GAZA: Legacy of Occupation—A Photographer's Journey

By DickDoughty and Mohammed El Aydi. Kumarian Press, 1995, 190 pp. List: $14.95; AET: $11.95.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

Canada Camp is the only Palestinian refugee camp in Egypt. It also is the site of occasional photos in the world press of separated Palestinian refugee families calling back and forth to each other across a 300-yard no-man's-land on the Sinai-Gaza border as Egyptian and Israeli guards watch impassively from barbed-wire-enclosed watchtowers at the Rafah border crossing point.

One of several camps housing more than half of Gaza's 800,000 population, Canada Camp came into existence because of the 1970 "Iron Fist" crackdown against Palestinian resistance by then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. He decreed that streets in the eight major Gaza refugee camps would be widened in order to provide maneuverability for Israeli military vehicles and unimpeded visual surveillance for Israeli guards in their ubiquitous watchtowers. Some 13,000 Gaza refugees whose whitewashed or stuccoed concrete-block houses were ordered bulldozed were offered new building sites in open spaces outside but generally close to their camps, if they would sign away their rights to any further compensation for the homes and lands they had lost in 1948 when they fled or were driven out of towns and villages in what subsequently became Israel.

Rather than accept this condition, some of the displaced refugees moved in with relatives elsewhere in Gaza. Between 1973 and 1975, however, 496 extended families comprising nearly 5,000 Palestinians accepted building sites in a former almond grove on the southern outskirts of Rafah, a town located on the old border between the Palestinian Mandate and Egypt. Because a similar relocation site on the Gaza side of the border had once been occupied by Brazilian U.N. peacekeeping forces, Palestinians living there started calling it "Brazil." As a joke, residents of the almond grove site started calling themselves "Canada," and the name stuck. The fact that they were a few meters south of the old border made no difference at the time, since both Gaza and Sinai had been occupied by Israeli troops in the war of June 1967, and both remained under Israeli occupation.

The location became worrisome to residents of "Canada Camp" on April 25, 1982, however, when Israel handed back Sinai in return for a peace agreement with and full recognition by Egypt. When neither Egypt nor Israel agreed to redraw the restored Gaza boundary to include Canada Camp, Palestinians living there applied to return to homesites in Gaza. Israeli occupation authorities refused the request.

This created great alarm because, from the time they had arrived in 1948, all of the Palestinian refugees in Gaza had been people without a country. The Israelis would not allow them to return to the homes from which they had fled or been driven in Jaffa, Askelon and dozens of other towns and villages now inside Israel's borders. The Egyptian army, which had seized Gaza to keep it, too, from falling to the Israelis, had provided the Palestinian refugees with protection, but did not let them move permanently out of Palestine's Gaza Strip. Unlike the Palestinian refugees in Jordan or in West Bank areas occupied by the Jordanian army, the refugees of Gaza ended up without citizenship in or passports from any country at all.

The United Nations had issued them laissez-passer documents that allowed them to study in Egypt and travel to whatever country would admit them to work or live, but basically they had no rights at all other than their U.N.-recognized refugee status in Gaza. It was fear of losing even their refugee status, and of permanent separation from their relatives and from those who had been their neighbors prior to their forced relocation south of the Gaza border, that motivated the 5,000 affected Palestinians to press both the Israeli government and the international community for permission to return from what had again become Egypt.

Finally, in 1982, the Israeli government agreed to an extraordinarily cynical repatriation agreement. It would permit 35 families per year to return until all had been repatriated. Each family would receive a 200 square meter (1Ž20 of an acre) building site in the Tel Es Sultan area on the Gaza side of Rafah, and a permit to build a house on that site. Each family's repatriation depended, however, upon depositing in Israeli banks $12,000 from the Palestine Liberation Organization to cover the cost of starting construction of its house.

Whatever the Israeli intention, repatriation under this agreement actually became possible only because international donors agreed to pay the costs for each family as it was admitted. Foremost among the donors was the Canadian government. Although it had had no role either in founding the camp or splitting its occupants, it assumed the responsibility because of the camp's name.

The repatriation agreement had been in effect for seven years when, in 1989, Dick Doughty, a young University of Missouri journalism graduate working for the English-language Cairo Today magazine, was assigned to cover the families still waiting in Canada Camp, Egypt, to rejoin their relatives in Canada Camp, Palestine.

"We were shown the Calling Wall, or el-silik, 'the wire,' as residents say, at the edge of Canada Camp," writes Doughty in the preface to his book. "Here, on either side of the international border, stood people. Families have met here to yell across razor wire and no-man's-land since 1982. I never forgot the faces, nor the hands, reaching."

When Doughty finished his work in Cairo after six months, he obtained his alma mater's McIntyre Postgraduate Writing Fellowship to photograph and write about the people of Canada Camp, Palestine. In his words, the media then were describing Gaza as "a sinkhole of poverty, a wellspring of irrational hatred, a netherworld where life is either unimaginable or just pathetic," which was home to "one in eight of the world's 6.5 million Palestinians." As he carried out his research during 1992 and 1993, both before and after the Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake, it became clear that, in Doughty's words, "the Gaza Strip has become the proving ground for the future of Palestine."

When he arrived, Doughty realized that the hazards to completing his assignment would come not from Palestinian resentment against Americans and the violence that had been endemic in Gaza since the birth of the Palestinian intifada there on Dec. 9, 1987, but from the reluctance of Israeli occupation authorities to permit an American photographer to record what was happening there. He recognized that he would need a Palestinian collaborator he could trust, and who would in turn entrust his own security to the American journalist's discretion.

"From the day we met in 1992, Mohammed El Aydi's role as host, guide, cultural consultant and, more than anything, unflagging and buoyant friend, proved so determinative at every stage of this book that he has been, all along, a coauthor," Doughty writes. "Thus this is a book inscribed not merely through cameras, film and notebooks but also through relationships."

In fact, it proved dangerous and extraordinarily difficult to reach Canada Camp on a regular basis. There were fixed checkpoints and roving Israeli roadblocks and curfews and closures of the Camp or nearby areas, sometimes for days at a time, followed each outbreak of violence in Gaza. As a result, Doughty regularly spent time with El Aydi's family or in a room he had rented in Gaza City and often slept for a night in whatever home he was visiting when the evening curfew began. He also traveled occasionally to East Jerusalem where he processed, selected and printed his photos. When he also visited Cairo, he suffered the mixed emotions familiar to combat veterans of relief at the absence of external tension and fear and guilt generated by concern for his friends and collaborators still facing deprivation and danger.

The result is that his book is less about the victims of Kafkaesque Israeli bureaucracy in Canada Camp and far more about all of the Palestinians of Gaza than the author originally intended. In fact, the first chapters are not so much about the violence that regularly barred his access to Canada Camp but initially eluded his camera as they are about the culture shock that nearly overwhelmed an American suddenly thrust into a world where his host's family lives jammed into an uninsulated cinderblock home that is bitingly cold in winter and stiflingly hot and humid in summer.

While Doughty, who now is assistant editor of Aramco World magazine in Houston, was in Gaza, whole camps or neighborhoods were closed down after increasingly frequent outbreaks of violence in which Israeli soldiers or civilians were occasionally shot or knifed to death. This would keep Palestinian children from going to school and male members of the household in which he was staying from leaving for their construction jobs in Israel or service jobs in Gaza itself.

Doughty describes the claustrophobic boredom of daytime confinement to rooms filled with endlessly smoking men, women making the best of monotonous and inadequate food supplies, and bored, bickering children. On some nights without electricity, the darkness and silence were suddenly broken by moments of sheer terror as the roar of military vehicles, flashing lights and squealing brakes announced the arrival of Israeli forces bent on catching wanted "terrorists" at home.

Although the soldiers never broke into a house where he was hiding, twice Doughty and Palestinians with whom he was staying listened as Israeli soldiers emptied whole blocks at gunpoint and then pounded the houses into rubble with anti-tank shells to kill any fugitives hiding in the homes, and make examples of neighborhoods suspected of harboring fugitives.

Children in the El Aydi house had experienced personally one of the attacks in which Israeli soldiers suddenly fire tear gas into closed homes, offices, factories or even hospitals, often with fatal results. As a result, as the sounds and lights of an impending raid began, screaming, terrified children had to be comforted both during the raid and for days afterward.

Soon Doughty's experiences became more dramatic. He witnessed, and stepped out to photograph at great risk to himself, the retreat of an Israeli patrol, guns blazing, from a crowd of youths which suddenly had assembled to repel the invaders from a neighborhood with a cloud of stones. He saw the children agilely step behind walls when the guns were turned their way, and emerge immediately to throw more stones as the soldiers raced past. Just as a quick check revealed that injuries among the youths were superficial, word came of a more serious incident nearby.

Doughty and a Palestinian escort raced to a hospital in time to join a crowd of men who had assembled to witness the burial in a pre-prepared grave by a weeping father of a blood-covered youth who had been killed only half an hour earlier. The hasty funeral was to prevent the Israelis, who had fled the angry crowd after shooting the boy, from returning to seize his body. Doughty describes in indelible and almost poetic language the shocking suddenness, the raging savagery and the irrevocable finality of only 40 minutes of violence that took one life, resulted in scores of wounded and precipitated another round-the-clock curfew. Such instances had become routine, perhaps almost addictive, daily occurrences in one part or another of Gaza.

The writer's vivid prose spares neither the Israelis, his Palestinian hosts nor even himself. While he is never judgmental, clearly he was baffled by the regular Palestinian strikes, commemorating events from before and during the intifada, that further complicated the already nearly unbearable lives of the Gazans. Enforced by youths of the competing leftist, mainstream PLO and Islamic militias, those inconvenienced by the strikes were not Israelis nor even Palestinian collaborators, but ordinary Gazans who could not get to jobs either in Israel or at home, and those who operated and patronized the shops that might alleviate the harsh conditions of daily life in Gaza.

Nevertheless, the book contrasts the spontaneous hospitality, warmth and, eventually, trust of the Palestinians of Gaza with the seemingly purposeless provocations and casual cruelty and mean spiritedness of the Israelis. The fact that many of his hosts went out of their way to recount for Doughty individual instances of consideration by Israeli soldiers or compassion by Israeli peace activists pointed up, for Doughty, how rare such manifestations of humanity seemed to ordinary Gazans.

Doughty is hardest on himself. He describes the sudden splitting headaches that would force him to break off the enlightening but frequently emotional conversations with Gazans who wonderingly sought explanations as to why every hand in the world, and particularly American hands, seemed raised against people whose only crime was to allow themselves to be driven, like cattle, from the Palestinian towns and villages where their ancestors had lived for millennia.

Seldom could he endure for more than two nights at a time the crowded quarters and intense interactions with his principal hosts, who were risking so much by sheltering him. Yet, it is thanks to his flights to Jerusalem, where he selected the photos, and to his solitary room in Gaza, where he painstakingly recorded the notes that became the memorable text of this book, that he has produced such a gripping and informative documentation of a key period in the long history of Palestine.

In describing from the inside the lives of refugees from throughout Gaza with all of their ambiguities and contradictions, the two authors, Doughty and El Aydi, portray honestly, sensitively and in achingly clear prose the essence of the entire Palestinian problem. They leave it to the reader to decide if, by disregarding the foundations and traditions of America's open society, and aligning themselves instead with racism and sectarianism in the Middle East, American political leaders are putting their fellow citizens at risk, and their country on the wrong side of world history.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.