gaza, bitter and sweet

I'm writing an article for SocialistWorker.org about our delegation's experience in Gaza. (I'll post when it's up, which should be within the next week.) I was given a suggested word limit of 2,500 words, which seems unbelievably vast compared to my 850-word limit when I used to write for the Columbia Spectator.

Although I have been writing and thinking about Gaza pretty much non-stop since the first day of our trip, summing it all up proved to be surprisingly difficult. Perhaps this is because there are at least two Gazas, each inextricably intertwined with the other, so different from each other but impossible to separate.

One of the most surprising things to discover about Gaza was that on the surface, things can seem...well, perhaps not normal, but functional. At first glance, society seems functional. There is food in the shops. Children go to school and young people go to university. Families hang out on the beach and kids play in the beautiful Mediterranean waters. People go to work every day as doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers, store owners, farmers, fishermen. They have lives and dreams and ambitions that are in so many ways not at all different from us.

It's both stunning and inspiring to see what people have built, often seemingly out of nothing. Gazans are extremely proud of their ability to make something out of nothing. After seeing places like the Atfaluna Society for the Deaf, which is as sophisticated and well-appointed as any such facility you would find in the US, and run with such professionalism and care, one can't help thinking, My God, what could these people do if they weren't under occupation?

Driving along the coast road on one of the days of our trip, we saw people cleaning the beach. You'd think litter on the beach would be the least of people's concerns when they're being shelled and shot at every day, but people take pride in their home, which is truly one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been. I swear, the streets of Gaza City were cleaner than New York--and certainly cleaner than nearby Cairo and El Arish.

Certainly, the lack of trash is partially due to lower consumption. And there may very well be another reason for Gaza's swept streets and pristine beach, which is that people are desperate for work, so any public works project that gets funded is immediately swamped by many more applicants than it can handle. But I'm sure a certain portion of it is pride--they love their home (even their temporary home as refugees) and they want to impress.

Gazan pride is also evident in the many extremely well-educated people we met--from the many, many people who speak excellent English (and in at least one case, French, Spanish and Italian as well) to the university students among our UNRWA guides and host families who are studying graphic design, emergency nursing, English literature. I could continue to list the statistics and anecdotes. One of the highest rates of high school graduation and education of women and girls in the Middle East. The director of Nour el Malefa, the school for children with learning disabilities, who said 73% of his students go on to pass their final exams in the UNRWA school system. The director of the American International School, who spoke about his former students who went on to study at Harvard and Yale. Literacy programs for older women who may not have benefited from the UNRWA school system. At one of the community centers we visited, the modest library was full of middle-aged women, who meet regularly at the library for both education and community support. "We come here to discuss our problems, and because reading expands the mind," one woman told us.

Seeing all this, it is easy to be lulled into thinking conditions in Gaza are really not that bad at all. But really, nothing could be further from the truth, and a quick probe beneath the surface confirms this. Like many of the buildings in Gaza, which look fine at first glance, until you look closer and find a bullet hole here, a broken window there, you sometimes have to take a second look to see the damage in Gaza.

Those kids walking home from school, looking for all the world like normal school kids except for the fact that it's 12:30 or one in the afternoon? They're on the first shift of the school day. Most schools are so overcrowded they have to run on double shifts. This is not due to lack of funds or even lack of qualified teachers, but lack of building materials and often physical space to expand the schools. In areas where schools were damaged or destroyed during the last war, some schools are now running on triple shifts to compensate.

It is the same with everything. The goods that fill the shops are smuggled by children and teenagers who risk their lives in unlined tunnels under the border with Egypt. The farmers and fishermen consider it a good day when they're not shot at by Israeli patrols while trying to work. The American School? Destroyed by two missiles from an F-16 during the war. And just offshore, Gaza's rolling turquoise sea bristles with Israeli gunboats.

The director of the Abu Yousif Al Najjar Hospital in Rafah told us that when European doctors visited to help during the war, they told him that Gaza's trauma surgeons were the most knowledgeable they had ever seen. Unfortunately, they've had lots of practice. "We have a great school for war surgery here," he told us. We thought this was an actual school until he explained that we had misunderstood--the school is life experience. The doctors learn by trial and error, because they cannot leave Gaza to attend conferences and update their medical training. (Or, sometimes, because Israel is using experimental weapons like DIME, which no one fully understands or knows how to treat.) And they must contend, like everyone else, with the daily problems of the siege: lack of supplies of any kind and constant power cuts, including during surgery.

As for the son of one of our host families who is studying English literature at the Islamic University, he and his classmates complain that they have no books in English to study from. Again, the problem is not lack of funds. Books are just one of the thousands of items that are officially banned by Israel from entering the Gaza Strip.

The students of English literature compensate with what they can find on the Internet. And this is what everyone does. They compensate. They cope. Everyone does their best to hold it together for everyone else, because they know there is often no one else to help them. Self-reliance, ingenuity, solidarity and superhuman toughness are not virtues but necessities for basic survival.

The director of Al Najjar Hospital said something else that stuck with me. "There are 1.5 million casualties of war in the Gaza Strip." Meaning, everyone. He spoke briefly about his own experience during the war, seeing his own friends and neighbors from Rafah being brought into the emergency room. The whole time he was at the hospital, he was terrified for the safety of his own family in the Brazil section of Rafah camp--calling home for reports on how close the bombing was to their home, or trying to guess by the sound, which was clearly audible from the hospital. But when he was at home, he was terrified of the hospital being hit (a valid fear given the damage to many other hospitals in Gaza) and couldn't think of anything else.

Gazans are so friendly, open, generous and warm, so delighted by visitors and eager to make our stay as comfortable, joyful, and yes, even as fun as possible, that you can sometimes forget how deeply wounded the entire population is. The horrific stories that lurk in the background of every single person's life there have a way of blindsiding you, like the destroyed buildings that appear without warning in the middle of an otherwise unblemished street. Those same kids who will break into a smile from ear to ear over something as simple as taking their picture on your digital camera one minute will quite calmly tell you about their martyred friends and relatives the next. People bury a lot of pain--for the sake those around them and for their own sanity. You can catch a glimpse of it when someone's smile doesn't quite reach their eyes, or in the expressions on their faces when they think you've stopped watching, or in the one little girl who burst into tears without warning when Gael tried to hold her hand at one of the schools we visited.

Of course the fact that people, somehow, remain so incredibly kind just makes everything that much more heartbreaking. But perhaps being kind is a coping mechanism in its own way, a way reminding oneself to stay human in inhuman conditions.

There is another element of life in Gaza, something I think is often overlooked in "humanitarian" reports on the crisis. That element is an absolutely unbreakable political will that, as a radical and activist facing far less severe conditions, I can only describe as awe-inspiring. Ordinary people's determination to not only survive but to fight for their land and their rights is an incredibly humbling thing to witness. This is the electric current running under everything in Palestine, the engine that keeps one of the world's last great national liberation struggles going strong after more than sixty years of the most savage efforts to defeat it.

After actually being on the ground in Palestine, one thing is unequivocally clear to me. These people will never give up. They may be militarily crushed--and that is a real and frightening possibility--but they will never, ever voluntarily surrender their land, their homes or their dignity. You can see this determination reflected in people's practice of putting Palestinian flags everywhere--on the beach, on street corners, even on piles of rubble that used to be homes, as if to remind whoever is around: we're here, and we're not going anywhere. A protest sign in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians are being driven out of their neighborhoods to make room for Israeli settlements, summed it up succinctly: "WE WILL NEVER LEAVE."

One day on our bus, someone made a remark about how Gazan farmers are being pushed out of their farmland near the border with Israel. "You're not even safe your own land!" "It's all our land," Mazin, our translator, corrected simply. And, of course, he's right.

One of the only times in Gaza I felt in real danger was when we were in Abasan, very close to the Israeli border in the southeast corner of Gaza. (This is one of the areas where ISM volunteers are needed to protect farmers from being shot at, and shot, while they try to work their land.) Our UNRWA guides refused to let us get out of the bus, even though we very much wanted to walk around, take pictures and talk to people. They were afraid--not afraid for themselves, but for us. I got a very clear sense that if we would have ever been in a really dangerous situation, these people--who, as far as I know, had volunteered to accompany us--would not hesitate to put their own lives at risk to protect us. And why not? They learned long ago that much of the world considers their lives cheap, where as we internationals at least had a chance of getting their story out.

In such a situation, solidarity--even to the point of facing Israeli guns as the folks in the International Solidarity Movement do--ceases to become some huge noble sacrifice and really becomes something incredibly obvious. Why wouldn't you stand with these people against those who are trying to crush them? Why on Earth wouldn't you do everything in your power to help them? After all, they would do the same for you.

In Gaza, you will simultaneously be confronted by the best and worst of humanity. The unrelenting and deliberate cruelty of the occupation and siege on the one hand, and the overwhelming sweetness, hospitality and fortitude of ordinary people on the other, make for a heady mix. "Good luck to you in your home countries...or maybe you will get addicted and come back," said the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights before we left, and I totally know what he means.

This was the sentiment I had been trying to get into my script: this sense in which hope and despair, joy and tragedy, bitter and sweet are all so incredibly mixed together and right up against each other in Gaza. It's an intense and intoxicating world, and I don't know if I completely succeeded in conveying it, because it's so unique and contradictory and unlike the way of living that most Americans are used to. But I wanted to show that yes, there are plenty of horrible, awful, hard things about living in a place like this, but there are also amazing, wonderful, beautiful, inspiring things--in other words, things worth fighting for.