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CounterPunch
October
9, 2002
Khan Yunis:
Before the Juggernaut
by JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
A mobile watchtower, lifted into the air by a
crane, surveys Khan Yunis day and night. An ambulance from the
city waits behind a nearby concrete building day after day; it
waits so that the next child shot for playing too close to the
wall can make it to the local hospital before dying. The wall
is a vast, menacing construction stretching down the coast as
far as you can see, separating Khan Yunis from the Gush Katif
settlement block in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers sit poised
with machine guns in the cylindrical bunker at the northern edge
of the wall overlooking the ruins they've made of the Khan Yunis
refugee camp.
Over there to the south and west, in
the Jewish settlements, no one worries about water shortages
or electricity outages. Families don't live in corrugated iron
shacks unrecognizable as homes from the outside until someone
points out what is supposed to be a door; until you see ragged
clothing hanging up to dry above a parched piece of earth beside
the shack. Parents in the settlements aren't afraid that their
children will be murdered for absentmindedly playing too close
to a wall. Their panorama is the buoyant, sparkling Mediterranean
lapping the white sands outside their windows; an occupied view:
for settlers only.
There are children from the refugee camp
playing in the shell of a building not far from the wall. A small
Gaza girl eyed me with a dark face, suspicious but curious, the
last time I walked this area. When I asked to take her picture
she simply stood still with the same brooding expression on her
face as I clicked the camera. A year later and here she is playing
among the ruins; taller and longer haired but with the same knowing
look. When she sees me she stops and we both flash a quick smile
of recognition. She's not dead, I think. One cannot help but
wonder this about those who go on living here.
And now I wonder again about her and
her playmates; about the men and women mulling about in the hot
streets of the market. I wonder about the boy who was shot in
the arm by a soldier in the mobile watchtower target practicecarried
away by the ever-present ambulance just after I arrived to gape
incredulously at the wall. I wonder about the boy who draped
a Palestinian flag over his shoulders like a cape after the funeral
of two others killed in the night by a tank. He ran past us to
his home, a white apartment building with bullet holes and tank-blasted
craters in the concrete decorating its sorry facade. Can it really
be this bad? Can you expect people to keep listening to the morbid
descriptions of life here without questioning your accuracy?
Perhaps not, and yet the most striking feature of all is that
it is so much worse than these paltry words can express.
I've awoken to a most disturbing email
message from a friend. "Massacre in Gaza" the subject
heading reads. "Things grew very bad tonight in Khan Yunis.
After an incursion into the refugee camp two people were killed
and ten injured. A tank then stopped suddenly in the road and
the Israelis started behaving in a crazy way, firing everywhere.
A helicopter fired a rocket killing eight more people and wounding
about 100. Later we heard that they were shelling the Nasser
hospital in Khan Yunis. Things are going so much to the worse
here..."
It's deja vu in the Gaza Strip: more
incursions, more firing, more dead, more dazed children, more
grieving relatives, more wreckage in the wasteland of the Strip.
I still tense up at the sound of airplanes flying overhead because
of my nights spent in Rafah and Gaza City. Five months of listening
to fighter jets, helicopter gunships, tank firing, machine gun
fire, grenadesand the slightest "bang" now makes me
jump. What are we turning a population of full-time inhabitants
of this hell into??
My friend Ghada writes to me the next
day, "The attack in Khan-Yunis was more than horrible. I
went numb when I heard of it. The only thing I can say is 'what
can we do?' We pray God to stop the Israeli madness soon."
The signs aren't looking good. The specter
of war in the region is looming. Talk of "transfer",
of the forced expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank
and Gaza, is gaining in popularity not only in Israel but also
in pro-Israel circles in the United States. Members of Congress
and of the Bush administration are echoing the most outspoken
advocates of this policy in Israel, people like Effi Eitam in
charge of Israel's settlements programs and an outspoken advocate
of expulsionor General Eitan Ben Elyahu, former head of the Israeli
Air Force who recently announced that "eventually we will
have to thin out the number of Palestinians living in the territories."
No one protested.
Under cover of war, the Gaza girl with
the dark eyes and her playmates, the bereaved family members
of the recent massacre, the children at the kindergarten near
where the Mezan Center for Human Rights office is, my former
co-workers themselves Ghada with her beautiful English and hopes
to study abroad, and Mais with her beaming 'good-mornings', and
Anwar, the maintenance man, and the diligent Ramiz, Adnan, and
Hazem, and the owners of the Matooq restaurant who welcomed me
every time I came in for lunch, and the storekeepers and the
taxi-drivers, the beggar-children and the women shopping for
food they're all supposed to disappear, like chemical-treated
stains.
The juggernaut advances and there is
blood on our hands. The oranges and olives will witness the last
of the just the people I met who told me they would never leave
Palestine. Will their deaths move us to open our eyes?
Jennifer Loewenstein can be reached at: jsarin@facstaff.wisc.edu
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October 4,
2002
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