june 2: women, children and prisoners

Tuesday was our day to tour the central region of Gaza. We started off at a women's and children's center in Marghazi refugee camp.

First of all, a word on Palestinian refugee camps. When many people hear the term, they may think of tent cities--and this is indeed how the refugee camps in Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon started out. But people have now been living in these areas for over 60 years. They've built houses and shops and the camps have become more like small cities. Many camps in Gaza are adjacent to cities that were there before the Nakba (the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from the land that now makes up Israel) and you often can't tell where the city ends and the camp begins.

We had been to quite a few community centers by this point, and some people were feeling a bit NGO'd out. But at this center we were greeted by a room full of women who were all ready and more than willing to talk to us.

Perhaps it is a necessary response to living under occupation, but Palestinian women are fierce. They are fearless and self-confident and bear not the slightest resemblance to any stereotype one might have about women in the Muslim world. They are quite educated and many of them work, since the many Gazan men who used to work as day laborers inside Israel have not been allowed in for several years. In this room of about forty women, there were two women wearing full burkas. (Almost all women in Gaza wear headscarfs and many wear abayas, the long-sleeved single-piece dresses, but few wear the burka.) These two women were the most vocal and insistent of the group--to the point that our poor translator (a man) was reduced to pleading with them to slow down and pause frequently enough for him to translate.

Rana, one of the burka-clad women, said she did not want the men in her family to go back to working in Israel, where they are often exploited as cheap labor. "We need factories here." "We don't want aid," said Newal, another woman. "We want to be able to produce."

The desire to be self-sufficient is very strong here. Over and over again, people have told us that they don't want to be dependent on the benevolence of the UN and international governments, but to produce for themselves. Gaza has incredibly rich farmland (if farmers could use it without getting shot at), a bountiful sea (if the sewage system could be upgraded and if fishermen could go out on their boats without getting harrassed by the Israeli Navy) and an extremely educated population. It has all the resources to be self-sufficient and have a thriving economy, but the siege and the occupation strangle everything and leave 80% of the population dependent on food aid from the UN.

After the Marghazi community center, we visited the Nour El Malefa School for children with learning disabilities. 18% of children in Gaza have some kind of learning difficulties. Many factors are to blame, with poor nutrition for both young children and pregnant women (due to the siege), and living under the constant threat of war being at the top of the list. But the director of the school--the only one for special needs children in Gaza--was quick to tell us that after graduation from his primary school, 73% of his children who enter the UNRWA-run school system pass their final exams.

We got a royal welcome at Nour El Malefa, and we soon realized we were to be the guests of honor at their graduation ceremony--which featured an elaborately choreographed dance number performed by the children to the weirdest mix of Arabic and '90s American pop music ever heard. It's pretty bizarre for Americans to hear pop songs where the roar of an F-16 flyover is part of the mix, but that's just one of the many upside-down things that are normal in Palestine.

After the graduation ceremony we were served a delicious lunch of makloubeh, chicken cooked with rice and vegetables. "Who would have thought I'd go to Gaza and gain weight?" one of our delegates remarked.

Our afternoon meeting was back in Gaza City with relatives of prisoners. There are between 11,00 and 12,000 Palestinians in prison inside Israel, often serving long sentences on nebulous charges and little to no evidence. Many relatives have been unable to see their loved ones at all for nine years now, since the start of the Second Intifada, and some (including an 80-year-old woman whom we met) are not allowed in to Israel at all because they have been declared a "security threat."

I found the prisoner meeting one of the hardest things to witness. Our schedule was so busy that we have been constantly late for everything the entire trip, and we were late for this meeting too, of course. When we arrived, we were greeted by about 100 women, and quite a few of their kids, and every single woman had a picture of a husband, father, son, brother, or other relative who is in an Israeli jail. As soon as they saw I had a camera, everyone insisted I take pictures, sometimes grabbing me by the arm to get my attention. It was really hard to see so many people who so desperately wanted any help we could give them and knowing we have no more power over the situation than they do.

During the meeting I was sitting next to a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, a group of internationals who work with Palestinians to perform nonviolent acts of resistance to the occupation. "Sometimes I feel ashamed, because I got arrested in the West Bank and spent just one day in jail," he said. The men in the photos are serving sentences of ten years, twenty-seven years, seventy-five years.

Desperate to do something, the women have started a weekly protest at the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which they feel has not done enough to intervene on the prisoners' behalf, particularly on behalf of those ill prisoners who are being refused medication inside prison.

After dinner we were invited to an informal meeting with women members of Hamas, introduced by Huda Naim, a female Hamas MP. Thing #243,681 you probably don't know about Palestine: the Parliament is 20% women.

Huda brought probably about 20 women with her, and we were able to break into small groups and talk together. As with the women in Marghazi, after meeting these women for five minutes you have no doubt that they would not let anyone push them around. "Now the men of Hamas want their own rights," joked one women, who worked in the Ministry of Education, lives in Khan Younis and traveled 40 km to meet us. "I left the house early this morning and have not been home since," she confidently declared--this was at around 7pm.

We also met members of the student council at the Islamic University of Gaza. One confident young woman told the story of her 18-year-old brother, who was in his first year of university, studying business, and was killed on duty as a (volunteer) medic during the last war. Since his death she has become even more determined to finish her studies and become successful. "They killed my brother," she said, "but they can't kill our dreams."