DEC. 30, 2014
GAZA CITY — You trudge into Gaza from a high-tech Israeli facility through a caged walkway that brings you, after about 15 minutes, to a ramshackle Palestinian border post; and then, formalities completed, on you go, through dust and the reek of sewage, past the crumpled buildings and the donkey carts, to arrive at last in the middle of nowhere.
Gaza is nowhere. Very few people go in or out of the 140-square-mile enclave. Most people want to forget about it. The border with Egypt was closed in October. A handful of travelers negotiate the labyrinth of inspections at the Israeli border and proceed into the Jewish state.
I watched a young man passing sand through a sieve as the surface of a road was laid beside the sea in Gaza City. He’d shake the sieve, watch the sand drop through and, finally, tip out the remnants. Again and again he did it, in the dust. He is among the more productively employed of Gaza’s 1.8 million citizens.
International affairs and diplomacy.
There is another war waiting to happen in Gaza. The last one changed nothing. Hamas rockets are being test-fired. A Palestinian farmer has been shot dead near the border. Tensions simmer. The draft Security Council resolution at the United Nations, championed by the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, seeking a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank by 2017, amounts to an elaborate sideshow. The real matter of diplomatic urgency going into 2015, for the Palestinian people and the world, is to end the lockdown of Gaza.
“People are mad, frustrated, they have nothing to lose,” Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to the Hamas Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told me. “We are dying gradually so it is better to die with dignity.”
The only dust-free environment is the compound of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. I went to see its director, Robert Turner. He told me that initial estimates of war damage belittled its extent: 96,000 homes of refugee families (against initial estimates of 42,000) are either destroyed or damaged, and 124,000 houses in all. But very little rebuilding material is available. “There’s a vacuum.” he said.
The supposed reconciliation between Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas has proved worthless. At the hospital, contracts for cleaners and food are not being paid. Hamas and Fatah blame each other. Turner described “a drift toward more radical groups.” None of the causes of the conflict had been addressed. “Fatah and Hamas and Israel can avert a descent into new violence, but I don’t think that window will stay open for long,” he told me.
Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.
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The enclave is a thorny quandary. Hamas has a vile Charter, a goal of destroying Israel, and it fires rockets on Israeli civilians from among Palestinian civilians. But it is not monolithic. Putting Gaza first would have several merits: forcing Palestinians to unify their national movement and hold long-delayed elections; averting yet another war with its heavy toll in human life and negative impact on Israel’s international standing; ushering a large group of Palestinians out of radicalizing misery; obliging the peacemakers, so-called, to get real or go home; stopping the distraction at the United Nations.
My Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys. It is about 1,400 yards from the border in eastern Gaza City. You look out past a destroyed juice factory, a destroyed farm-equipment factory and see the tantalizing green fields of Israel, from which Palestinians tend to avert their eyes. The classrooms all have windows blown out or doors blown off. Kids play football in a courtyard imprinted with Israeli tank tracks. Half of them have homes partially destroyed. I asked one student, Saleem Ejla, age 16, what he expected: “War after war,” he shot back.
Hasan al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli airstrike on July 20. Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”
He told me about his 8-year-old daughter, Zeina, who refuses to speak to God since her grandmother was killed and tells her father: “God is a weak one. I will never say God again. He can’t change anything.”
But Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Europeans and Americans can — if they choose to locate the nowhere named Gaza and turn it into somewhere. The alternative is war without end.
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