Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Walking in Gaza

By Graham Usher

To walk through Gaza is to penetrate the heart of the Palestinian uprising and understand why it endures. This is not simply because you sometimes have to enter Israel's vast, fortress-like Eretz crossing into Gaza under fire from Palestinian guerrillas or under stones thrown by Palestinian children. Or even because a trek along the strip's 45 kilometre length can take three hours on a good day and an eternity on a bad one, due to Israel's calibrated system of "external," "internal," "full" and "partial" blockades.

Rather, it is in Gaza that you come up against the sophisticated regimen controlling every facet of Palestinian life, from work to walking. Israel honed the regime to perfection before and during the Oslo process. But its essentially colonial architecture becomes visible with resistance against it -- which is perhaps one reason why Gaza has been off-limits to Israelis for the course of the uprising and, last week, also to representatives from the human rights organisation Amnesty International.

The economic control is evidenced by a stroll through the desolate streets of Gaza City. Ninety per cent of Gaza's trade is with Israel, an economic dependency made more -- not less -- acute through agreements signed with Israel under the promise of "turning Gaza into Singapore," but which in fact resulted in a 30 per cent cut in Gaza's per capita GNP during the seven-year Oslo era.

Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak banned 25,000 Gazans from their jobs in Israel, denying with a stroke of his pen a primary source of revenue for Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. This month he has prohibited all imports into Gaza save for food and medicine, cooking fuel and gas.

The political purpose is to squeeze the PA so hard that it will desist from "violence." The consequence is already a "severe humanitarian crisis," in the view of Peter Hansen, commissioner-general of UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees, who make up around 75 per cent of Gaza's million or so inhabitants.

For example, in less than eight weeks, the percentage of those in need of food assistance from UNRWA has soared from eight to 85 per cent of the overall refugee population in Gaza, or some 127,000 families. Unemployment has hit 40 per cent and the poverty rate is on a rising curve that could reach 50 per cent if the blockade continues into next year, and sooner if UNRWA does not get a cash injection of US$40 million over the next three months.

You don't require statistics to understand this thoroughly planned impoverishment. You need only walk through Gaza City's Fares market, where Palestinian men barter an old TV set for a sack of flour or women sell tomatoes to earn enough Israeli shekels to buy one. Or watch the scramble for ancient kerosene bottles being sold from the back of a donkey cart. "There is no cooking gas left in Gaza other than what we have in our homes. So people are starting to use kerosene," says Imad Heikal, a worker with an international non-governmental organisation. "We expect the kerosene will run out in about 15 days."

But the siege is not simply economic. It is also territorial, and possible under Oslo through the army's control of Gaza's borders with Egypt and Israel and over the three "south," "middle" and "north" lateral roads that connect the strip's 17 Jewish settlements to Israel. Throughout the uprising, the army has not only "secured" these bridgeheads but also razed vast tracts of Palestinian land to expand them in readiness for any future unilaterally imposed demarcation of Gaza's borders.

An Israeli soldier watches Palestinians cross the Kissufim road, which is used by Israeli troops and Jewish settlers near Khan Yunis in Gaza (photo: AFP)

You get a sense of the future by approaching Rafah's Salah Al-Din border gate to Egypt. Today it is an avenue of mostly deserted houses, boarded-up shops and a white mosque scarred with bullet holes and the occasional crater from Israeli tank shells. The gate has been one of the flashpoints in the uprising, with scores of schoolchildren every day trying with stones to prise open a door Israel has long slammed shut on them.

"I can't be precise but I'd say between six or seven children have been killed by the army on this street alone and maybe 200 wounded," says Ibrahim Shatat, who lives beside the gate. He and his 13 children share a two-storey house barely 20 metres from an Israeli army command post that routinely sprays the gate with machine-gun fire whenever the children get too close or Palestinian snipers take up position in one or other of the abandoned houses.

The latest fatality was Eyad Abu Jazar, a 21-year-old Palestinian shot dead on Saturday outside his home, 150 metres from the post. It was unclear whether clashes were happening at the time. What is clear is that Jazar was not participating in them. He was mentally and physically disabled.

A walk east and you see the same "buffer" policy of pushing Rafah back from the border but this time inflicted on scores of uprooted olive trees and some 17 greenhouses, all of which are a shambles of wood, torn plastic and twisted steel. At the end of one devastated grove we come across three tents, home now of Saha Abu Rish and her three children. The tents sit on the flattened roof of her house.

"The army didn't give any reason for the demolition," she says. "They simply came one morning with two bulldozers and a tank and said we had five minutes to leave. They destroyed all the furniture, all our papers, everything."

She berates the fact that the only thing she receives is "delegations" from the Red Cross and UN but neither materials to rebuild her house nor money for her children. She is likely to wait some more. According to UNRWA, Abu Rish is from just one of 500 families in Gaza -- mostly from Rafah and Khan Younis -- who have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to destruction or damage caused by Israeli shelling or machine-gun fire.

How do people survive? "We don't have a choice," answers Imad Heikal, with a smile. "We've never had a choice." In a way he is right, for survival has long and tenacious roots in Gaza. In 1948 -- rather like Saha Abu Rish today -- his parents and grandparents lived in tents in Gaza after they fled their villages on the southern coastal shelf of what was Palestine but is now Israel. In 1967, they asserted squatters rights in the homes of relatives after Israel occupied Gaza for the second time in 10 years -- just as three thousand or so Palestinians are doing today.

Because there is no food, men dust down the ancient craft of shoreline fishing along the beach because they are prevented from launching their boats on the sea. Because there is no fuel, women stack branches from broken olive trees on their heads to prepare for the winter. "Between 1948 and 1967 we lived on three things in Gaza -- fish, oranges and UNRWA," recalls Jamal Zaqout, a leader in the Intifada which began in 1987 and a leading figure in the alliance of National and Islamic Forces in this one. "And the first two items were more important than the third." There is only one thing Palestinians in Gaza will never do -- leave their homes, just in case Israel's "new borders" again become permanent.

Following the armed attack on a settler school bus near the Kfar Darom Jewish settlement last week, the army sliced Gaza in two. Apart from two hours a day -- when soldiers weave through a snarl of trucks, cars and donkey carts sometimes four kilometres long -- the only way Palestinians can reach the south and north of Gaza is via a mud track several kilometres east of Kfar Darom.

They walk across fields, edge carefully along tree-lined avenues and stream over a settler "lateral" road guarded by two Israeli tanks. Occasionally -- when the crowd gets too close or too dense -- the tanks fire a shell above them. The Palestinians neither duck nor flee. They simply walk, from their homes in the north to their homes in the south.

"It's a form of resistance, like the way we used to walk to our villages in Israel," says Heikal. "We know Israel has cut Gaza in half for the sake of 5,000 settlers. We walk in the name of the one million Palestinians who live here. As long as we walk, we feel we are winning."

Related stories:
In quest of Rafah
War in Gaza 23 - 29 November 2000
Intifada in focus 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000
Intifada special 19 - 25 October 2000

Related links:
UNRWA

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