Madison Rafah Journal

Ahmed Al-Sourani, Agricultural Development Association (PARC) – Gaza, May 24, 2009
Article in Arabic

Recently, at the local and international levels, both governmental and non-governmental, there has been decided the urgent needs for the relief of the agricultural sector in Gaza Strip. However, as it is apparent, there are numerous challenges and risks that a large number of people, institutions, and authorities concerned do not apprehend such as:

The general atmosphere which determines the majority of the interventions intended by the international community in Gaza, in at least, the coming two years, are relief efforts and with little real impact on the genuine reconstruction of the agricultural sector in Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, this situation is applicable to the economic and housing sectors which have been badly damaged.

With all respect to the role of the international organizations in assessing a large part of the destruction and damage ensued with little role played by the community and its local grassroots organizations. Add to that the reality of the split and disorganization between the governmental and non-governmental Palestinian parties, in the process of assessing the damages and the needs, and in deciding the priorities of interventions, based upon the reality of the Palestinian situation and the political and economic challenges it encounter, within a framework of a whole Palestinian national plan.

Many of those developmental international organizations have altered its characteristics of development into relief and recovery, following the international and regional agendas of Gaza support. Thus, the "whole Palestinians," governmental or non-governmental, or small local advocacy groups, or friendly organizations, encounter a real challenge. They are required to systematically pressurize the intervention programs of the international organizations to intervene for a real reconstruction and systematic pressure on Israel to gain permits for the needed construction material to rebuild Gaza Strip and save time, effort and funds. This needs more pressure to alter the current direction and intervention strategy adopted in Gaza Strip nowadays. It is to be altered from the strategy of "eat to survive" into the strategy of "rehabilitation and reconstruction from a developmental perspective," based upon a real assessment of community's needs and assets.

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From: Lora Gordon (loragordon(at)gmail.com)
Subject: Gaza Update #4: Outside, Inside
Date: Sunday, April 12, 2009

I just wanted to comment on a few things that have really struck me
here. It's always really funny to compare the conversation we have on
the outside about Gaza to the conversations people in Gaza have about
Gaza.

– The motorycles. I don't remember ever seeing a motorcycle the first
time I came here in 2003. Now they are everywhere.. There are
apparently 720,000 registered and thousands more assumed to be
unregistered. That's one motorcycle for every two people in Gaza. I'll
be riding in a taxi or hanging out with old friends and inevitably
people of my parents generation will start complaining about the
motorcycles, how dangerous they are, how many accidents they've
caused. I haven't had time to properly research it but a friend told
me the motorcycle craze started when Hamas blew a hole in the wall in
2006 — you probably remember the pictures of people pouring into
Egypt and loading up on goods for 11 days. I guess motorcycles were
one of the things people brought back. Since then they've been coming
through the tunnels.

– Microwaves and toaster ovens are also new here. They're still
luxuries, but now more common and available to the middle class. Many
friends have them newly and it seems like people are having the same
debate about their dangers as we did in the US when they came out.

– A friend shared the most interesting analysis of the tunnels that I
didn't totally agree with but wanted to share. Her family's house was
destroyed in 2004, along with most of her neighborhood. Since then,
most of the former house owners have rented out their uninhabited land
for the use of smuggling tunnels. She said her family was one of the
few refused, even though they were offered $30,000 for the first five
years, plus 25% of the profits from goods coming in. She said she
opposes the tunnels on principle because they jack up the prices and
the goods that come in through the tunnels are only affordable to
comfortable families. Prices have more or less doubled for almost
everything since 2005. She said it would better not to have chocolate
in Gaza at all, than to have chocolate that parents can't afford to
buy for their children, and that if the tunnels were gone it would
show the true face of the siege on Gaza. I personally thought her
analysis was a little hardline, but find it really interesting how
there are two different conversations going on about the tunnels
depending on which side of the border you are. Outside, people debate
whether Hamas is smuggling arms in, and whether this justifies the
full-scale bombing of Gaza, and seem pretty oblivious to the much more
significant economic implications of the tunnels and how they affect
daily life here, which is much more debated here in Gaza. No one in
conversations about the tunnels here ever talks about weapons, which
are an insignificant part of the business. People here talk about
prices, class, and motorcycles, and debate the quality of the
different origins of imports. Syria and Hebron seem to be the highest
quality, with Egypt and Gaza unpredictable, and China affordable but
bad quality.

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Laura Gordon, March 22, 2009

Abu Jameel was waiting in a white pickup truck by the side of the road with the same beard he grew in Ramadan 2003. He was glowing and listening indulgently, waiting for my cab driver to run out of steam with how he’d driven me an extra three or four blocks and all I’d given him was three extra shekels. He kissed me on both cheeks and put me in the truck with three little smiling girls in the front seat and the cab backed out of the dirt road and Abu Jameel drove forward. I asked him whose girls they were and he said they were his. Nancy and Bassant and Haneen. Aseel was at preschool and Fatima the baby was with Nura at home and Jameel was with his grandmother. It was one of those moments of five years passing. Last time I’d seen them, Nancy had been a tiny hairless two-year-old and Bassant in a baby chair and Haneen and Aseel hadn’t been born. I did one of those extended family double-takes. Here were these little babies, all grown up overnight, laughing and talking with braided ponytails, and here I was telling them how last time I saw them they were this big, and they were loving being told how small they had been. He parked the car and we walked through a courtyard with trees and there was Nura, holding a blond, blue-eyed baby and looking exactly the same, wearing mismatching headscarf and a bright, comfortable dress for hanging out inside the house and being a mom surrounded by little girls.

In all the reuniting, there have been a number of bittersweet encounters with people whose lives have dead-ended or people who have settled for something less than they wanted in life and you really feel the five years. One friend got married, moved into her husband’s beautiful but isolated house with her two kids in a city where she knows no one and never goes out. Her husband, pleasant but boring, lost his government job when Hamas took over, and like the other government employees in the same situation collects a salary from the rival government in Ramallah to sit around at home and do nothing. Another friend’s brother’s house was destroyed and keeps getting his visa to the UK rejected and wants to know why I haven’t been in touch.

With Nura and Abu Jameel and the girls it was different, simple and direct, like we’d just seen each other yesterday. Life has been hard for them, too, harder than for many of my old friends, but they’re just that kind of people who absorb people easily, without pretense. It was a perfect sunny morning. We sat in the living room around a tray of bread and cream cheese and tea, eating breakfast.

My Arabic is still broken, but it’s much better than it was in 2003, and one of the joys in coming back is being able to talk a little easier with people. I had heard from mutual friends that the home they built on their farm had been destroyed a week after the bombing was over but I hadn’t heard the whole story. They had been living in different houses, Abu Jameel with his sister and Nura and the girls with her family, for two months while they looked for a new place to live. It’s not easy to find places to live anymore in Gaza. Since so many people have lost their houses, there’s been a huge housing crisis. They finally found this new place and have been living there for less than a week. It’s a beautiful one-story surrounded by a courtyard with fruit trees.

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Lora Gordon, March 19, 2009

It's not immediately obvious that Gaza has tilted on its axis. The scenery is basically the same. Piles of exploded concrete and flattened farms, aggressive taxi drivers, families sitting in the rubble of their homes offering foreigners like us cups of tea, then stretches where all the buildings are disconcertingly whole and you can forget where you are, or at least the media cliche of where you are.

I live in one of those areas where you forget Gaza was bombed to hell a month ago. Rimall is the Gaza City neighborhood where Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights rented me an apartment, a little studio that opens onto an enormous white tile patio lined with trees. When I walk outside in a t-shirt no one looks at me funny. When I turn left, then right, then left, walk one block and bump onto one of those piles of concrete – the Ministry of the Interior – and an intersection whose traffic lights don't work and whose street signs were blown out of their frames, but the frames are still intact, like empty glasses frames, and the free-for-all traffic pattern does not yield tons of traffic accidents, which is totally unsurprising in the Middle East – when I get to the bombed out ministry I know I've come to Omar al-Mukhtar Street, the main shopping drag in Gaza City.

When I lived in Rafah in 2003 and wanted to feel posh, I would take a servees to Gaza and walk around go to Omar al-Mukhtar Street. Now I live a five-minute walk away and kinda feel like I've hit the big time. The Pizza Inn on Omar al-Mukhtar, where I first ate pineapple pizza, paid for by PA people who were trying to either spy on us, control us, or hang out with the foreigners instead of sitting around at their boring day jobs, now serves all kinds of Arabic food as well as pizza. The park next to what was formerly the Pizza Inn is still there, with the same manicured trrees and red flowers.

Another minute down the street and I'm at Gaza City's Palestine Bank ATM, withdrawing money. Six years ago in Rafah I tried to cash a check and it took a whole morning of negotiations at the Palestine Bank's Rafah branch, and was only possible in the end because one of Mohammed's relatives worked there. I'm pretty sure you still have to go to Gaza City to find an ATM here, but in Gaza City they're everywhere, reminders of ease/normal life/nothing at all.

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I go to Cairo with two doctors, two community organizers, another journalist and a filmmaker. We pick up water purifiers to take to hospitals and call ourselves a delegation. We pay the US embassy $30 each for the privilege of signing an affidavit that releases the embassy from responsibility for our lives. (The US embassy has become increasingly persistent on this point. I remember in 2003, before the signed affidavits, how we used to call the embassy from the middle of invasions, and how a less-than-friendly voice on the other line would inform us we had gone to a place under travel advisory and they could do nothing for us.)

Then we take the taxi six hours SE. The road: flat buildings, disheveled concrete, bright paint fading slowly to sand. Outdated billboards and the desert, pale and constant. A pit stop at an outdoor stand, with a refrigerator, a few tables and a shelf of sweets, where the owners learn where we are going and gift us bottles of juice and water.

And then we're on a bridge, new white metal shooting up from a clean bed of concrete: the Suez Canal. Five years ago, a man with a potbelly and a gun identified this historical site to Mohammed, who identified it to me, as we rode in the back seat of a speeding white car, with three armed men, in the opposite direction, toward Cairo. I nodded, nauseous on a road that stretched six hours without a checkpoint, with a desert that extended farther than I could walk, with the place I had just left, maybe forever. The guards were people we had paid off so Mohammed wouldn’t have to follow the normal Egyptian protocol for Palestinian men 15-50. The normal protocol for this demographic was, you join other individuals of your demographic in the Egyptian checkpoint until you number 60. Then they put you on a crowded bus and take you to a room in the Cairo airport called the deportation room, a dirty carpet with a few chairs, where you stay until armed guards come to escort you to the gate. This is so you won’t try to live illegally in Egypt.

The bridge is long, and now we're on the other side, driving down, back toward flat road and flat buildings. Five years ago, our armed escorts parked by the side of the road for a dinner of soggy rice and fish. They looked away as they put us back into the car, and Mohammed whispered in my ear, "They expected you to pay."

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Our friend Lora Gordon, who spent time in Rafah in 2003 immediately following the death of Rachel Corrie, is returning to Gaza this month. We will be posting her messages and writings under Lora Gordon and Letters from Gaza.

GAZA UPDATE #1
Imagining Gaza

Here's how I imagine it. A servees, brim-full with passengers, Arabic pop or Quran chanting, blasting (59% of the music blasts out the windows, only 41% into the cab, allowing the passengers to speak and be heard), the driver smoking an endless cigarette.

I generally fall prey to my own personal myth that Gaza’s cab drivers are impervious to lung cancer, that war trumps disease, and that no one in Gaza can be hurt by anything but guns and things like guns.

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We recently received this e-mail from Lora Gordon, an activist now living in Chicago who spent time in Rafah and Gaza about six years ago, around the time of Rachel Corrie's death. Lora visited Madison and spoke on the first anniversary of Rachel's death at the Madison premiere of "The Killing Zone" about the murders of Rachel, Tom Hurndall and journalist James Miller.

Lora is planning to return to Gaza and plans to work for a few weeks with our partner in Rafah, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.

Please consider if you can help defray the costs of her trip. Instructions for that are below. They are also taking donations for water purifiers.

Thanks,
Barb O.

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Said Abdelwahed is a professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Al-Azhar University of Gaza. These photos were sent by Professor Abdelwahed during the Israeli invasion.

All Photos

PARC Headquarters, Jan 29, 2009

Factories, Gaza City, Jan 29, 2009

Palestine University, Jan 29, 2009

Naooq Home, Jan 26, 2009

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