2865. Why I Stay in Gaza

By Atef Abu Saif, The New York Times, March 21, 2018

A video clip of a Palestinie youth being gundown by Isreali army during the Land Day demonstration, March 30, 2018, on the Gaza side of the fence that Israel has errected. In the same attack, 17 Palestinians were killed and more than 1,400 wonded by the Israeli army. 

JABALIYA CAMP, Gaza Strip — “Are you still living there?” he asks.

“Where else should I live?” I answer.

It’s the same conversation I have every time I catch up with this one Palestinian friend in France. Same question, same answer. Life in Gaza is hard. Then it gets worse and we think it’s intolerable. Then it gets even worse.

According to the World Bank, youth unemployment in Gaza hit 58 percent in 2016, and nearly 80 percent of the territory’s two million residents received aid. The United Nations has warned that the place might collapse. Despite a reconciliation deal in the fall, tensions remain between Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza, and Fatah, which leads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. This month there was what looks like an assassination attempt on the Palestinian prime minister as he traveled to Gaza, and Fatah leaders are blaming Hamas.

“You must be tempted to leave,” my friend says.

When so many basic things are so fundamentally beyond your control, you sometimes do feel like giving up, saying goodbye to both country and past, and letting Palestine go. The problem is, Palestine won’t let you go.

My younger brother Ibrahim studied English literature hoping to become a teacher. It’s been nine years since he graduated, and he still has had no teaching job. He recently started working at a TV repair shop after trying reporting, translating and being a cashier in a supermarket. He spends most of the day fixing satellite dishes for customers in the Jabaliya refugee camp, where he and I and our other eight siblings grew up, and where most of our family still lives. “It’s better than nothing,” he says. Many people here say that.

I teach political science at Al Azhar University. My introductory course sometimes has 200 students. When I ask them what they want to do after graduation they say, “nothing.” When I meet former students years after they have graduated and ask them, “what did you end up doing?” they, too, say, “nothing.” Even the brightest ones wind up jobless, or at least careerless, scratching a living from dirt.

One of my current students is so smart — I know that in any other place he would have a great career in academia ahead of him. But for that he would have to do research and take posts abroad, and he can’t leave. “I am rotting in Gaza,” he says. He’s been trying to leave, legally, through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt for five years. But the border is closed much of the time — last year, it was opened for a total of just over 30 days— and his name never makes it onto the short list of those who get permission to go. (During the latest opening in late February, some 660 people reportedly made it through, most of them medical patients.)

The other exit is via Erez, into Israel, and then onward to Jordan. That’s an even harder way to go. Again, you need permits. Until recently you first needed a permit from Hamas. Then there’s the permit from Israel. And then the one from Jordan. My student has never been able to get even the first of those.

“Should I leave by boat?” he asks. He’s joking: The Israeli military patrols the sea off the Gaza Strip as closely as the land border. He knows he will have to bide his time and meanwhile, like the rest of us, makes accommodations with destiny.

Some things help with that. Like the beach. The view of the sea at sunset. Except that last year, for the first time in my life — I’m 45 — I didn’t swim. The waves are still beautiful from a distance, and so is the sight of fishermen uncertainly setting out to sea in the mornings. But now to go into the water is to bathe in raw feces. The sewage-treatment plants aren’t working properly, the result of Israel’s decade-long blockade of Gaza, decaying infrastructure and electricity shortages. Pollution is a health hazard along some 73 percent of the coastline. Abu Aseel, a neighbor and friend who owns a cafe on the promenade, says he has fewer and fewer customers.

All of this may seem like an old story, just more of the same. But things haven’t improved for so long that they can’t help but get worse. My paternal grandmother, Eisha, was expelled from Jaffa in 1948, during what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, and since then four generations of hers, of us, have lived as refugees in Jabaliya. The restrictions on Gaza have affected every generation here — even the dead.

My friend Donia Ismael, a poet, was visiting relatives in Egypt when her husband, the well-known activist Bassam Aqra, had a heart attack. She couldn’t return to Gaza fast enough; the border is closed in that direction, too. So she had to bid her husband farewell after he had died, by looking at his image on the screen of a mobile phone held up by one of their children.

I remember Bassam from when we were growing up: He was one of the best football players in our camp; he was our Maradona, our Messi, and our hero. Games were a big event. We would play in a small dirt yard behind the souk. It has since been overtaken by the market, along with our playgrounds and the orange orchards.

The other day I was driving through Remal, in the western part of the city, with my five kids. Suddenly my 5-year-old daughter, Jaffa — who is named after the city my grandmother Eisha came from — shouted: “Dad! Dad! Pizza! Pizza!” She was pointing to a shop on the other side of the street. She wasn’t hungry; it’s just that seeing a pizza drawn out on a storefront sign made her think of a cartoon she watches. I was thrilled to see her make a connection between the image and the word. It reminded me of a moment during the 2014 war with Israel when Jaffa, just 18 months old then, had tried out another new word for the first time. One night, she sat up on her mattress, and pointing to the dark sky said, “mooooooon.”

Children are different from us adults: They’re wired to find some joy in everything. I think Eisha would have smiled to see her great-granddaughter — despite the drones hovering above, despite the warships lined up on the horizon, despite the constant provocations of political leaders near and far — shout through a car window at a slice of pizza, thinking of a silly cartoon.

It’s Jaffa’s hope that makes me stay in Gaza. It belongs here, this hope, not elsewhere. It belongs to Palestine.

Atef Abu Saif is a political scientist and the author of “The Drone Eats With Me: A Gaza Diary.”

1712. Disillusioned by War, Israeli Soldiers Muted in 1967 Are Given Fuller Voice

By Jodi Rudoren, The New York Times, January 25, 2015

Tel Aviv--A young Israeli soldier, fresh from the front, bluntly recounts the orders from above. “They never said, ‘Leave no one alive,’ but they said, ‘Show no mercy,’ ” he explains. “The brigade commander said to kill as many as possible.”

Another recalls encountering Arabs on rooftops. “They’re civilians — should I kill them or not?” he asks himself. “I didn’t even think about it. Just kill! Kill everyone you see.” And a third makes it personal: “All of us — Avinoam, Zvika, Yitzhaki — we’re not murderers. In the war, we all became murderers.”

The wrenching, taped testimony is not from last summer’s bloody battle in the Gaza Strip but from the 1967 war, when Israel started out fighting Egypt, Jordan and Syria for its very survival and ended up seizing the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula and parts of the Golan Heights. As the International Criminal Court considers a war crimes investigation in the recent conflict, a new documentary film is showcasing previously unaired admissions of brutal behavior by an earlier generation.

The film, “Censored Voices,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, the latest in a series of movies by leftist Israeli filmmakers who have won awards abroad by presenting harsh looks at their own society. Based on interviews that the military heavily edited at the time, it includes accounts of Israelis summarily executing prisoners and evacuating Arab villages in a manner that one fighter likened to the Nazis’ treatment of European Jews.

The director, Mor Loushy, said in an interview that she was trying to revamp the prevailing Israeli narrative of triumph in 1967 in light of all that has happened since, and that the film “is very relevant for today.”

But with Israel increasingly in a defensive crouch on the international stage, the film raises concerns that, viewed without consideration for the existential threat Israel faced at the time, it could become catnip for contemporary critics.

“People abroad who don’t remember the way we do the circumstances of the Six-Day War will turn this into one more indictment of Israel,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, whose 2013 book, “Like Dreamers,” followed the lives of a group of 1967 veterans. “If there were isolated acts of abuse by our soldiers, that should not become the narrative about what the Six-Day War was about. Many of us here are, frankly, sick and tired of the blame-Israel-first narrative.”

Asked to respond to the film, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israel Defense Forces said it was “representative of Israel’s vibrant democracy, where everything can be and is openly discussed,” but not particularly pertinent to current debates over military conduct. While 1967 was a war between sovereign states, Colonel Lerner noted, today Israel faces “belligerent nonstate or semistate” actors with weapons “dispersed within the civilian arena.”

“Any attempt to draw similarities between the two,” he said in an email, “is weak and nonrepresentative of how warfare has developed, how the battlefield has evolved and how today terrorism takes precedence over traditional warfare.”

The 84-minute film had a budget under $1 million, financed mainly by Israeli and European broadcasters and the American documentary producer Impact Partners. Interspersing the 1967 interviews with archival footage from the war and ABC News’s coverage of it, it does make clear the imminent threat to Israel — and then the stunning turnabout that military historians have long considered a marvel.

Beyond the accounts of killing prisoners and civilians, perhaps the most striking element of the film is that within a week or two of the war’s end, these soldiers — from Israel’s socialist kibbutz movement — questioned its wisdom.

“I think that in the next round the Arabs’ hatred towards us will be much more serious and profound,” one says. Already ambivalent about the occupation of Palestinian territory, another worries, “Not only did this war not solve the state’s problems, but it complicated them in a way that’ll be very hard to solve.”

As Ms. Loushy put it, “This is the story of men who went out to war feeling like they had to defend their life, and they were right, of course, but they went out in one position and came back as conquerors.”

“If those voices had been published in 1967,” she said, “maybe our reality here would be different.”

Some of the voices were published at the time in “A Conversation With Warriors,” a collection edited by Avraham Shapira that sold a stunning 120,000 copies in Israel. (The English-language version is called “The Seventh Day.”) Mr. Halevi said its publication “was the moment when part of Israeli society started sobering up from the euphoria.”

When Ms. Loushy, 32, tripped across a copy doing research for a history paper, she was riveted by how different its tone was from the 1967 story she had learned in school. She cajoled Mr. Shapira, an aging kibbutznik and philosophy professor, to share the original audiotaped interviews that he had denied to legions of journalists and historians.

“If you listen — not hearing but listening — to the recordings, there is a symphony of sounds: There are screams, crying, real weeping,” Mr. Shapira said in an interview. “They anticipated what can happen if we’ll not work immediately for peace, practically to return back all the occupied territories. They express it as an inner feeling, no politics.”

He said current soldiers had told him that they found in these old interviews “a deep, personal expression of their own moral and human dilemmas.”

Ms. Loushy, whose previous film, “Israel Ltd.,” attempted to unmask Zionist propaganda tours, listened to 200 hours of tapes over eight months, much of which the censors had blocked from publication in the book. She was deep into the project before she discovered that the film, too, would be subject to censorship, she said.

Israel forbids the filmmakers to reveal how much they were forced to change, and the military censor’s office refused to discuss it.

“For us as a society to mend and to improve ourselves, we can’t censor,” Ms. Loushy said. “I think it’s important that we look the truth in the eyes.”

The film’s star is the original reel-to-reel tape recorder that Mr. Shapira bought in 1967. It replays the interviews as the soldiers — now graying, wrinkled men — sit alongside, sometimes closing their eyes or cringing a bit. Only in the final few minutes do some of them speak, briefly. One says he has become “less Zionist, less patriotic, less of a believer,” and another says, “I’m much more right wing than before.”

Pinchas Leviatan, 73, a retired horticulturalist and teacher, said in an interview that when Ms. Loushy had come to his home and played the tape, he had not recognized the voice, “but when I heard what I said, I was sure that it was me.” He had been telling the same stories to students for years.

In the film, Mr. Leviatan talks of being emotionally broken by seeing the humiliation of Egyptian soldiers after the fighting, when they “came with canteens filled with urine” and, upon being given water, “threw up on our feet and kissed us.” He is one of the Israeli soldiers whose views have changed with time.

“I was convinced that the peace is coming, and maybe after the Six-Day War I was hoping that it’s going to happen,” he said in the interview. “I was very naïve. I participated in another five wars as a commanding officer. The fact is that during the years, I lost my belief in the possibility of getting any solution in the area.”