The
Streets Of Gaza
By Laila El-Haddad
20 December, 2006
Diary Of A
Palestinian Mother
Things are grim here in Gaza
City. During the day, few shops opt to stay open anymore, and at night,
the city is transformed into a ghost town. And then the shooting begins.
Tonight, in addition to the usual machine gun banter, we also heard
a large unexplained explosion-it appears a mortar attack in northern
Gaza near the Mukhabarat (Intelligence) building.
Yesterday, a Fateh-linked
security officer was kidnapped and killed, and clashes ensued in front
of Ministry of Foreign Affairs after unknown assailants fired on the
convoy of Mahmud Zahar; Later, Fateh gunmen took over the Ministries
of Agriculture and Educationin what Zahar has described as an attempted
military coup; and in the north of the Gaza Strip, Jabaliya, clashes
continued today despite a tenuous "ceasefire" (people are
now trying to keep track of which ceasefire is which).
Every hour, new blood is
spilled, and every hour, we here new condemnations and regret at the
fact that brethren are doing this to each other. How does a society
actually slip into civil war? is it gradual or abrupt? When is that
red line finally crossed, the point of no return, when all precedents
are broken, and wrong can suddenly be right?
And why are we in the media
so anxious to call this a civil war, almost as we want to will into
existance, while the civil war in Iraq has been raging for years, and
no one knows how to characterize it yet.
Today, we saw members of
the presidential guard, who were deployed last night, cautionally manning
every corner of Gaza City. They were stopping cars on main streets in
Gaza City, asking us to turn on our lights inside our cars as we drove
(perhaps so as to avoid becoming an intinended target?). For a change,
we actually felt a little safe, though also a little more vulnerable.
I can't help but think of
Amira Hass's article of this past summer. Her words reverberate over
and over again in my mind.
The experiment was a
success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving
as expected at the end of the extended experiment called "what
happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space
like battery hens.
The average person don't
know what to think anymore. They are confused and and exhausted and
mostly very, very afraid.
As a friend of my mother
put it today, "We don’t’ know anymore who's right and
who’s wrong, and who’s at fault and who isn’t. And
we just want it to end."
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