Go and see the checkpoint at the Erez junction. The fences and the
watch¬towers and the sentries and the iron gates and the
Border Police barricaded behind sandbags and concrete slabs, with
electromagnetic inspection gates and buzzing computer
terminals.
No written word can really convey the sight. Go and see the 20,000
workers setting out each day at dawn through barbed-wire fences
which are concealed by concrete slabs so as not to embarrass VIP's
- foreign diplomats and Palestinian leaders traveling in their cars
- who would see such a humiliating scene.
Go and see the laborers returning exhausted in the afternoon,
carrying parcels of old clothes, or even a stove given away by a
compassionate employer, walking two or three kilometers until they
cross the check¬points and take one of the hundreds of
Palestinian taxis waiting for them since morning. And these workers
are the happy ones who have a labor permit, all over the age of
30.
Travel 45 kilometers and the same distance back. Imagine that you
are forbidden to travel more than a length of 45 and a width of
eight kilometers. Imagine that in order to travel further, you have
to get a special permit or be sick or be a businessman, and all
this only when there isn't a her¬metically sealed closure,
when nobody crosses the border.
Imagine that you are unable to get up in the morning and decide for
no special reason to go and see friends in another city, or go and
buy books, or visit the library in Bir Zeit, or go to pray in
Jerusalem, or simply to get a breath of mountain air. If you have
family in another town and have received the permit to visit them,
this doesn't permit you to sleep there. Imagine this.
Imagine that you are an official, or director general of a ministry
(Health, or Industry or Education) who receives the requests for
permits. Imagine the hundreds of people pressing against your door
and asking angrily or desperately where the promised permit is. In
order to defend yourself from your own helplessness and indignation
- it's all stuck in the offices of the Civil Administration (excuse
me, it's now called the Israeli Coordination and Liaison
Administration) - you start to get tough, to impatiently wave off
and rebuke these nudniks who aren't satisfied with the liberated 45
kilometers by eight. (Of course one must deduct from this about 20
percent of the most beautiful and congenial part of the Gaza Strip
belonging to the settlers, and roads closed to Palestinians.)
Imagine that you are a manufacturer. The world bestows so much
praise on the business and productive sectors as the backbone of
peace, without which the process is not possible. Imagine that last
year you had to close the factory down for 90 or even 180 days
because raw materials didn't arrive in time; or there was
insufficient money to pay the electricity bills.
All because you hadn't succeeded in marketing most of your produce
in your main West Bank markets, or because your transportation
costs had been doubled. Due to regulations forbidding Palestinian
trucks to travel between the two areas - the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip - you had to pay Israeli truckers to do the work. Imagine
that some of your trucks had set out for Tel Aviv in a convoy, but
your supplier of raw materials (but¬tons and cloth, for
instance) was stuck in a traffic jam, making the Border Policeman
who was accompanying you look at his watch and say it was too late
- "Yallah, back we go," empty.
These are some of the contours of peace in Gaza. It is a place
where people are statistics in an Orwellian play, while the world
applauds the language of officialdom and public relations.
Without Illusions
The Israeli media have been largely concentrating on when and how
the Palestinian Legislative Council, which was elected in January
1996 in the first general elections in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, would cancel the Palestinian Covenant. This interest
corresponds with the essence of Israeli expectations from the
council: it should be a body providing legitimacy for Yasser
Arafat's moves, for the character and direction of the negotiations
which he conducted before he officially won the support of the
majority of the people. It may well be that Palestinian
expectations will very soon clash with those of the Israelis. The
Palestinians will focus on the authori¬ty of the council to
voice the frustrations and dissatisfaction which they feel over the
results of the implementation of the Oslo agreements.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi is the candidate who won the highest number
of votes not only in Gaza but in all electoral areas. In his many
elections meetings and press conferences, he stressed how he saw
the two tasks of the council, and his role within it.
From the internal aspect, a body which will pass laws promoting
democ¬racy and a civic Palestinian society, will supervise the
executive authority and demand reports on the quality of its
activities and its incorrupt¬ibility. In his opinion and not
only his, the council must also demand to fulfill the role of
guiding and directing the Palestinian Authority and its
representatives in the negotiations with Israel. In external
affairs, it must turn to that Israeli and world public opinion
which is prepared to lis¬ten in order to make it clear that,
up to now, the peace process can teach that Israel has not yet
recognized the national rights of the Palestinians. "I will tell
the Israeli public that to fall prey to illusions will not serve
the cause of peace."
People want the council to ask difficult questions: Why is it taken
so much for granted that for "security reasons" men aged 30 and
less aren't entitled to leave the Gaza Strip? Why does one have to
beg every clerk to grant an exit permit to the West Bank, and how
long will every student have to live in uncertainty as to whether
he will get to his studies there in time? Why does a worker aged
50, who has worked for 25 years, sudden¬ly have his magnetic
card of passage confiscated by the Israelis? For how long will the
negotiations with Israel be conducted as if there is no
impor¬tance to the fact that a million people are restricted
to a length of 45 kilo¬meters and a width of eight?
As If I Were There
More than once I have been asked what is the secret of my being
drawn to Gaza, where I, an Israeli, have been living for the past
two years. One real reason is that in Gaza I meet a lot of people
that I enjoy getting to know. People who conceal their sadness
behind wide smiles.
I don't divulge the second real reason to most of the questioners,
because I know that the Jews will draw the hasty and distorted
conclusion that I am making comparisons between regimes and the
intentions of those in power. In that case they won't pay attention
to what I am saying. The Palestinians will be encouraged by my
answer to go on making gen¬eral, irrelevant and impatient
comparisons.
What can I do if I am the daughter of refugees saved from the
Nazis? When I translate human behavior patterns, they cannot but be
founded on this personal fact. Perhaps I formulated the real second
answer in my childhood. I took in my mother's stories to the extent
that it seemed to me that I was there: a prisoner of the German
Gestapo in Yugoslavia, taken in the summer of 1944 to the
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in West Germany.
When she and the others were taken off the cattle wagons and led by
foot to the camp, she noticed German women riding comfortably on
their bicycles, with a food basket on the back of their seat,
watching those being led off with a dull, apathetic
curiosity.
My father tells, according to a film he saw, that when the Warsaw
Ghetto went up in flames during the Jewish revolt, on the Ayran
side of the ghetto walls a fun fair was set up for Polish children.
On one side the smoke rose to the skies, on the other the
children's merry shouting.
On the way out of the Gaza Strip and its fences, one travels by Yad
Mordehai, a kibbutz named after Mordehai Anielewitz, leader of the
Warsaw Ghetto revolt. The journey takes five minutes, but it is as
if Gaza, the refugee camps and the people hungry for freedom there
don't exist. There in the kibbutz roadside inn, a reply drawn from
the experience of my parents, refugees who were saved from the
Nazis, is constantly reshaped within me: I won't be with those who
were riding the bicycles.
This article was written before total closure was imposed on the
Gaza Strip at the end of February 1996.