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.