And then there’s the Business and Technology Incubator (BTI).
BTI aims to offer professional business services to Palestinian entrepreneurs who have mature concepts for unique and innovative IT related products assessed to have strong market potential. BTI will design, develop, implement and promote those initiatives that will support the development of entrepreneurial business ventures with high growth potential by providing them with an integrated package of world-class business development services that will nurture and support the commercialization of ideas and enhance the development and growth of dynamic enterprises.
What sort of unhinged person will hatch out in this incubator?
Subsequently I spent long sessions alone in IUG’s library, the most agreeable building on the campus. Like An-Najah’s newish library in Nablus, it is short of books because too much was spent on the building. (Some West Bank UNRWA schools are short of teachers and equipment for the same reason.) There was little new stock; at the time most volumes dated from the 1990s or before. Beside the few ‘English’ shelves, I met Jannath, taking notes for an essay on Jane Austen. Afterwards we walked together down the long corridor to the women’s entrance and I began yet another ‘Women’s Rights’ debate. Jannath fumbled around my argument that the Islamists’ ‘Gazan traditions/local custom’ smokescreen deserves to be mocked. The grandmothers of contemporary students – and their mothers as teenagers – were free to go bareheaded and bare-armed, wearing short skirts, if they so wished; the fact that many preferred customary garb is beside the point.
‘But now,’ said Jannath, ‘traditions and customs have changed!’
‘Quite so,’ said I. ‘Changed by whom? And why?’
Jannath laughed, then invited me to visit her in Jabalya on the following Friday morning. She wrote her address on something interesting – the top flap of a cigarette packet. Could it be that she was a secret smoker?
* * *
On 15 January 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, I had taken a minibus taxi from Ramallah back to Nablus and on the way we heard al-Jazeera radio reporting attacks on four Gaza City hospitals. When I looked around at my fellow-passengers’ faces they variously showed anger, disgust, contempt and what can only be described as incredulous horror. One man recalled that in the Lebanon, in 2006, some of Israel’s worst war crimes were committed on the eve of their withdrawal. And he recognised that Cast Lead must end before President Obama’s imminent inauguration.
One of those four targets was the deservedly famed and honoured al-Wafa Medical Rehabilitation Hospital which in 1979 began as a nursing home for the destitute aged left without family. By 1995 it had become the Strip’s first and only in-patient rehabilitation centre, dealing with head and spinal cord injuries and other neurological afflictions. It collaborated with Israel’s Tel Hashomer Hospital and with a number of relevant Norwegian NGOs; IUG trained its physiotherapists. In 2008 it was at last able to expand – just in time for the IDF to target it with eight artillery shells which completely destroyed the men’s ward and did so much damage all patients had to be discharged. Since my arrival in Gaza I had heard al-Wafa mentioned a dozen times, with gratitude and affection, by the most disadvantaged people on my visiting list. And now I had been given an introduction to its Director, Dr Khamis Elessi.
As an ISI (Islamic Social Institution) al-Wafa naturally has links with Hamas; over the years some of its management team and probably many of its staff will have been members or sympathisers. This however does not affect their professionalism. Al-Wafa’s record proves that it is not swayed by political or religious leanings. It exists to do the best it can, with the limited resources at its disposal, for all Gazans who need its expertise. In an immensely valuable book (Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza) published shortly after my return from Gaza, Sara Roy writes: ‘Hamas’s social support structure played a key role in building up popular support for the organization [but] this was not the same as mobilizing people into an activist constituency based on the political ideology of Hamas.’ Here is reliable confirmation of my own (necessarily superficial) impression of how things are on the Strip. The West Bank, too, had shown me conflicting currents: gratitude for an ISI like the Nablus clinic where my damaged hip was X-rayed, coexisting with resentment of increasingly Islamic influences on the socio-political scene.
Tragically, such subtleties are beyond official Israel’s grasp. During Cast Lead, a senior Israeli government representative told the New York Times:
The operation’s central aim is to destroy both aspects of Hamas – its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing … In a war, its instruments of political and social control are as legitimate a target as its rocket caches.
Back-up came from Reserve Major-General Amiran Levin:
What we have to do is act systematically with the aim of punishing all the organizations that are firing the rockets and mortars, as well as the civilians who are enabling them to fire and hide.
(In case you’ve forgotten – between 2001 and 2011 rockets from Gaza killed 22 Israelis and one immigrant labourer.)
No wonder the Goldstone Report described Cast Lead as ‘a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population’.
The Israelis’ sustained imposition of all-out collective punishment is by any standards a very frightening phenomenon. For decades they have been attacking defenceless populations through curfews, closures, sieges, house demolitions, olive-grove bulldozings, well poisonings, shootings, bombings, torture and indefinite imprisonment without trial. One of my Gazan friends proposed that this Israeli obsession, this conviction that collective punishment is the way forward, may well be a hideous hangover from the Holocaust when Jews were collectively punished for being Jews. The logic behind this proposal escaped me. But then my friend argued, ‘We’re not talking about logic! We’re talking about something very deep and dark and twisted. Something so sick the international community is afraid to go near it.’
Several years ago, the same comparison was drawn by Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur in the OPT, a Princeton international law authority and himself a Jew. He said, ‘Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.’
Perhaps this grim analogy no longer shocks because Zionist criminality is becoming ever more strident and arrogant. Now a retiring head of Israel’s security forces feels free to brag on TV that ‘Our successful operations have made political assassinations internationally acceptable.’
In my serveece to al-Wafa a retired professor of English sat beside me and insisted on paying my fare. His brain-damaged grandson lay comatose in the Rehabilitation Centre; a wall had fallen on him as he sought to salvage stones from a recently shelled house. The professor’s specialty was George Bernard Shaw but I soon steered him off John Bull’s Other Island and onto the Strip. He blamed ‘Protestant sentimentality about biblical places’ for the Balfour Declaration. And he, too, spoke of Zionism’s ‘humiliation campaign’ against Palestinians as having Nazi roots. ‘It’s how they were treated in the ’30s.’
Habitually I arrive too early (a perverse form of unpunctuality) and at 8.30 a young doctor, seeing me on an outside bench, invited me into a small stuffy room off the hallway. Here several young men sat around discussing case notes, drinking tea and eating home-made chocolate cookies from a huge box in the centre of the table. It was someone’s birthday, an occasion not traditionally celebrated in the Arab world but now adopted. They were a friendly bunch, apart from one physiotherapist whose very long, very thick black beard must have taken a lot of maintenance. I had come to associate disapproving stares with that sort of beard.
The only English-speaker told me about donated wheelchairs seized from the 2010 Flotilla and taken to an Ashdod warehouse where they were cunningly vandalised – rendered almost useless – before being delivered to the ICRC at Erez. One’s first reaction is to disb
elieve such stories (‘must be propaganda!’) but the Zionist exercise of wanton cruelty, which I had so often witnessed on the West Bank, made this story only too credible.
To greet me, Dr Khamis Elessi stood up behind his makeshift desk: a small man, balding, round-faced, soft-spoken, kind-eyed. He comes of a notable Gaza family and one soon senses a noblesse oblige attitude (not very common among Palestinians) to the Strip’s least privileged. No money had been wasted on this rather cramped, utilitarian Director’s office.
Dr Elessi opened the conversation by deploring all violence, whatever its source or motive. A tediously trite statement, you might think – yet it’s contestable in Occupied Palestine where there are plausible arguments in favour of violence as an assertion of people’s right to freedom. Indisputably, as Dr Elessi said, ‘All forms of retaliation must increase suffering and bitterness.’ Yet he could understand, as I cannot, the sort of martyr’s mother who rejoices because her son has ‘given himself’ for the cause and is now being rewarded by Allah – while his community is being collectively punished by the IDF. Dr Elessi also conceded that to an extent attacks on Israelis, military or civilian, do boost communal morale in territories with a 60-year backlog of impotent rage. ‘Which means,’ he said, ‘the Occupier is corrupting the Occupied.’ I remembered then Anwar literally shuddering as he described an Islamic Jihad street party spontaneously organised to celebrate a ‘successful’ suicide bombing in Israel – ‘like you see in normal countries when the local team wins’.
Dr Elessi agreed with me that the world should not be allowed to forget a fact now hidden behind stacks of Israeli hasbara. On 23 December 2008 Hamas offered to renew for at least ten years the truce violated by Israel on 4 November. Their condition was that Israel would fulfil the two original clauses of the ceasefire: a complete stop to hostilities and lifting the blockade of Gaza. Zionists genuinely interested in a ‘Peace Process’ would have discussed this offer; Hamas has a deserved reputation for sticking to agreements and had jailed some of its own militants for breaking the previous ceasefire. However, Cast Lead had been planned soon after the IDF’s shaming Lebanese experience in 2006. ‘And it was timed,’ said Dr Elessi, ‘to reward warmongers in the Knesset [February 2009] election.’ I now learned that the no-expenses-spared planning included a Gaza City mock-up beside a remote training camp in the Negev. Nothing Hamas said or did could have prevented Cast Lead, which had very little to do with deterring home-made rockets – or even Iran-made missiles. It was a continuation of the Nakba by other means.
The barrenness of youngsters’ lives in the Strip’s most deprived areas – such as that around al-Wafa – greatly distressed Dr Elessi. Many more football clubs were needed – but where to kick? He told me then about al-Jazeera Sports Club for the disabled, started by himself and a few colleagues. Before the blockade locked them in, its members had won several medals in international competitions – achievements which gave a tremendous boost not only to the competitors’ families and friends but to their whole community. Now, with the Rafah Gate open again, the club could begin to plan and fundraise for further endeavours in foreign stadia. But would Rafah remain open? And even if it did, would the Egyptians facilitate the exit and re-entry of disabled Palestinians and their escorts? Deeb had put it rather well – ‘Gaza’s future is a forest of question marks.’
While showing me around (discreetly: one doesn’t want the severely disabled to feel like tourist fodder) Dr Elessi introduced me to several of the staff and what I glimpsed of their relationships with the patients set off good vibes, confirming my observations while visiting other clinics with Nita. Al-Wafa’s rehabilitation work is unofficially extended beyond the physical. The Director only mentioned the bombing en passant; rebuilding was almost completed, one had to live in the present, not brood over the past or despair of the future. As he escorted me to the nearest taxi route, along a pavement seething with small children, he admitted to finding the Zionists’ demographic fears quite rational. Already the Palestinians, if united in a show of non-violent strength, could end the Occupation and move the problem onto another plane. ‘Binationalism?’ I suggested. But Dr Elessi pretended not to hear. People in his position can’t step forward as political leaders. Al-Wafa is there for everyone imprisoned on the Strip who is misfortunate enough to need it.
In the taxi I thought about that ‘if’ … If the Palestinians could unite – a possibility made ever less possible by energetic schemers. And the very next afternoon afforded a disturbing example of such scheming.
At al-Wafa I drank tea with an exhausted-looking nurse who habitually works overtime for no extra pay (so said one of her patients). She had urged me to visit her cousin, Director of the Ministry of Health’s Central Drug Store which was reporting ‘zero stock levels’ for many essential medications. Nita came too and we crossed an empty car park to a hastily rebuilt (after bombing) warehouse – surprisingly open and unguarded. ‘There’s not much to guard,’ Nita reminded me.
In a dingy office, lined with shelves of files, the Director and four of his colleagues were gloomily conferring. When Nita introduced me he stood and bowed slightly (no hand-shaking) – a compact, grey-haired, clean-shaven man, his expression compounded of tiredness, irritation, sadness and a determination to be cheerful. In response to his formulaic ‘How are you?’ I replied, ‘Depressed because Gaza is suffering so much.’ He laughed. ‘Sit down! Sit down and be happy! You must be happy because Gaza is liberated! We are free – here no Israeli soldiers or settlers like on West Bank – be happy with us!’
Nita said something to stop this Hamas patter and at once the Director stood up again to lead us down a long grey corridor, smelling of damp concrete, to an enormous, almost empty storeroom. This is the distribution centre for all the Ministry of Health’s medications for the Strip’s 13 hospitals and 54 primary health care clinics. Here the Director let us see the depth of his own depression. This crisis began in January 2011 and the store was now short of 180 types of crucially important medications. Gazans suffer from the range of diseases one would expect in any malnourished population of 1.6 million – plus complicated IDF-induced injuries and illnesses. Every day news came of needless deaths. Tunnel-derived medicines were costly and often dangerously unreliable. The varieties that might occasionally come in otherwise were even more costly and no more reliable. Substitute medicines were gaining in popularity – their effects usually dire and quite often fatal. For some reason the sight of all those empty shelves touched me more than the standard ‘Appeal’ photographs of starving children.
Israel was not directly to blame for this collective punishment. The missing donated medications had long since arrived in Ramallah where the PA, living up (or down) to its ‘quisling’ label, was withholding them from Hamas-governed Gaza. In Jerusalem in December 2010, I had heard Mahmoud Abbas’s security services being praised for their merciless manoeuvrings to demoralise and discredit Hamas’ administration and Hamas’ West Bank supporters. The PA police had probably impressed the CIA by arresting six faculty members at An-Najah university, all voluntary workers for an ISI, therefore accused of ‘assisting a front for Hamas’. More serious because even more divisive, 1,000 schoolteachers had lost their jobs – some Hamas members, some related to individuals suspected of Hamas leanings, some who refused to promote Fatah. One of my Nablus friends belonged to that last category and I knew he disliked Fatah and Hamas equally. But he still lost his job.
Nita admitted that being collectively punished by fellow-Palestinians was the unkindest cut of all.
* * *
At IUG Dr Moheer had described other health-care impediments. Because of an acute shortage of specialists, many complicated cases need to go elsewhere but most are unable to leave the Strip. For the lucky few, it can take a long time (sometimes too long) to find a suitable Israeli (or other) hospital willing to accept them and to arrange payment through the Ministry of Health – or a private benefactor, if such is available.
There is
also a shortage of experts to maintain equipment and the lack of one tiny, irreplaceable part can leave a $50,000 machine crippled. The irregular electricity supply ruins sensitive machines, when suddenly the power drops below or shoots above the required voltage. (In my flat, dependent on the family generator, I had noticed that this often happens.) I suggested seeking voluntary experts from among the Palestinians’ many foreign friends (ISM-like people) but according to Dr Moheer ‘commercial confidentiality’ rules this out. Each firm’s cherished know-how must at all times be protected, even at the cost of patients’ lives. Another complication: many of the firms’ own experts won’t travel to Gaza, either for ideological or fear reasons. Alternatively, they may be so expensive to import it makes more sense to buy new machines with guarantees covering one or two years.
Bureaucracy and corruption (or both combined) present major problems. To minimise their effects the rich donor (individual or group) arranges for the manufacturer – preferably with a branch in Israel – to send the gift directly to the Gaza hospital after the manufacturer (not the donor) has done all the tortuous paperwork in Israel. The donor pays by sending money straight to the manufacturer’s bank account. ‘In this way,’ explained Dr Moheer, ‘we keep it absolutely transparent. These manufacturers are big multinationals so no one can suspect them of dishonesty.’ It seems Dr Moheer has a lot to learn – I hope not the hard way.
* * *
A serveece set me down in the middle of Jabalya town early on a Friday morning when the streets were quiet and all the shops shut; the ramshackle drabness and littered gutters seemed peculiarly depressing without the usual jostling throngs and noisy tangle of motor/equine/hand-cart traffic. Jannath had given ‘Jabalya camp’ as her address, which was misleading. When I showed it to a few astonished-looking men, wearing white mosque gowns and prayer caps, they directed me this way and that (by gesture: no one spoke English) – until finally a ragged, friendly youth led me through a maze of laneways to a long, high mud wall overhung by the mature trees within: fig, palm, lemon, flame-of-the-forest. The refugees’ dwellings had grown up around an imposing two-storey mansion built in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire by Jannath’s great-grandfather. My guide pulled hard on an old-fashioned bell rope and as we heard a metallic clanging he smiled at me and waved and hurried away. I had learned that in such circumstances, when help has been spontaneously offered, a tip can cause offence – however ragged one’s helper.
A Month by the Sea Page 18
