Dr. Subhi Ali:
We’re going to resume our program. This is the afternoon session and one that is probably most interesting, provocative, talked about, and contemporary with topics that are on everybody’s plate everyday. The committee that put this program together actually planned this very carefully. It will be moderated by the journalist as he was referred to today that you’ve seen ask a lot of questions. He’s a member of the Palestine Center Committee and a gentleman that I’ve known here since the early 70s, Mr. Said Arikat, one of the most capable Arab journalists that I’ve seen here in Washington, DC, and I’ve been here for over, or at least associated with Washington for 53 years and I’m proud to say that. I’ve known Said and he has done an excellent job. The panel is in your program. The bios of the speakers are in your pamphlet and the topics are also as you can see are very simple, very easy to articulate. Only Jerusalem, Gaza, and the BDS, so this is a tall order for this panel. Said, it’s all yours.
Said Arikat:
Thank you Dr. Subhi, and thank you everyone for being here. We’ve definitely had two wonderful panels earlier today. We had a dynamic and very energetic panel that went through the idea, the only way to end, the difficulty, the adversity Palestinians face is really through the undoing of Zionism as a colonial project. And then of course we talked about, we went through the elusive presence of the Israeli left and where it is and so on, and then the path forward. Then we went through, in the second panel as we all have participated in the panel, we went through the Bantustans as something to preclude sovereignty. Khaled addressed shared sovereignty and Sam very carefully talked about the media’s role and how you can hold their feet to the fire and the path forward. For this afternoon, as Dr. Subhi said, we have issues that are really a tall order: Jerusalem, Gaza, and BDS. Jerusalem is definitely shrinking under the feet of its Palestinian inhabitants being forced out of it. You know it’s becoming suffocated. Gaza has been termed by the United Nations as, come 2020 it will be unlivable. It is probably unlivable now, and BDS is really a glimmer of hope around which we can rally. So it can become, in a way, or in combination with others as a rallying cry, around which we can organize.
We have excellent panelists for this panel. We have Ambassador Feda Abdelhady-Nasser who represents the State of Palestine at the Security Council and at the General Assembly, and its main committees, particularly the Special Political and Decolonization Committee, the Fourth Committee, with specific focus on the issue of UNRWA. UNRWA is as you know being threatened a great deal by the Israeli lobby to undo because of its service for the Palestinians. And then we have, among many other things, I will not go into the details – then we have Dr. Lawrence Davidson who is a Professor Emeritus of History at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. He’s the author of five books including America’s Palestine (2001) and Foreign Policy Inc. (2009). He has also published numerous articles on Palestine, Israel, U.S. foreign policy, among others… And last but not least, we have Dr. Sara Roy who’s senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies specializing in the Palestinian economy, Palestinian Islamism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At Harvard University Dr. Roy is also co-chair of the Middle East Seminar, jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and co-chair of the Middle East Forum at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. So with that, let’s begin.
Ambassador Feda Abdelhady-Nasser:
Thank you very much. I am honored to be here, among all of the distinguished presenters, participants, and organizers at the Palestine Center’s Annual Conference. I’ve been asked today to reflect on Jerusalem. There are, of course, limitless dimensions of the subject of Jerusalem, historical, religious, political, strategic, cultural, and otherwise across the centuries. Today, however, I will focus on the legal dimension as concerns the applicability of international law to the City, specifically in the context of United Nations resolutions since Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. This City – once the vibrant heart of Palestinian life, a tapestry of our heritage and civilization, home to the three monotheistic religions and glorious holy sites and antiquities – has been abused and pillaged by a brutal foreign occupation bent on the violent dispossession, displacement and denigration of its Palestinian inhabitants and on the erasure of its legal status, character, and history through a series of unlawful policies and measures, in grave violation of international law and United Nations resolutions over decades.
That Israel’s actions have aimed at altering the facts on the ground, including the demography of Palestine by ethnically cleansing the City’s Palestinian population and diminishing, if not deleting, its Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Christian identities is undeniable, as is the colonial and annexationist nature of this fifty-year occupation. I will posit, however, that international law – in particular the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, as embodied in the Fourth Geneva Convention, and international legislation and interpretation of the law regarding the question of Palestine – as reflected in UN resolutions – has helped protect East Jerusalem and maintain its status as occupied territory, in which Israel is not in any way considered the sovereign in the city, despite its declarations and actions to the contrary, but is considered the occupying power, according to which its actions are assessed and deem to be unlawful.
Conference participants are well aware of Israel’s countless violations against our people and land, including in East Jerusalem. So, in the interest of time, I will not go into full detail. But it is essential to consider the extent of these crimes, as we reflect on the law and the protections it provides. The most glaring of Israeli violations in Jerusalem include, but are not limited:
1. Construction of settlements and the Wall in and around the city, which, along with numerous checkpoints, have intensified its isolation, severing it from its natural Palestinian environs and the rest of the Palestinian population and fragmenting the Palestinian land;
2. Transfer of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers to the city, with thousands implanted in entirely-Palestinian neighborhoods, including in quarters of the Old City.
3. Seizure and demolition of Palestinian homes and properties, causing forced displacement of Palestinian families, in addition to the revocation of the residency rights and eviction of thousands of Palestinian Jerusalemites.
4. The prolonged closure of Palestinian political and cultural institutions in the city.
5. Provocations, inflammatory rhetoric and incitement by Israeli government officials, from the Prime Minister on down, as well as by extremist settlers and Jewish zealots, targeting Al-Haram Al-Sharif in particular and dangerously stoking tensions and religious sensitivities.
6. Excavations near and around holy sites, undermining their sanctity and stability.
7. Collective punishment of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, with constant arrests and detention of civilians, and military raids of homes and neighborhoods; denial of so-called “permits” for building housing and infrastructure, including schools and health facilities; and the ghettoization of the Palestinian community and suffocation of its economy, including through imposition of severe movement restrictions on the rest of the Palestinian population, to access what was once the country’s commercial and cultural center, causing high unemployment, poverty and a deep sense of despair, especially among our youth and as evident in the desolation of the city’s refugee camps and neighborhoods, including, for example, the Shu’fat camp.
These policies have been carried out by every single Israeli Government since 1967, in grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Additional Protocol 1 and, since 2008, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and in violation of countless Security Council and General Assembly resolutions and the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.
From my perspective of over two decades at the UN, international law has, in the absence of a just solution, preserved Palestinian rights in the City and averted a fait accompli in spite of all of Israel’s illegal schemes and measures aimed at negating Palestinian rights and very existence in East Jerusalem and creating an artificial Jewish majority there in order to solidify its annexation plans since 1967.
Of course, it is true that the status of the entire City remains unresolved. Regrettably, however, the law was unable to protect Jerusalem from Israel’s seizure of the western part of the City in 1948 in contempt of the General Assembly’s designation of Jerusalem as a “corpus separatum”, in accordance with resolution 181 (II), by which Palestine was unjustly, unlawfully and forcibly partitioned 70 years ago. As Israel went on to seize lands far beyond the partition, amounting to 78 percent of Palestine, the 1949 Armistice Line would later become the 1967 border, or Green Line, and that territory has been designated for decades now as the geographical space for future Palestinian independence and sovereignty as per the two-State solution.
Here, I acknowledge, as was exchanged during the discussion today, that there are differing views on the two-State solution versus the one-State solution or any other solution. However, the fact remains that, up until the present, this solution is the primary component of the consensus international position – the position shared by States in the United Nations – regarding the parameters of a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and this compromise was accepted by the PLO, nearly thirty years ago, in the context of the 1988 Declaration of Independence of the State of Palestine. The two-State solution thus remains central to numerous UN resolutions on Palestine to the present day, until a determination is made otherwise, and it can, with a change in strategy, but we are not there.
To further respond to concerns in this regard, I’d like to quickly highlight an assertion made recently by the Executive Director of Al-Shabaka, Ms. Nadia Hijab, that, despite the perceived unfairness, unviability or impracticality of the two-State solution, we must not let go of the 1967 line or in any way assist Israel in negating that line or the international legal provisions applicable to this situation of occupation, only facilitating Israel’s attempts to normalize and sanctify its conquest of territory.
As she states, “despite all of its maneuvering, Israel has not yet been able to erase the Green Line altogether and legalize the permanent acquisition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory…Even though the international community has not held Israel accountable in an effective way, it will not sign off on Israel’s colonization project and give it legitimacy in the eyes of the world.” She emphasizes this as central to the importance of UN Security Council resolution 2334 (2016), which was adopted last December, which among other things, reaffirmed the illegality of Israel’s settlement campaign and annexation measures in the Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, stressing that “this is why Israel’s response to 2334 was so angry: its ability to erase the Green Line took a major hit”. Indeed, regardless of Israel’s insistence that the entirety of Jerusalem is its so-called “united and eternal capital”, the fact remains that its 1980 annexation of East Jerusalem remains unrecognized by nearly every country in the world. Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem remains that of an occupying Power, and its control and actions continue to be considered unlawful.
This was explicitly reiterated by the Security Council as recently as 2016, when in resolution 2334, it underscored “it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem”, and called on States “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”. In this way, international law, as enshrined in UN resolutions, has preserved East Jerusalem’s status as occupied and as an integral part of the Palestinian Territory. These resolutions have prevented the granting of legitimacy to Israel’s illegal measures and safeguarded the city’s holy sites, including the “historic status quo” at Al-Haram Al-Sharif, in place for decades, even preceding the occupation.
Moreover, the law has served to protect Palestinian rights in and to the city, including in regards of their national rights and aspirations to independence, as the territory occupied in 1967 has been recognized by the UN General Assembly as the patrimony of the Palestinian people on which they should be enabled to exercise their right to self-determination and freedom in the context of an historic compromise aimed at ensuring a just and lasting peace.
So, far from simply being “words on paper”, as some critics tend to refer to UN resolutions, they are actually significant to shaping global views; reinforcing longstanding positions despite the passage of time and Israel’s feverish attempts to alter facts on the ground, especially in Jerusalem; and ensure the applicability of international law in all aspects, until Palestinian rights and a just solution are ultimately achieved.
We witnessed invocation of longstanding principles in response to hostile Israeli actions in Jerusalem again this past July. Provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque galvanized Palestinians in peaceful protests by the thousands, underscoring Jerusalem’s centrality to our cause and its sensitivity to all Palestinians, Muslim and Christian, religious and secular, young and old, and also once again highlighting the legendary resilience of our people and their readiness to stand firm against the occupation’s crimes. These events also led to mobilization by the governments of Palestine, as well as Jordan, in its role as custodian of the holy sites in the City, along with other regional and international partners, intensifying pressure on Israel through messaging that such actions would not be tolerated and must be ceased.
Similarly, the threats of the new US administration to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem – an incendiary pledge made by one candidate after another in every presidential election campaign in contradiction of longstanding US policy not recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the city – triggered a flurry of diplomatic and political activity earlier this year to prevent such a move, cautioning of its dangers and reaffirming international legislation in this regard, the majority supported by the US, or at least not vetoed by it.
As stressed earlier, this could be noted in the effects of the latest resolution on the matter, Security Council resolution 2334 (2016), which unequivocally reaffirmed the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force as well as other applicable rules of international law – contrary to Israel’s constant efforts to divorce the issue entirely from the law and entirely from international engagement.
As you will recall, resolution 2334 was adopted at the end of last year, at the end of the Obama Presidency, after an eight-year dry spell in the Security Council due to US opposition that has historically shielded Israel from censure and accountability, inevitably fostering further impunity rather than a cessation of its crimes. Again – to the cynics – yes, resolution 2334 is far less than we need or deserve, but it is what was possible and is important, for we can only imagine what the situation might be in the absence of such a resolution and how much more exploitative Israel would be in its attempts to blur the lines and impose its annexation schemes under an administration like the current one or any other in power.
These resolutions therefore remain of immense value, sustaining long-held legal positions based on the law, rather than allowing for the emergence of arbitrary positions based on the sentiment of the day, and remain meaningful, despite repetition over the decades and despite the lack of political will, up until now, to enforce the law.
Here in this regard, many may not know that the General Assembly annually adopts a resolution on Jerusalem. That resolution reaffirms that “all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purported to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, in particular the so-called ‘Basic Law’ on Jerusalem and the proclamation of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel are null and void” and must be ceased and rescinded.
This resolution receives overwhelming support to this day in the General Assembly and will be voted on once more on the 30th of November.
Security Council resolutions on Jerusalem are equally explicit, with numerous resolutions adopted since 1948. At least thirteen of those resolutions have been adopted by the Council since 1967 with specific reference to the situation in Jerusalem.
As early in the occupation as 1968, the Council declared in resolution 252 that “all legislative and administrative measures taken by Israel…, which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change that status”, and called on Israel “to rescind all such measures and to desist forthwith from taking any further action which tends to change the status of Jerusalem”. Such pronouncements would be repeated in subsequent resolutions, refined and strengthened as Israel’s non-compliance and mal-intent became more obvious.
In resolution 298 (1971), for example, the Council went on to deplore “the failure of Israel to respect the previous resolutions adopted by the United Nations concerning the measures and actions by Israel purporting to affect the status of the City of Jerusalem”, including expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations and legislation aimed at incorporation of the occupied section all of which the Council said are invalid and cannot change that status. By 1979, in its resolution 446, the Council explicitly determined that Israel’s policy of colonizing the territories, including East Jerusalem, was unlawful and called on Israel to rescind all such measures.
Later, in resolutions 672 (1990), 1073 (1996), and 1322 (2000), the Council addressed developments regarding Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Haram Al-Sharif, using that specific terminology, which is also used by the General Assembly to this day, as opposed to current trends in the US and Europe adopting the Israeli terminology of “Temple Mount” to refer to this site, alongside its Islamic-Arab name. In this regard, we all know that words matter and that their distortion, including of names, can constitute the first step towards altering history, identity, and status, thus making such articulations in international legislation significant.
In 1980, the Security Council also called not just upon the government of Israel but also the people of Israel to cease on an urgent basis the establishment, construction and planning of settlements in the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, and stressed the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967 including Jerusalem. Thirty-six years later, this call was made again by the Council to the occupation. Indeed, all of these decisions made across five decades, sound as though they could have been made just yesterday, as all violations continued to the present day, compelling the Council to make these calls over and over again, yet to no avail.
So some may ask then: how has UN legislation helped to remedy the situation, since it has clearly only worsened as a result of the occupation’s crimes and blatant disrespect for UN authority? I would posit that the problem is not in UN resolutions, but rather in their lack of implementation, and here lies the gap between international law and the reality on the ground. And, this gap between the law and its implementation is at the core of this continuing injustice. There is a harsh disconnect between the legal positions adopted by States and actual measures being taken by States to uphold the law in order to hold Israel accountable for its violations and compel its compliance.
To remedy that gap between legislation and implementation, there are respective roles that must be played by diplomats, governments, civil society, activists and the public, each role essential and reinforcing of the other. As diplomats we use the diplomatic legal, diplomatic tools available to us, to pursue this day in, day out, year in, year out – not just on the day or two we might make the headlines in any given year – and we continue to do so. Although the difficulties and setbacks are immense, we cannot relent in this regard. For, despite prevalent misperceptions, UN resolutions, ICJ Advisory Opinions, and such clear affirmations of our people’s rights do not happen simply by the UN’s good grace or the international community’s unconditional care and generosity towards Palestine. This has been painfully proven by history.
If Palestine’s representatives don’t give voice to our people’s plight and continuously draw attention to the occupation’s violations; if we don’t advocate for our rights; if we don’t draft and negotiate each and every word and line; and lobby for each and every cosponsor and each and every vote, then these resolutions would likely cease to exist and we would lose an important part of our struggle in the realm of the international arena and international legitimacy.
I had a little bit more to say but I will conclude in order to give enough time to the rest of the participants.
Dr. Lawrence Davidson:
Hello. My name is Lawrence Davidson and I’m going to talk to you about BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – and I’m going to try to do that [Off screen voice says, “in fifteen”]…. You bet, yup.
My premise here is that Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, otherwise known as BDS, actually works. And when I say it works, I mean it begins to raise the cost to the Israelis of ignoring the otherwise position of states, in theory, about condemnation of their racist and colonialist behavior. So again, if we’ve got international law, and there’s this disconnect, between the law and its enforcement, we’ve got to have a way of raising the cost of violating the law. At least in the West, the BDS [movement] seems to be one of those ways.
If you go to the website of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, you can find a list of 200 recent victories in the US all within the Boycott and Divestment categories. Sanctions, or course, are a little harder to come by, but they’re working on it. Success in this particular area has of course generated fierce resistance, fierce pushback by the Zionists, and to the degree that they’re pushed back one can assume that that’s a way of measuring the success of the BDS.
The Israeli government, according to an article in the Huffington Post has reportedly committed tens of millions of dollars, one whole government ministry, and elements of its military and security intelligence assets to fight against the BDS. Of course there this infamous statement by the Israeli Minister of Transport, Yisrael Katz who said, “Why don’t we just target the BDS leaders for civil elimination.” So, Ok, we don’t have any metal detectors at the door?
Actually, this reaction reflects the fact that the Zionist have lost the public debate when it comes to their behavior towards the Palestinians. They’ve lost the public debate. And so, having done so, they then retreat, for the most part, and focus their efforts on public officials, on corporate boards, on university boards of trustees, where they can apply either ideological or financial influence, in order to compensate for their inability to win a debate over these issues. It’s the direction that this influence is taking the modern world that I think has to be recognized.
So Israel, for instance, is a society that should be seen as a product of the pre-World War II colonial era. I think the brouhaha over the Balfour Declaration is one demonstration of the fact that Israel even in terms of how it sees its legitimacy goes back to a pre-modern colonial era. So the Balfour Declaration, for instance is an imperial and colonial document in which a European power promised a non-European parcel of land to another European people, and essentially did so, to quote Edward Said, “in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in the territory.”
That flat disregard was in perfect harmony, perfectly accepted by Europeans and westerners generally within a colonial cultural context. So no, for instance, if you look at the debate within the British War Cabinet nobody challenged the British representative of an empire to do this. They had logistical and tactical objections, some of them, but nobody said, “Oh, you don’t have the right to do that.” And as a consequence, you get this European settler community implanted in what was at that time the midst of 700,000 Arabs. Given the end for which the Zionists pushed, that is given the exclusive ethno-religious ends of that particular settler community to create a state first and foremost for one group only, overt racist policies and laws were absolutely inevitable, absolutely inevitable. You can’t do it any other way. You can’t take one group, put them down in the midst of an alien group, and have that one group’s goal being an exclusive community for it alone, and not end up with ethnic cleansing, racist laws. You can’t do it any other way. But within a pre-World War II colonial environment, nobody in the West would question it. I wouldn’t say no-one, but most people would not.
However, today, things have changed. Today, most of us understand that these behaviors and these beliefs are morally reprehensible and that their consequences should be remedied. And so, to the extent that modern people share this sense of moral repulsion, the world has really changed. Today we live in a post-colonial environment where an imperialism is thought by most people to be a negative thing of the past. That has real consequences. That means that Israel and the Zionist project are anachronisms, much like apartheid in South Africa was an anachronism, all products of a previous era.
And it follows from that fact that for Israel to be truly accepted into the modern world, one of two things has to happen. Either Israel has to change, and when I say it has to change, I say it has to become a non-colonial settler state. It has to give up Zionism. Or [#] 2, the world must revert back to an acceptance of at least some of the colonial practices of the 19th century. Now you would think that choosing the anti-racist option there, and therefore taking seriously the pressuring of Israel, seriously pressuring that state, as was done with South Africa, to fundamentally change, you’d think that that option would be the obvious choice of today’s statesmen. But it’s not.
There is now an ongoing effort, and I’m sure we all can recognize it if we think about it. There’s an ongoing effort, we might call it an updated Zionist project to move the world backward so that it accepts some of the racist past practices. This is done by an attack two-ways: an attack on international law, to the extent that it tries to predict human rights; and this attack on international in respect to human rights is very ironic because a lot of that law is the product of a reaction to not see crimes against Jews. The Zionists are attacking this anyway.
So there’s an effort to push the world back so that it accepts these colonial practices by attacking international law is it pertains to human rights. And [#] 2, an attack on the United Nations, and its efforts to protect human rights who are Palestinian specifically. What this means is that the BDS is part of a struggle to prevent this retrograde movement. It’s a tactic to defend modernity, modern decency. So it’s part of an effort to help save international law, the integrity of international law, human rights, civil rights, the rule of law really for all of us. Here in the United States, the right to wage this struggle in the form of boycott and divestment is wrapped up in an effort to protect our constitutional right to free speech. And this is all because BDS has become successful.
It’s got the potential to do to Israel what the same kind of movement did to South Africa. And that’s why the Israelis are so uptight about it. Because it has this potential, Israel and its surrogates in the US and Europe are willing to destroy or undermine the very laws and rights that help uphold civilization as we know it in a post-colonial scenario, post-colonial era.
So BDS is more than just the tactic. It’s like a symbol of modernity. As goes BDS, so goes the First Amendment, so goes international human rights, civil rights and what have you. That’s why we all have to protect and support the BDS. I gave all my extra minutes to Sara Roy.
Dr. Sara Roy:
Well first of all, I want to thank the members of, or the organizers of the Palestine Center for inviting me. I’m very glad to be back. Perhaps it’s fitting that I should be the last speaker since I’m going to take the conversation down to the ground level in Gaza. And I’m going to speak to you from a piece that is soon to be published which I wrote based on a trip I made to Gaza a little over a year ago. And this is an accounting of what, most importantly, of what people told me, what they wanted me to communicate, what I saw and what I came to understand.
It was my last day in Gaza. I was in a UN bus with several UNRWA employees, leaving for the Erez checkpoint at Gaza’s border with Israel. This was after a very intensive week of interviews. We were driving along Omar al-Moukhtar Street, one of the main commercial streets in Gaza City. The bus stopped at a red light at a very busy intersection and I was staring out the window and noticed below me in a lane next to ours an old man in a car. He held a pita bread in his hand and was attempting to make a sandwich with some other food I didn’t recognize.
Suddenly the old man looked up from his sandwich and motioned to a young boy who was no more than eleven or twelve years standing on the sidewalk, pedaling packs of cigarettes he held in a big wooden tray. The tray hung like a millstone around the boy’s neck, the weight too much to bear for such a small child. The young boy approached the old man and a brief exchange ensued. I assumed the old man was going to buy a pack of cigarettes, but instead the young boy handed him two individual cigarettes, which it seemed was all he could afford. The old man paid the boy and then in a gesture that surprised the youngster the man threw half of his pita sandwich into the boy’s tray. He scurried away and I kept staring at the old man thinking about his small but generous act of kindness. As our bus began to move, I looked up and I saw the young boy at the corner of the intersection voraciously eating his half of the pita sandwich, and he ate with a hunger that stunned me.
So much has been written about Gaza, her economic decline and political dysfunction, and the unending predictions of an imminent war. “Why even talk about Gaza?”, a friend of mine asked rhetorically. But that of course is not the right question. The far more relevant and difficult question, especially now, is “How is one to talk about Gaza?” And what follows is my attempt at an answer, and again I’m just going to read excerpts.
[She reads the title of her article:]“We are people who can float in an inch of water”.
Gaza is in a state of humanitarian shock due primarily to Israel’s intensified closure or blockade now in its eleventh year, and disgracefully supported by the US, the EU, and Egypt among other countries. The blockade, coupled with three assaults in six years, has created severe hardship, as you all know. It has ruined Gaza’s economy, largely by ending normal trade relations upon which Gaza’s tiny economy depends. Gaza, historically a place of trade and commerce, has very low levels of production at present, largely reduced to one common denominator, and that is consumption. An easing of Israel’s restrictions on certain agricultural exports and limited industrial exports over the last three years has eased conditions slightly but has failed to rehabilitate Gaza’s productive sectors. Gaza’s disability deliberately and consciously planned and successfully executed, has left almost half the labor force without any means to earn a living. Unemployment, and especially youth unemployment, was the defining factor in all my conversations with people.
Overall unemployment now hovers around 42 percent, and it has been higher, while for young people between 15 and 29 years, it stands at least at 60 percent. At least 70 percent of the population receives international assistance, humanitarian assistance without which they could not meet their basic needs. Personal need is everywhere. But what is new in my long experience of Gaza is the sense of desperation, which can be felt in the different ways people behave and respond, and the boundaries they are willing to cross that once were inviolate. Such behavior is not hidden, but in full view, an emerging feature of daily life.
In one painful example, a well-appointed woman, her face fully covered by a niqab came to the Marna House Hotel where I was staying. And she came to beg. When politely asked to leave by the hotel staff, she aggressively refused and insisted on staying, raising her voice in anger, obliging the hotel staff to forcefully remove her from the premises. She clearly was not asking to stay and beg but demanding to do so. I’ve never seen this before in Gaza.
In another instance, also at the Marna House, I was sitting with a colleague in the hotel restaurant when a boy, a teenager with acne on his face, came to our table, quietly pleading for money for his family. By the time I reached for my wallet, the wait staff had approached and gently ushered him out of the restaurant, and he did not resist, unlike the woman in the niqab. This young boy was well-dressed and clearly well-educated and I kept thinking that he should be at home studying for an exam or out with his friends by the sea. Instead he was begging and humiliated, asked to leave the hotel and never return.
Perhaps the most alarming indicator of people’s desperation is the growth of prostitution in Gaza’s traditional and conservative society. Although prostitution has always been present to varying but very limited degrees in Gaza, it was always considered shameful and immoral, carrying immense social consequences for the woman and her family. This appears to be changing as individual and family resources dissolve. A colleague who is a well-known and highly respected professional in Gaza told me that women, many of them well-dressed, have come to his office soliciting him, and “not for a lot of money”. He also told me that because of the rise of prostitution it has become harder for girls to get married, because “no one knows who is pure”. Families also plead with him to provide a clean and decent space for their daughters by employing them in his office.
Another friend told me, while sitting in a restaurant, he witnessed a young woman trying to solicit a man with her parents at a nearby table. When I asked him how he explained such incomprehensible behavior, he responded by saying, “People who live in a normal environment behave normally. People who live in an abnormal environment, do not.” Abnormality in Gaza is also seen in a rising suicide rates from hanging, immolation, jumping from heights, drug overdose, ingestion of pesticides, and firearms. Gaza’s divorce rate, historically low, at two percent, now approaches 40 percent, according to the UN and local health care professionals. In fact, I had a conversation with a friend in Gaza just two days ago and he was telling me that a friend and colleague of his who’s a judge in the Sharia courts in Gaza told him that in one day he had 29 cases of divorce, which was a peak for him.
There are two thousand domestic disputes a month in Al-Shati Camp, said an UNRWA official and the police cannot cope. The courts alone receive hundreds of complaints every month. The Hamas government cannot deal with the number of problems and around 40 percent of Gaza’s youth want to emigrate. One must also remember that around three quarters of Gaza’s approximately two million people is 29 years old and younger, and remains confined to Gaza, prohibited from leaving the territory and most never have.
Amid such disempowerment young people have increasingly turned towards militancy as a livelihood, joining different militant and extremist organizations simply to secure a paying job. Person after person argued that growing support for extremist factions in Gaza does not emanate from political or ideological belief, although that is true for certain people, but from the need to feed their families. One colleague, himself a religious Muslim, argued to me, “If the Israelis were smart, they would open two or three industrial zones, do a security check, and find the most wanted among us and employ them. El-Qassam would evaporate very quickly and everyone would be more secure. There is a difference,” he said, “between what is said in the mosques and what people would settle for. I tell, the mosques would be empty.”
I repeatedly heard about former El-Qassam fighters who left the organization when they obtained new homes in one of Gaza’s housing projects, not wanting to risk the security of their home as a possible Israeli target. In a similar vein, a local businessman told me, “What we need is Israeli factories in Palestinian hands. One sack of cement employs 35 people in Gaza, with one worker in Israel, you have seven people in Gaza praying for Israel’s security. Imagine, a ‘Made in Gaza’ brand. We could market regionally and it would sell like hotcakes. Gaza would benefit and so would Israel. All we want are open borders for export.”
[sub-heading from article] “To be rich in Gaza”
Amid Gaza’s misery and impoverishment lies a striking contrast, an in consistency, as it were, Gaza’s privileged. This sector is tiny, and the number I kept hearing was 50,000, but highly visible. For some, their wealth derives from the now almost defunct tunnel trade, which once kept Gaza’s economy functioning, even thriving, albeit artificially under Israel’s damaging closure. The existence of this miniscule sector of affluence is sometimes used to argue that conditions in Gaza are much better than portrayed. The privileged, historically vital to local production, are consumers of goods, since relatively little is produced in Gaza right now. They, together with a fluctuating tourism sector, fill Gaza’s hotels, shopping malls and restaurants that have grown in response to their demand. I call it the “Gaza bubble”, others call it a welcome sign of normalcy. One human rights worker told me that the fastest growing business in Gaza City today is restaurants because they are one of the few profitable activities left in the Strip.
The pervasive consumerism that characterizes the prosperous in Gaza is certainly not specific to the territory and nor is the great disparity in class and scale. Of course, people should not be denied the right to consume whatever they want. Yet, like the vast majority of Gazans, the affluent are also confined and beleaguered. Enraged and demeaned by their inability to live freely and with any real semblance of predictability. One of Gaza’s richest and most successful businessmen spent an evening with me pouring out his frustration and describing in painstaking detail the restrictions imposed on his business by Israel, which used to be an essential market: “The Israelis are destroying my business, my ability to work, and why? They squeeze, squeeze, squeeze towards what end? Where will this bring all of us?”
Others were present at this evening, all of them members of Gaza’s social and economic elite, and no one could see a way out. The evening alternated between exasperation and silence, always ending in irresolution. Yet my friend’s disgrace, and fundamentally that is what it is, does not derive from any sense of defeat, but from the knowledge that no amount of reason, law, or morality has had or will have any impact of their situation. To the contrary, appeals based on fairness, principle or rationality have only brought them more destruction.
Those who are considered privileged in Gaza are not necessarily people with a great deal of money. They are also people with a source of income. There are those who do what they can to help others. But amid the despair that now permeates Gaza, charity is no longer a simple, unencumbered act of giving. It is burdened with a set of expectations and demands that can never be satisfied. A dear friend of mine from a prominent Gaza family described his dilemma: “After paying my taxes to Hamas, new fees springing up all the time, household expenses, food and helping friends, I’m depleting my personal funds. Soon I will have to sell some assets just to pay my bills. Yes, I am much better off than most people here, and I do what I can to help others, but where does it stop? The tragedy of this situation,” he said, “is that friends look at you as a source of money, and friendships end when you can no longer provide that money. Think of what it takes to make people behave in this way. No one seems to be considering the pressure it takes to change one’s core values. This is what we have been reduced to. This was never Gaza.”
Now I want to briefly read from a section called, “Questioning Hamas and God” which I found to be one of the most interesting findings from my trip, and there’s a whole section here on Hamas, which I’m not going to be ready but will be happy to discuss during the Q&A.
There is also in Gaza a struggle to create a normal society, there always has been. Some people, no doubt more than I realize, have not abandoned possibility and creative resistance. They see scarcity as a catalyst for change and their work assumes a variety of forms. One uses religion to reexamine social behavior and to critique it. This is altogether new in Gaza and it is quite stunning. Although the trend amongst some in Gaza is to turn to religion as a refuge, there has emerged a counter trend that also seeks refuge of another sort. This is how it was explained to me and admittedly I did not have the time on this trip to examine this claim more deeply. The misconduct and fraudulence that is now associated with Hamas and the inability to challenge it in any meaningful and effective manner have given rise to social commentary and critique on Hamas’s social conduct that uses religion as its analytical instrument. This critique is not about life conditions in Gaza but about the use of religion by Hamas as a coercive tool and justification for abusive behavior. By linking political behavior to religion, and using religion to judge the defects in that behavior, people are “putting power on the defensive” in an altogether unprecedented way, at least in Gaza. This critique is taking place entirely on social media, facebook, twitter, whatsapp, beyond the control of Hamas, which is apparently very frustrated by its inability to control or extinguish the increasingly harsh commentary.
According to my sources, the social media phenomenon reaches tens of thousands of followers. For example, I heard about a story of a cow and the brutal, unconscionable way the animal was slaughtered. The cow’s cruel treatment apparently became an internet sensation, viewed by thousands. While some people justified the slaughter in the name of Islam, others railed against it, asking, “Is this Islam? Why are we behaving like this?” A vibrant exchange apparently followed. The critique my respondents argued is all the more astonishing because it is not confined to a religious critique of Hamas alone but increasingly and carefully includes the idea of Islam and God as well. The emerging questioning of religion and God, an incendiary act by any measure in the Middle East, represents a potential “earthquake” in the Islamic world, and there I am quoting another friend. And it continues to grow. Given the enormous risks associated with even engaging in such a discourse, to do so is a courageous act and one in my view that speaks powerfully to the non-existence of other viable and acceptable options, and it certainly bears watching.
Gaza too is home to other forms of creative thinking and rebuilding. A burgeoning of cultural production – art, theatre, photography, and music – and volunteerism among the young is apparently growing. A range of initiatives has emerged that attempt in their own way to address Gaza’s predicament. Without a guiding and functioning central authority, these efforts are by nature, self-contained and confined, still they remain persistent and vibrant. They include the renewal of small-scale agriculture, human rights monitoring, mental health rehabilitation, and research into trauma, environmental repair and technological innovation. The last was strongly emphasized. Gaza has a highly talented tech-savvy population. “If ever there were peace,” an American investor stated, “Gaza’s internet sector would become another India.” The number of internet users in Gaza is reportedly equal to that of Tel Aviv, and a limited number are subcontracting for companies in India, Bangladesh, and in Israel. The constraining factor in Gaza has never been insufficient talent.
So here are my concluding remarks: Perhaps the most striking feature of life in Gaza is attenuation, a narrowing of space and the certainty of that space as a place to live, and a narrowing of desire, expectation and vision. Given the immense difficulties of everyday life, the particular and the mundane, having enough food, water, electricity, or clothing have been elevated to an aspiration. Concerns have been paired as have yearnings. They have become inward looking and confined, focused understandably on self and family. When a friend of mine asked some of his students, “What is your wish?”, they answered “A new pair of pants, a new shirt, and ice cream from the shop on Omar al-Moukhtar Street.” The craving is not for a homeland and the fear is not its absence. The craving is for a livelihood, no matter how meagre, clean water and sanctuary. And the fear is that they are unattainable. Within such incarceration, there is simply no place for dreams. “Why dream”, someone said, “when opportunities do not exist and dreams cannot be created? Why plan when there is little if any possibility of realizing those plans, and why even resist when it is unclear who should be resisting, who will benefit, and what it will achieve?”
So how then does one even begin to think about the greater good, of moving forward as a society, a future that was so defining in the first intifada which too many young people in Gaza know little if anything about. In fact, I was struck by how little young but well-educated adults I met knew of the first intifada and the Oslo years, and how acutely young Palestinians in Gaza are embedded in the present day. In this way not only are they disconnected from their future, they are also disconnected from their very recent past and the many important and now apparently lost lessons contained within it. My friend, the professional I mentioned earlier, said, “People are afraid to enter the world, or they enter it defensively with weapons. Our openness to the world is narrowing more and more, and people are afraid of leaving Gaza because they do not know how to cope with the world outside, like a prisoner who has been released from prison after years of confinement. People must be taught to think more broadly, otherwise we are lost.”
“What do the Israelis want?” This question was asked of me repeatedly with each questioner looking at me searchingly, even imploringly for some answer, for some insight they clearly felt they did not have. Stated a colleague in his early 50s, “If the Israelis were thinking everyone could benefit, all they must do is give us a window to live a normal life and all these extremist groups would disappear. Our generation wants to make peace, and it is foolish for Israel to refuse because the next generation may not be as willing.”
During the first six months of 2016, the Ministry of Interior reported that 24,138 babies were born in the Gaza Strip, averaging 132 babies per day. During the month of August 2016 alone 4,961 babies were born in Gaza or 160 babies per day, over 6 babies every hour and one baby every 9 minutes. The distance between Gaza City and Tel Aviv is 44 miles. “What will Israel do?” asked a friend, “when there are 5 million Palestinians living in Gaza?” Thank you.
