Why
Friends Of Israel Should See Gaza
By David Aaronovitch
The Guardian
14 May, 2003
The checkpoint at the north
end of Gaza - where you can (if you're lucky) spend a couple of hot
hours waiting to be let through - was manned last Tuesday by a collection
of very young Israeli men and women. The boys resembled people I had
shared classrooms with in north London, the girls beautiful sixth-formers
from my daughter's school. Eventually - along with the woman from Unicef,
two Swedes and an ostentatiously world-weary film crew - the three of
us (myself, a producer and a Channel 4 cameraman, making a documentary)
were waved politely through and made our way across the walled no man's
land and into the strip.
There is no real distance
between Gaza City and the checkpoint: the journey takes only a few minutes.
Yet you would hardly situate the dusty, chaotic, governmentless jumble
of concrete and rubbish on the same continent as the fields and woods
through which you drive from Jerusalem to the border. I saw the camps
in Lebanon in the old days, and Gaza is worse. It is becoming like Beirut
used to be, except they don't kidnap foreigners in Gaza. Instead the
Gazans surround them, smile at them, yell at them, accuse them of being
Israelis, shake their hands and, above all, demand to be heard. Men
with guns but without uniforms walk the streets.
We went to a school. Unbelievably,
most of the kids in Gaza still dress up in neat school uniforms, and
in our school - recently built with money from the Gulf - the boys wore
shorts and a kind of sailor shirt in navy and white. The headmaster
showed me round. We saw his office, the classrooms where they were teaching
dental hygiene and geography, and the makeshift museum in which the
head displays the remains of his safe and the computer destroyed in
an Israeli raid two weeks earlier.
In the English class, we
found a boy who had been educated in Chesterfield and somehow been plonked
down here in hell, and we asked him what he and the other 12-year-olds
felt about "the situation". For himself, he said, he was always
frightened. Every noise became a tank, or a helicopter, and might mean
death or injury for him, his family or his friends. His class-mates,
however, were too well-schooled to admit to fear. Death was welcome,
said one exceptionally handsome, tall boy. His teachers nodded approvingly.
Several of the boys in the
class had witnessed the Israeli incursion six days earlier, in which
12 people were killed. The target had been a Hamas militant, but he
and his brothers had refused to surrender, and they and several of their
neighbours (including a two-year old boy) had died in the subsequent
fire-fight. One of the dead brothers had been a respected teacher at
the school, and his portrait decorated the notice boards. Almost all
the children had some experience of violence or coercion. They had been
stopped at checkpoints, watched helicopters fire rockets, seen the wreckage
of cars in the aftermath of attacks, looked on at the resulting funeral
processions, lost relatives. They might have been the nephew of the
farmer maimed on his donkey cart last week, after he got too close to
the limousine that was carrying the Hamas man. Or they were the grandson
of the unfortunate bystander who stopped a tank round. Possibly their
cousins owned the house blown up by the IDF this week because it stood
alongside one that housed an Islamic jihad activist.
Some of this Israeli action
is aimed theoretically at stopping terrorist attacks (like the recent
bombing in Tel Aviv); some at protecting the 3,000-odd settlers whose
pointless and (for Israel) hugely expensive scattered colonies in Gaza
cause so much trouble. The result is that, while Israel claims to be
hitting at the "terrorist infrastructure", the consequence
last week was a two-mile funeral procession through Gaza City, in which
mourners chanted "no to Abu Mazen", the new pro-roadmap Palestinian
prime minister. In Gaza, as in the other Palestinian territories, the
space for moderation gets smaller with every minor humiliation and every
death.
You don't have to be a peace
activist to understand that this is a kind of madness. If ordinary Israelis
and their friends in other countries were to spend even a few hours
in Gaza, or talking to people on the West Bank, then it is difficult
to imagine them supporting the policies of the present Israeli government.
They might instead see that the seeds of the present intifada were sown
in the way the last intifada was handled. At random, I met several Palestinian
men who had, as youngsters, been imprisoned and tortured in the 80s.
It is hard to talk to them about peace. And tomorrow's harvest will
(if nothing stops it) become the killing of one group of the flawless
young people I encountered last week by the other.
The bottom line on mummy-watching
On Thursday afternoon I gazed
consecutively into the stone orbs of the weird Akhenaten, the brown,
gold-set eyes of Tutankhamun, and upon the desiccated eyelids of the
mummy of Ramses II. The Egyptian museum in Cairo, an odd French-built
edifice, painted rose and set at a right angle to the Nile, was largely
empty, and it was possible to wonder both at the exhibits and the fact
that few of them were labelled. Most of the people there were Egyptian
art students, white-uniformed antiquities police or cleaners, swabbing
hard at the glass cases with dirty cloths.
The woman with the very large
bottom, however, who approached every treasure through the view-finder
of her digital camera, had to be an American. At one point her husband
was forced to admonish her for having interposed her machine between
me and Tutankhamun's vulture necklace. "Now, Betty," he said,
"let the gentleman finish here before you take your picture."
I thought of reminding Betty
that there was a catalogue for the museum in which every item she was
snapping had already been photographed by a professional. But Betty
was imagining a happy evening with the Baptist women's coffee circle
of Salutation, Ohio, in which she projected her own images on to the
TV screen - even if she didn't know what the images were actually of.
The red-faced man in shorts,
carrying a rucksack, eating an apple and rushing into doors marked Exit
and out of doors marked Entry, could only be Dutch or German, expressing
that modern European paradox - purposefulness without a purpose. The
Japanese, of course, were standing under the biggest statue in the whole
place (Amenophis III and his wife), having pictures taken of themselves,
in which they would inevitably appear like tiny signatures in the corner
of an Old Master.
Then there were the French.
They touched everything that they shouldn't, pressing their bodies against
ancient paintings and fingering the friezes. They clambered on to display
cases to get better camera angles, and they took no notice when the
Englishman standing next to them tutted loudly. No notice at all.