Rights-less in Gaza (or not even in it yet)
To understand somethng of how it feels to be a Palestinian, go read Laila el-Haddad's account of her (so far unsuccessful) attempt to return with her son and her parents to her home-city, Gaza.
The Israelis claim to have withdrawn from Gaza in september 2005. But they still control all its means of contact with the outside world, including the tiny strip of internatinal border that Gaza shares with Egypt.
That's where Laila-- along with, apparently, several thousands of other Gaza Palestinians-- is trying to cross.
They got as far as El-Arish, a 30-minute drive from the Rafah crossing point and the closest large Egyptian town to the border:
- During times of extended closure, like this summer, and last year, it becomes a Palestinian slum. Thousands of penniless Palestinians, having finished their savings and never anticpating the length of the closure, end up on the streets. The storeowner and taxi drive relay story after story to us from this summer.
In response, and under Israeli pressure, the Egyptian police no longer allows Palestinians driving up from Cairo past the Egyptian port city of al-Qantara if the border is closed and Al-Arish becomes to crowded. "They turn it into a ghetto. That, and the Israelis didn't want them blowing up holes in the border again to get through."
We carried false hopes last night, hopes transmitted down the taxi driver’s grapevine, the ones who run the Cairo-Rafah circuit-that the border would open early this morning. So we kept our bags packed, slept early to the crashing of the Mediterranean-the same ones that just a few kilometres down, crashed down on Gaza's beseiged shores.
But it is 4, then 5, then 6am, and the border does not open. And my heart begins to twinge, recalling the last time I tried to cross Rafah; recalling how I could not, for 55 days; 55 days during which Yousuf learned to lift himself up into the world, during which he took his first fleeting step.
... So, as always, we wait. We wait our entire lives, as Palestinians. If not for a border to open, for a permit to be issued, for an incursion to end, for a time when we do not have to wait any longer.
[What] is so frightening about borders-and particularly Rafah- that it drives chills down my spine? They are after all crossings like any others I tell myself. What divides one metre of sand from the next, beyond that border? It is exactly the same. It is history and occupation and isolation that changes it.
For Palestinians, borders are a reminder-of our vulnerability and non-belonging, of our displacement and dispossession. It is a reminder-a painful one-of homeland lost. And of what could happen if what remains is lost again. When we are lost again, the way we lose a little bit of our Selves everytime we cross and we wait to cross.
So it is here, 50 kilometres from Rafah’s border, that I am reminded once again of displacement. That I have become that ‘displaced stranger’ to quote Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Displacmenet is meant to be something that happens to someone else, he says. How true. To refugees that the world cares to forget. Who have no right of return. Who return to nowhere and everywhere in their minds a million times. When the border closes, we are one day closer to become that.
Of course, that, is Yassine [her husband; a Palestinian who grew up in lebanon and has a Lebanon-issued 'Palestinian' refugee ID] -- who cannot even get as far as I-- cannot even get as far as Egypt, to feel alone. He feels alone everyday, and is rejected everyday, finding belonging in other, non-static things: family, love, work.
But the Palestinian never forgets his aloneness. He is always, always reminded of it on borders. That, above all, is why I hate Rafah Crossing. That is why I hate borders. They remind me that I, like all Palestinians, belong to everywhre and nowhere at once. The Border of Dispossession .
Helena
Other than sympathy what can we offer Laila?
Bloggers have an important role in breaking down the barriers of Orientalism and letting us see educated articulate people with the same concerns and joys as us.
One of the most moving TV clips from the Summer war in Lebanon was from an air raid shelter where I was surprised how many people in a border village spoke english. Why it surprised me I don't know.
Laila and Heba both illustrate that it could be us or our children getting shelled or starved or oppressed.
But beyond sympathy?
Firstly, don't under-estimate the power of simple expressions of empathy and human concern... See how she says that the "feeling alone" part of it is one of the worst aspects?
Beyond that, we in western countries need to do all we can to persuade our governments to lift the inhuman blocade that israel has maintained on Gaza for so many horrendous long months now-- and indeed, to insist on a very speedy negotiation to end, once and for all, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian (and Syrian) territories that has continued for nearly 40 years -- 13,434 days-- at this point.
We should share our outrage at the continuation of this occupation and our understanding (1) that rule by military occupation, anywhere and everywhere, is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-humane, and (2) that all peoples, including the Palestinian people, have the right to national self-determination in their homelands and to live in peace and security alongside their neighbors.
The rest is just commentary.
Helena,
I thought you might find this interesting. The NYT!! May be an awakening of conscience?
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/world/middleeast/21land.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Helena
From today's post
We went downtown today to buy some more food. We are buying in small rations, “just in the case the border opens tomorrow”. I feel like we've repeated that rephrain a hundred times already. I go and check my email. I feel very alone; no one cares, no one knows, no one bothers to know. This is how Palestinian refugees must feel every day of their lives.
Even those in Gaza and the West Bank. We discriminate. There are “muwatineen”-residents, and “lajieen”, refugees. And the refugees on the outside, in Lebanon and Syria and all over cannot vote in our elections (while Iraqi refugees did in their elections). They feel abandoned, even by their own government.
I read the news, skimming every headline and searching for anything about Rafah. Nothing. One piece about the Palestinian football team; another about the European monitors renewing their posts for another 6 months. We do not exist.
Her comments section hasn't posted anything for days.
Is there a journalist who might do a piece on Rafah (might you put something in Hayat?)
It sounds like Limbo. Even Benedict has cancelled Limbo.
If her email still works maybe we could do a mail campaign like the prisoner of conscience run by Amnesty.