The Aftermath. Sarah Helm
the news, euphoria swept across the Israeli occupied territories. Nowhere was the upsurge of hope more tangible than in Gaza.
It was a sunny September day when Yitzhak Rabin met Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), on the White House lawn. As their handshake flashed up on Gazan TV screens, a sea of Palestinian flags waved against the bright blue Gaza skies, the green flags of Hamas, which opposed the deal, disappeared. The militants’ graffiti also vanished and was replaced by doves of peace.
In the first phase Israeli troops were to withdraw from Gaza and Jericho. A simultaneous first exit from Gaza and a portion of the West Bank at Jericho seemed a clever idea: it would symbolise the intention to permanently join the two Palestinian territories and, for a while, people talked excitedly about “Gaza and Jericho first”.
Most important for these Gazans was the prospect Oslo offered of free movement, of travel to the wider world and the chance, as Gazans say, “to breathe”. There were to be “safe-passages” across Israel to the West Bank. Fishermen would be able to claim back the sea. “We will be able to fish where we like. There will be a port here,” said Abdel Latif Bakr on the day of the handshake, preparing to set off in his rickety boat, newly-draped in Palestinian colours.
Not only were Palestinians celebrating. I saw a bemused Israeli soldier on duty outside a base in Jabalia refugee camp look out at the happy Palestinian faces and I asked him what he made of it. He thought for a moment then turned and said: “It’s Palestinian independence day, it’s strange.” Another Israeli soldier, policing the fisherman’s wharf said: “I want them to have their peace. I respect them now that I see that they really want peace.”
Sceptics warned Oslo was a sell-out – not least because there was no promise here that Palestinian refugees, made homeless in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, would have a chance to return home. However, Gazans, always adaptable, – no doubt because so many of them had long been refugees – were even prepared to adapt to the shape of this “peace”.
“It will be enough to have our freedom for the first time,” said Wasfi Masrouh, who fled his home in 1948, at the time.
In the months that followed evidence of that “freedom” was slow in coming, as the peace-negotiators backtracked, giving extremists on both sides a chance to ferment new hatred, symbolised by the blood-soaked prayer mats, hung out to dry outside the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where in February 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, murdered 29 Muslims at prayer. Palestinians launched suicide bombings. As I headed to the airport in January 1995 to leave for a new posting in Brussels, news came over the taxi radio of a Palestinian suicide bombing near the Israeli town of Netanya. Many more would follow.
Over the subsequent years I followed the news from a distance as the building blocks of Oslo were shattered. In November 1995 came the cataclysmic blow: a Jewish extremist assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, still probably the only Israeli leader who could have rescued the deal. Now Israeli politics swerved to the right. More and bloodier suicide bombings were carried out by Palestinians, often by the al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, which grew in power particularly in Gaza, where the Islamic movement was formed during the first intifada.
Its charter declared all of Palestine an “Islamic Waqf” – a place sacred by law to Islam – which effectively committed Hamas followers to fighting for the destruction of Israel. As Israeli deaths mounted in the suicide attacks which followed the Oslo failure, Hamas appeared hell-bent on just that.
In 2005, claiming it was offering Gazans a viable autonomy, Israel unilaterally “disengaged” from Gaza by withdrawing its forces and its settlers from the strip.[1] But there was nothing “viable” about the siege Israel now imposed; it sealed Gaza’s borders and patrolled its waters and its airspace in an attempt to kill off Hamas by collectively punishing every Gazan living there.
Hamas only gained more support and in the 2006 elections the Islamists defeated Fatah, the largest secular Palestinian Party. Factional fighting intensified until, in 2007, Hamas seized power in Gaza in a bloody coup against its secular rivals. Already declared a terrorist organisation by the US Congress, Hamas was henceforth blackballed by scores of countries in Europe and around the world. All contact with Hamas was now banned and, overnight, this narrow, sandy and overpopulated strip of land became a pariah, its residents unable to work in Israel or even reach the West Bank.
The clashes I had once reported on seemed like mere skirmishes compared with what came next and the contours of the conflict had changed so radically since the 1990s, it was hard not to disengage, especially as the media tired of reporting the story. But as Gaza boiled, it periodically exploded, when Hamas fired out rockets into Israel and Israel responded by bombarding Gazans, each time with ever-greater force, bringing the TV cameras back to film the slaughter. Last summer’s Israel-Gaza war was the third since the siege was imposed and by far the most deadly with more than 2,200 people killed, including at least 1,500 civilians, of whom an estimated 500 were children and 260 were women, according to the United Nations.
Like everyone else I watched on in horror and began to realise that the only time I ever saw inside Gaza nowadays was through the lens of ever more bloody war. Though the place seemed almost unrecognisable through the smoke and flames, the names of camps, buildings and towns called out by reporters were only too familiar, as were some names of the people. Amongst the first killed in the 2014 war were four boys aged between seven and 11, who were members of the al-Bakr fishing family, whose grandfather had spoken to me of his hopes for peace as he set off in his fishing boat in 1993.
Once the dust had settled on this latest bombardment, I decided to return to Gaza in a time of relative quiet to see how much of what I once knew was still there and to talk to the people again. What had become of those courageous Gazans who – against all the odds – had once even dared to hope?
1 On background to Israel’s disengagement from Gaza see http://www.btselem.org/topic/gaza_strip↵
3
Besieged
The day I “went in” – the expression used nowadays for visiting Gaza – a single Palestinian returning from an exceptional hospital visit in Jerusalem was “going back in”.
People today call Gaza a giant prison. As I approached the Erez Crossing and saw, for the first time, the hulking perimeter wall, it certainly looked more like a prison than ever before.
And yet Gazans on the other side are not there for committing a crime. The vast majority are descendants of Palestinians who came to Gaza 66 years ago for refuge during the 1948 war. Before 1948, many of these Gazans had lived along this coast in towns like Ashkelon, which they still call al-Majal. During the fighting, which engulfed them in 1948, they abandoned their homes and fled to the relative safety of this coastal strip, only to find the towns they once lived in became a part of Israel and they could not return.[1]
In its early days Gaza looked more like an encampment than a prison as the refugees lived in tents, provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), established to care for and protect the refugees until a permanent solution to their displacement was found; the refugees themselves – like other Palestinians who fled at the time – insisted on a right to return to their original homes.[2] Over the years, as the refugees found they couldn’t return home, their tents were replaced by breeze block huts and the camps took on a more permanent character, like shanty towns.
As the second-generation refugees were born and families needed more space, many moved out of the refugee camps altogether and built their own houses elsewhere along the strip. Gazan refugees now comprise 1.2 million of the 1.8 million “prisoners”. Of these more than half have moved out of the camps into Gazan villages and towns.
The refugee family clans have usually stayed together, with 60 or even more living in one building or one neighbourhood. The new generation are still defined as “refugees”