Helicopter
gunships fired into crowded areas of Nablus and Jenin again today.
Nobody knows how many are dead. Yesterday's count stopped
at 44. Ariel Sharon hasn't finished his "operation"
yet. Hold your horses, George, Tony; I'm going
as fast as I can. Just have to make sure we've smoked out
(and then snuffed out) all the terrorists. Surely, George, you
understand this? And if you don't, tough. This is my land;
these are my wild Indians. Mind your own terrorist wars.
Life
has taken on a surreal quality in Gaza, where we sit in our offices
more silently than usual. The news hasn't improved and no
one has anything to say. The waiting game continues. When will
they come for us? Nobody knows, but the people here are pessimistic
enough after five decades of experience to assume it won't
be long. Sand-hill barricades have begun to appear around the
crumbling camps and the towns. Children construct their own barricades
from garbage, stacking it tightly in rough piles nearly as high
as they are. If you close your eyes you can imagine for a second
that they are effective tank deterrents. And the ragged, bleary-eyed
men with guns slung over their shoulders at the street corners
are the superior fighting forces poised to take on the Israel
Defense Forces, the sixth most powerful military in the world,
when they come rolling in to town.
What
is routine has become absurd: An ice-cream truck drives around
Gaza City day after day, hour after hour, with Beethoven's
"Fuer Elise" piping out of its loudspeaker as if from
a tin whistle. I'll never hear this tune again without feeling
that I am caught in the eye of a storm. No one ever buys ice cream.
We drift in an unquiet calm.
Next
to the "Oasis" Internet café where we write and
chat away our frustrations in the afternoons is a coffee shop
called the "Titanic". I refuse to take my coffee break
there, preferring instead the one-shekel falafel dive down the
street where news blares endlessly from a big TV in the corner
of the kitchen You are American? The proprietor asks me,
and then points to the images of tanks rolling over West Bank
cities. His face is grim; my face is grimmer. I won't order a
Coke with my falafel. Just now I'd rather drink sand.
Ruba
arrived in Gaza with her father and sister one week before the
start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, her mother and older sister intending
to join them two weeks later. But they never got their papers
because of the uprising so they still reside in Baghdad. Ruba
can phone her mother once a month. Her mother gets ill with worry
after each phone call; and lately, after each day of news. What
will happen to her husband and daughters? When will she see them
again? Ruba reciprocates the worries: when will Baghdad be bombed
again? Will her mother and sister be safe? The seesaw of sorrow
goes up and down equally weighted.
The
storm to the east rages on. Fighting terror requires destroying
the phone boxes on the city streets, blasting bullet holes into
street front windows, shooting at parked cars and then crushing
them with tanks, bursting water pipes with machine gun fire, ransacking
family homes clothes, books, computers, TV's, dishes, targeted
with equal fury; looting local businesses, cutting the electricity,
putting entire populations under curfew with no reprieve for supplies,
targeting ambulances, medical teams, UN personnel, journalists,
burning mosques and shelling churches, gunning people down in
the streets for being there, deporting human rights lawyers and
activists, demolishing the civil infrastructure and the records
of NGO's, politically independent organizations, and community
centers; refusing burial for the dead, and telling the American
paymaster it has the right to defend itself. The paymaster agrees;
gives the official nod, and then sends its envoy to the region
to chastise the occupied and request that the occupier be a little
more discreet. Otherwise the bombing of Iraq will be postponed
again. Don't you understand? This is so inconvenient.
Gazans
keep checking the weathervane, checking for signs of the westerly
winds.
Jennifer Loewenstein lives in
Gaza City, and works for the Mezan Center for Human Rights.
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