Two ways of looking at the same object, one not
seeing, the other seeing what the former misses--a response to the
former from a Palestinian, Sam Bahour,
The NYTimes December 30, 2014
Gaza Is Nowhere
ROGER COHEN
GAZA
CITY — You trudge into Gaza from a high-tech Israeli facility through a
caged walkway that brings you, after about 15 minutes, to a ramshackle
Palestinian border post; and then, formalities completed, on you go,
through dust and the reek of sewage, past the crumpled buildings and the
donkey carts, to arrive at last in the middle of nowhere.
Gaza
is nowhere. Very few people go in or out of the 140-square-mile
enclave. Most people want to forget about it. The border with Egypt was
closed in October. A handful of travelers negotiate the labyrinth of
inspections at the Israeli border and proceed into the Jewish state.
I
watched a young man passing sand through a sieve as the surface of a
road was laid beside the sea in Gaza City. He’d shake the sieve, watch
the sand drop through and, finally, tip out the remnants. Again and
again he did it, in the dust. He is among the more productively employed
of Gaza’s 1.8 million citizens.
There
is another war waiting to happen in Gaza. The last one changed nothing.
Hamas rockets are being test-fired. A Palestinian farmer has been shot
dead near the border. Tensions simmer. The draft Security Council
resolution at the United Nations, championed by the Palestinian leader,
Mahmoud Abbas, seeking a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank
by 2017, amounts to an elaborate sideshow. The real matter of
diplomatic urgency going into 2015, for the Palestinian people and the
world, is to end the lockdown of Gaza.
“People
are mad, frustrated, they have nothing to lose,” Ahmed Yousef, an
adviser to the Hamas Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told me. “We are dying
gradually so it is better to die with dignity.”
The
only dust-free environment is the compound of the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency. I went to see its director, Robert Turner. He told me
that initial estimates of war damage belittled its extent: 96,000 homes
of refugee families (against initial estimates of 42,000) are either
destroyed or damaged, and 124,000 houses in all. But very little
rebuilding material is available. “There’s a vacuum.” he said.
The
supposed reconciliation between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas has proved
worthless. At the hospital, contracts for cleaners and food are not
being paid. Hamas and Fatah blame each other. Turner described “a drift
toward more radical groups.” None of the causes of the conflict had been
addressed. “Fatah and Hamas and Israel can avert a descent into new
violence, but I don’t think that window will stay open for long,” he
told me.
Nobody
wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of
Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered
Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary
for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the
failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the
failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the
war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but
otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is
impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human
beings.
The
enclave is a thorny quandary. Hamas has a vile Charter, a goal of
destroying Israel, and it fires rockets on Israeli civilians from among
Palestinian civilians. But it is not monolithic. Putting Gaza first
would have several merits: forcing Palestinians to unify their national
movement and hold long-delayed elections; averting yet another war with
its heavy toll in human life and negative impact on Israel’s
international standing; ushering a large group of Palestinians out of
radicalizing misery; obliging the peacemakers, so-called, to get real or
go home; stopping the distraction at the United Nations.
My
Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys.
It is about 1,400 yards from the border in eastern Gaza City. You look
out past a destroyed juice factory, a destroyed farm-equipment factory
and see the tantalizing green fields of Israel, from which Palestinians
tend to avert their eyes. The classrooms all have windows blown out or
doors blown off. Kids play football in a courtyard imprinted with
Israeli tank tracks. Half of them have homes partially destroyed. I
asked one student, Saleem Ejla, age 16, what he expected: “War after
war,” he shot back.
Hasan
al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close
relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli
airstrike on July 20.
Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be
taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”
He
told me about his 8-year-old daughter, Zeina, who refuses to speak to
God since her grandmother was killed and tells her father: “God is a
weak one. I will never say God again. He can’t change anything.”
But
Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Europeans and Americans can — if
they choose to locate the nowhere named Gaza and turn it into somewhere.
The alternative is war without end.
++++
Open Letter to the Editors of the New York Times
By Sam Bahour
December, 31, 2014
By Sam Bahour
December, 31, 2014
 |
A view of Gaza City
|
Re “Gaza Is Nowhere” (By Roger Cohen, Dec. 30, 2014):
I started writing this as a Letter to the Editor, but my anger could not be conveyed in only 150 words, so I am posting this open letter instead:
Readers expect greater accuracy from New York Times columnists.
How dare Mr. Roger Cohen suggest that Gaza, a part of my homeland, is “nowhere!”
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