By JOE HARBISON
Reader Report
an urban island riddled by bullets and bombs. It is a place where the slow cascade of destroyed buildings implode after a war not allowed to be grieved over or repaired. Gazans, more than 50 percent of whom are under 15, are seemingly oblivious to their poverty.
A world that celebrates 60 years of the UN charter of human rights and the Geneva Convention ought to wail at its inability to care for and heal a population displaced for a time corresponding to the birth of that charter. Take a walk through the dusty potholed streets of Gaza and you will find a sad maxim illustrated in the faces of the adolescents. Those under 10 have the amazing ability to smile and play and even fashion toys from the rubbish-strewn streets. But look again at the post-adolescent. These are among the living dead. Their role models are etched in posters that line the dismal streets remembering martyrs. Up to 75 percent of the children in Gaza have been traumatized by war. The wounds won't heal on their own. Someone must wipe the tear, bind the wound.
Resilience is a word used for people affected by traumatic change. Gazans are out in force in their city at night in the darkened streets. They walk and jostle along the roads, eating shawarma, ice cream and falafels in a visible demonstration of resilience. The goods that make everyday life possible in Gaza must come from someplace. Israel has a strategic list of about 34 items allowed to be shipped into Gaza. One of these items is electricity, happily sold to the small enclave besieged by its rich neighbor. Soap, shampoo, and plastic sheets are not.
Where do the resilient people turn to? To the underground malls! Tunnels etched in the crude earth of antiquity along the southern border with Egypt. Hundreds exist but they are not hidden. Like Sutters Mill, the enterprise seeks to exploit an even bigger bonanza. Everything goes through the tunnels. Motorcycles, cars, Cokes and laundry detergent. Sleeping lions and livestock, gasoline and pomegranates. The patient citizens of Rafah are awakened almost nightly to the roar and rumble of rockets unleashed on the tunnel network. Across the border, Egyptians flood tunnels, weakening the shoddy, timberless networks and killing more youths. Since 2006, more than 100 people have been killed down below, most of them young people lured underground for a few dollars.
The answer is not more timber for the tunnels, but a lifting of the siege.
Often I ask, "What hopes do you have for the future?" Invariably the reply is, "I hope the borders will open, the siege end and that my kids don't have to worry about a building falling on them or be hit by a stray bullet when the IDF decide to come visiting."
In Gaza, the mornings are the best. Breakfast along the sea wall at the Al Deira Hotel, reminiscent of "Casablanca's" Rick's Cafe, is especially nice. Looking north you just get a glimpse of the towers at the giant electric generating plant in Ashkelon. As the goat cheese omelet is served, the dull sound of machine-gun fire barks out, staccato, punctuating the air. Fisherman have strayed too close to the three-mile offshore limit imposed by the Israeli navy. Another day in paradise.
Another metaphor for Gaza is "The Plague," written by Albert Camus in 1947. It describes Oran and Algiers in stark terms, not unlike my visionary Gotan Project song locale. Camus describes a variety of characters quarantined with no place to go, yet who get on with their dreary lives as one after another dies from the unstoppable plague. The allegory is uncanny. After the city is startled by a dramatic rise in the rat population, the doomed are sealed off from the world. Trying to get on with their futile lives, the victims of the plague soon embrace irrationality in a macabre dance of the absurd. When the plague is lifted, the people return to their self-absorbed lives, ignorant of their inner condition.
Remember, the majority of Gazans are under 15. Under the age of bomb-making ability, explosive vest wearing or even of effective rock-throwing ability. Change is in the air. We don't know what permutation the change will take. Inshallah (as they say here), it will be peaceful, beautiful. Something worthy of the lofty aspiration of the human spirit.
A Gazan told me, "We Gazans don't read much." He continued, "We are too consumed with the survival instinct; we don't know enough about what's coming round the corner, so why fill our minds with novels?" Picasso said art removes the dust from the soul, so where's the balance here?
I take a walk along the beach in Gaza. I make it beyond the next corner, find the anarchistic beach, walk the filth-strewn sands and gaze upon the beachgoers in waters murky with pollution. I ask a bather if he wasn't frightened to swim in such dirty water. "Oh yes, it is dirty today. Once in a while the sewers are opened and they drain out from Israel along our coast." But he turns and dives in anyway.
And the song goes on.
Joe Harbison of Huntington Beach works for World Vision, a Christian relief group. This fall he was assigned to work in Palestinian-controlled Gaza.
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