Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, pages 14-16
The Nakba Continues
CODEPINK Delegations Visit Gaza, Hear Eyewitness Accounts of Israeli Assault
By Jane Adas
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IN VISITING Gaza at the end of May, four CODEPINK-affiliated delegations—this writer being a member of the New York-area one—accomplished three goals. First, we broke the siege and got into Gaza via Egypt and the Rafah crossing. Egyptian authorities turned back the first delegation of Canadians four times and the second group of students from the American University of Cairo twice. Then, on May 26, both groups and our New York delegation—a total of 66 people—made it through.
Secondly, we distributed sports equipment, toys, and money to children’s centers throughout Gaza. (The fourth CODEPINK delegation, which made it through on May 30, even brought in and installed three pink playground sets.) Finally, we saw for ourselves conditions in Gaza and spoke with people about their experiences under siege, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead that began on Dec. 27, and since the cease-fire of Jan. 18.
In the Ezbat Abed Rabbo neighborhood of Jabalya, in the northeast corner of the Strip, we met Majd Abdullah Al-Atannah, a taxi driver. He had moved his family there after the Israeli army destroyed his and his sons’ homes in Beit Hanoun during Operation Autumn Clouds in November 2006. But Ezbat Abed Rabbo became the first neighborhood taken over by Israel’s ground troops in the invasion that began on Jan. 3. Al-Atannah described how soldiers forced families out, firing on them with machine guns as they walked the 2 kilometers to Beit Hanoun.
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When the families returned after Israel’s unilaterally declared cease-fire, they found their homes and cars destroyed, including all three of Al-Atannah’s Mercedes taxis. Witnesses who had remained in hiding reported that most of the destruction occurred in the last three days as the Israeli army was pulling out, apparently in an effort to cleanse the border area. Almost as if it were a laboratory for different methods of destroying homes, the army demolished some by aerial bombardment, some by bulldozer, and others by land mines. Many of the land mines failed to detonate, so most families asked the Hamas government to remove them. Al-Atannah, however, pulled out a live land mine from the rubble of his house. Asked why he didn’t have it defused, he answered, “What’s the difference? Who can accept a terrorist act like this? We were hit with American missiles. Israel influences the U.S. so much; when you go back you will not speak about this because the Israelis will stop you. Bush has two daughters who should come here and see what their father did.”
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In a nearby tent, Asha Abed Rabbo told of her family fleeing to an UNRWA school, but American-made F-16s struck there, too, “with all kinds of missiles.” Her grandson was among the many amputees, losing a leg and some fingers. The area used to be like a piece of heaven, she said: the razed ground where her tent was pitched used to be a citrus grove. When it was ready to be harvested, the Israeli army uprooted the trees. Then the family planted wheat, but when the wheat ripened, the army burned the fields. “They killed our animals and deprive us of a good life,” she said. “We are very tired.” She is waiting for her home to be rebuilt (see story p. 19).
Khuza’a is a farming village in the south, east of Khan Younis and very near the border with Israel. On Jan. 10, during the third week of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces launched a three-day assault on the village, beginning with aerial bombardment. On the third day tanks and bulldozers invaded at midnight. Here, too, they demolished more than 100 homes and much farmland. Islamic University student Shatha Abu Rijela described fire everywhere from the initial phosphorous bombs, “like a huge animal trying to eat us.” People ran screaming from their homes, not knowing where to go. A neighbor showed us a piece of phosphorous outside her house. When exposed to the air and scratched with a stick—even after four and a half months—it still smoked and ignited.
But troubles in Khuza’a didn’t begin or end with Operation Cast Lead. Three years ago Israelis killed Shatha’s uncle when he was working in his field, and took her father prisoner. The family has been allowed no visits, letters, or phone calls in that whole time. And since the cease-fire, Israeli gunfire has killed two people and injured seven. During its assault, the Israeli military erected several unmanned guard towers that resemble huge gold-topped mushrooms and are operated by remote control, like a computer game. One morning, a neighbor of Shatha told us, the tower opened like a flower and shot all four of his sheep.
Israeli-Created “Black Zones”
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The day we arrived, the Israeli air force dropped hundreds of leaflets declaring 300 meters (one-fifth of a mile) within Gaza, along the entire border with Israel, off-limits to Palestinians, who would be shot if they entered the closed zone. Ahmad Sourani, director of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, told us that this “black zone” comprises 25 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land and 50 percent of its animal production. “You cannot talk peace in the presence of walls and buffer zones,” he said.
Similarly, Israel seems determined to shut down the Palestinian fishing industry, impoverishing some 45,000 Gazans who live from fishing and related trades. The Oslo agreements allowed fishermen to go out 12 nautical miles. Israel reduced that limit to 6 last October, then, during the war, to 3. Even within the 3 nautical miles, Israeli gunships flood fishing boats with water canon and shell them and the beaches as well. Since the cease-fire, Israeli shelling has injured five at sea and seven onshore. Indeed, when we paid an early morning visit to the Gaza wharf, we were alarmed by the sound of shelling; the fishermen, however, treated it as ho-hum.
Israeli forces have abducted dozens of fishermen, often pressuring them to collaborate, and have confiscated tens of fishing boats that, if returned, are always damaged, with no spare parts allowed in to mend them. Still, the fishermen go to sea and people swim in the surf and enjoy the beaches—which struck us as nonviolent resistance.
John Ging, head of UNWRA in Gaza, spoke of “the deficit of truth and absence of justice in policymaking” and urged those who make decisions in far away offices to come see the results of their decisions. He reported that those who have come so far—U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, European leaders, and U.S. congressmen—have, without exception, been shocked and humbled to meet ordinary people, who have every reason to lose their minds and turn violent, being civilized and dignified.
The visiting dignitaries had heard that the aim of Operation Cast Lead was “to destroy the infrastructure of terror,” but they see the American International School, bombed Jan. 3, all the cement factories deliberately flattened as the IDF was leaving Gaza, the demolished presidential compound, legislative council building, and various ministry buildings, and wonder why Israel destroyed the infrastructure of democracy, peace, education and the economy.
Like Ging, Taghreed el-Khodary, who reports from Gaza for The New York Times, stressed that Gaza is not a humanitarian problem, but a political one; nor should the entire population be turned to dependency. She met with Sen. John Kerry when he visited Gaza, and told him that “talking humanitarian is work avoidance” of addressing the political situation. For example, citing the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority’s silence on the siege and opposition to a unity government, El-Khodary said, “You cannot endorse a peace process if you are encouraging division.” She agreed with Ging that “the biggest manifestation of inhumanity and injustice is the closure of the Gaza Strip” and that the most urgent need is for Israel to lift the siege. “The war is over,” she said, “but not the story.”
During Operation Cast Lead, according to Khalil Shahin of the Palestine Center for Human Rights, the IDF dropped 2,500 tons of explosives on 365 square kilometers. Not a centimeter of Gaza was out of range, and the entire population, denied refuge, is traumatized with real psychological problems. Hassan Ziada of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, however, believes the real patient in need of psychological efforts is Israel. “We are doing our best to have a civil society,” Ziada explained, “but we are kidnapped by the Israeli mentality.” Because of their tragic experience, he elaborated, Israelis are still using displacement and projection. They need to heal their own suffering—not because they love Palestinians, but because their own society is suffering.
A Jewel in Gaza City
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The Gaza City of today is not where one might expect to find the best appointed, most spacious and tasteful children’s library any of us has ever seen, but such is the Qattan Center for the Child. Moreover, as director Reem Abu Jaber proudly pointed out, it is by and for Palestinians— “our dream with our own money.” The center is a project of the A.M. Qattan Foundation, named after its founder, who is originally from Jaffa. The dream began 10 years ago, but the second intifada intervened. It took two years to get bought-and-paid-for shelves into Gaza. Just before the Center opened four years ago, Israel bombed it, killing a child at the entrance.
The focus of the Center, Abu Jaber explained, is reading for all. To that end, she has established a family literacy project so parents can be first teachers, and a program for librarians to attract children to reading. Because “geographic freedom is necessary for freedom of the mind,” the Center encourages Internet blogs and offers drama and cinema clubs. In less than four years, the Center now has 13,000 members from all over Gaza.
Miraculously, the Qattan Center for the Child remained unscathed during Operation Cast Lead, but its employees did not escape trauma. Hathem ran four kilometers carrying his 4-month-old son during a phosphorous attack, worrying how it would affect the baby. Ghassan’s wife, Asma, was full-term with their second child. His worry was how hospitals, overwhelmed with the injured, would be able to help his wife deliver their child. When their baby, Kareem, was four days old, the family fled to a Red Crescent office, but when Israelis bombed that neighborhood as well, the family ran 10 kilometers to Shifa Hospital, his wife badly bleeding all the while.
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After the assault, the Center provided special programs for traumatized areas. The children painted what they had experienced, producing youthful “Guernicas,” including a depiction of a white phosphorous attack. “Words are not made for what we go through,” Abu Jaber lamented. Nevertheless, she added, “from this place we are making a future. We don’t want to spend our whole lives in emergency situations.”
Finally, a hopeful sign at the end of the journey: the Homeland Security agent at JFK airport looked through my passport and said, “you’ve been to Palestine.” Uh oh, I thought, what now? “Was there any trouble?” he asked. Plenty, I replied, but none for me. He then said, “You get a stamp for doing a good thing.”
Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.
