1 - 7 March 2001
Issue No.523
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 March 2001 Issue No.523 |
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Losing paradise
Mushir Al-Fara's family owns 76 dunums of land squeezed between the minuscule Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in the centre of the Gaza Strip and the vast Gush Qatif settlement bloc that occupies its southwestern finger. On 21 November Israeli occupation army bulldozers swept away 12 dunums of their guava trees. The following week armoured pile drivers pulled down the family home, well and water pump. And in December the army arrived to raze the remaining land of woods, fences and gates.
"We think the Israeli army is clearing the land to lay a new settler road, linking Gush Qatif to Kfar Darom," says Al-Fara. He runs through his family's losses. "Apart from the land, there's the well, pump engines, irrigation systems, water tanks, the reservoir, fertilisers, furniture and family documents. At a conservative guess, I'd say we lost $200,000 in less than a month."
Still, he admits that he, his 79-year-old disabled mother, five brothers and six sisters are "lucky". The Al-Faras are a comparatively well-off family from Khan Yunis, the main town in southern Gaza. They have "alternative addresses" in Gaza City, Saudi Arabia and England. Others have no address at all.
Al-Fara is standing on scorched and cratered earth and torn, dead trees. This was the western edge of Qarrara, a small Palestinian village of 16,000. As the army ploughed through his land, it destroyed 20 homes in Qarrara, damaged another 40 and uprooted 5,000 of its olive and citrus trees. The army claims the "clearance" was necessary to defend the 242 settlers of Kfar Darom from armed Palestinian attacks. The Palestinians say it was an act of collective punishment or, worse, a way of extending the settlement's borders still further.
There are over 100 Palestinians now displaced in Qarrara, squatting in three tent encampments on or near what used to be their homes. Hayat Abu Azan is one of them. "No, there was no warning from the army," she says, recalling the night army bulldozers destroyed her house. "In fact, I was scared to death my 18-month-old daughter was under the rubble. She wasn't, thank God."
She has no hope for the future. "Once the Israelis extend their colonies, that's it," she says. "They never let you back." But she and the other displaced do return, every night and under army fire, if only to "assert their presence" on the land. Three Palestinians from Qarrara have been shot and wounded for making that assertion.
In Gaza any Palestinian presence is tantamount to resistance. The Tufah junction rests on the thin lip that separates Khan Yunis camp and its 54,000 Palestinian refugees from Neve Dekalim, a Jewish settlement of 2,000, the main block of which is carved in a star of David.
Over the last week ferocious gun battles have erupted there between Palestinian guerrillas and the Israeli army, leaving 30 camp shelters gutted and 77 Palestinians wounded, 40 from a particularly virulent strain of tear gas. Palestinian doctors say the army is using a new toxic agent in the gas that causes untreatable convulsions. The army says the gas is simply black smoke used to shield its positions.
But whatever the substance of the gas, trauma is in any case the common lot for those who live near Tufah. Ahmed Abu Namous shares his home with 21 other people, many of them second-time refugees from what were once homes but are now wrecked buildings raked by rocket and machine gun fire. He is convinced he knows what the army intends to do. "They're trying to push us back from the settlement. But we can't leave. Where would we go?"
Muna Al-Fara won't leave either. Mushir's older sister is a doctor who divides her time between her regular work in Gaza City and helping the homeless in Qarrara. From a ridge of towering date palms and dunes topped with wild grass, she points out a three-storey Palestinian house now commandeered by the Israeli army and a by-pass road occasionally used by speeding army jeeps and heavily armoured settler coaches. The rest is wasteland. This used to be her home.
"Don't ask me where anything was," she says. "I can no longer recognise the place. When the army destroyed the house, the bulldozers collected all the wreckage and dumped it somewhere. But I will fight the Israelis over this. I will get my land back and receive compensation. I will take it to the Israeli Supreme Court if I have to."
In the meantime, she draws sustenance on memory. She points to a small mound of rubble where, in 1969, her father divined a fresh water source on the land and dug the well. "He was a nationalist who believed greening the land was part of the struggle."
Another blasted grove is where she played with her brothers and sisters beneath giant Jomaz trees. "These are a rare species with thick trunks and creepers that fall down to the ground. The British brought them to Gaza from Kenya during the Mandate. Some were 70 years old. For me those trees were a little bit of paradise," she says. "The Israelis felled those, too."
She bites hard on her lip. "I wonder who the Israelis think we are. We cannot possibly be human to them. They cannot see us as people with feelings, with love. We are just numbers. Numbers to be reduced."
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