A White Lie

by Madeeha Hafez Albatta

  The so-called “Six-Day War” of 1967 resulted in the expulsion of another 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, including 130,000 who were displaced for a second time after their initial displacement in 1948.18 The defeat followed by the military occupation shattered Palestinians’ hopes for return, but energized the national movements led by the Fedayeen. To pacify resistance in the Strip, then Israeli Defence Minister Sharon initiated a policy of home demolitions that continues to this day. As people in Gaza were subjected to intensified restrictions on freedom of movement and to increasingly squalid economic conditions, it was no accident that the 1987 Intifada was first triggered in Gaza, specifically in the Jabalia refugee camp, and rapidly spread across the remainder of the Strip before it was joined by the West Bank. The uprising was a mass popular movement that held up for six years. It manifested in protests and strikes, in civil disobedience, and in boycotts. Unable to supress the masses, Israel shut down Gaza’s universities for six years, denying tens of thousands of students the opportunity to study, including one of the editors of this series. It imposed curfews locking the entire Palestinian population of Gaza inside their homes every night for about six years.19 An order ascribed to Israel’s then Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, directed the Israeli army to break the bones of Palestinian protesters.20 The images of unarmed Palestinian youths throwing rocks at fully armed Israeli troops captured attention in international media and contributed to a narrative of the Palestinian David fighting Israel’s Goliath.

  Amidst the heat of the Intifada, a peace process was launched in Madrid under the auspices of the Americans and the Soviets in 1991. The process eventually culminated with the Oslo Accords, signed by Israel and the PLO on the White House lawn in September 1993. In keeping with the terms of the Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA), an interim self-governing body, was constituted. The PA, led by the late Yasser Arafat, along with the PLO leadership, were allowed to return to Gaza and establish a headquarters. Oslo was the pinnacle of Palestinian hopes for statehood and self-determination. Widespread discussions stated that Gaza would become the “Singapore of the Middle East.”21 These hopes evaporated, however, when the Accords panned out as the “biggest hoax of the century.”22 They neglected to deal with the core issues of both the conflict and the Palestinian cause: with the Palestinian refugees, with the right of their return, and with the 1948 Nakba.23 Reflecting his deep frustration at the aftermath of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta, himself a refugee expelled to Gaza along with his family, wrote to PLO leader Yasser Arafat, asking him why the Accords and his ensuing speech at the UN had omitted “Palestine,” “Palestinians,” and demands for inalienable rights:

  I wished to hear you, Mr. President, say in your speech: I stand before you today to remind you that forty-six years ago 85 percent of my people were uprooted by the force of arms and the horror of massacres, from their ancestral homes. My people were dispersed to the four corners of the earth. Yet we did not forget our homeland for one minute…Let us learn the lesson of history: Injustice will not last. Justice must be done.24

  “Oslo,” as the Accords are commonly called, entrenched the segregation of Palestinian communities. In 1994, a fence was erected around Gaza; a permit system was applied to anyone who needed to leave the Strip. This had a drastic impact on the population’s ability to conduct anything approximating a “normal” life, while severely weakening the Strip’s economy.

  The failure of Oslo to recognize the core issues at stake for the Palestinian people was followed by the breakdown of negotiations between the PA and Israel in late 2000. This stalemate provided fertile ground for the eruption of the second Intifada. Israel’s violence in suppressing this uprising unleashed the full might of the world’s fifth largest army against a defenceless civilian population. Daily bombings by F-16 fighter jets became the soundtrack of daily life in Gaza, while Palestinians mounted armed attacks against Israeli military posts inside the Strip and against the army and sometimes civilians in Israeli towns and cities.

  In 2001, Sharon declared war on the PA’s leadership, security officials, and infrastructure. Israeli bulldozers destroyed the runway of Gaza International Airport, attacked the symbols of Arafat’s authority, and bombarded and destroyed Arafat helicopters. These attacks left much of Gaza’s internationally funded infrastructure in ruins.25 Even worse, however, as a form of collective punishment of Gazans, Israel imposed a policy of internal “closure,” preventing movement within the tiny Strip. It divided the Gaza Strip into three parts. The principal closure points were on the coastal road to the west of the Netzarim colony (formerly located between Gaza City and the Nuseirat camp) and at the Abu Holi Checkpoint (named after the farmer whose land was confiscated to build the checkpoint), located at the centre of the Strip. Each time the Israeli army shut down these points, Gaza was split apart, paralyzing all movement of people and goods.26 For five consecutive years, for Gazan doctors, nurses, patients, students, teachers, farmers, labourers, and mothers, a trip from north to south—ordinarily a ninety-minute round trip—could turn into a week-long ordeal, and dependence on the kindness of one’s extended family for accommodations and food until the checkpoints were re-opened.27

  In 2004, Dov Weisglass, advisor to Prime Minister Sharon, declared his strategy of rendering the peace process moribund and his intention to sink it, along with Palestinians’ national dreams, in “formaldehyde.”28

  Israeli political activity has always been rooted in unilateralism. The false narrative of a “land without people” permitted the “people without a land”—now instated in what was formerly Palestine—to conduct themselves in absolute disregard of the existence of another people. The latter, like so many rocks and boulders, were simply to be bulldozed flat as the new state was being constructed. Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005, vacating about eight thousand settlers, whose houses and farms covered forty percent of the area of the Strip, was an act of political sleight of hand that allowed Israel to declare itself free of political and moral responsibility for the Gaza Strip, while also declaring it an “enemy entity”29 in 2007. It could accordingly be enveloped in a siege designed to generate medieval living conditions.30

  The 2006 free and fair elections that brought the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas, into power were the fruit created by Israel’s departure, viewed by many Palestinians as a victory of the resistance, led by Hamas, to Israel’s brutal policies of oppression, as well as to the inherent weakness at the heart of the Palestinian Authority. The latter, which is supposedly authorized to govern, is constrained by severe limitations that effectively disable the centrifugal forces allowing the governance of states. The US and the EU were the parties at whose demand the fledgling Palestinian Authority conducted elections, and these were declared fair and free by all international monitors. And yet, these same parties proceeded to boycott the results (which they found unsatisfactory) and to cut foreign aid to the PA. For the most part, these cuts and the shortages they incurred were imposed upon Gaza (and to a lesser degree, the West Bank).

  Declaring Gaza an “enemy entity” allowed Israel to conduct three major offensives against the Strip, in 2008, 2012, and 2014. The 2014 offensive , which lasted 51 days, destroyed much of what had previously functioned as Gaza’s infrastructure and institutions, including the complete or partial destruction of at least 100,000 homes, 62 hospitals, 278 mosques, and 220 schools.31 It also left 2,300 people dead, the majority of these being civilians, and tens of thousands wounded.32

  Four generations of refugees now live in the Gaza Strip, scattered among eight refugee camps. As of 2020, Gaza is still under siege. Access to the outside world is controlled by Israel, or by Egypt, acting as Israel’s sub-contractor. No one can enter or leave the Strip without permits from one of these two powers. According to Oxfam, in 2019, one million Palestinians in Gaza lacked sufficient food for their families. Sixty percent of these Gazans were subsisting on less than $2 a day. Unemployment, meas
ured at 62 percent in 2019, is among the highest in the world.33 Economist Sara Roy has characterized the pattern as one of structural de-development,34 and Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes it as “a uniquely cruel case of intentional de-development” and a “classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era.”35 Although the World Bank has said that Gaza’s economy is in “free fall,”36 the Strip has in fact maintained a perverse stasis: formaldehyde, after all, is used to preserve corpses.

  Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz recently compared the present circumstances of the Palestinian people to conditions of slavery. These conditions, she said, present one of the great moral questions of our time and are similar, in certain respects, to the slavery that embroiled the US in civil war in the nineteenth century.37

  The strands of oppression and violence running through the Palestinian tapestry are interwoven with strands of endurance, ability to overcome, and Sumud—steadfastness—in the face of injustice. Palestinians still firmly believe in return and in the possibility of justice, even if these ideals have become embattled and tattered. Gaza’s high level of concentration on the importance of these narratives belies its tiny size, at just 1.3 percent of historic Palestine. Protesting the circumstances of all Palestinians, the near suffocation of the Gaza Strip, and the international disinterest in both, Gazan civil society launched the Great March of Return in 2018. Weekly protests were initiated along the border fence with Israel every Friday, calling on both Israel and the world to recognize the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly removed seven decades ago. The protestors also insist upon a plethora of other basic rights denied to Palestinian people in the “ongoing Nakba” of their lives.38 The World Health Organization reported over 300 Gazans were shot and killed by the Israeli army in the course of these rallies, as of December 2019, with 35,000 more injured.39 On May 14, 2019 alone, Israeli military snipers killed 60 unarmed demonstrators and wounded 2,700.40

  The weekly marches are an ongoing journey fulfilling the prophesy of Mahmoud Darwish that “a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky.”41 Every independent state formed after “the dismantling of the classical empires in the post-World War Two years” has recognized an urgent need “to narrate its own history, as much as possible free of the biases and misrepresentations of that history,” as written by colonial historians.42 In an analogy to the poetry that represents a highly important oral tradition in the Arab world, we see this book as an effort to capture the poetry of life and the history of a people, expressed by those who live it on a daily basis.

  Filling in a Tapestry of Resistance Through Memory Work

  The history of Gaza is far richer and deeper than the standard narratives of helplessness, humanitarian disaster, or war story would have us believe. Moreover, as is the case with other post-colonial regions and their histories, Gazan history differs greatly from official accounts and Eurocentric renderings based (largely) on oversimplifications.43 This series is, accordingly, an attempt to replace detached—and sometimes questionable—statistics and chronologies of erupting conflict with some of the concrete details of actual survival and resistance, complex human emotions, and specific difficult choices. The stories recounted reflect crucial facts and important events through the evidence of lived experience. They contextualize selective reports and statistics, correcting omissions, misrepresentations, and misinterpretations.

  This series is an attempt to re-imagine the history of Gaza from the viewpoint of its people. A true understanding of Gaza entails a reading of the human history beyond and behind chronologies, a reading that follows some of the coloured threads that make its tapestry so vibrant. The seven women whose stories we relate communicate the history they lived, through reflecting on events they experienced in their own voices and vocabularies. They shared feelings and named processes as they understood them, enabling others to grasp and realize the sheer dimensions of the injustice to which they were subjected and which they amazingly withstood.

  Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappe has used the term “memoricide” to denote the attempted annihilation of memory, particularly that of the Palestinian Nakba. A systematic “erasure of the history of one people in order to write that of another people’s over it” has constituted the continuous imposition of a Zionist layer and of nationalized Israeli patterns over everything Palestinian.44 This has included the erasure of all traces of the Palestinian people—of the recultivation and renaming of Palestinian sites and villages. These practices were recounted victoriously by Moshe Dayan in 1969:

  We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is, a Jewish state here. Jewish villages were built in the places of Arab villages and I do not know even the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because the geography books no longer exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneidi and Kfar Yehushua in the place of Tal al Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.45

  In the context of daily hardship, then, memory is crucial. It is a deeply significant site for resisting policies of elimination and erasure. Often, such resistance work takes place within families, and, in particular, through women. Stories of lost homes are handed down from generation to generation and repeated time and again, preserving the names of lost villages and towns, detailing former landholdings, passing on deeds, and recounting traditions and tales about “the ancestors, everyday life, the harvests, and even quarrels.”46 When asked where they are from, most of the children of Palestinian refugee families will state the name of a village lost generations ago.

  In recognizing women’s diverse experiences as a key to decoding history, we share accounts of women of the generation that experienced the 1948 Nakba, told with the backdrop of the master narratives of Gaza, offering new insights into the story of Palestine. The respective narrators enable readers to gain a fuller understanding of the scale of tragedy experienced by each of these women and of its socio-economic and political impacts.

  The series draws on the concept of “History from Below” proposed by the French historian Georges Lefebvre, who emphasized that history is shaped by ordinary people over extended periods of time.47 It also draws on the feminist concept of “Herstory,” where feminist historians and activists reclaim and retell the suppressed accounts of historical periods as women, particularly marginalized women, experienced them. It is in these traditions that we present the oral histories of Palestinian women from the Gaza Strip. The school of oral history, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s, achieved increased recognition during the 1960s, and is now considered a major component of historical research that enlists the assistance of twenty-first-century digital technologies.48 In defending the method of recording oral history, Paul Thompson argued, in The Voice of the Past: Oral History, that it transmutes the content of history “by shifting the focus and opening new areas of inquiry, by challenging some of the assumptions and accepting judgment of historians, by bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored.”49 The historically “silent” social groups cited by Thompson include Indigenous people, refugees, migrants, colonized peoples, those of subaltern categories, and minorities. Such groups have employed the methodology of oral history to counteract dominant discourses that suppress their versions of history. Alistair Thomson argued that “for many oral historians, recording experiences which have been ignored in history and involving people in exploring and making their own histories, continue to be primary justifications for the use of oral history.”50 In efforts to represent the totality of truths, oral history has been recognized as a method of realizing the rights of marginalized people to own and sound a voice, to share and reflect on their collective experiences, and to resist the dominant colonial rhetoric that omits or obliterates these experiences. In
this context, Julia Chaitin argues that oral history is not simply an attempt to find an alternative historical text, but also to gather new information that cannot be located by other means as it is undocumented.51

  Oral history, as a method that both enhances and disrupts formal history, has not yet taken root extensively in the Arab world. Among a few rare exceptions, according to anthropologist and historian Rosemary Sayigh, are the Palestinians “who have used oral and visual documents to record experiences of colonialist dispossession and violence that challenge dominant Zionist and Western versions of their history.”52 In gradually moving “from the margins to the center,” this practice has come to constitute the core of Palestinian historiography in the past twenty years,53 and is deployed abundantly, both formally and informally, in collecting and reviving knowledge that was formerly unrecorded. In response to Edward Said’s call for the “permission to narrate,” oral history has paved the way for the continued production of archival collections, resisting the ongoing erasure of Palestinian spaces, existence, history, and identity. Sherna Gluck notes that this method not only recovers and preserves the past through the collection of accounts, for example, of the Nakba, but also establishes the legitimacy of claim and of the right of return.54 For Palestinians such as Malaka Shwaikh, a Gaza-born scholar, oral history and memory of the past act “as a force in maintaining and reproducing their rights as the sole owners of Palestine” and as “fuel for their survival.”55