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“The worst spot in Gaza”: “You will not understand how hard it is here” until you see this checkpoint
Ghada Karmi
Salon
31.5.2015


http://www.salon.com/2015/05/31/the_worst_spot_in_gaza_you_will_not_understand_how_hard_it_is_here_until_you_see_this_checkpoint/



A 30-minute trip could take 10 hours -- I wondered how people could accept the unendurable with such quiet patience

Palestinians wait in line with their vehicles to pass through the Abu Holi checkpoint in the central Gaza Strip, July 3, 2004. (Credit: AP/Hatem Moussa)


Excerpted from `Return: A Palestinian Memoir`

The next morning I awoke early, and decided to take a walk along the empty streets around the hotel while it was still relatively cool. Since arriving in Gaza I had seen little of the UNDP party I had come with. They were busy with their projects, and had picked up two more workers who had been in Jerusalem and would return with us. Looking at the scenes around me I might have been in a poor Indian city: cracked pavements, mounds of rubble and sand, overflowing rubbish bins. A young boy passed by me, barefoot, sooty black with dirt, his blue eyes and fairish hair suggesting his normal complexion underneath was also fair; a grubby T-shirt and short trousers clothed his angular frame. The beaches were deserted; no throngs of skinny boys like him splashing and running in and out of the waves.



The Israeli soldiers in their watchtower were awake like me, and I wondered how they felt as they watched the people below living in such dilapidation and poverty just a few miles from their own modern, prosperous towns. Did they think those people wanted to live like that? For one mad moment I wanted to shout up at them to come and talk to me, to drag them down from their watchtower by their bullet-proof vests and their guns and their walkie-talkies. I wanted to push my face up against theirs and shout, ‘Look around you! Properly! These are human beings here, not beasts, not vermin. They want to live decent lives like you. Understand?’

The power of the image I had conjured up made me so shake with agitation I had to walk on quickly to dissipate the feeling and after a while calm down. The deputy director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, whom I had met briefly the day before, had invited me for breakfast with his family and was due to pick me up at the hotel. He was a genial, happy-looking middle-aged man with an air of optimism and purpose, though the hard life he had led should have made him exactly the opposite. His home where we would join his family for breakfast was in Bureij refugee camp, to which the family had moved from the nearby Nusseirat camp, his birthplace. As with most refugees in Gaza, his parents had fled their village in 1948 and ended up in the Gaza camps where they had lived ever since. Like other refugee children, Jaber was educated by UNRWA, and later became a physics lecturer. With his peers he soon became involved in resistance activities against the Israeli occupation. There were no suicide bombers in those days and violence was unusual, but young men used every other tactic they could think of in their struggle. Inevitably, he was caught, and in 1985, two years before the outbreak of the First Intifada, the army came for him in the night and he was committed to an Israeli jail where he remained for the next fifteen years. He did not tell me what he was accused of, but such harsh punishments were not usual for relatively minor acts against Israel as a deterrent.

There he joined the many thousands of other ‘security prisoners’, Israel’s designation for those carrying out what the Palestinians would have called acts of resistance against its occupation, stone-throwing, distributing revolutionary leaflets, holding secret meetings of activists to plan possible operations. Israeli law had no category of prisoners of war or political prisoners as applied to Palestinians. Along with other inmates accused of planning hostile acts against Israel, Jaber was tortured and kept in handcuffs and leg shackles. It was a terrible, unspeakable time during which his daughter was born, never to set eyes on him until she was five. But it was in that dark and rotten cell, as he described it, where he was kept in solitary confinement, that something important happened to him.

‘A man from the International Red Cross finally got to see me. They kept moving us to different jails, so it was difficult for the Red Cross to find us. But he did and I thought what a marvellous man he was for devoting his life to human rights. And it was then that I decided I would do that too. Don’t get me wrong. I will always hate the Israelis for what they did to me and all the friends I met in prison. They ruined my career and my family life for years, but they didn’t win. I resolved to fight them, not with violence, but through the struggle for human rights and the rule of law. That is what I have done ever since, and inshallah, we will succeed.’

I looked at him as he recounted his harrowing story; despite his ordeal, he had an air of inner peace as if he had indeed found his way. He chatted amiably as he drove me to the camp, telling me about Gaza, his work and his family, and stopping briefly to pick up fresh-baked mana’ish, flatbread covered in olive oil and za’tar (thyme), a typical breakfast dish in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Bureij camp was situated in the centre of Gaza and had about 35,000 inhabitants. In 1949 it had been nothing but an emergency collection of hastily erected tents and abandoned British army barracks to house the flood of refugees pouring in from the east of Gaza. But UNRWA later replaced the tents with concrete houses, and the camp became more firmly established. It looked more like a crowded small village than a refugee camp when I saw it, its dwellings set close together, trees and bushes growing amongst them.




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