A Month by the Sea (21 page)

As an ISI (Islamic Social Institution) al-Wafa naturally has links with Hamas; over the years some of its management team and probably many of its staff will have been members or sympathisers. This however does not affect their professionalism. Al-Wafa’s record proves that it is not swayed by political or religious leanings. It exists to do the best it can, with the limited resources at its disposal, for all Gazans who need its expertise. In an immensely valuable book (
Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza
) published shortly after my return from Gaza, Sara Roy writes: ‘Hamas’s social support structure played a key role in building up popular support for the organization [but] this was not the same as mobilizing people into an activist constituency based on the political ideology of Hamas.’ Here is reliable confirmation of my own (necessarily superficial) impression of how things are on the Strip. The West Bank, too, had shown me conflicting currents: gratitude for an ISI like the Nablus clinic where my damaged hip was X-rayed,
coexisting with resentment of increasingly Islamic influences on the socio-political scene.

Tragically, such subtleties are beyond official Israel’s grasp. During Cast Lead, a senior Israeli government representative told the
New York Times
:

(In case you’ve forgotten – between 2001 and 2011 rockets from Gaza killed 22 Israelis and one immigrant labourer.)

No wonder the
Goldstone Report
described Cast Lead as ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’.

The Israelis’ sustained imposition of all-out collective
punishment
is by any standards a very frightening phenomenon. For decades they have been attacking defenceless populations through curfews, closures, sieges, house demolitions, olive-grove bulldozings, well poisonings, shootings, bombings, torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial. One of my Gazan friends proposed that this Israeli obsession, this conviction that collective
punishment
is the way forward, may well be a hideous hangover from the Holocaust when Jews were collectively punished for being Jews. The logic behind this proposal escaped me. But then my friend argued, ‘We’re not talking about
logic
! We’re talking about
something
very deep and dark and twisted. Something so sick the international community is afraid to go near it.’

Several years ago, the same comparison was drawn by Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur in the OPT, a Princeton international law authority and himself a Jew. He said, ‘Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.’

Perhaps this grim analogy no longer shocks because Zionist criminality is becoming ever more strident and arrogant. Now a retiring head of Israel’s security forces feels free to brag on TV that ‘Our successful operations have made political assassinations internationally acceptable.’

In my
serveece
to al-Wafa a retired professor of English sat beside me and insisted on paying my fare. His brain-damaged grandson lay comatose in the Rehabilitation Centre; a wall had fallen on him as he sought to salvage stones from a recently shelled house. The professor’s specialty was George Bernard Shaw but I soon steered him off
John Bull’s Other Island
and onto the Strip. He blamed ‘Protestant sentimentality about biblical places’ for the Balfour Declaration. And he, too, spoke of Zionism’s ‘humiliation campaign’ against Palestinians as having Nazi roots. ‘It’s how they were treated in the ’30s.’

Habitually I arrive too early (a perverse form of unpunctuality) and at 8.30 a young doctor, seeing me on an outside bench, invited me into a small stuffy room off the hallway. Here several young men sat around discussing case notes, drinking tea and eating home-made chocolate cookies from a huge box in the centre of the table. It was someone’s birthday, an occasion not traditionally celebrated in the Arab world but now adopted. They were a friendly bunch, apart from one physiotherapist whose very long, very thick black beard must have taken a lot of maintenance. I had come to associate disapproving stares with that sort of beard.

The only English-speaker told me about donated wheelchairs seized from the 2010 Flotilla and taken to an Ashdod warehouse where they were cunningly vandalised – rendered almost useless –
before being delivered to the ICRC at Erez. One’s first reaction is to disbelieve such stories (‘must be propaganda!’) but the Zionist exercise of wanton cruelty, which I had so often witnessed on the West Bank, made this story only too credible.

To greet me, Dr Khamis Elessi stood up behind his makeshift desk: a small man, balding, round-faced, soft-spoken, kind-eyed. He comes of a notable Gaza family and one soon senses a
noblesse oblige
attitude (not very common among Palestinians) to the Strip’s least privileged. No money had been wasted on this rather cramped, utilitarian Director’s office.

Dr Elessi opened the conversation by deploring all violence, whatever its source or motive. A tediously trite statement, you might think – yet it’s contestable in Occupied Palestine where there are plausible arguments in favour of violence as an assertion of people’s right to freedom. Indisputably, as Dr Elessi said, ‘All forms of retaliation must increase suffering and bitterness.’ Yet he could understand, as I cannot, the sort of martyr’s mother who rejoices because her son has ‘given himself’ for the cause and is now being rewarded by Allah – while his community is being collectively punished by the IDF. Dr Elessi also conceded that to an extent attacks on Israelis, military or civilian, do boost communal morale in territories with a 60-year backlog of impotent rage. ‘Which means,’ he said, ‘the Occupier is corrupting the Occupied.’ I remembered then Anwar literally shuddering as he described an Islamic Jihad street party spontaneously organised to celebrate a ‘successful’ suicide bombing in Israel – ‘like you see in normal countries when the local team wins’.

Dr Elessi agreed with me that the world should not be allowed to forget a fact now hidden behind stacks of Israeli
hasbara
. On 23 December 2008 Hamas offered to renew for at least ten years the truce violated by Israel on 4 November. Their condition was that Israel would fulfil the two original clauses of the ceasefire: a complete stop to hostilities
and
lifting the blockade of Gaza.
Zionists genuinely interested in a ‘Peace Process’ would have discussed this offer; Hamas has a deserved reputation for sticking to agreements and had jailed some of its own militants for breaking the previous ceasefire. However, Cast Lead had been planned soon after the IDF’s shaming Lebanese experience in 2006. ‘And it was timed,’ said Dr Elessi, ‘to reward warmongers in the Knesset [February 2009] election.’ I now learned that the no-
expenses-spared
planning included a Gaza City mock-up beside a remote training camp in the Negev. Nothing Hamas said or did could have prevented Cast Lead, which had very little to do with deterring home-made rockets – or even Iran-made missiles. It was a
continuation
of the Nakba by other means.

The barrenness of youngsters’ lives in the Strip’s most deprived areas – such as that around al-Wafa – greatly distressed Dr Elessi. Many more football clubs were needed – but where to kick? He told me then about al-Jazeera Sports Club for the disabled, started by himself and a few colleagues. Before the blockade locked them in, its members had won several medals in international competitions – achievements which gave a tremendous boost not only to the competitors’ families and friends but to their whole community. Now, with the Rafah Gate open again, the club could begin to plan and fundraise for further endeavours in foreign stadia. But would Rafah remain open? And even if it did, would the Egyptians facilitate the exit and re-entry of disabled Palestinians and their escorts? Deeb had put it rather well – ‘Gaza’s future is a forest of question marks.’

While showing me around (discreetly: one doesn’t want the severely disabled to feel like tourist fodder) Dr Elessi introduced me to several of the staff and what I glimpsed of their relationships with the patients set off good vibes, confirming my observations while visiting other clinics with Nita. Al-Wafa’s rehabilitation work is unofficially extended beyond the physical. The Director only mentioned the bombing en passant; rebuilding was almost
completed, one had to live in the present, not brood over the past or despair of the future. As he escorted me to the nearest taxi route, along a pavement seething with small children, he admitted to finding the Zionists’ demographic fears quite rational. Already the Palestinians, if united in a show of non-violent strength, could end the Occupation and move the problem onto another plane. ‘Binationalism?’ I suggested. But Dr Elessi pretended not to hear. People in his position can’t step forward as political leaders. Al-Wafa is there for everyone imprisoned on the Strip who is misfortunate enough to need it.

In the taxi I thought about that ‘if’ …
If
the Palestinians could unite – a possibility made ever less possible by energetic schemers. And the very next afternoon afforded a disturbing example of such scheming.

At al-Wafa I drank tea with an exhausted-looking nurse who habitually works overtime for no extra pay (so said one of her patients). She had urged me to visit her cousin, Director of the Ministry of Health’s Central Drug Store which was reporting ‘zero stock levels’ for many essential medications. Nita came too and we crossed an empty car park to a hastily rebuilt (after bombing) warehouse – surprisingly open and unguarded. ‘There’s not much to guard,’ Nita reminded me.

In a dingy office, lined with shelves of files, the Director and four of his colleagues were gloomily conferring. When Nita
introduced
me he stood and bowed slightly (no hand-shaking) – a compact, grey-haired, clean-shaven man, his expression
compounded
of tiredness, irritation, sadness and a determination to be cheerful. In response to his formulaic ‘How are you?’ I replied, ‘Depressed because Gaza is suffering so much.’ He laughed. ‘Sit down! Sit down and be happy! You must be happy because Gaza is liberated! We are free – here no Israeli soldiers or settlers like on West Bank – be happy with us!’

Nita said something to stop this Hamas patter and at once the
Director stood up again to lead us down a long grey corridor, smelling of damp concrete, to an enormous, almost empty
storeroom
. This is the distribution centre for all the Ministry of Health’s medications for the Strip’s 13 hospitals and 54 primary health care clinics. Here the Director let us see the depth of his own depression. This crisis began in January 2011 and the store was now short of 180 types of crucially important medications. Gazans suffer from the range of diseases one would expect in any malnourished population of 1.6 million – plus complicated
IDF-induced
injuries and illnesses. Every day news came of needless deaths. Tunnel-derived medicines were costly and often dangerously unreliable. The varieties that might occasionally come in otherwise were even more costly and no more reliable. Substitute medicines were gaining in popularity – their effects usually dire and quite often fatal. For some reason the sight of all those empty shelves touched me more than the standard ‘Appeal’ photographs of starving children.

Israel was not directly to blame for this collective punishment. The missing donated medications had long since arrived in Ramallah where the PA, living up (or down) to its ‘quisling’ label, was withholding them from Hamas-governed Gaza. In Jerusalem in December 2010, I had heard Mahmoud Abbas’s security services being praised for their merciless manoeuvrings to demoralise and discredit Hamas’ administration and Hamas’ West Bank supporters. The PA police had probably impressed the CIA by arresting six faculty members at An-Najah university, all voluntary workers for an ISI, therefore accused of ‘assisting a front for Hamas’. More serious because even more divisive, 1,000 schoolteachers had lost their jobs – some Hamas members, some related to individuals suspected of Hamas leanings, some who refused to promote Fatah. One of my Nablus friends belonged to that last category and I knew he disliked Fatah and Hamas equally. But he still lost his job.

Nita admitted that being collectively punished by
fellow-Palestinians
was the unkindest cut of all.

At IUG Dr Moheer had described other health-care impediments. Because of an acute shortage of specialists, many complicated cases need to go elsewhere but most are unable to leave the Strip. For the lucky few, it can take a long time (sometimes too long) to find a suitable Israeli (or other) hospital willing to accept them and to arrange payment through the Ministry of Health – or a private benefactor, if such is available.

There is also a shortage of experts to maintain equipment and the lack of one tiny, irreplaceable part can leave a $50,000 machine crippled. The irregular electricity supply ruins sensitive machines, when suddenly the power drops below or shoots above the required voltage. (In my flat, dependent on the family generator, I had noticed that this often happens.) I suggested seeking voluntary experts from among the Palestinians’ many foreign friends (
ISM-like
people) but according to Dr Moheer ‘commercial
confidentiality
’ rules this out. Each firm’s cherished know-how must at all times be protected, even at the cost of patients’ lives. Another complication: many of the firms’ own experts won’t travel to Gaza, either for ideological or fear reasons. Alternatively, they may be so expensive to import it makes more sense to buy new machines with guarantees covering one or two years.