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A
mobile watchtower, lifted into the air by a crane, surveys Khan
Yunis day and night. An ambulance from the city waits behind a
nearby concrete building day after day; it waits so that the next
child shot for playing too close to the wall can make it to the
local hospital before dying. The wall is a vast, menacing construction
stretching down the coast as far as you can see, separating Khan
Yunis from the Gush Katif settlement block in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli soldiers sit poised with machine guns in the cylindrical
bunker at the northern edge of the wall overlooking the ruins
they've made of the Khan Yunis refugee camp.
Over there to the south and west, in the Jewish settlements, no
one worries about water shortages or electricity outages. Families
don't live in corrugated iron shacks unrecognizable as homes from
the outside until someone points out what is supposed to be a
door; until you see ragged clothing hanging up to dry above a
parched piece of earth beside the shack. Parents in the settlements
aren't afraid that their children will be murdered for absentmindedly
playing too close to a wall. Their panorama is the buoyant, sparkling
Mediterranean lapping the white sands outside their windows; an
occupied view: for settlers only.
There are children from the refugee camp playing in the shell
of a building not far from the wall. A small Gaza girl eyed me
with a dark face, suspicious but curious, the last time I walked
this area. When I asked to take her picture she simply stood still
with the same brooding expression on her face as I clicked the
camera. A year later and here she is playing among the ruins;
taller and longer haired but with the same knowing look. When
she sees me she stops and we both flash a quick smile of recognition.
She's not dead, I think. One cannot help but wonder this about
those who go on living here.
And now I wonder again about her and her playmates; about the
men and women mulling about in the hot streets of the market.
I wonder about the boy who was shot in the arm by a soldier in
the mobile target practice watchtower carried away by the ever-present
ambulance just after I arrived to gape incredulously at the wall.
I wonder about the boy who draped a Palestinian flag over his
shoulders like a cape after the funeral of two others killed in
the night by a tank. He ran past us to his home, a white apartment
building with bullet holes and tank-blasted craters in the concrete
decorating its sorry façade. Can it really be this bad?
Can you expect people to keep listening to the morbid descriptions
of life here without questioning your accuracy? Perhaps not, and
yet the most striking feature of all is that it is so much worse
than these paltry words can express.
I've awoken to a most disturbing email message from a friend.
"Massacre in Gaza" the subject heading reads. "Things
grew very bad tonight in Khan Yunis. After an incursion into the
refugee camp two people were killed and ten injured. A tank then
stopped suddenly in the road and the Israelis started behaving
in a crazy way, firing everywhere. A helicopter fired a rocket
killing eight more people and wounding about 100. Later we heard
that they were shelling the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis. Things
are going so much to the worse here…"
It's déjà vu in the Gaza Strip: more incursions,
more firing, more dead, more dazed children, more grieving relatives,
more wreckage in the wasteland of the Strip. I still tense up
at the sound of airplanes flying overhead because of my nights
spent in Rafah and Gaza City. Five months of listening to fighter
jets, helicopter gunships, tank firing, machine gun fire, grenades
and the slightest "bang" now makes me jump. What are
we turning a population of full-time inhabitants
of this hell into??
My friend Ghada writes to me the next day, "The attack in
Khan-Yunis was more than horrible. I went numb when I heard of
it. The only thing I can say is 'what can we do?' We pray God
to stop the Israeli madness soon."
The signs aren't looking good. The specter of war in the region
is looming. Talk of "transfer", of the forced expulsion
of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, is gaining in
popularity not only in Israel but also in pro-Israel circles in
the United States. Members of Congress and of the Bush administration
are echoing the most outspoken advocates of this policy in Israel,
people like Effi Eitam in charge of Israel's settlements programs
and an outspoken advocate of expulsion, or General Eitan Ben Elyahu,
former head of the Israeli Air Force who recently announced that
"eventually we will have to thin out the number of Palestinians
living in the territories." No one protested.
Under cover of war, the Gaza girl with the dark eyes and her playmates,
the bereaved family members of the recent massacre, the children
at the kindergarten near where the Mezan Center for Human Rights
office is, my former co-workers themselves: Ghada with her beautiful
English and hopes to study abroad, and Mais with her beaming "good-mornings",
and Anwar, the maintenance man, and the diligent Ramiz, Adnan,
and Hazem, and the owners of the Matooq restaurant who welcomed
me every time I came in for lunch, and the storekeepers and the
taxi-drivers, the beggar-children and the women shopping for food
– they're all supposed to disappear, like chemical-treated
stains.
The juggernaut advances and there is blood on our hands. The oranges
and olives will witness the last of the just—the people I met
who told me they would never leave Palestine. Will their deaths
move us to open our eyes?
Jennifer
Loewenstein lives in Gaza City, and works for the Mezan
Center for Human Rights.
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