53. Gaza City, 1998 - Errand boys
In which Eleanor goes to Gaza
A boy is buried. Israel imposes a closure. And the mission has a new staff member.
Eleanor
I’m in Gaza today, working with Tariq on getting our satellite office here established. He’s our third Palestinian staff member and he’s just started. He’s slowly coming along, but he’s no Nagla. We’re working on trying to get Nagla to Gaza or Tariq to the West Bank, but Israel is being impossible about permits, and the Embassy is being practically useless. “Just use the phone”, they say. Sometimes I just want to throttle someone.
It was depressing being at the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior this morning for meetings. The line was out the door and down the street: Gazans waiting, hoping to get a permit to enter Israel for work. The lists and lists of approved and rejected. Who gets to support their family. Who doesn’t. Who gets to have a life. Who doesn’t. Hearing the little stories, the petty, banal details of total Israeli control, it’s mindlessness and barbarity, I just can’t numb myself to it. And Ministry officials—forced to be Israel’s errand boy—detest their role. “Gazans see us as an extension of Israeli control,” Ghassan had lamented bitterly this morning. “We’re expected to do their dirty work, and if we refuse, then they just find some other way to make life in Gaza more miserable, like limiting supplies in. We’re losing our legitimacy here, but our pleas just fall on deaf ears.”
Meanwhile, of course, the settlers come and go as they please.
What goes wrong in a mind that one can so degrade and dehumanize another? Is it a neural lapse? Is it some synapse that fails to connect? Is it simple callousness, indifference? Or is it cruelly deliberate? It’s too easy to hide behind the system, to cite “security” as the reason for all these inhumane actions, but it’s all human choices, all human decisions. To abrogate our responsibility to other humans is to write our own suicide note on our humanity.
Yesterday a settler shot and killed a fifteen year old Palestinian kid. All the shops in Ramallah closed. There were some sporadic clashes. And always the worry: “Is this the spark that lights the conflagration”. Or is this just yet another spark that flares then dies? It’s always impossible to predict. Violence and clashes seem to erupt on a whim. There seems to be no logic as to which incidents and provocations touch a nerve and everything erupts, and which cause only a minor spasm. It’s mind numbing to try and figure out if there is a logic, a pattern to events here. In South Africa there was a clear link between the violence and the breakthrough points in the negotiations. But here it always seems so random, the scale of the response on either side, high or low, so entirely unrelated to the causal incident.
Today the boy was buried. Israel has imposed a full closure on Ramallah. Because of course it has: the funeral of a 15 year old Palestinian boy is the threat, not the actions of the settlers. Only the diplomats are able to get in and out, Francois told me on my drive down this morning when I called from the car. Even here in Gaza the mood is so tense, you can feel it. A knife could cut the air, it’s so thick.
So we wait.
Always we wait. For a promised peace that becomes more elusive by the day.
I can't ignore the obvious here. In writing about 1998 in Gaza, it is as if you're looking thru a time machine to 2025. Tactics and motivation remains the same, just the violence and cruelty has been multiplied by thousands!!! Barbarism is in control!