In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the place that many families of the Palestinian bourgeoisie chose to spend their summer holidays. With its magnificent beaches, warm climate and proximity to Egypt, Gaza was a place of “tourist” appeal before tourism became a social phenomenon, an ideal place for the comfort and rest of the well-off classes of a traditional society in the process of modernization. Until 1948, when the armed militias of the Zionist movement, the Israeli army from the creation of the state, carried out the great operation of ethnic cleansing in which nearly a million Palestinians were expelled from their land.
Tens of thousands of displaced people then arrived in the territory of Gaza, mainly from the region of Yafa and Bersheva, the first Palestinian refugee camp was established on one of its beaches. Seventy-five years later, there it is. About 70% of the current population of the Strip, more than two million people in a territory 10 kilometers wide by 40 long, are refugees from 48 and their descendants.
Gaza holds the record for the world’s highest population density, also the record for unemployment, more than 40%, two thirds of its population lives below the poverty line and needs help from UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees, to survive.
16 years ago, Dev Weiglass, an adviser to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said of the people of Gaza: “We will not starve them but we will feed them so little that they will be very thin”. The cynicism of the sentence is obscene and does not hide the brutality of the message. Mr. Weiglass was announcing the blockade on Gaza. And the slow agony to which it condemned its inhabitants.
Any possibility of economic development, including the modest but successful industry of growing flowers, fruits and vegetables which had been basic to the economy of the Strip, any entrepreneurial, cultural, artistic, sporting and professional initiative, every vital project was crushed within the limits of an inhuman confinement.
Gaza is a large open-air prison regularly subjected to massive incursions and bombardments by the Israeli army: “Rains” summer”, 2006, “Molten lead”, 2008, “Defensive pillar”, 2012, “Protective margin”, 2014 are the names of some of the Israeli military operations against Gaza. In the language of the occupying power, the Israeli language that is usually used by the Western media, are operations against “Hamas terrorists”, in reality they are punitive operations against the population of Gaza, It would be enough to see the number of civilian victims, including the appalling number of children killed, for that deceitful language of the occupier to cease being the usual language in our media.
Despite everything in Gaza there are teachers who are committed to passing on not only knowledge but some safety to their students, doctors who give up their lives trying to cure, in the middle of the rustling of bombs, power outages and lack of medicines, to a cancer patient or save the life of the wounded young man who arrives bleeding in the arms of his friends, in Gaza there are musicians, rap groups, Painters, writers and poets and young people who play football or study business sciences dreaming that one day they will be able to move freely around their land and the world. Nevertheless, there is life in Gaza.
Five years ago, in the spring of 2018, began the so-called marches of return, a peaceful initiative in which thousands of people, young, old, women, men, entire families, walked to the border line with Israel, to claim their right of return. Unarmed and waving Palestinian flags, the demonstrators came within metres of the fence separating Gaza from the so-called no man’s land, an area confiscated from its Palestinian owners, cleared of vegetation and buildings and converted into a security strip where the IDF patrols and monitors all movement on the other side of the fence. On a Friday, March 30, the day of the Palestinian Land, that first march took place with an almost festive atmosphere as if it were a pilgrimage; on the other side, protected by a large embankment of earth, snipers from the Israeli army were stationed and fired at the demonstrators, 17 people were killed and more than a hundred wounded, but the return marches continued every Friday for a year. Unarmed people facing the elite corps of one of the most powerful armies in the world.
At the end of the year, the number of victims was 312 dead, including several doctors, journalists, photographers, a young nurse pushing a wheelchair for an invalid and the invalid who was being cared for by the nurse and 59 children, 29,000 injured, mostly with severe amputations, including 3,565 children, 1,168 women and 104 elderly. All were shot in Gaza territory, on Palestinian land. There were no wounded Israeli soldiers. There was no international condemnation or any kind of sanction against Israel. Shooting unarmed civilians is not a war crime if the international community, that euphemism we refer to without pointing at the US and the EU, decides not to see it. And not judge him.
In reality, the marches of return did not intend to cross the fence but to approach it and shout to the world, here we are, we are the children and grandchildren of those who were expelled from their homes 70 years ago, we have not forgotten, we will not let you forget us. This message, so often ignored, is not very different from the one that the Hamas militias have launched these days with their atrocious attack on Israeli territory. The method is the opposite but the message is similar, a Palestinian friend described it to me like this: “You can kill us but we are still alive and we can also kill. That’s the message”.
Killing civilians is always a crime and the lethal attack by Hamas on Israeli territory with more than a thousand Israelis killed, is undoubtedly a criminal act, as criminal as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the US invasion of Iraq or the periodic attacks that Israel launches on Gaza using prohibited weapons such as white phosphorus bombs which the Israeli army is apparently again in their bombing response to the Hamas attack. The difference is that in the first case there is international condemnation and punishment, in the case of Israel and of course in the US, the norm is impunity, complicity and blindness.
The Israeli journalist Gideon Levi one of the few but very valuable voices in Israel that denounce the daily brutality of the occupation, has had the courage, and it takes a lot of courage to say what he has said in these days of fire and fury, to denounce the blindness of Israeli society to the atrocities that its army is carrying out daily in the Palestinian territories.
“We thought that we were allowed to do anything, that we would never pay a price or be punished for it. We arrest, kill, mistreat, steal, protect massacring settlers, shoot innocent people, tear out their eyes and tear their faces apart, deport them, confiscate their lands, We plunder them, we kidnap them from their beds and carry out ethnic cleansing… We thought that we could continue to arrogantly reject any attempt at a political solution, simply because it was not in our best interest to do so, and that everything would remain so forever. And once again it turned out that it was not so. Several hundred Palestinian militants passed through the fence and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli could have imagined. A few hundred Palestinian fighters have demonstrated that it is impossible to imprison two million people forever without paying a high price”.
The price, however, has not only been paid by Israel, the price in the form of massive bombardments and the total siege including the cutting off of electricity, gas, water, sanitary equipment, medicines and food, is paid above all by the population of Gaza. And it will be a much higher price.
The absolute blockade announced by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant hours after the extent of Hamas’ attack was known is clearly an extermination strategy. The horror that all, first of all, members of Hamas, we know will fall in the coming weeks on the people of Gaza, has the green light from the US, the impotence of the Arab world and the hypocritical passivity of the European Union. The people of Gaza are going to be massacred once again in the eyes of the world. And nothing will happen. The atrocity of Hamas’s attack reinforces Israel’s habitual impunity and encourages voices calling for or demanding the destruction of Gaza.
In recent days, a tertullian very close to the Israeli theses and whose name I prefer to forget, stated quite forcefully that Gaza is going to disappear, then perhaps aware of the brutality of his phrase, he has nuanced: well Gaza as we know it now will disappear. I am almost certain that the tertullian whose name I prefer to forget, has never been in Gaza nor knows anyone or anything from this little corner at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, otherwise he would know or should know that the people of Gaza have an impressive strength, that they are able to withstand the calamities of life without breaking down and that sometimes make jokes about their misfortune and the brutality of the soldiers of the occupation and usually be kind to the stranger and even capable of laughing when looking alive after the bombardment because despite all of them, as the verse of the great Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish says “there is something worth living in this land”.
