By G. Jefferson Price III
Last Saturday, we celebrated the 31st birthday of our
youngest son, Sebastian. He was born in a maternity hospital on the outskirts of
Jerusalem, across from the Qalandia Palestinian refugee camp where there is an
Israeli checkpoint on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah and further along to
Nablus. Passage on that road was pretty easy then, even for Palestinians; now
it is not.
I was stationed in Jerusalem then as the Middle East correspondent for
The Baltimore Sun. The morning of my son’s birth, July 26, 1983, I had gone to
Gaza to interview a 38-year-old Palestinian mother of ten children, sitting in
the rubble of her ramshackle home that had been demolished by the Israelis because
it had been constructed beyond the legal boundary of the UN refugee camp where
she lived.
The woman’s name was Fatma Ubeid. The Israelis had demolished her home
only two days after she delivered her tenth child whom she was nursing while
sitting on a dilapidated couch amid the rubble of her home. Today, her children
would be in their thirties or forties, if they are still alive. Survival was
never easy in the Gaza Strip, even when the Israelis were not pounding the
place to smithereens as they were on my son’s most recent birthday last month
when The New York Times reported: “More than 140 bodies were
recovered across Gaza on Saturday — including 21 members of one family —
raising the Palestinian death toll to 1,139, most of them civilians, according
to Gaza’s Health Ministry. On the Israeli side, 42 soldiers and three civilians
have been killed.”
One hundred and forty bodies, including
21 members of one family! Why is the
life of one Israeli worth so much more than the life of one Palestinian, or, as
in this case, a hundred Palestinians?
If the children of Fatma Ubeid left
homeless by the Israeli army on the morning of my son’s birth 31 years ago are
still alive, I expect they are very angry people. They have had good cause to
be angrier and angrier since the Israelis tore down the roof from over their
heads leaving them to baste in the merciless heat, trying to comfort their
wailing mother. Nothing the Israelis have done in the ensuing three decades has
brought comfort or encouragement to the people who live in Gaza. Quite the
opposite. So much so that we should not be surprised that they hate the
Israelis enough to want to kill them even if they have to kill themselves in
the process.
Gaza is a desperate place. On the best of
days, it is a shit hole, quite literally. A Palestinian population of more than
1.5 million lives there crammed onto a squalid piece of land that is less than
half the size of Cape Cod. And nothing really works.
Electric power is sporadic –
practically non-existent now that the Israelis have destroyed the main power
plant.
. The water is unclean.
The sewage system – such as it is
-- is overwhelmed. (You get a pretty clear picture of this on most days flying
into Tel Aviv airport over the mud-colored waste that flows directly into the
Mediterranean Sea from Gaza.)
The unemployment rate in Gaza is over 30 per cent.
The vast majority of the population is not originally “from” Gaza. They
are the direct descendants of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their
homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. They have been
refugees for more than half a century now in a place that originally was viewed
as a temporary haven.
Israeli mythology asserts that those who fled were enthusiastically following
the exhortations of the Arab states that were so confident of victory that they
soon would be able to return to their homes. Most of those who fled though were
just trying to get out of the way. Many others were driven from their homes by
the Israelis. Whole Arab villages were wiped out in the process.
And here is a most important fact in any discussion about the difference
today between the Israeli experience in Israel and the Palestinian experience
in Gaza. It is a difference that no one seems to be talking about.
An Israeli family that feels
threatened by the rockets from Gaza can move to a safer place, even leave
Israel for a safer country any time they want to.
A Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip cannot do that. At one end of the
Gaza Strip Israel controls the border and hardly anyone is allowed out. At the
other end Egypt controls the border and hardly anyone is allowed out that way.
There is no airport for Palestinians to fly out. Leaving by boat is not
possible. The Israel navy has the coastline blocked.
So Gaza is a trap. And the people trapped there are being killed or
wounded by the hundreds and thousands. They must be terrified. And they must be
enraged. Enraged enough to want to kill their lifelong enemies. And given that
Washington supplies Israel with weaponry that goes far beyond the stuff needed
for the protective shield that has worked so successfully against missiles
launched from Gaza, it’s hardly surprising that Americans are also considered
the enemy.
.
And these Palestinians are not going away. Instead the entrapped and
enraged population of Gaza (not to mention the West Bank) increases
exponentially. Thirty years ago the population was half a million. Today it is
three times as many and growing.
Thirty years ago Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was
the pariah that Hamas is treated as today. What, then, will tomorrow bring us
and them?
Probably something a lot scarier. Try the Islamic State in Palestine.
