GAZA STRIP 2006

III. The Forgotten War — Into The Gaza Strip

(This is from a longer article on the 2006 conflict. You can read that article here.)

The day before I’m supposed to go to Gaza, I ask an Orthodox Jew at a bus stop where I can find a synagogue. His name is Michael and he invites me to come with him to the Wailing Wall — it happens to be the an­niversary of the destruction of the temple. Michael hasn’t shaved in three weeks. Jews are supposed to suffer to help themselves remember. Some people put dirt in their shoes.

On the way, we stop at a de­monstration. They’re protesting the forced removal of the settlers from the Gaza Strip. They wave orange flags, and some have orange strips tied to the end of rifles.

Michael tells me I’m not half-Jewish. “That’s like being half-pregnant. If you’re mother’s not Jewish then you’re not Jewish.” I feel rejected. “C’mon,” Michael says. “I didn’t invent these laws. Do you think I don’t want to eat pork?”

We talk about the temple and Al-Aqsa mosque. Michael says when the temple is rebuilt, we’ll all live in peace. “We all believe in one God,” Michael says.

“But you’d have to remove the mosque to rebuild the temple,” I say. “Where Mohammed rose to heaven.”

“No. We would just move it. It’s not even their holiest place. It’s only their third-holiest place. They pray with their backs to the temple.”

“It’s hard to imagine the Is­lamic world being OK with moving Al-Aqsa,” I say.

“It’s hard to imagine a wolf and a lamb,” Michael replies.

I think about Michael and the endless war on my way into Gaza. When the temple is rebuilt there will be peace on earth. It’s not something I be­lieve, but religious extremism has risen on all sides of the Israeli conflict. I think about Maimon, whom I saw later that night. We were in the old city, filled with Orthodox Jews mourning the temple. We met an old friend of his on her way to the wall. Maimon whispered to me after she passed, “She’s not Orthodox. She used to fuck.” Maimon got his papers the other day. He’s being called up for military service even though he’s forty years old.

Most people aren’t thinking about the war in Gaza since everyone is focused on the war in the north with Lebanon. But 175 Palestinians were killed in Gaza in the last forty days.

Gaza is a hard concept to grasp without going there. It’s barely twenty-eight miles long and four miles wide. There are 1.4 million people; it’s the mostly densely pop­u­lated place on earth. One million of them are refugees from the Is­raeli War for Independence in 1948, or what Arabs refer to as al-Nakba, or the Disaster. About 860,000 of those still depend on the United Nations for food. They are citizens of no country. The cros­sing to Egypt has been closed. The port for imports and exports has been closed. The crossing to Israel has been closed. All of Gaza is surrounded by an electric fence. Journalists and humanitarian-aid workers are the only ones who can get in and out. Until a year ago, a third of Gaza was dominated by Is­raeli settlements, and to protect the settlers there were heavy restrictions on movement inside Gaza. It could take a full day to travel the twenty-eight miles between Gaza City and Rafa.

In Gaza, Hamas has risen to power, displacing Arafat’s corrupt Fatah organization. Like Hezbollah, it’s part of the government but also maintains a separate militia. The foundation of both groups is Islamic extremism. But there are also many differences. Hezbollah is Shiite, while Hamas is Sunni. There is little reason for Hezbollah to exist, but Gaza is still completely controlled by Israel and has been for the last forty years.

When I arrive at the border there are three buses. America and Germany are taking their few citizens from Gaza to the Jordanian border. Everyone with a foreign passport is leaving. They laugh at me going in. “We should kidnap you,” one of them says.

I walk a long, quiet tunnel built for processing thousands. There are steel beams and giant cement py­lons. A large gate opens at the end, and I step into a chamber. The gate closes behind me, and another opens. Sunlight scatters inside through holes in the roof. I pass a rest­room covered by razor wire. Then I hear Arabic music and step into the Gaza Strip.

Ashraf is there to meet me. “You look good!” he says. “You took out your earrings, and your haircut makes you look like an Arab.”

“That’s because an Arab cut my hair,” I explain.

“Don’t tell anyone you’re American,” he says. “People here don’t like America anymore.”

In Gaza, the dominant features are poverty and destruction. We pass a destroyed bridge over a ra­vine that will flood when the rains come in the winter; houses will be re­duced to rubble. There are some cars, but there are also carts driven by ­horses and mules. Posters of men surrounded by guns are taped on all the buildings. The men have died re­cently and are celebrated as martyrs. We pass the settlements the Is­raelis left just a year ago and de­stroyed on their way out. We pass a distillation pump donated by Italy, crowded with Palestinians waiting with jugs.

“Nobody can drink Gaza water,” Ashraf says.

I visited Gaza in 2001, and at the time it seemed like things couldn’t possibly get worse. But things can always get worse. Gaza is the graveyard of optimism.

If you ask where the current round of destruction began, the Gazans will say it began with the death of the Ghalia family, killed by Israeli artillery while on the beach near the Erez crossing, where I came in. Israel denied that its ordnance was responsible, but human rights groups have displayed fragments of a 155-mm Israeli artillery shell. Many Israelis believe that only militants are killed in the fighting. They are naive. They don’t be­lieve in collateral damage. War is nothing if not mistakes. The image of the surviving child, Huda, captured the world’s imagination for a few days and the imagination of the Gazans for much longer.

The Israelis say the conflict started with the election of Hamas, whose militia continues to launch Qassam rockets across the border. The rockets are small, but they do damage. They terrorize the population, and eight Israelis have died. More important, the Israelis be­lieved when they pulled out of Gaza and unilaterally left the settlements that the militants would cease their attacks. But they were wrong, and this has infuriated the Israeli public, who feel like they have given something and gotten nothing in return. But the Gazans, who don’t control their ports or crossings and have no international representation, don’t see what they have to be so excited about.

At the hospital in Rafa the head surgeon sleeps on a matt on the floor. “There were nine martyrs today,” he says, lighting a cigarette, trying to wake up.

“There were also twenty-three wounded,” the surgeon says. “To­day I amputated four extremities. We fear there will be more martyrs because of infection. We suspect the IDF attacks again tonight. Al­ways we fear at night.”

Leaving, I notice even the hospital walls are covered with posters of the men who have been killed.

Mosher Al-Masry is thirty years old, a member of parliament, and the Hamas spokesman in Gaza. We meet in his apartment in Beit Lahia, a particularly hard-hit suburb just north of Gaza City. There is a sitting room in the front and a curtain to prevent us from seeing the women in the rest of the house. He is well dressed, with a nicely trimmed beard.

Mosheer tells me it is just the Is­­raeli media that says Hamas re­fuses to recognize Israel and that Hamas has always been willing to negotiate. This is a lie, but I let it pass. He tells me, “America should correct the policies of its government. They will be more welcome in the world.” He’s just a kid with a beard, I think. I mention that the charter of Hamas calls for the de­struction of Israel. Mosheer waves his hand and smiles. He offers me an orange soda.

At night I sit on the Mediterranean, on the patio of a hotel called Al Deira. This is where the richest people in Gaza meet. They wear Western clothes. Women sit at tables with uncovered heads. There has been no alcohol since the last bar, the UN Beach Club, was burned to the ground less than a year ago. Among the patrons are a smattering of foreign press documenting the tragedy playing ­outside — second-stringers covering a war forgotten since the hostilities with Lebanon to the north. Also here are the leftover foreign aid workers. But there are almost no foreign aid workers left in Gaza, and there are less than a hundred people sipping strawberry juice and smoking nar­ghiles, talking, and listening to the sea.

I sit with Hamada, the Gazan head of a major UN organization. His office was destroyed several days ago during a riot that erupted to protest the UN response in Le­banon. “The people you see here,” he says, “they are here every night.” It’s like the deck of the Titanicafter the last lifeboat is gone.

With its beautiful beaches, Gaza was once thought of as a po­tential tourist attraction, but all the other hotels are empty. There is only Al Deira, which costs $80 a night. Ashraf offered to let me stay in his apartment for free, but the water doesn’t work and there are only six to eight hours of elec­tricity. I was hoping to save some money since the Israeli military stole my computer, but when Ashraf told me I would need to keep away from the windows and only open the door if I heard my name, I decided I would stay in the hotel.

Hamada’s foreign counterpart has left Gaza already, like everyone else. I tell him I met a sick man earlier who was dying and had been waiting more than a month to leave for Egypt and get care. We talk about the impossibility of a targeted assassination. “There are four thousand people per square kilometer. There’s no such thing as a targeted killing in that dense a population.” We talk about the crowding and poverty, twenty people living in one room with no basic sanitary functions. There is sewage running through the streets of the refugee camps where the majority of people live.

“The main problem of Gaza,” Hamada says, “is access.”

We talk about the import/export zone, which has been closed. There was a project to grow vegetables in the hothouses bought for the Gazans by the World Trade Organization. The hothouses were bought from the settlers, and after the settlers left it looked like the project would succeed. But when it was time to export the ve­getables, the port was closed, so the tomatoes sat on the dock rotting.

We talk about the phone calls. In the past months, the IDF has taken to calling people and telling them their homes are going to be destroyed. Often in less than ten minutes. The problem is that this has led to prank calls. “My neighbor got a phone call,” Hamada says. “‘We’re going to bomb your house.’ We didn’t go home for three days, there was no way to verify.”

Then there are the sonic booms. Ehud Olmert has vowed that as long as Qassam rockets are coming from Gaza, the Gazans will not sleep. When there are no troops in Gaza, planes fly over and break the sound barrier. The noise is incredible.

To highlight the animosity between the Palestinians and the Israelis, Hamada tells me about the Beit Leah Wastewater Plant. “The plant contains two million cubic meters of raw sewage in a lagoon. The plant is not working because of the lack of electricity. To make matters worse, the Israelis bomb the lagoon to prevent absorption. If something isn’t done soon, the plant will overflow. If the plant over­flows, it will flood an entire neighborhood. The flood will cover 450 houses. The only thing to do at that point will be to push the sewage into the sea, which will kill all the fish.”

I imagine 450 houses two stories deep in shit. I wish they served alcohol here. But when we talk about solutions, Hamada disappoints me. He talks about the right of return, which states that all the refugees from the 1948 war should be allowed to return to Israel. It’s the kind of idea suggested by people who are not looking for a solution. Most of the homes and communities they would return to have long since ceased to exist. Hamada tells me that Israel provokes all the intifadas, that the Qassam rockets are just firecrackers. But in fact, the Qassams have destroyed homes and claimed lives. More important, the Qassams are a provocation.

The problem here is that a Ga­zan intellectual with a good job with the United Nations cannot see the part his own people must play in any solution. History, Israel, the United Nations, the Arab nations — particularly Egypt — have created a welfare state and an echo chamber. This echo chamber is ob­livious to news coming in from the networks and the internet. People don’t trust information from the outside world because most people don’t know anybody from the outside world. Here, in response to the seizure of a Palestinian militant in Jericho, rioters destroyed the British Council, where people could get job training and borrow books. Here, in response to the war in Lebanon, they destroy UN offices even though the UN is the only real employer left and is responsible for feeding and housing more than half the population. Hamada doesn’t see the role the Pa­lestinians have played in their own misery: the kidnapping of the soldier, the election of Hamas. In this way, he’s no different from most of the Israelis I’ve met who blame all of their troubles on Arabs. I let Hamada pay for my juice.

I lie awake in the middle of the forgotten war. There is some gunfire in the streets, or perhaps just fireworks from a nearby wedding. I watch CNN and the current death statistics filter across the bottom of the screen followed by news of the doping scandal in the Tour de France. I ask myself, if stuck in this cage and unable to make contact with the rest of the world, what would I do?

In the morning, Ashraf and I have breakfast, then I wait for him in his apartment while he goes to mosque. When he gets back, I ask what he heard, and he responds that the preaching concerned America and the evil use of American power. Driving through Gaza City, Ashraf points at the de­stroyed buildings and laughs, “American-made! You make very good bombs. Look, they go through six floors. It’s amazing.”

After the head of Hamas, the most important man in Gaza is John Ging, head of UNWRA, the UN organization found­ed in 1948 to deal with the Palestinian re­fugee population. He’s the only person in Gaza who seems willing to criticize the Hamas government. But then his office is giant and air-conditioned and he can leave when he wants to.

“The tragedy is, after all this time we still feed 860,000 refugees in the strip because they don’t have the means to feed themselves. With the recent incursions, we’ve added 100,000 to our rolls. Donor assistance has been cut off since March, when the Palestinian Authority under Hamas control didn’t meet donor requirements. There are no garbage trucks to pick up waste, for example. We’re at the relief end, providing the very basics. We have four schools at the Jabalya camp that we’ve now filled with fifteen hundred people seeking shelter, running from the Israeli military. This is the first time the Israelis have cut off power, so things are much worse. The sense of imprisonment is heightened. Anybody with the option to get out is already gone. What the Palestinians don’t understand, when they launch their rockets at Israel, is that the damage might not be the same but the fear is the same. People get distracted by the magnitude of force. Israel should rein in its military. The PA, which is run by Hamas, has the responsibility to stop the Qassam rockets, which are being launched by Hamas. Hamas can form a legitimate government but there cannot be a separate military wing that exists outside of the government. They also have to recognize Israel and recognize existing agreements.

“Over the years, there’ve been so many false starts. We see a flicker of hope, most recently the settlements leaving. We thought we would now move on to economic development. But it didn’t happen.”

John provides me with contacts to facilitate visits to refugee camps and meet families whose homes have recently been destroyed. I see the schools and the rooms filled with mats. Each room sleeps roughly fifty people, with separate rooms for women and men. Many have lost homes near the Israeli incursion zone, the homes de­stroyed for strategic reasons.

I hear about the phone calls, parents running with their children and eight minutes later their houses de­stroyed. One family explains how their house was bombed two weeks prior. The only grown-ups in this family are women and a very old man. The women’s brother was killed over a month ago. “And then they shot the cow,” they tell me.

“What?”

“After the Israelis bombed the house, they shot our cow.”

I decide to leave Gaza after a couple of days. The suffering is the only story here. Or is it? Before I go, Ashraf shows me the uni­versities, and I understand at least one thing: the rise of Hamas.

There are two universities, Azar University and Islamic University. Azar University was founded by Fatah. Islamic University is at least un­officially affiliated with Hamas. Azar, like Arafat’s organization, is old and decrepit, the buildings in disrepair, despite the fact that it is newer. Islamic University is pristine and orderly. This is why Hamas is in power in Gaza. Under Fatah, a tenth of the population was employed by the government, but the police wouldn’t stop the most basic crimes. But Hamas runs clinics, and their security forces are effective. Islam offers structure in a place that knows only war. Hamas did not come to power because of their position on Israel. They rose on the backs of inefficiency and cor­ruption. The idea that Hamas can be forced from power by starving Gaza is a false one. Hamas is the power here, they control the message. There is no one else to negotiate with.

• **
• Thank you for reading. The original,full article is available from The Believer.