LETTER FROM THE ROAD, 21
ELIAS AMIDON
30 JULY 2003, GAZA

“What reign is worse than that of militant virtue?” – Amin Maalouf

GAZA

The taxi drives south toward Gaza through the pleasant Israeli countryside. There are well-kept farms, villages, fields, and forested hillsides. After leaving the taxi at the heavily militarized border crossing into Gaza, my colleague (the Jerusalem Representative from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)) and I are interrogated by the Israeli guards who finally let us through. The border crossing is nearly deserted, only a few aid workers and Americans working for the U.S. consulate office. You can tell the Americans because they wear heavy flak jackets in spite of the heat. The jackets have a small American flag stitched over the heart, a sign of the current nervous condition of our patriotism.

Once we get into the well-worn taxi on the Gaza side and continue on our journey, the view changes radically. The roads are rutted, and on each side there are bombed-out buildings and orchards in which the trees are bare sticks or chopped off at knee height. Within a few kilometers of the border the density of buildings and population increases sharply, and soon we are in a maze of streets festooned with hanging electrical wires, the buildings in sad repair. It reminds me of the back streets of Baghdad after 12 years of sanctions.

Gaza is a 10 by 40 kilometer (6 by 25 mile) strip of land surrounded on three sides by razor wire. The fourth side is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, where, three miles out, Israeli warships patrol, blocking any escape. The only way out is south, through Egypt, and that is a highly controlled crossing and a difficult journey. 1.6 million Palestinians live in Gaza, making it one of the highest population densities in the world. About a half million of the people here are housed in refugee camps, the U.N. having set up these tented camps in the early 50’s to house refugees who had fled to Gaza during Israel’s war of independence in 1948. The tents have long since been replaced by labyrinths of concrete block homes separated by narrow alleys often less than a meter wide. Water, electrical, and sanitation services are minimal. Little kids scamper in the alleys barefoot. Something like 65% of the population here is below the age of 24.

In the afternoon I arrange for a van to drive me around. Ahmed, my driver, steers the van down rutted streets piled with trash. Groups of teenage boys sit in the shadows, flicking the butts of their cigarettes into the dust and waiting. A few old men stare glumly from their chairs by the doorways. The walls are decorated everywhere with Arabic graffiti and with portraits and memorials of local boys killed in clashes with the Israelis.

At one point we slow to pass three kids playing with a plastic ball. Ahmed shakes his head. “How can children have a life here?” he asks me. “This is not living!” He says he has to keep close watch on his own sons so they don’t go “make bombs” with some of their friends. “What do the Israelis expect? I know three boys whose father is out of work. The man just sits at home, he is broken. Now his boys go with the militants, they want to win back their father’s honor. Do you understand?”

A View from Detroit
A few days ago in Jerusalem I met by chance an American sitting with his blond seven-year old daughter in a park. The guy looked like a typical middle-American: sandy-haired with a baseball cap and shorts. He was from a suburb of Detroit. It turns out he is a hydro-geologist working for USAID in Gaza, building water wells. He has been coming to Gaza for four years, and he was completely exasperated.

“I can’t believe it!” he said. “I just finished restoring and equipping a whole field of irrigation wells and pumping systems in Gaza with U.S. funding, and then the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) came in with bulldozers and destroyed everything. They filled the wells with rubble! These were 60-year old wells, hand-dug, three meters wide and over 100 meters deep. And they cut down all the orange trees, as far as the eye can see! It looks like a desert. If they did this to the blacks in Detroit they’d burn the city down.”

I asked him if USAID confronted the IDF about this, or reported to Congress about it, since this is all done with U.S. taxpayers’ money. “Sure we do,” he said, “but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s a racket. U.S. money pays for the wells and the equipment, and it pays for the Israeli bulldozers that destroy the wells and equipment. And now I’m buying more equipment with more U.S. money to go re-build the wells.”

I asked him how he can keep on. He looked at me and said simply, “Hey, they need the water.”

Talking Nonviolence with Hamas
In Gaza we meet with a number of Palestinians, including a well-spoken young economist, Salah Abdel Shafi. Salah is part of a committee charged with bringing reform to the Palestinian Authority. He is also working with a group drafting a Palestinian constitution. He describes the sad state of corruption and cronyism within the Authority, and tells us of a number of initiatives aimed at reforming the legal system, law enforcement agencies, and the Authority’s management of money. He expresses considerable hope that these efforts will be successful.

On short notice we are called to a surprise appointment to meet with a senior Hamas leader, Ishmael Abu Shenab. Abu Shenab is on the political, non-military side of Hamas, though he is nevertheless a supporter of violent resistance. He is an intellectual, an engineer, and a lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza.

Over the past decade, the religiously-based resistance group Hamas, along with three other militant organizations, has used the tactic of suicide bombings to fight the Israeli occupation. To me and to many Palestinians I have talked with, suicide bombing is an abhorrent and counter-productive form of resistance, no matter how oppressive the Israeli occupation may be. Yet many other Palestinians reluctantly accept it as a legitimate form of resistance, especially considering that they do not have helicopter gunships, F-16’s, tanks, or other powerful weapons. Hamas itself considers these “martyrdom operations” very effective in inflicting a heavy human toll and psychological trauma on Israeli society, thus creating a relative balance of fear and giving them more leverage against the occupation. Without this distasteful weapon, they say, they would have no power at all.

I believe they are mistaken, and this is what I want to talk with Abu Shenab about. I want to challenge him about the value of nonviolence. I want to ask him if Hamas wouldn’t succeed in its goals more nobly by renouncing violence and adopting nonviolent strategies, as Gandhi, King, Aquino, Tutu, and others have done?

A single bodyguard sits on a chair outside his modest home. We are led into a waiting area where, after some time, Abu Shenab comes to greet us. He is surprisingly shy. He apologies for keeping us waiting, setting down a small tray with glasses of mint tea. Soon his three-year old son climbs into his lap.

After some pleasantries the conversation turns to the conflict. I say something critical about suicide bombings, both as a moral issue and as a strategy. He replies, with some irritation, “Do you think we want to send our sons and daughters to be killed? We want peace as much as anyone. You tell the Israelis, please stop killing our children, and our children will stop killing you!” He then launches into a long rationale for the armed Palestinian resistance, drawing on the history of colonialism and its economic and political roots.

“And what are the settlements doing here in Gaza?” he asks me. “This is a little piece of land, but now 20% of it is occupied by 4,000 Israeli settlers. What is the justification for that? They took three fourths of Palestine and now they want this too! And half of the settlers have American accents! American Jews leave their big country and come here to settle our land!”

His response to my challenge about nonviolence is respectful, but he doesn’t believe it will work in the Palestinian context. He makes two points. The first is that the situation of Gandhi’s movement against the British was very different, and aided by economic realities. The British were in India for trade, and when India was no longer profitable for them they left. But the Israelis are not here for trade, they are here for the land. He refers to the map on the wall showing the spreading settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

His second argument is that he doesn’t believe the world media would report on Palestinian nonviolent resistance. He understands that media attention is a critical element for the success of nonviolent struggles, but what if no one sees it?

He gives a number of examples of the media ignoring peaceful Palestinian protests and we dialogue closely. It is a sensitive point, I know, but I have more faith than he does that world media would pay attention if massive nonviolent actions were done in a spirit of peace and not rage. “You say the first Intifada was nonviolent,” I tell him, “but children throwing rocks and shouting curses is not nonviolent. What if instead of throwing stones they were blocking the progress of tanks by holding hands, everyone dressed in white, singing gentle Islamic songs, or Jewish songs for that matter? If the IDF harmed them they would be ashamed of themselves before the world.” Abu Shenab is unmoved. He says “the big machine of the media” is controlled by Jews or people on their side, and they will not show such things. I tell him I hope he will be proved wrong.

My colleague and I describe to him several projects we are involved in that support nonviolent alternatives to the conflict and the development of a Palestinian culture of nonviolence. The first is a major project led by two Palestinian organizations (advised by the AFSC and Nonviolence International in Washington, DC) developing “A Palestinian National Movement of Active Nonviolence” by sponsoring a series of community meetings throughout the West Bank and Gaza, followed by trainings in nonviolent tactics and strategy. The second effort involves working with the global Nonviolent Peaceforce (described in earlier letters; Rabia is on its International Governing Council and Executive Board; see www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org) to assess the potential for bringing a large international contingent of citizens trained in nonviolence to monitor and when possible to intercede to prevent violence on both sides of the conflict. The third project, just hatching, is a collaboration between an Israeli and Palestinian organization, along with our own Boulder Institute, to create an educational curriculum for 15 to 22 year-olds exploring the teachings of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace-building in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

Abu Shenab wishes us luck, but doesn’t express any confidence in the power of these efforts to end the occupation or to bring justice. His is a loyalty to the logic of violence, the result of countless centuries of insisting that blood and fear are the only weapons with which to combat the letting of blood and the imposition of fear by one’s enemies. I suspect that if I had a similar conversation with Israel’s current leadership, I would hear a similar loyalty to the logic of violence. I believe it is up to us to find a more pragmatic loyalty in the world to come, as the logic of violence has clearly failed.

My colleague and I describe to him several projects we are involved in that support nonviolent alternatives to the conflict and the development of a Palestinian culture of nonviolence. The first is a major project led by two Palestinian organizations (advised by the AFSC and Nonviolence International in Washington, DC) developing “A Palestinian National Movement of Active Nonviolence” by sponsoring a series of community meetings throughout the West Bank and Gaza, followed by trainings in nonviolent tactics and strategy. The second effort involves working with the global Nonviolent Peaceforce (described in earlier letters; Rabia is on its International Governing Council and Executive Board; see www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org) to assess the potential for bringing a large international contingent of citizens trained in nonviolence to monitor and when possible to intercede to prevent violence on both sides of the conflict. The third project, just hatching, is a collaboration between an Israeli and Palestinian organization, along with our own Boulder Institute, to create an educational curriculum for 15 to 22 year-olds exploring the teachings of tolerance, nonviolence, and peace-building in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

Abu Shenab wishes us luck, but doesn’t express any confidence in the power of these efforts to end the occupation or to bring justice. His is a loyalty to the logic of violence, the result of countless centuries of insisting that blood and fear are the only weapons with which to combat the letting of blood and the imposition of fear by one’s enemies. I suspect that if I had a similar conversation with Israel’s current leadership, I would hear a similar loyalty to the logic of violence. I believe it is up to us to find a more pragmatic loyalty in the world to come, as the logic of violence has clearly failed.

 

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©2003 Elias Amidon & Rabia Elizabeth Roberts, The Boulder Institute