Gaza's falling wall changes Middle East map for ever
Pastor Dale Morgan
Gaza's falling wall changes Middle East map for ever*
The tide of humans pouring over the frontier from Gaza into Egypt for
days has now become a vast convoy of carts, cars and lorries. Peter
Beaumont joined the jubilant throng who watched as the borders of a
conflict that has lasted for generations were crossed
Sunday January 27, 2008
The Observer
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded
with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in
the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza's southern border. Four
days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first
time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum
had been reached.
They carried generators and goats, diesel and huge piles of carrots and
cabbages. But most of all they carried the message that Israel's long
blockade of Gaza is over. 'I want to get some cheese,' says Ameera
Ahmad, after crossing the border from Gaza into Egypt yesterday. 'And
honey. Look, crisps! I haven't seen a bag of crisps for months.'
The teenager in the car's front sticks his head out of the window into
the crush of vehicles and people. 'Jibna!' he shouts, meaning cheese. It
is not a request, although there are people selling it nearby. It is an
affirmation of the possibilities outside Gaza.
Ameera, 24, texts her husband to ask if there is anything he wants
brought back from Egypt. 'Oh!', she says suddenly in a quiet, happy
voice, surveying a pretty vista of open fields, without walls or
boundaries that cannot be crossed without risk. 'This is my first time
out of Gaza.'
So walls fall down. Not only physically, blasted down on Gaza's border
with Egypt last week with dynamite and cutting torches, but in the mind
as well.
On the fourth day of Gaza's explosive relief from seven months of tight
economic blockade by Israel, and seven longer years of economic
isolation since the beginning of the second intifada, it was not only
people who were crossing yesterday.
After bulldozers of the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza since
seizing power last June, opened new routes through the border area on
the Philadelphia Road on Friday night a new kind of traffic was
streaming over.
By mid-afternoon, as the news had spread through Gaza that Egypt was
accessible by car, and not just by foot, the cars, buses and lorries
snaked from the border, through Rafah and Khan Younis and up to Gaza
City in a column in perpetual motion. The men of Hamas's Executive Force
stood with their weapons by the road and watched the passing traffic.
Beyond the border, out of the clogging traffic jams, the vehicles fanned
out, little convoys of Palestinian cars setting off along the sandy
roads to avoid Egypt's police on the main highway, traversing fields of
flowering trees and tiny farms, all heading for the city of Al-Arish, 60
kilometres distant.
What seemed on Wednesday to be a huge, but perhaps brief, phenomenon
dampened by the attempt by Egyptian riot police who moved later in the
week to try to reseal the border, by this weekend was taking on the
impression of a seismic and unstoppable reordering of the facts of the
Middle East.
The four short days since Hamas blew down the six-metre metal border
wall built by Israeli soldiers before the withdrawal of Israeli settlers
and troops has forged a confusing new reality on the ground. What first
was being treated as a holiday from the oppressive conditions of Gaza
under Israeli siege, by yesterday was taking on the attributes of an
entitlement - one for long refused.
But its uncertainties - in particular what it means in the long run for
Gaza - do not change a simple fundamental fact. For the first time in
years Gazans feel free. And when Gazans remember the last week it will
be in two halves.
What will separate it in people's memories will be the cold and
overwhelming notion of Israel's blockade that is lifted - at least for
now. What they will remember will not simply be the condition of
unemployment and deprivation that have gathered pace but the slow,
corrosive degradation of a society that has accelerated since the
beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, with the closing of
Israel's labour markets to Palestinian workers.
It is something that a few brief days of 'festival' - as many Gazans
described the extraordinary scenes last week as they poured into Egypt
to shop and visit relatives - cannot solve overnight. And which they
cannot fix alone.
It is exam day at al-Azhar University. In the women's campus, a hundred
or so girls sit in the chill winter morning, some still cramming from
notebooks for exams that mean little in a place where a degree does not
mean a future. In his office, Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist,
talks about the years of the blockade. He believes Gaza's problems
cannot simply be traced to the recent tightening of the closure on Gaza
by Israel two weeks ago to complete closure - ostensibly in response to
an increase of attacks from home-made Qassam missiles - aimed at the
nearby Israeli town of Sderot.
He believes Gaza's problems are the consequence of a longer-lasting
pattern of behaviour whose wounds and deformities are beyond
transformation overnight. 'Since September 2000 and the beginning of the
second intifada the Israelis stopped using Palestinian labour. Those
going to the "other side" could earn between three and five times as
much as labourers in Gaza. It was hugely important to Gaza.
'It had a huge economic impact. The figures now show that we now have
unemployment running at in excess of 55 per cent, and 80 per cent of the
population lives below the World Bank's poverty level.'
But it is only part of a history of Gaza's decline. In truth that began
with the al-Nakba - 'the Catastrophe' - as Palestinians call the
Arab-Jewish war of 1948 that saw the establishment of the state of
Israel. Then, Gaza's population of 80,000 was swollen by the influx of
200,000 refugees, whose descendants occupy Gaza's UN-run string of camps.
Occupied by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, which seized it from
Egyptian rule, the long years of direct Israeli rule ended with the Oslo
peace accords that failed to see the end of Israeli settlement within
the Gaza Strip. That only ended with Israeli's unilateral 'withdrawal'
in September 2005 that left Israel still largely in charge of access to
Gaza, its airspace and access to the sea. Israel provided two-thirds of
Gaza's electricity, policed the land routes into which fuel, medicines
and raw materials must pass, and controlled access of Palestinians to
labour markets - Gaza's population was in effect imprisoned.
Never wealthy, Gaza's economic collapse was rapidly accelerated
following the election in 2006 of the militant Hamas in the Palestinian
elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Amid factional fighting between
Hamas and the previously dominant Fatah, and a widespread breakdown in
law and order, Hamas finally assumed power from Fatah in a few days of
violence seven months ago. Israel's response was to declare a Hamas-led
Gaza a 'hostile entity', further strangling a sealed off Gaza Strip and
leading to severe shortages of cement, cigarettes and other basic goods,
in a move that further deepened poverty.
That noose was tightened even harder this month after a rise in rocket
attacks led Israel to impose a complete closure on the Gaza Strip -
relenting later to allow in some fuel and humanitarian supplies amid
international horror at what was being done to Gaza as a whole. But deep
and lasting damage had been inflicted, long before the events of the
last week.
For the consequence of the longer-term blockade of the Gaza Strip -
measuring just 40 kilometres by 10 - has been a far-reaching social
fragmentation going deeper even than the political and clan violence
that plagued Gaza before Hamas took power. For as the economic screw has
been turned by Israel on Gaza, domestic violence, divorce and child
abuse have increased to levels previously unheard of in a society where
the family is a basic building block.
'One of the main problems,' says Sumya Habeeb, who works in marriage
counselling in Gaza, 'is that wives do not understand why their husbands
are sitting around not earning any money. It is one of the major causes
we are seeing both of domestic violence and wives returning to their
parents. There is tremendous stress in marriages, not least for those
men who worked in the Palestinian security forces before the Hamas
takeover and who lost their jobs.'
Gaza's great migration shows no signs of solving its longer-term
problems. Instead, in the short term it may exacerbate its already deep
economic woes if a more equitable solution to the Gaza question is not
worked out.
For even as tens of thousands headed south, other merchants, already on
the edge of ruin, were left watching money that would, in normal
circumstances, be spent inside Gaza pouring out into Egypt.
Among them, in the Saha market in Gaza City, was Jaweed Ashour, the
42-year-old owner of Ashour Watches, who gloomily surveyed the sudden
influx of both Gazan and Egyptian street sellers into the market-place
outside his shop hawking cheap clothes and cigarettes brought from
across the border.
'I have seen no one come in today,' he says standing in his small shop.
'This month I haven't sold a single watch. This is the hardest time I
have ever known. There is no money. I no longer buy what we used to eat.
I used to buy my son new clothes at every Eid. Now I can't. If I buy a
bag of sugar it is only a kilo bag.'
If many businesses faced being damaged, others will be saved by the
opening of the Egyptian border after the months of hardship. Among them
is the Lotus Flower hairdressing salon of Fatin Kehail. 'Before the
tightening of the blockade, after the Hamas takeover, women still used
to go to restaurants and hotels a lot,' she explained. 'Now the only
customers I tend to see are brides preparing for their weddings. Even
then people will say: "Three hundred shekels? That is too much now." I
understand and do my best when I can.
'There are less weddings that I hear of, too. People have been putting
it off. And because of the blockade I am running out of the stuff I need
for work, like hairsprays and shampoos. I'm down to my last gallon of
shampoo. I hope to go to Egypt to replace it.'
They are contradictions that are reflected in the wider questions posed
for the future of Gaza. For while the propaganda coup by Hamas, under
intense Israeli pressure, of bringing down the wall may well have
temporarily humiliated and wrong-footed Israel, the issue of where in
fact Gaza's future lies may have been made more complicated still.
There is little likelihood that Egypt can replace the valuable jobs lost
in Israel for Gazan workers, even if President Hosni Mubarak has the
will to do so, in a country where day rates for labouring are tiny in
comparison.
While Mubarak may have acquiesced - under pressure from an outraged Arab
street - into allowing the Palestinians of Gaza to cross the breached
border en masse, a President who routinely locks up members of the
Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to view dealings with its off-shoot,
Hamas, with very much enthusiasm.
Israel also finds itself in a similar bind. While some politicians
suggested last week that the fall of the Rafah wall was an opportunity
to hand responsibility for Gaza to Egypt, that, too, shows signs of a
deep naivety.
Although there are those in Israel who might wish that Gaza looked to
Egypt, Hamas - Gaza's key player - is unlikely to trade easier access to
the outside world in exchange for abandoning the struggle against Israel
to end the wider occupation.
Which leaves Gaza where it was before the Rafah border crumbled: an
economic disaster zone, with more cigarettes and meat and fuel for now,
but no more certainty about its future than before last Wednesday morning.
But for now at least one sentiment remains. 'It feels today,' Ameera
says on the return journey home to Beit Hanoun after her first journey
out after buying her cheese: 'that Gaza is not quite the same big prison
any more.'
Not yesterday at least.
Gaza: A brief history
· A 225km rectangle on the Mediterranean, the Gaza Strip is squeezed
between Egypt and Israel. With just under two million people, it has one
of the world's highest population densities. Half of all the people in
Gaza are refugees, or their descendants, from Israeli wars.
· It was in Gaza that Samson brought down the temple on himself and his
Philistine captors.
· The Ottoman Empire ruled Gaza during the 19th century. Palestine came
under British rule in the First World War, Egyptian rule in 1948 -
during the Arab-Israeli war when Gaza's population tripled as
Palestinians were pushed out of the new state of Israel. Israel captured
the Strip in 1967 and has held it ever since.