State-less Gazans lead miserable lives

Press, 20 February 1986, Page 39

State-less Gazans lead miserable lives

By

HUGH BARLOW,

NZPA Staff Correspondent Gaza The main road south from Tel Aviv travels through some of the most fertile and attractive countryside in Israel. Compared with the dry, rock-covered hills in the north and east of the country, the green plains dotted with date palms, eucalyptus trees and welltended citrus orchards seem like paradise.

The Middle East is known as a region of contrasts — old and new, poverty and wealth, sun and snow — and the contrast to the cultivated orderliness of southern Israel is more startling than most who travel the main road would realise.

It can be seen by anyone who turns right at the signpost marked “Gaza,” about 70km south of the capital. Few Israelis want to go to Gaza. Most tourists don’t even know it is there.

The Gaza Strip, a piece of land 50km long and 10km wide, hugs the Mediterranean on the border of Egypt and Israel. It is the saddest product of the years of hostility that have followed the creation of Israel in 1948.

It has escaped the international attention focused on the West Bank, the other area occupied by Israel after its success in the Six-Day War of 1967. To the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs crammed in to its dishevelled towns and refugee camps, the reality of living in an occupied area is even harsher than it is to the West-Bankers.

Mr Bill Lee, from the West Bank area office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, said: “Here on the West Bank it is subtle — a camp tucked behind a hill here, another merging into a town there. But in Gaza, it hits you right between the eyes.” Dr John Hiddlestone, a former Director-General of Health in New Zealand and now in charge of U.N.R.W.A.’s health programme, knows Gaza well.

“Gaza is the most depressing, sad, miserable place I’ve seen and I’ve travelled a lot,” he said In his Vienna office. The residents of Gaza, 430,000 of whom are classified as refugees, are stuck there. Neither Egypt, which controlled the area from 1948 after Palestine ceased to exist, nor Israel ever annexed it. Therefore, the Palestinians have no nationality and no passports. Most have an Egyptian document giving them limited travel rights. They can attend Egyptian universities but they cannot stay there to work, and opportunities in Gaza are extremely limited. The Palestinians’ passion for education, which

was fuelled by a scholarship scheme run by the former Egyptian president, Gamal Nasser, has perversely helped contribute to the depressed atmosphere in Gaza. “The tragic thing about Gaza is that it is full of highly educated people — lawyers, doctors, engineers — but they’re unemployed and not likely to be employed,” Dr Hiddlestone said.

“They are miserable, unhappy people ... One once said to me ‘the best we can hope for is to get a thermo-nuclear device and at least take some of them (Israelis) with us.’ He wasn’t joking. That’s the level it has reached.” An estimated half of Gaza’s work force is jobless. For many, obtaining a permit which allows them to travel to Israel each day offers the only hope of finding work. Every morning, between 60,000 and 70,000 Gazans squeeze into cars, buses, trucks and taxis and head into Israel. Some have jobs to go to, but most end up in “labour markets” in the cities, where they hope an Israeli contractor will pick them out of the crowd for a day’s work. The exodus begins around 3 a.m. for those with a long way to go — some travel as far as Haifa, 150 km to the north, and back each day — and by 6 a.m. there are still thousands preparing to leave.

One small group contained a qualified teacher, who had never worked in a classroom, and an accountant who had not seen a ledger since graduating in Cairo three years ago. Their friend, an engineer, sought labouring jobs on building sites. The vast majority of those lining the streets were men, but there were small groups of women and the occasional child. One boy, aged 12, explained he had had to leave school to seek work because his father alone could not earn enough.

Gaza looks like a sprawling prison complex. Israeli soldiers man checkpoints on roads into the area and constantly patrol the towns. Barbed wire and sentry towers abound.

The feeling of being trapped reaches its height at the border with Egypt. Across the no-man’s land and behind high fences is an enclave of refugee shelters housing 5000 people.

The residents found themselves stranded when the border was redrawn in 1982 after the Camp David accords of 1978. They cannot move back to Gaza and their friends and relatives cannot visit.

The Israeli and Egyptian Governments have promised to resolve the matter, but so far nothing has happened. Split families wanting to communicate have to stand behind fences about 50m apart

and shout to each other. The sole point of beauty on the Strip is the beach. But even the endless stretch of golden sand and palm trees has its darker side. Concern that the beach was being used to smuggle Palestinian fighters and arms into Gaza led the military to declare it out of bounds from sunset to sunrise. Curfew breakers are liable to be shot at.

Security considerations also led to most of Gaza’s fishing industry being closed down. Those fishermen still in business have to make sure their boats reach shore by dusk if they do not want to spend the night offshore.

The Israelis have not gone out of their way to endear themselves to the local population. Anyone asked to explain life in Gaza tells the same stories of children being shot, demolition of houses for offences such as throwing stones at Army vehicles, and continual harassment.

U.N.R.W.A. estimates that more than 20,000 rooms housing more than 9000 families have been demolished on the Gaza Strip since 1967.

Most were to allow the widening of roads in the camps “for security reasons.” Others were listed as having been voluntarily demolished by families moving to Gov-ernment-sponsored housing projects. But the remainder, affecting up to 1500 families, were levelled by Army bulldozers as a punishment. Families had to watch their homes turn into rubble because a family member had infringed security regulations. This is in spite of the outlawing of "collective punishment” by the Geneva Convention.

A former British Army officer who had been involved in security work in Northern Ireland and had visited Gaza said he was impressed “from a military point of view” by the Israelis.

“They were so tough. Anything they considered a security problem they dealt with absolutely ruthlessly. We would never have been allowed to do what they did,” he said. The price the Israelis pay for their efficiency is the deep resentment of the Gazans. Attacks against soldiers and the occasional Israeli civilians who visit Gaza are common.

“Up to a year or two ago there were probably two incidents a month,” U.N.R.W.A.’s director of operations in Gaza, Mr Peter Hawkins, said. “The situation intensified last September-October, but has ‘calmed down’ to two or three a month now.” Rashad Shawwa, twice appointed mayor of Gaza town by the Israelis and twice sacked for not cooperating, said he thought the situation in the area was worsening daily.

“The continuation of the Israeli presence is making people more and more hateful and bitter. Matters will definitely reach another explosion — people cannot stand the way they are living too long. Mankind’s love of freedom does not allow it,” he said. Yusra Barbari, the in-

domitable head of the women’s union in Gaza, told of the; difficulties the organisation had trying to organise kindergartens, libraries and craft activities for women.

“They prevent us from accepting any donations. We are forbidden to organise any social or cultural activities. Th'dy prevent us from circulating books about Palestine, Palestinian culture,' biographies of Palestinians. Any poem or novel about resistance or liberation movements anywhere in the world is forbidden,” Ms Barbari said. “We Palestinians have the right to live in our mother country as free people. We are being denied that right.” She said her willingness to speak plainly had often landed her in trouble. She said she was once reprimanded for remarking to a foreign reporter that military occupation was the cause of social problems in Gaza.

“I always tell the truth to everybody — I don’t care who it is. I’ve said these things to the Military Governor. The truth is not something I see any reason to deny, avoid or lie about.”