Mitchell Prothero reports for The National:
This is the entrance to the Gaza Strip: a 250-metre long causeway of exposed concrete slabs about five metres wide, surrounded by barbed wire, CCTV cameras and motion sensors, and closely monitored by remote-controlled machine guns mounted on the huge concrete walls that mark the border around the Erez Crossing Terminal.
This awful corniche, a fitting introduction to the physical and social isolation inside Gaza, traverses a deep buffer zone that separates the Israeli military and border police at Erez from the Hamas border guards, who maintain their own checkpoint 500 metres away. It’s difficult to coordinate along a border when neither side recognises the other’s right to exist – but determining exactly who gets to make the harrowing walk between the two checkpoints is as close as these two belligerents come to cooperation.
The area leading up to the Israeli fence is filled with huge piles of shattered concrete, twisted rebar, broken metal door and window frames – the remains of warehouses, factories, and Palestinian Authority customs offices built in a more optimistic era and long since flattened by dozens of Israeli incursions. What was once a sign of a developing peace has now been turned into a wasteland of rubble, guarded on one side by Islamic radicals and on the other by deadly machine guns operated by teenaged conscripts in a far-off control room. But what looks like rubble to most of the world remains precious in Gaza: the Israelis haven’t allowed rebuilding supplies like concrete and steel into the strip for several years.
Some of Gaza’s poorest residents support their families by sneaking past the Hamas checkpoint near the border, at the risk of being arrested – or shot and killed by Israel’s robot machine guns – to gather up broken concrete they can sell to their homeless neighbours.
It would be hard to find a better metaphor for life in Gaza than this walkway at Erez: a scorching hot concrete slab that’s hard to enter and harder to leave, littered with rubble and jammed uncomfortably between Israel and Hamas. Despite a long and proud history of resilience, the people of Gaza – who have endured for decades against their own leaders, against Israel’s policy of collective punishment, and against the apathy of the international community – appear today to have given up any hope that life will return even to the semblance of normalcy enjoyed by their still-occupied cousins in the West Bank.
United Nations statistics on the economic and social conditions inside Gaza are bleak: more than half the working population is unemployed; the vast majority of those who do draw paycheques are employees of the deposed Fatah-backed government in Ramallah. They are paid, in other words, not to go to work – in the eyes of the Palestinian Authority, showing up to work at a Gaza ministry is tantamount to treason. Hamas, for its part, can barely afford to pay its own employees, so it has little capacity to reward the PA civil servants willing to cross the virtual picket line and report for duty.
If the humiliation of chronic unemployment, or being paid to not work, isn’t enough, with a widespread travel ban on Palestinians except in rare medical cases requiring Israeli help, no one ever gets to leave this tiny patch of sand along the sea. And with meager wages supplemented by humanitarian rations, people aren’t starving. Instead they seem to be losing any sense of hope and increasingly, according to social workers, smugglers and even the police, turning in massive numbers to cheap narcotic tablets smuggled through tunnels from Egypt. A sense of lethargy and hopelessness now pervades almost every aspect of life here.
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The road to Gaza’s present misery began, as many things do, with an election. In 2006, Palestinian voters rejected the corruption, nepotism and incompetence of the long-ruling Fatah Party and elected Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement – surprising no one except the US State Department, which had brushed aside Israeli concerns that Hamas would prevail in a fair election.
The Hamas election campaign had two planks. The first was opposition to corruption. In Gaza, discontent was focused on the gangster rule of the local Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, which by 2006 had turned Gaza into an unstable collection of competing resistance groups, security services, police forces and clan militias. Foreign journalists and aid workers were regularly being kidnapped, huge sums of money kept disappearing into the coffers of the Palestinian Authority (and, presumably, into the pockets of its officials in Ramallah) and the overall sense was that the opportunity offered by the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 was being lost amid internal strife and large scale theft. The second, which attracted less attention from v oters at the time, was continuing resistance to Israel and a rejection of the peace process that began with the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Putting an end to corruption and nepotism while mounting an effective military resistance to Israel was an ambitious agenda, to say the least: few other Arab regimes have managed to accomplish even one of these goals. But Hamas has shown little inclination to publicly abandon either of these ambitions, and reconciling these two directions – good governance and military resistance – has proven to be a challenge Hamas is ill-prepared to surmount.
In the four years since the Hamas election victory, the people of Gaza have suffered through a series of crises. First, the international community refused to recognise the results of the election it had imposed, sparking an 18-month-long power struggle that pitted factions loyal to Dahlan and Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, and which came to an end only in the summer of 2007, when Hamas dealt Dahlan and Fatah a decisive defeat and took full and unquestioned control of Gaza.
Adding to the misery, in a 2006 joint operation with two other smaller militant groups, Hamas kidnapped Gilad Shalit, a corporal in the Israel Defense Forces, from just outside the security fence, leading to a major military invasion and a backbreaking embargo of virtually all consumer goods and travel in or out of Gaza by its residents.
These draconian measures, along with continued military action by both sides, led to a campaign where Hamas and its allies fired thousands of homemade rockets into southern Israel, finally provoking another large- scale invasion, Operation Cast Lead, in December 2008, which killed more than 1,200 people and further degraded Gaza’s already crumbling infrastructure.
Since then, the Palestinian government has been split: Hamas rules Gaza, while the international community and Israel ignore them, preferring to deal instead with the Palestinian Authority headed by Abbas in the West Bank. But the campaign to weaken Hamas’s grip on Gaza --- which has employed economic deprivation and military force – has done little to hurt Hamas, and its political opponents inside Gaza say the Islamic Resistance Movement treats them no better than the Israelis once did.
Mkhaimer Abu Sada worked as a Fatah political official in Gaza before Hamas took power in 2007. While most of his comrades fled the territory in fear – either into Egypt or, with Israeli help, via the Erez Crossing – Abu Sada had enough friends on the Hamas side to remain, and today he’s one of the few independent political analysts left in Gaza City. As we sat over coffee on a sweltering evening as much of the city lay dark after the only working electrical plant ran out of fuel in an three-way Israel/Fatah/Hamas billing dispute, he explained that the campaign to weaken Hamas has done just the opposite.
“Oh, they are in total control of the situation in Gaza,” he said. “In 2006, when they started taking over, their fighters numbered between five and six thousand men. Now they have at least 25,000 paid employees of their ministries acting as police, security and intelligence services with another 10,000 members of the Izzedine al Qassam Brigades [the Hamas military wing].”
“The Americans, Israelis and Fatah simply cannot accept this simple fact: that for now there is absolutely no way anyone can beat Hamas,” Abu Sada said. “And the more they try, the more they isolate the people of Gaza, the stronger the militants and Islamic movements get.”
But despite solidifying its control over large sections of the official government and economy, which Hamas controls by maintaining strict management of the hundreds of tunnels that import goods and weapons to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli embargo, the group has seen its support among the Palestinians collapse even as its control tightens.
“We are under occupation,” said Abu Mohammed, a secular businessman with close family ties to the old Fatah security services. “After the takeover, people thought it might get better if the religious guys were in charge of the money, that security would improve and corruption would end. But they’re just as corrupt: If you’re not in Hamas, you get nothing. If anyone does anything, they are arrested, tortured or killed. Just like with the Israelis. Except the Jews always give you a lawyer.”