"Azza kemavet" ("Eyeless in Gaza"), by Shlomi Eldar, Yedioth Ahronoth Books, Sifrei Hemed, 326 pages, NIS 88
The Gaza that emerges from the pages of Shlomi Eldar's book is not another paradigm of a landscape of a dreamy and desired homeland. In Gaza there is no room either for life or songbirds, for the dead or the contents of the garbage bins. Gaza is shriveled up geographically, crowded by any international criterion, and young with respect to the age of its population. It is inhabited by refugee camps that have burgeoned to monstrous size, imbued with religious belief and a traditional way of life that sanctifies family frameworks and a conservative way of life. All of this has given rise to islands of fanatical fervor, strong urges for determined resistance and continuing belligerence.
"Azza kemavet" ("Eyeless in Gaza") is not a book of broad brush strokes or of sweeping claims in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian reality. It does not speak in the language of wishes or wrathful prophecies. It is not trapped in the talons of sweeping generalizations or in the charm of theoretical misconceptions. In essence the book avoids joining the relentless preoccupation with the mazes of Israeli policy, the Palestinian arena, the ideological contents of the Hamas or the Islamic Jihad, the murderousness of the Izz al-din al-Qassam Brigades, which belong to Hamas, or the Tanzim that has been engendered by the Fatah movement.
"I do not take from the Palestinians," declares Eldar in a kind of statement of intentions, "the irresponsibility for the murderous terror attacks that have cost the lives of many innocent people. I do not argue that the Palestinians have been innocent of disastrous errors ... These arguments have been put forward in innumerable books and articles. I am continuing to try to understand and to this end I spend many long days and nights in Gaza. I meet people who are called the man in the street, who just want to live like human beings. The workers on their way to and from their jobs in Israel, the unemployed who spend their days on their doorstep and have already despaired of the hope of finding work and improving the conditions of their lives. I also meet leaders of all stripes, the leaders of Hamas, trying to understand their way of thinking and whether it is possible to bridge between their perception of the world and the Israeli perception of 'peace and security'; I meet with released prisoners for whom their unmediated encounter with Israelis has changed their attitude toward us, and in contrast to them, the wanted men, who have Israeli blood on their hands. And children. Many children who have been born into an impossible reality, and who knows what future awaits them and how their future will affect us and our children."
Three facets"Eyeless in Gaza" is an extraordinary book, which has been written from an anthropological perspective by a sensible and knowledgeable person, who has observed the lives of individuals from up close, who has spent time in the homes of families and documented in real time the events and the circumstances that have shaped the wrinkled and furrowed visage of Gaza's bleak reality. This reality, as it is reflected in the book, focuses on three facets that together create a panoramic, comprehensive social picture.
The first facet concentrates on what Eldar ironically calls the "the Palestine academy for command and staff." This "academy" was founded by the Palestinian prisoners in the Israeli prisons. It has detailed curricula aimed at imbuing the values of national consciousness, education to discipline and good behavior, and general studies within the context of courses of the Open University, which necessitate the study of the Hebrew language. The books of A.B. Yehoshua, along with biographies of Israeli leaders, have become hits.
Mohammed Dahlan, Sufyan Abu Zaydeh, Sami Abu Samhadana, Samir Mashrahawi, Hisham Abu Razak, Rashid Abu Shabak, Ihab al-Ashkar and others are among the graduates of the so-called academy that is active inside Israeli prison walls. They, in turn, have become recognized leaders and key figures in the Gazan political arena. With the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, in the summer of 1994, it was the local political consciousness that had been nourished by the geographical closure and the distance from political centers that sharpened the difference between the released inmates from Gaza and Yasser Arafat. Some of them, such as Al-Ashkar, did not hesitate to enter into confrontations with Arafat for fear that Gaza?s interests and their place in the PA institutions would be pushed aside. This repeated itself in April 2003, in the connection between Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Dahlan's people, with the aim of compelling Arafat to delegate governing authority to then prime minister-designate Abu Mazen. The Gazans, despite Arafat's control of the PA mechanisms, refused to give up.
The second aspect is the struggle for physical and psychological survival by the inhabitants who are trapped in the eye of the storm of the continuing intifada and the collapsing economy. Eldar follows closely the reversals in the life of this human material that is comprised of families and individuals, women and men, children and adults, laborers alongside professionals and officials, wage-earners and self-employed, and extremists from the religious camp and from the nationalist camp.
'Not much remains'Eldar's protagonists are those laborers who gather in the early hours of the night at the Erez border crossing to ensure their place in the long line, in the hope of finding, at first light, another day's employment in Israel. This "army of hunger," as Eldar calls them, fights to remain human. These are the adults and the children, more than one-third of Gaza's populace, who suffer from attacks of anxiety and trauma syndromes as the result of bombardments, the noise of the airplanes and the sonic booms. They are also those who have been left without a roof over their heads and without property as the result of sweeping military decisions concerning house demolitions and the uprooting of trees in the name of a supreme security interest.
"Of the famous groves in Gaza not much remains," Eldar writes. "Most of the owners of the groves who picked their crops have lost everything. And those who have survived the race for survival ... lost their groves at the outbreak of the intifada and the beginning of the policy of 'exposure.' Of 130 tons of citrus fruit that the owners of the Gaza Strip exported each year, a total of only 30 tons remains."
The struggle for survival is thus one of the major factors shaping political consciousness. This consciousness, to paraphrase poet Natan Alterman, was created in people's homes and born in the markets, in the narrow streets of the refugee camps, among the trees that have been cut down in the groves, and in the long lines of goods and laborers waiting because of security checks - and less in the battlefields and political forums.
The third aspect focuses on the way the local populace perceives Israel, with its policy moves and economic and military measures. A feeling of victimization and a sense of being persecuted, along with a combination of vitality and anxiety, tragedy and stamina, are common motifs that arise from Eldar's conversations with a wide variety of local people. The conversation with Ihab al-Ashkar, a prominent leader in the first intifada and among the political prisoners, who was not deterred from coming out strongly against Arafat's behavior, gives succinct expression to this: "You are a new country, of about 50 ... You are the largest and strongest country in the Middle East. This has positive characteristics, but also negative things that have happened to you. Like a person who suddenly has a lot of money, so he thinks that he can buy himself even health and happiness and the joy of life. But this is impossible. You can't live in your home, in a villa or a palace, and all your neighbors have nothing to eat. You can't behave toward people as though they are donkeys. You can think that they are donkeys, but you must not behave toward them in that way.
"You say that the people here are animals, you say that they are terrorists, you say that Islam has made the people who live in Gaza crazy. So I say: If you are fed up with the occupation, or with maintaining connections with the uncivilized, the impolite and the uneducated here, look for another people to occupy. "
Fanning the flamesA statement made repeatedly by Gaza leaders and other inhabitants is that the aggregate of military means and the economic measures taken by Israel - aimed at forcing a reality upon the Palestinians that would bring about an end to the intifada - suffered from a lack of sensitivity, were flawed by mistaken judgment and achieved the exact opposite. The restrictions in the economic realm, the military incursions, the endless bombings and the targeted assassinations did not succeed in overcoming the terror and causing the population to withdraw its support from it or its identification with it. In their opinion, all of these fanned the flames and prevented exploitation of opportunities that could have led to early dialogue between the sides.
"The Israelis lost control," says Samir Mashrahawi. "The logic that guided them was flawed. The Israelis did not determine how to deal with the intifada. Is it their wish to destroy the PA, or perhaps to hit the armed men and the leaders? They did not even decide whether to concentrate on the opposition, Hamas and Jihad, which led the big terror attacks. As far as they were concerned, all of them were a target for attack. If Hamas carried out a suicide terror attack in Tel Aviv, they attacked a PA installation. Even if the terror attack was in the West Bank, they attacked in Gaza ... In that way they enlisted the Palestinians in the intifada."
"Eyeless in Gaza," more than any other book, invites rethinking of Israel's conduct in the Palestinian thicket and gives rise to questions about the strategy that presumes to apply Israeli logic to the need to understand the reality on the other side. The principle at the basis of Eldar's book is that in going into Gaza, a defensive suit of well-formulated skepticism should be preferred to one made of materials of absolute certainty. The latter comprises the danger of nurturing the thinking that leads to unconsidered reactions and to moves that border on irrelevance.
Thus, in the sands of Gaza lie much mistaken reasoning and many insufficient truths. Everything might have been different had we known how to listen to the sound of the buzz of the pain and not just to the flight of the Qassams.
Shaul Mishal's book, with Avraham Sela, "Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence" is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
