NOVANEWS
Gaza from a distance is quiet, bestilled, stuck in political stasis—the government quietly accruing power, the population quiescent, the Israeli army engaged in obscured, never-reported incursions in Farraheen, Khoza’a, Abasan, savagely flaying the rural edges of Gaza, squeezing the Strip geographically and, in turn, economically.
The buffer zone protests have subsided, or been quashed. For a brief period they were going on frequently, three or even four times a week, or multiple protests simultaneously: in Rafah, Meghazi, Beit Hanoun. But those have mostly stopped, in part because people got so scared after IDF snipers showed how they were prepared to enforce that buffer zone. At quick glance, there seems to be very little organized political protest. But beneath the surface, Omar Shaban of Pal-Think tells me, sentiment is bubbling fiercely.
There’s ongoing political debate and discussion: lectures, seminars, strategy sessions, self-education, and so on. Last week I was at a brief movie viewing and discussion about the apartheid analogy, hosted by Haidar Eid, where we discussed the benefits and costs of using the apartheid analogy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yesterday I went to a lecture and open discussion on Western Media Discourse toward the Palestinian Issue, given by Mousheer Amer, a professor of Linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza—he discussed the Chomsky and Herman propaganda model, did a discourse analysis of the way the conflict is reported.
Other professors, journalists, old leftists I know filled the room, along with several of the hyper-literate young writers from Gaza that have been filing their reminiscences of the Cast Lead massacre, on its biennial, at the Mondoweiss site. At that event a female university student was carrying Amira Hass’s Drinking the Sea in Gaza. She said that the situation is “hopeless,” in that exasperated way some people have here of announcing its hopelessness with their secret hope that it is anything but. Anyway, most of the people here, young and old alike, say this, and most carry on, stolid, implacable.
The occupation here is doing two things. Some sectors of the population are being psychically destroyed by the siege. I am scared to know what’s happening to the children. They draw pictures of blood and death and war-machines. Without outlets for their anger, many of them must internalize it, traumatized and numbed, or else furiously explode. Some of the resistance fighters who go to the border areas know, as one farmer told me, that they are going to die, and “what can you say to someone who wishes to die?”
As Eyad Serraj reminds us, “Let me tell you first that the people who are committing the suicide bombings in this intifada are the children of the first intifada-people who witnessed so much trauma as children. So as they grew up, their own identity merged with the national identity of humiliation and defeat, and they avenge that defeat at both the personal and national levels.” When a Hamas thug screams at his countryman to move away from some solidarity activist on a convoy, the first reaction is to recoil in revulsion.
But the second reaction is to pause, and remind oneself of that thug’s life, and remind myself that it has not been like mine: it has been settlers and soldiers humiliating his family and torturing his people. If you communicate with people with rifle-shots and rifle-butts, expect that many of them will learn by example.
But there’s something else dangerous that Israel is doing, too. It’s turned Gaza into the last ghetto. But inside that ghetto, except for the fishermen and the farmers in the border areas—a big except—there’s no boots-on-the-ground occupation here to make day-to-day life impossible. Israeli forbids the fullness of life here but only itinerantly carries out a savage intrusion. So for some of the slightly older generation, 20, 21, 22, 23, those my age and a bit younger, and especially the more motivated ones, the stultifying nothingness of the siege is giving them something dangerous: time to read, to write, to think.
In a couple years, this generation won’t need sympathetic Western journalists to advocate for them. Desperate to hone their English, they’ll be able to do so themselves, and do so beautifully. They request books: Said, Malcolm X, Fanon, Benjamin. And they debate strategy, tactics, and politics endlessly: in Twitter and Facebook and class. And they erupt: not with RPGs but with manifestos, and then livid critiques of the manifestos—for impotence, for lack of a political program, for criticizing the government too harshly, for criticizing it purposelessly.
My first impression when I got to Gaza two weeks ago was the pervasive bleakness, the increased tempo of murders from the Israeli snipers haunting the border, the muffled roar of F-16s flying low and slow overhead, and the high-explosive hell they rain on the people here. That bleak wash is still omnipresent, especially when I talk to people in the streets, or taxi-drivers, or those glancing nervously at the skies, waiting for the next steel rain.
But then I twist the kaleidoscope a bit: perhaps what’re new, what are breaking through, just their tips visible through the dry dirt and rubble, are the early shoots that will grow into the future. Perhaps it’s time to think about how to help them grow.
Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, resistance movements, revolution
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