Days before I first made it into Gaza a year ago, Palestinian friends living in Ramallah were trying their best to persuade me to stay away from the coastal enclave under the control of Hamas.
“Gaza? Are you crazy? What do you want to do in Gaza?” they would tell me, as if they were talking about some faraway God-forsaken country. “There’s only Hamas and bearded men and no beer.”
I thought it was a shame that they, Palestinians just like the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip, were the most vociferous in trying to dissuade me from going there. Now I can understand why.
On the one hand Ramallah is “the capital of Palestinian escapism”, as the BBC correspondent living there once put it. On the other, the Gaza Strip has earned the reputation of the trouble maker, the nest of radicals and, since the Hamas takeover in 2007, the enclave of extremists.
It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who, in a hysterical moment of anger just after his unforgiveable faux pas of attempting to postpone the UN debate on possible war crimes in Gaza, called it “the emirate of darkness,” forsaking his own people.
Gaza was the spark that started the first Intifada in 1987, the birth place of Hamas a year later, Arafat’s and the Palestinian Authority’s new home after years in exile in 1994, and the scene of the bloody civil war between Hamas and Fatah three years ago.
For Israel, Gaza has served as the testing ground of Israeli military gadgets and policy engineering. Over the years, Israel’s policies have turned Gaza into one big laboratory with 1.5 million test cases. Among the experiments: total occupation to protect a few thousand Jewish settlers, unilateral disengagement of Israeli troops and total closure.
For three years, Gaza has been receiving food, fuel and imports not according to demand but according to some obscure calculations made by the Israeli occupation’s masterminds.
“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger,” an Israeli government advisor had explained at the beginning of the blockade.
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| My grocer |
The owner of the corner shop grocery where I do my shopping always informs me that an item I ask for is out of stock by telling me “welcome to Gaza”.
The Israeli blockade has made the Gaza market so unpredictable that you just cannot ask for items by brand. One day there is Turkish lemon juice imported from the tunnels – the label battered by the sand in the underground trip – the next it’s a new juice produced in Gaza, until a wave of Israeli products flood the market.
When I arrived a year ago, the only cigarettes available were Egyptian L&M; their awful taste reminding you instantly of their cancerous nature. My stash of Gauloise disappeared in a week. I learnt only too late to keep them hidden, and by that time everyone knew I had some good non-Egyptian cigarettes. In about a month, new brands started appearing on the market, at cheaper prices. The tunnel traders were diversifying their imports.
Over a year I have seen items appearing and disappearing on the market within days, their prices as unstable as the peace process. Olive oil, the traditional ingredient in every Palestinian household, has become so expensive because of Israel’s destruction of olive trees that most Gazans have had to start living without it for the first time in their life. Fish, once Gaza’s staple diet, has become a luxury few can afford, as Israel imposes a 3 nautical mile limit on the few fishermen that remain.
‘We just want to live’
I first entered Gaza through the Rafah border, eight months after Israel’s 22-day aggression called Operation Cast Lead that left 1,400 people dead and thousands of houses destroyed.
I recall passing through the Rafah gate, hearing the cold iron clank as it was locked behind us, giving the first impression of entering a massive prison.
Back then, Gaza was still under the rubble of Israel’s merciless war. Young Palestinians looked at me walking down the streets as if I was an alien, asking me all sorts of awkward questions.
“What’s your age? What’s your religion? What are you doing here? Are you married?”
Complete strangers shot questions at me like gunfire in my first couple of weeks – the blockade had totally cut off an entire generation from the rest of the world, even from the West Bank.
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| Palestinian rap, now forced underground |
On my first night in Gaza City I came face to face with Gaza’s stark contradictions. Hundreds of young people wearing fashionable clothes sipping lemon juice and smoking shisha gathered in the outdoor Gallery café, while a Palestinian rap band ran its gig alongside Dabka (Palestine’s traditional dance) and hip-hop dancers. As the show was going on, Hamas people in suits were harassing the organizers, accusing them of turning a public place into a “whorehouse”. Months later, the owner of Gallery café was arrested and beaten up, and the rappers remain banned from performing in public.
Hamas – once democratically elected to govern Palestine – is nowadays decried by many Gazans as “the second occupation”. From its charitable work with the poor, it is now the governing authority imposing heavy taxes, new fines and prohibitive licenses, while brutally suppressing civil liberties and individual freedoms.
Most of the foreign journalists visiting Gaza for a couple of days – only a handful are based here – report about the latest ban on women’s freedoms, such as the ban on shisha smoking in public places or the bizarre law prohibiting women from riding motorbikes. Hamas’s weird policies make the news, helping shape Gaza’s notoriety as the enclave of peculiarity. But it is the ordinary people’s desire to live that is most often left unreported. Normality rarely sells in the news industry.
Like the story of my friend in his late thirties from Jabalya. He used to work in Israel, had Jewish girlfriends and speaks perfect Hebrew. He longs for a pint of beer, a night at some nightclub, driving through the Tel Aviv coast.
For eight straight months I experienced – to a certain degree – what it meant to be a Palestinian in Gaza; being unable to plan your departure, totally dependent on the unpredictable opening of borders and invisible higher powers that decide your fate. But it was upon leaving Gaza, not upon entering, that I got my real culture shock. I remembered Ramallah and its bars and nightclubs, of what it means to be able to travel without restrictions, of waking up and having water and electricity. It’s amazing how easily the abnormal becomes normal in a few months.
A 22-year-old colleague of mine managed to travel on holiday to Malaysia through the Egyptian Rafah crossing after years trapped here. Listening to him upon his return, it felt as if listening to a prisoner granted a week of prison leave. Only that he committed no crime.
Walk down Omar Al Mukhtar street in central Gaza City, and you find the skimpiest women’s clothes you can imagine in the shop windows, even though you’d never see them worn in the streets. On Thursday evenings – the start of the weekend – thousands of men prepare themselves for some steamy nights with their wives, buying prescription pills for sexual enhancement from all sorts of dealers. Walk down the beach and you see families, young people and children enjoying the sand and the sea.
This is the real Palestinian resilience. It’s not the resistance, nor the rockets fired by the few and fiery rhetoric of the leaders, but the simple wish to live, “like everyone else”, despite the trauma and the hardships. Given a chance, the people of Gaza would be living like those in Ramallah, or like Israelis in Tel Aviv. Deprived of that chance for much longer, it is only a matter of time until it will turn into a wish to die.
