Today we went to the areas around Khan Younis and Rafah, Gaza's two southernmost cities. We stopped in three small towns, Abasan, Khoza'a and Sufa, which were very hard hit during the war.
Abasan and Khoza'a are both quite close to the eastern border with Israel. This is probably the most dangerous part of Gaza at the moment, as Israeli soldiers have been shooting across the border at farmers trying to work their land on a regular basis.
Our UN escorts were frankly terrified at the thought of us being this close to the border. They absolutely refused to let us out of the bus to photograph the many damaged houses in Abasan and only allowed us to stop for a few minutes. In Khoza'a they were still very wary, but we were a little further away so they actually let us get out of the bus to photograph a house that had been partially bulldozed when the Israeli ground troops came in, and is now standing with one wall sheared off.
Sufa, which has the same name as the (now closed) commercial crossing with Israel just down the road, is nothing but piles of rubble. It looks kind of nondescript until you stop and think about the fact that each pile of rubble used to be a house.
There was one rubble pile that had a Palestinian flag stuck on top of it, and I went over to photograph it. I was met by a man and his son. "Is this your house?" I asked him. It was. The man, whose name is Mufid Amur, spoke excellent English and of course the first thing he did was offer me tea. Our UN escort was clear on the fact that there was no time for tea (which can lead to quite extended visits in this part of the world), but I was able to visit what now passes for a house for Mufid Amur, his wife and seven children, the oldest of whom is probably fifteen or sixteen.
The Amurs had a two-story home with enough space for everyone before it was destroyed. They are now living in three shacks with no running water or plumbing. One shack is the kitchen, which has a small wood-burning stove. The other two are furnished with little more than some rugs and three thin twin-sized mattresses, on which all nine family members sleep.
I asked to take a picture with Mr. Amur and his family (his wife and some of the children were shy.) He again insisted that I have tea, but I was getting a "yalla" (let's go) from the UN guy, so all I could do was tell him that I would take his story back to the US, and apologize sincerely on behalf of my government, which paid for this destruction and probably sold Israel the bombs they dropped on his home.
Next we were headed to Rafah, which is on the border with Egypt and is both a town and a large refugee camp. Israel has bulldozed hundreds of houses here over the years, continually widening the "buffer zone" around the wall at the border. It was here in 2003 that US peace activist Rachel Corrie, who worked with the International Solidarity Movement, was killed while trying to stop an Israeli Caterpillar bulldozer from demolishing the home of a Palestinian doctor.
That morning our bus had staged a little coup and insisted that we be allowed to visit the location where Rachel Corrie was killed. At first the UNRWA folks flatly refused, but we kept asking and eventually they relented.
Whichever house Rachel was protecting has been demolished now, as have all the houses in this area. The ones still standing, some distance away, are pock-marked with holes of every caliber on the side facing the border. We are told a barren, sandy lot that looks like nothing at all is the Rachel Corrie Peace Park--no point in planting or building anything, since this is hardly a safe place for children to play.
This area is very close to the Rafah tunnels (although an investigation into Rachel Corrie's death found no tunnel under the house she was defending, as Israel claimed there was.) With the medieval siege currently strangling Gaza, the tunnels, which run under the border fence into the Egyptian side of Rafah, are a lifeline. Huge quantities of everyday goods travel through them, from fuel, small appliances and generators, to probably all the canned and bottled beverages and packaged goods I have consumed while here, including my seven-shekel tunnel Coke from the other night.
The really shocking thing about the tunnels is that they are quite out in the open and not hidden at all. (These are commercial tunnels. There are separate tunnels for weapons, which are smuggled in just like everything else, but those are controlled by individual parties or militias and are not so easy to find.) Most are run by families, and actually a lot of kids work in them, since most are only three feet tall. It's an extremely dangerous way to make a living, since the tunnels are bombed quite frequently. (In fact, we walked past the collapsed entrance of one, now a huge crater, that had recently been hit by an F-16 strike.)
One of our UNRWA companions was kind enough to negotiate a look at one of the tunnel entrances for us. We were not allowed to take pictures or go down into the tunnel, but an obliging twelve-year-old did monkey down the lined wooden entrance shaft with a light on a really long extension cord to show us the bottom, fifteen meters deep.
After seeing how ridiculously-not-hidden the tunnels actually are, many of us wondered why Israel doesn't just send an F-16 or two by to bomb them all. The theory we worked out is that they need the tunnels as bit of a release valve. Cut off all supplies, even illicit ones, and they would have more resistance than they could deal with. Allow just enough in for people to live on (but not enough to make the prices at all reasonable), combined with just enough bombing to torture people with constant fear, and you have the perfect recipe for yet another form of collective punishment.
After witnessing so much destruction, our day still ended on a sweet note--two, in fact. First, we drove on what used to be a settler road (ie. no Palestinians allowed) when there were settlements in Gaza. This road runs parallel to the coast road and used to connect all the Israeli settlements. We didn't have to take this road, and later turned off it onto the coast road, but I think our UNRWA escorts--who are, after all, all Palestinians themselves--rather enjoyed showing us that they could drive on this road now.
We also got a brief stop at the beach, which is still incredibly beautiful when you forget about the pollution from untreated sewage and the gunboats lurking in the distance. Palestinian women tend to wade into the sea in their clothes, but most of us settled for putting our feet in.
On the bus ride today I had gotten a chance to know Said, who is the brother of one of the UNRWA staff members who was accompanying us. Their family is originally from Jaffa, now inside Israel. Said went to university in Algeria, but lost his student visa and was unable to finish his studies. He now works as one of Palestine's seemingly endless supply of journalists.
After I came back to the bus with sandy feet and half a dozen perfectly whole shells from the shores of Gaza, he said with a smile, "You are Palestinian now," which I told him I considered a great honor.
There are so many things here that are one hundred percent the opposite of the image that most Americans have of Gaza. In certain regards it will be really hard, painful even, to have to go back to the US and hear people say so many ignorant, racist and untrue things about people who--Said informed me--are now my brothers and sisters. I know it's part of our job to go back. But in yet another thing that's opposite of what many people might expect, it feels very easy to stay and hard to go.
Being here and witnessing the limitless kindness, generosity and openness that every single person has shown us, along with a seemingly bottomless resolve to not only survive in the face of horrific violence and privation, but continue to fight for their land and their rights, you might be tempted to think that Palestinians are some extra special kind of human beings. But really, I think all human beings are like this. Most of us are just fortunate enough never to be so severely tested.
I have been thinking a lot about something the author of tales to tell wrote during the war, about how when you're in Gaza, even if things are terrifying--and what she experienced during the war was a thousand times more terrifying than anything we encountered--there is a certain level of...comfort? That's not really the right word. I think she said something about lack of dissonance, because you are there with people, experiencing the same things they are, and everyone has the same understanding of the reality of what's going on.
For the past five months, writing and researching about Gaza, I feel like a little part of me has been here, always straining at the rest of me that was in the US. Now that I'm here the two parts are united; I'm a whole person, and it's going to be really hard to tear them apart again.
No comments:
Post a Comment