NOVANEWS
I woke up today, walked out my door. To the right was the insanely vivid blue of the Mediterranean. Omar al-Mokhtar was quiet. I jumped in a cab, went to a demonstration, and on the way heard about the latest sordid, crappy little thing the Israeli army had done to the people living here: six fishermen were kidnapped off the coast of Gaza City late last night, maybe as I was looking at the stars cutting through the black weft of the night sky, so bizarrely visible in Gaza when in a normal city there’d be far too much light pollution to see the stars so starkly and clearly.
One blinked oddly and too brightly, too close to be a star: a drone, hovering over the water slightly to the south. North, from the roof, I could see the flames licking out from the rig drilling the oil discovered offshore, and farther north, Ashkelon, obscenely and tauntingly glimmering, as if to say to the people living here, This is the life we have, and you don’t have and won’t have, and it’s something so simple that it’s nearly surreal: just having electricity on 24 hours a day, something so taken for granted that a blackout in a Western metropolis is a couple-times-a-century-event. Here’s it’s quotidian.
The Israeli army refrained for firing today. I was surprised. Not only had I been sure they’d fire but I’d been sure they’d hit someone too. We tramped along a dirt road with the dust nearly choking the baked air. The lack of rain and the odd heat is palpable, and my landlord tells me that it was exactly this temperature—hot days, a slight chill at a night, and a preternaturally calm sea—when the Cast Lead massacre occurred two years ago. We briefly commemorated the massacre. The Local Initiative team carried posters of several children who had been murdered in the area of Beit Hanoun during the assault. We went by the house of one of their fathers to pay our respects.
There was some singing, some chanting, some speeches. I hadn’t been on this land in six months. The Israeli army had dug a 6-foot-deep trench alongside a coiled-wire fence that the Local Initiative team had started to dismantle. They planted the Palestinian flag and a frond in the ground several hundred meters from the fence, a reminder to the Israeli soldiers manning the watchtowers that it’s Palestinian land. Even that symbolic resistance is infuriating—frequently such flags are uprooted. Then we turned around, went by the ICRC office, where Saber asked the newly-arrived manager to carry out the minimalist recommendations of the Goldstone Report, and we went home.
The next attack is on everyone’s mind. They speculate: one university professor told me that it would probably be a set of surgical strikes, hitting government targets, compressed into a two or three day hell. Any day now, he said. And, he asked, who would notice, or care? It would pass like a quick storm and be gone from people’s minds before the Western journalists left their quarters in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv to try to pass through the Erez Crossing, with the aftereffect of the government here further embittered, the population traumatized by again seeing F-16s, missiles, and apaches filling the air.
My landlord told me of hurrying past the government building in a taxi instead of by foot for fear of the next bombing. A friend tells me in response to my question of how she’s been that they are simply surviving. This is what life is like here, in the penumbra of death’s shadow, with death tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after. What they wish is so plain and regular that it’s nearly pathetic in its sheer normalcy, and what’s sickening is the wrenching denial of that wish by a state that insists that it has the right to abuse another people merely for being. What they want is for the Goldstone Report’s findings to be taken seriously.
The Bedouin farmers in Karara want to farm their land in the border areas, they want an NGO to come and repair their well to irrigate their crops. As my friend Mona al-Farra writes, “We are a nation that is looking forward towards a normal peaceful life. We deserve it.” They deserve it and we withhold it, demanding one concession after another: submit to dispossession, submit to demilitarization, submit to humiliation, just take it. And they never will, and when we reap the hell we sow here day-in and day-out, we will know exactly whom to debit.
Technorati Tags: Beit Hanoun, Beit Lehiya, Gaza, Israel, Local Ini, Palestine
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