One of the things that hit me most about the Gaza Strip was how tough the people were in the face of adversity, adversity that has lasted for years. The territory saw much of the worst of Israeli-Palestinian fighting since the occupation began in 1967, when Palestinians here regularly clashed with troops protecting a few Jewish settlements. Though the settlers were pulled out in 2005 the violence has hardly ended. Israel controls land, air and sea access - effectively also having a veto over Gaza’s border with Egypt - and the movement of people and things has been severely curtailed. For Gazans the occupation did not end when Israel withdrew; the oppressor, in their eyes, merely redrew the lines of engagement. So I was struck, then, at how with the boom of a distant explosion, Gazans would hardly bat an eyelid. It was one of several features of life in Gaza that remain with me after returning from a week’s reporting assignment there earlier in the month.
Life has been returning to something like normal after January’s Israel military operation against the Islamist group Hamas which runs the Palestinian territory. In three weeks, Israel killed some 1,300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, wounded 5,000 and rendered homeless around 20,000. Fighters firing rockets into southern Israel — the declared casus belli — killed 4 people, including a soldier, while the Israeli army said it lost 9 troops in ground combat inside the enclave.
“Israel has been practising collective punishment on all Gaza since the first uprising began in 1987,” said a pharmacist who gave his name as Abu Baraa. “We’ve been through so many crises that it creates a kind of psychological immunity.” His meagre display of medicine and health and beauty products reflected Israeli restrictions on imports. Prized international brands of baby diapers were nowhere to be found and he complained about the Egyptian versions that arrive smuggled in tunnels under Gaza’s border with Egypt.
Not that many are not traumatised. Some areas of the territory, mostly in impoverished refugee camps and farming villages, were completely flattened. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said last week that Palestinians in Gaza, when polled about their needs, cited psychological treatment, especially for children, as their number one priority after the war. One of the saddest moments of my week in the coastal enclave was a chat with Helmy Samouni, a 26-year-old widower and and father of one baby boy who survived a missile attack on a house. He alleged that the Israeli army had herded him and over 20 others into the building during the offensive. Twenty-three members of his extended family died in the area and Helmy says he spent days inside the ruins watching some of them die from wounds while the army refused to let them out.
He was stoic and philosophic, surprisingly together considering his loss — his mother, father, wife, son, brother and brother’s wife. But his eyes welled up all the same as we toured the family home that remains standing, though damaged by fire, in disarray and with walls sporting racist graffiti. “They came here intending to cause destruction. The army has a new generation of 18-year-olds who have been taught that Gaza is a place that you can do what you want,” he said. ”Up to now I still can’t understand why they did it. This is an agricultural area, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, just farms. People here are just poor folk. I still can’t understand. There’s no resistance here or people in political movements. They just wanted to kill us, otherwise they wouldn’t have left us bleeding for days.” In fact, they came to his area of Zeitoun because they wanted to occupy strategically placed farmhouses on the edge of densely populated zones that presented dangers for Israeli soldiers. The Israeli military has said its troops were under orders not to mistreat Palestinians and that any alleged abuses would be investigated.
In the city of Gaza itself, trucks were removing rubble from the ruined Palestinian parliament, hit by a missile. A poster of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat stares from across the street. “My dream will not be complete without you, Jerusalem,” it says, in a reminder of Palestinians’ wider national goal for a state with the holy city as its capital. Young security recruits supervising the building praised Hamas for confronting “corrupt” elements of the PLO around Arafat. “He was the leader of a revolution but people pulled him from the path,” said one, citing financial corruption and moral vices. “Hamas has a specific programme.”
Gaza’s streets are brimming with colourful street graffiti, testament to years of brutal conflict. Some of it promotes Hamas, some of it promotes Fatah, Arafat’s secular party and the dominant force in the PLO, which excludes Hamas. Some of it calls for an end to the infighting between the two main Palestinian political groups. “The key to the cause is Islam and the gun,” one slogan pronounces. “By dialogue and unity we will spoil the plan to ruin the national project,” another says.
A common thread in most conversations with Palestinians in Gaza was the fear that the war and disunity would prolong the political separation between Gaza and the West Bank and make the chances of an independent state more remote. An inconclusive election in Israel last week has left the U.S.-backed peace process in limbo. “As long as we are divided, we stay weak and easy to break,” said Tareq, who runs a souvenir shop where business has fallen to a trickle since a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000.
Hamas accuses Fatah of being naive in giving up on armed action against Israel to rely solely on negotiations to achieve an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Fatah says Hamas is more concerned with consolidating Islamist rule in Gaza than showing responsible leadership for all Palestinians. Each side Hamas says Gaza was a victory for sumoud, or the Palestinian ”steadfastness” that politicians and poets have praised for decades.
“Was there a victory?” said former Palestinian Authority culture minister Ibrahim Ibrach. “It was a victory for the Palestinian people because they stood firm. No party can claim a victory.”
(PICTURE: A Palestinian girl holds her brother as they walk past a destroyed house in the northern Gaza Strip February 15, 2009.REUTERS/Mohammed Salem)
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