Gaza Diary: July 16th 8:00pm
by Brian Lenzo | Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

The bus ride back to Rafah, driving along the beautiful coast line, was one of the saddest moments of my life.  No matter how much the people of Gaza show their appreciation and endless graciousness, or how many people you exchange emails and phone numbers with, you can’t escape the guilt that you get to leave, that you are just visiting.  I won’t be returning to the lap of luxury by any means.  Our economic crisis means that my daily life is fast becoming closer to that of some in Gaza, but with that one overwhelming difference…I get to go home, a right all Palestinians are denied.

As we drove down the coast line, watching the sun set over the Mediterranean sea, I cracked open the bus window to take a few last photographs, but Gaza quickly reminded me of its dilemma.  The smell of raw sewage filled the bus, a smell many are getting used to in Gaza since Israel destroyed the last functioning sanitation facility.  Residential and commercial waste is dumped freely into the sea, not by some corporation trying to boost their profits by dumping illegally, but by the government and municipalities out of necessity, a practice not seen in the US since the 1920’s.

Our guide came on the loudspeaker to point us to the east side of the bus.  A few miles away you could see fairly new high rise apartment buildings, completely undamaged, billboards, and what looked like a budding metropolis.  Signs of progress right?  Just the opposite, these are the former Israeli settlements, abandoned when Ariel Sharon decided to “withdraw” from the Gaza Strip, a supposed sign of his commitment to peace according to many.  Our guide then asked us to glance back westward to see the two Israeli destroyers a few hundred kilometers off the coast to view for ourselves just how far Israel has “withdrawn.”

Our buses continued on, the sun setting gracefully below the horizon, leaving just enough light to see the southern country side.  Interspersed between large houses built for Palestinian Authority officials, are acres of farm land, the light too dim to make out what was growing.  What you could see was the tank tracks and signs of demolition.  Almost every free standing structure, aside from the officials houses, showed some sign of damage or disrepair.  Most of this pre-dates the January offensive, some from previous assaults, some from the scheduled home demolitions made famous by Ariel Sharon’s government.  You cannot rebuild without raw materials, so the rubble sits, and farmers continue to work their land, breed their livestock and eek out a living.

By the time we reached Rafah, the sun was long gone, but the stores, restaurants and street lights lit up the town center.  I learned that the night is practically kept alive and bright by fuel fed generators, a power source most buildings rely on.  However, I found a much more profound reason a few minutes later.  As we waited to enter the Egyptian crossing, I noticed a bit of graffiti on the walls next to our bus.  One was a small hand, holding a heart, filled in with the colors of the Palestinian flag with little wires and lightening bolts scattered about the composition.  Above and over the center of the heart was the text, roughly translated in from Arabic, “Gaza is powered by the electricity in the hearts of all Palestinians.”

I had hoped to leave Gaza and conclude this entry perhaps on that hope-inspiring message, but Gaza will not let you forget about its dilemma.  As we passed through customs, one of the Palestinian doctors on our convoy had hoped to finally bring his three young children back out of Gaza.  They have been trapped there, despite having American passports, for 5 years.  They were denied entry into Egypt.  Apparently Israel and Egypt feel this well educated doctor would become a bigger threat to Israel by re-uniting with his three young children.  That is my last memory of Gaza, but one that was a stark reminder of my task, and the task of everyone on the Viva Palestina convoy.

There is no middle ground on this issue.  This isn’t about the right of Hamas militants to carry guns across the border (although it seems to be absolutely fine for the US to send guns, missile and bombs over the Israeli border many times each year).  This isn’t even just about Gaza.  Gaza is just the latest chapter in a 60 year campaign of ethnic cleansing and strangulation, which is readily available to read if you’re willing to flip through the pages.

This is about the right of families to live together.  This is about the right of farmers to work their own land, students to attend their schools, and people to carve out a decent life in a land filled with the fruits of 10,000 years of humanity’s greatest achievements.  Its about the right of any people to govern themselves as they see fit, without foreign interference.  Another bit of grafitti caught my eye during my visit, it was written in English, presumably aimed at the Americans from our convoy.  It read, “Palestinian Children:  You will not stop our DREAMS.”

If we only cry and send a few dollars, the Palestinians will continue to suffer and continue to fight by themselves.  If the children of Gaza can remain defiant and fight through their tears, then I am confident we can too.  We, the people of the United States, will need to fight and organize and build a movement.  One that is crucial to build inside the US and a movement that will hold a special place in history if it can stop the US from funding Israel’s colonial project.  If it were easy, it would have been done already.  Viva Palestina represented, for me, the real beginning of a broad movement, however small it currently is.  We came to break the siege and we broke the siege.  Others can, should and undoubtedly will follow in our footsteps.

Tags: Gaza, gaza strip, Israel, Palestine, Siege, Viva Palestina

9:44 am. Viva Palestina.