During a conversation last night in Gaza with a group of 20-something male students, the issue of homosexuality came up. These were university-educated, Muslim men with relatively liberal attitudes but accepting a gay lifestyle was a complete anathema to them. “It’s disgusting,” one said, a Fatah loyalist and opponent of Hamas.
We sat and talked alongside Gaza City’s beach, a beautifully peaceful place with a Hamas wedding being celebrated nearby to the MC-led, Western soundtrack. “Jump”, “jump”, “jump”, screamed the music.
The Gaza Strip, under siege for over three years by Israel and the Western powers, is utterly unlike anywhere I’ve ever visited. Over 70% unemployment, garbage strewn across many streets and in abandoned buildings, a thriving tunnel business from Egypt that brings in the essentials of life and Hamas gunmen on most street corners directing traffic and keeping cool in the searing heat.
The main image in the West of Gaza is of a fundamentalist Islamic regime bent on Israel’s destruction. Although there are worrying signs of an increasing intolerance of difference — witness the news that sharia law and a kind of Muslim code of conduct may soon be implemented here — Hamas is a broad church. The reality on the ground is removed from virtually everything I read before crossing the border.
The Hamas Deputy Foreign Minister and former adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Dr Ahmed Yousef, told me in his high-rise office building, overlooking an Israeli-destroyed, Hamas home and the deep blue ocean, that his group was becoming more pragmatic and now embraced the two-state solution with Israel. He was pessimistic that the Jewish state would ever agree to completely cease and reverse the illegal settlements in the West Bank. If not, he explained, “resistance” had to continue.
I came principally to talk to the Gazan people. Yesterday I spent time at El-Wafa hospital, the only rehabilitation centre in Gaza and situated very close to the Israeli border. During the recent war, Israeli missiles struck two, unfinished wards. Akram al-Sattari, the head of planning, told me that officials there received countless requests of assistance from poor and needy families on a daily basis. Some need therapeutic work and others orthopaedic surgeries. I saw a man in a coma, his legs missing and stomach mangled, lying in a bed with his eyes and mouth wide open. There were literally thousands of similar patients across Gaza, mostly refused entry to Israel or Egypt to receive essential care.
The effects of Israel’s December/January bombardment are pervasive. The town of Jabaliya was flattened in parts by Israeli missiles and shells. It’s a ghost town, with a few families living in tents and the ruins of their homes and donkeys and young boys carrying rubble piece by piece to be sold or re-used.
Majed Alathanma, a 60-year-old father, lost his well-appointed home and taxi business in a barrage one day. He told me that he had personally seen Israeli troops open fire on civilians and drivers carrying dead bodies to be buried. These allegations are borne out in the recent report by IDF soldiers of the “Breaking the Silence” group. I have heard so many similar stories, all completely unverifiable, but consistent in their detail and callousness.
Homes cannot be re-built with cement because Israel bans its import. The Strip’s first clay building for disabled children is the first of many experiments in this now necessary skill. The engineer said that the Palestinians could keep on re-building as long as the Israelis continued destroying. Such despondency wasn’t uncommon, though surprising was the hope that co-existence with Israel wasn’t only important but essential. I’ve heard very few comments against Jews themselves.
Despair, depression, sexual dysfunction, bed-wetting (for children and adults) and lethargy are common complaints, a number of psychologists have told me. Students are refused exit permits to study abroad. Teachers can’t improve their skills with native English speakers. Journalists are trapped between dedication to truth-telling and battles with Hamas officials over what version of events should be published.
In the small village of East Maghazi, near the Israeli border, a farmer told me a story that seemed to encapsulate the sense of humiliation that infects this conflict. After the Israelis bulldozed his home without warning in early January, along with killing some of his live-stock, they returned to steal the roots of a 100 year-old sycamore tree, a shady covering used by his grandfather in decades past. The roots would undoubtedly be re-planted in Israel as a way to eradicate the Palestinian connection to the land.
This is the real meaning of occupation.
Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution
Anton Loewenstein is THE outstanding Australia-based journalist who understands and has the ability to explain the tragic situation in the Middle East. No one else can bring to us with such professional skill the truth about the sufferings of the Palestinian people. Members of the well-organised team of Israeli supporters in Australia will no doubt denigrate his latest moving article based on his visit to Gaza. But never, never will any of this Israelis cheer squad ever express any sympathy for the Palestinian people and what they have had to endure since the creation of the Jewish state. Why does the Western media (with one or two rare exceptionsd) and world leaders look the other way when the agony of the Palestinians is brought to their notice? Already we are seeing signs of weakness in Obama’s attitude towards Israel. Netanjahu is defying the US President on settlement building in the West Bank. He seems confident that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington will be able to exercise its traditional influence. Loewenstein continues to shine some light on a sad and dark period in human history.
Thank you Antony! This is just a horrific situation isn’t it? I’ve been on many websites that cover this terrible, no horrific reality, and it’s just worse than sad. There’s a wonderful young woman called Nahida who writes poetry. She can be found on http://www.poetryforpalestine.spaces.live.com I recall being shocked seeing the many photos that clearly show the horror of daily life in Gaza and other places. Kids with Israeli guns pointed at their heads as they go to school; others subjected to at best ridicule or violence while they attempt to play. It was beyond horrific. There are children in jails in Israel – how could this be? What sort of people are we to allow this to happen? It seems to me, that Israel is just acting like Hitler behaved to the Jews. The oppressed have become the oppressors. I had to stop looking at the images during the horrors of December/January and beyond. The state of shocked horror is only taken over by helplessness. I speak out whenever I can, I stay in contact with what’s happening, but what can an ordinary person do?
Is there any point in complaining to Israel? Are they even bothering to listen these days? They seem to be unaccountable to anyone or any govt or even the UN. There’s heaps of UN Resolutions chastising, castigating, appealing etc to Israel, but nobody makes them comply. Why aren’t weapons inspectors checking out their nuclear weapons? Why can they have possibly hundreds, but Iran (I’m not supporter, I just hate injustice & hypocrisy) has threatened war if they don’t comply with what? I don’t believe the nonsense about the uranium, and their imminent manufacture of a nuclear bomb. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran can enrich uranium for use in nuclear reactors. Neither Israel, Pakistan or India are members of the NPT, but who wants to inspect their nuclear weapons? Isn’t Pakistan a threat these days? What if ‘terrorists’ get old of nuclear fuel or a weapon? Who checks their weapons with what’s on ‘the books’? Is there material or waste missing? Aren’t the dreaded Taliban approaching the main city?
The role played by the US and Australia to the suffering people of Gaza is beyond despicable. The people in Gaza are in a virtual prison, and each one of them is in danger of dying or being killed by Israelis, and we just sit around and do zilch!If I despair, no wonder the Palestinians are suffering terrible psychological health problems?
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has evolved into a unique crime, beyond mere slaughter and barbarism. The refinement of humiliation over sixty years has become, in Gaza, a form of mass torture.
You have to ask where are decent members of the Australian Jewish diaspora who have the gumption to stand up & be counted against Israel’s decades-long mass torture of the Palestinians.
With some notable exceptions such as Antony L, John Docker and many others, only relatively few Aussie Jews have criticised Israel’s appalling human rights abuses.
And to think that there is a popular view held by the Jewish community in Australia & globally, that ordinary German people were collectively responsible for the Nazis horrific human rights abuses, even though 98% were oblivious to the extent of the Nazis evil killing regime.
In Australia right now, 99% of Aussie Jews know exactly what’s being done to the Palestinians daily, but they say nothing.
I know who I believe are guilty of extreme moral cowardice.
And finally, let’s not forget that GAZA Gillard co-led a deputation to Israel recently with the full support of the Rudd Cabinet. Her co-leader on the trip, and publicly declared friend, Albert Dadon, is on the public record in the Australian newspaper in January last saying that it’s justified to bomb civilians if HAMAS fighters are hiding among them. That ill-advised trip will haunt Gillard for many years to come.
The enemy of my enemy is NOT necessarily my friend. This is surely a case of wanting both “sides” to lose.
” Over 70% unemployment, garbage strewn across many streets and in abandoned buildings” As even the Oxley Moron pointed out in our benighted NQld, this is a contradiction in terms. Rather than clean up & rebuild (the Romans managed without Israeli cement), they indulge in black marketeering, rippingt off whom? Their own people, usally nbeighbours.
As for the anti homosexual rantings, sodomy of younger (usually but not necessarily) males is so normal in the gender sundered pathology that passes for muslim society, that they honestly do not regard it as homosexual.
The tradition of “travelling wives” has been around since camel trains were invented. The boys are no more ‘homosexual’ than the fainuu of Polynesia or iron pumping prison inmates. Sexual desire will find an outlet, and occasionally a receptacle, no matter what the prevailing religious idiocy.
Israel was created by Euroids to assuage their WWII guilt. The Palestinians were of no more account than were the Cananites to Joshua.