A third has become homeless and a fourth has become an orphan. One may not be able to share his story because he lost his life.
Lost Everything
During the onslaught, Ramadan, a month when we Muslims abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk, came to an end. Eid al-Fitr is the first day after Ramadan, and it is usually a day of celebration.
Mothers cook delicious meals and bake special cookies. Children wear new clothes, buy candy and new toys and go to playgroups; they visit relatives and friends along with their parents to congratulate them for the end of this
month which we spent worshipping God.
Children wait for this day all year long. They prepare their new clothes and count the days until they can put them on.
This year, there was no such day. No new clothes. No cookies. No toys. No candy. No playgroups. No family visits. Thousands of houses no longer stood in place. Thousands of families who still had their houses no longer lived in them.
They escaped the Israeli war machine and sheltered in schools. Mothers did not cook or bake luxury foods because, inside the schools, they waited for charitable organizations to send them basic staples. Hundreds of children neither wore new clothes nor bought new toys because they had lost the people who bought them these clothes, and those with whom they usually celebrated.
Some have lost everything, their family and their house. Others had to spend this special day alone on a cold bed in a hospital.
On the first day of Eid, ten children were killed in a playground.
No words can justify what is happening to children today in Gaza. Nothing can justify killing the innocence of our babies and children. And nothing can justify the world’s silence.
As long as this bloodshed continues, the whole world will be an accomplice in these war crimes. As long as we live, we shall not forgive.
And we shall live to tell the story.
The Electronic Intifada, August 2, 2014, http://bit.ly/1lposDn
Who Benefits from Billions Pledged for Gaza Reconstruction?
Maureen Clare Murphy
A donor conference hosted in Cairo on Sunday to raise funds for the reconstruction of war-devastated Gaza has boasted $5.4 billion in pledges from various Western and Arab governments.
Yet Israel is the true beneficiary of this aid money. The self-declared international community has once again footed the reconstruction bill as it arms Israel with the weaponry and ensures it the impunity that only rewards its brutal onslaught on Gaza and essentially guarantees its repetition.
“This is the third time in less than six years that together with the people of Gaza, we have been forced to confront a reconstruction effort,” an exasperated U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry stated at the conference, as though this summer’s bloodshed was something other than inevitable given all those arms Washington lavished on Israel, along with the monetary aid and diplomatic cover since the large-scale assaults in November 2012 and winter 2008–2009.
Parties involved in the donor conference are making only the most minimal efforts to pretend that the priority is the survivors in Gaza, where more than one in every thousand of the nearly 1.8 million Palestinians there, most of whom are refugees, were killed.
The Palestinian Authority, based in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah, has already announced that half of the pledges raised at Sunday’s conference will not even make it to Gaza.
Burned fishing boat on a Gaza beach, August 7, 2014. Israeli shelling cost the fishing industry about $3 million in July. The industry has been hard hit by repeated Israeli restrictions on fishing areas (from six to three nautical miles from the coastline).2
Photo by Mohammed Asad.
Gaza Pledges Diverted to Ramallah
Instead, those funds will be diverted to the Palestinian Authority’s budget for unspecified purposes.
Though the PA did not say how it will spend the money raised at the Gaza reconstruction conference that it earmarked for itself, “the security sector has grown faster than any other part of the Palestinian Authority” in the past decade, as noted by Sabrien Amrov and Alaa Tartir in a recent policy brief published by the Palestinian think-tank Al-Shabaka.
Last year, 26 percent of the PA’s budget was spent on security (compared with just 16 percent for education, nine percent for health and a minuscule one percent on agriculture, historically the backbone of the Palestinian economy). Forty-four percent of PA civil servants are employed in the security sector—more than any other, Amrov and Tartir point out.
The Palestinian Authority—which has already blocked efforts to bring Israeli war crimes in Gaza this summer before the International Criminal Court—is led by Mahmoud Abbas, who recently described collaboration with Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank as “sacred.”
PA Seizes Opportunity
More than forty Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far this year; fourteen were killed during the equivalent period in 2013. “Security coordination” is obviously not concerned with securing the preservation of Palestinian lives.
As pointed out by Amrov and Tartir, “the armed resistance that was once considered an inseparable part of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination is being dealt with by the PA as a form of dissent that needs not just policing but eradication and criminalization.”
The current paradigm of security coordination, state Amrov and Tartir, is “to criminalize resistance against the occupation and leave Israel—and its trusted minions—in sole possession of the use of arms against a defenseless population.”
As the Palestinian Authority, which serves as the policing arm of the Israeli occupation, positions itself as the executor of Gaza’s reconstruction, this will surely be used as an opportunity for those who seek to dismantle the armed resistance (which defended Gaza and demonstrated greater discipline and tactical capability than it did during any prior confrontation with Israel).
Though the PA has jockeyed for this role to sideline the Hamas leadership in Gaza, any attempts to rebuild are subject to Israel’s ultimate authority.
(It is worth noting that the Palestine Liberation Organization told the Ma’an News Agency on Sunday that no date has yet been set for implementing reconstruction projects in Gaza.)
Reminding observers who is really in charge, West Bank-based PA ministers including Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah were initially denied permits by Israel to visit Gaza, which remains under closure and economic siege imposed by Israel and enforced by donor conference host Egypt.
“More than 50 Years to Rebuild”
The international aid agency Oxfam warned last week that money pledged at the global donor conference “will languish in bank accounts for decades before it reaches people, unless long-standing Israeli restrictions on imports are lifted.”
As the importation of basic construction material into Gaza has been prohibited with few exceptions since 2007, and the supply tunnels under the border with Egypt largely destroyed, Palestinians are unable to rebuild.
Oxfam added that “under current restrictions and rate of imports it could take more than 50 years to build the 89,000 new homes, 226 new schools, as well as the health facilities, factories and water and sanitation infrastructure that people in Gaza need.”
No matter how much money international donors raise for reconstruction, Israel determines what gets in and out of Gaza.
Truckloads of construction materials brought in to Gaza last month were “designated for projects pre-approved by Israeli authorities and to be implemented by international organizations in Gaza,” the United Nations Agency for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs notes in a recent weekly monitoring report.
Israel’s total stranglehold on Gaza’s economy also applies to exports—only two truckloads of which were permitted through the Israeli-controlled commercial crossing last month, the first trucks of exports since June.
Accountability or Complicity
The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) condemns the failure to bring meaningful pressure on Israel to end the siege that had brought the economy to its knees even before the destruction it wrought on Gaza this summer—during which 419 businesses and workshops were damaged, with 128 completely destroyed.
“Donor money pledges are no substitute for holding Israel accountable for its grave violations of international law, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and achieving justice for the Palestinian victims,” the BNC stated on Sunday.
“Israel’s blockade and repeated military assaults against
the occupied Gaza Strip are part and parcel of systematic Israeli efforts to permanently separate the tiny Gaza Strip from the West Bank and ‘get rid’ of its large Palestinian population, most of them refugees of the 1948 Nakba with unresolved rights and claims in Israel,” the statement adds.
The BNC criticizes international agencies including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross for operating “within the confines of Israel’s policy of separation and collective punishment.”
Without also adopting a comprehensive and binding military embargo on Israel, donor states, international agencies and nongovernmental organizations are complicit in an unjust and illegal policy of collective punishment, the BNC makes clear. And there is no mechanism of accountability to the Palestinian public.
Abandoning Gaza
Given all of these realities, it is tragic but unsurprising that young Palestinians in Gaza, facing unemployment rates as high as 60 percent, have lost hope and are putting their lives in the hands of smugglers in a bid to reach Europe and a future.
“This has never happened before...Even in the worst of times, people never considered abandoning the Gaza Strip,” Sara Roy, who has studied Gaza’s economy for three decades, told Bettina Marx in an interview for Deutsche Welle.
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