Anan Maalouf: The Joint List
Israel is about to hold its fourth parliamentary election in the past two years. The last time Israelis went to the polls, in March 2020, the Joint List — a coalition of four Arab Palestinian political parties — won an unprecedented 15 seats in the Knesset. But since then, the Joint List has fractured. Why? And what does this mean for the future of Palestinian politics?
Israel is about to hold its fourth parliamentary election in the past two years. The last time Israelis went to the polls, in March 2020, the Joint List — a coalition of four Arab Palestinian political parties — won an unprecedented 15 seats in the Knesset. But since then, the Joint List has fractured. Why? And what does this mean for the future of Palestinian politics?
Producer Max Freedman speaks with Anan Maalouf, former chief of staff and policy advisor to Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List and leader of its largest party, Hadash-al Jabhah.
CREDITS
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Amjad Iraqi.
Photo: Makbula Nassar; election night in Nazareth, March 2015.
bio
Anan A. Maalouf is an Urban Planner and a Ph.D. student of Urban and Public Policy at Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment (The New School). He earned his M.Sc. of Urban and Regional Planning from the Technion IIT (2018), his thesis focused on the relationship between urban forms and technological alterations. Before moving to New York, Maalouf served as Nazareth Mayor’s Assistant (2012-2013), and as MP Ayman Odeh Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor (2015-2018). Anan works currently at The Arab Center for Alternative Planning (ACAP) and is a teaching assistant at The New School and at Barnard College.
Resources
“The Only Left That Is Left” (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 3/5/2020)
“The Beginning of Breakdown” (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 3/31/2020)
Arabs in Israel Split over Homosexuality (Dima Abumaria, The Media Line, 7/24/2020)
How Israel’s Netanyahu helped break apart the Joint List (Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 2/9/2021)
As Arab consensus splinters, wangling for community’s vote sparks hard questions (Haviv Rettig Gur, Times of Israel, 2/12/2021)
Israel’s Islamists Side with Netanyahu (Joshua Leifer, Jewish Currents, 2/16/2021)
Liat Berdugo: The Weaponized Camera
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has been running its Camera Distribution Project since the early 2000s. The project distributes video camcorders to Palestinians, training them in documentation, and building an archive of citizen-recorded video. These videos cover a wide-range of topics, including settler violence, IDF night searches and demolitions. How do visuals disrupt historical narratives of conflicts? What does it mean for someone to later on witness preserved traces of events? And in the context of Israel-Palestine, what impact does a camera actually have in the face of entrenched power dynamics?
“So it becomes this dance of cameras where the whole goal of the Palestinian camera is to document a human rights violation, to take back some kind of power. And the goal of the Israeli camera is to block that power from being taken through vision.” — Liat Berdugo
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, has been running its Camera Distribution Project since the early 2000s. The project distributes video camcorders to Palestinians, training them in documentation, and building an archive of citizen-recorded video. These videos cover a wide-range of topics, including settler violence, IDF night searches and demolitions. How do visuals disrupt historical narratives of conflicts? What does it mean for someone to later on witness preserved traces of events? And in the context of Israel-Palestine, what impact does a camera actually have in the face of entrenched power dynamics?
Producer Emily Bell interviews Liat Berdugo, author of the recently released book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East: Videography, Aesthetics, and Politics in Israel and Palestine.
CREDITS
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Video courtesy of the B’Tselem video archive.
BIO
Liat Berdugo is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Her work has been exhibited and screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), Transmediale (Berlin), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and The Wrong Biennale (online), among others. Her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, among others, and her latest book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, was released from Bloomsbury in 2021. She is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University. She is currently an assistant professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. Berdugo lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Resources
Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick: The Limits of Progressive Politics
In recent years, a term has emerged in leftist activist circles: “progressive except for Palestine,” or “PEP” for short. It describes a person whose values and political leanings are consistent across issues of racial justice, homophobia, healthcare, immigration and more—but on Palestine, they are either silent, or actively hostile to a progressive point of view. It’s a worldview that permeates media spaces, academia, and Washington. What causes the progressive exception for Palestine, and are we seeing a shift on the horizon? In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, authors of the forthcoming book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.
In recent years, a term has emerged in leftist activist circles: “progressive except for Palestine,” or “PEP” for short. It describes a person whose values and political leanings are consistent across issues of racial justice, homophobia, healthcare, immigration and more—but on Palestine, they are either silent, or actively hostile to a progressive point of view. It’s a worldview that permeates media spaces, academia, and Washington. What causes the progressive exception for Palestine, and are we seeing a shift on the horizon? In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, authors of the forthcoming book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Marc Lamont Hill is an award-winning journalist and the Steve Charles Professor of Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is the author of multiple books, including the New York Times bestselling Nobody, and co-author (with Mitchell Plitnick) of Except for Palestine (The New Press). He lives in Philadelphia.
Mitchell Plitnick is the president of ReThinking Foreign Policy and is a frequent writer on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, is the former vice president at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, director of the U.S. Office of B’Tselem, and co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace. The co-author (with Marc Lamont Hill) of Except for Palestine (The New Press), he lives in Maryland.
RESOURCES
Lara Friedman: What will Biden do?
President Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that he'd bring the country back to “normal.” But that message has raised some eyebrows, as many have pointed out that America’s “normal” doesn’t necessarily mean good, or right. In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, about what is considered normal U.S. foreign policy on Israel-Palestine, the relationships with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that Biden inherits from former President Donald Trump, and what we can expect from Biden given his record as Vice President in the Obama administration.
President Joe Biden campaigned on the idea that he'd bring the country back to “normal.” But that message has raised some eyebrows, as many have pointed out that America’s “normal” doesn’t necessarily mean good, or right. In this episode of Unsettled, producer Ilana Levinson interviews Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, about what is considered normal U.S. foreign policy on Israel-Palestine, the relationships with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that Biden inherits from former President Donald Trump, and what we can expect from Biden given his record as Vice President in the Obama administration.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions
Lara Friedman is the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP). With more than 25 years working in the Middle East foreign policy arena, Lara is a leading authority on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, with particular expertise on the Israeli-Arab conflict, Israeli settlements, Jerusalem, and the role of the U.S. Congress. She is published widely in the U.S. and international press and is regularly consulted by members of Congress and their staffs, by Washington-based diplomats, by policy-makers in capitals around the world, and by journalists in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to her work at FMEP, Lara is a Contributing Writer at Jewish Currents and a non-resident fellow at the U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP). Prior to joining FMEP, Lara was the Director of Policy and Government Relations at Americans for Peace Now, and before that she was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, serving in Jerusalem, Washington, Tunis and Beirut. She holds a B.A. from the University of Arizona and a Master’s degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service; in addition to English, Lara speaks French, Arabic, Spanish, (weak) Italian, and muddles through in Hebrew.
RESOURCES
Biden may offer some key opportunities for Palestinians and their allies (Noura Erakat, Washington Post, 11/17/20)
Biden’s Israel-Palestine policy: A chance to restore and reset (Lara Friedman, Foundation for Middle East Peace, 11/12/20)
Bill to define anti-Semitism passes state House (Wissam Melhem, AZ Mirror, 3/9/20)
ACLU Statement on Senate Introduction of 'Anti-Semitism Awareness Act' (5/23/18)
How the Israeli flag became a symbol for white nationalists (Ben Lorber, +972, 1/22/21)
Israel announces new settler homes, risking Biden's anger (Joseph Krauss, ABC News, 1/22/21)
Samiha Hureini: Youth of Sumud
Samiha Hureini is a university student from the village of a-Tuwani, in the South Hebron Hills. She is one of the founders of Youth of Sumud, a group of young people who came together to defend their community in the wake of a dramatic direct action (chronicled in the very first episode of Unsettled).
In this interview with producer Max Freedman, Samiha explains how Youth of Sumud has maintained a Palestinian presence in the caves of Sarura despite the constant threat of violence from soldiers and settlers, and the price that she and her family have paid for their activism.
Samiha Hureini is a university student from the village of a-Tuwani, in the South Hebron Hills. She is one of the founders of Youth of Sumud, a group of young people who came together to defend their community in the wake of a dramatic direct action (chronicled in the very first episode of Unsettled).
In this interview with producer Max Freedman, Samiha explains how Youth of Sumud has maintained a Palestinian presence in the caves of Sarura despite the constant threat of violence from soldiers and settlers, and the price that she and her family have paid for their activism.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
LINKS
“The Story of Sumud” (Unsettled, 8/4/17)
“Palestinian children travel dangerous route to school in At-Tuwani” (DCI Palestine, 9/10/13)
Yuval Abraham, “He grabbed his generator. They shot him in the neck” (+972, 1/3/21)
Amira Hass and Hagar Sheizaf, “The Village Where Palestinians Are Completely Powerless” (Haaretz, 1/5/21)
Joshua Leifer: The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn
"Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn brought Palestine solidarity politics into the heart of the largest left-wing party in Europe. And [his leadership has] ended with criticisms of the occupation being untenable in British politics." How did this happen?
Producer Max Freedman talks to Joshua Leifer, assistant editor at Jewish Currents and author of "The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn."
"Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn brought Palestine solidarity politics into the heart of the largest left-wing party in Europe. And [his leadership has] ended with criticisms of the occupation being untenable in British politics." How did this happen?
The unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party in 2015 appeared to signal the renewed political viability of both socialism and Palestine solidarity. But under Corbyn's leadership, Labour was consumed by a series of anti-semitism scandals, with disastrous results. Was the charge of anti-semitism simply a weapon in Labour's long-running factional conflict, or is the British left irredeemably anti-semitic? What can Americans learn from Corbyn's mistakes?
Producer Max Freedman talks to Joshua Leifer, assistant editor at Jewish Currents and author of "The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn."
CREDITS
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Blue Dot Sessions.
Joshua Leifer is an editor, writer, and translator. He is currently an assistant editor at Jewish Currents. He was previously an associate editor at Dissent, and before that, at +972 Magazine. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, n+1, Jacobin, Haaretz, and elsewhere.
REFERENCES
Joshua Leifer, “The Tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn” (Jewish Currents, November 27, 2020)
Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)
J.J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996)
Nathan Thrall, “How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics” (The New York Times Magazine, March 28, 2019)
Mari Cohen, “Jewish Federations Urge Biden to Promote Controversial Definition of Antisemitism” (Jewish Currents, December 10, 2020)
Noura Erakat
When we first pitched our documentary "The shepherd and the settler" to be part of the "Rulebreakers" series on the BBC World Service, we started with a question: What are the rules, exactly, where Palestinian shepherds and Israeli settlers live side-by-side? Who makes the rules, and who’s breaking them?
To better understand the legal landscape in the occupied West Bank, we turned to Noura Erakat: a human rights attorney, a scholar of law in the Middle East, and the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.
When we first pitched our documentary "The shepherd and the settler" to be part of the "Rulebreakers" series on the BBC World Service, we started with a question: What are the rules, exactly, where Palestinian shepherds and Israeli settlers live side-by-side? Who makes the rules, and who’s breaking them?
To better understand the legal landscape in the occupied West Bank, we turned to Noura Erakat: a human rights attorney, a scholar of law in the Middle East, and the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.
Unsettled is produced by Asaf Calderon, Emily Bell, Ilana Levinson, and Max Freedman.
Amiel Vardi
Amiel Vardi is a professor of Classics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the founders of a grassroots movement called Ta'ayush: Israelis and Palestinians striving together to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct action.
Amiel was with our producer Max Freedman when he visited Rashash to report "The shepherd and the settler" for the BBC World Service. Listen to the full documentary, then return to this episode to learn about why Ta'ayush focuses on herding communities, and the resistance they face from both settlers and soldiers.
Amiel Vardi is a professor of Classics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the founders of a grassroots movement called Ta'ayush: Israelis and Palestinians striving together to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct action.
Amiel was with our producer Max Freedman when he visited Rashash to report "The shepherd and the settler" for the BBC World Service. Listen to the full documentary, then return to this episode to learn more about why Ta'ayush focuses on herding communities, the resistance they face from settlers and soldiers, and why an older generation of activists struggles to find young Israelis who are willing to join them.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, and Ilana Levinson.
Aviv Tatarsky
Aviv Tatarsky is a researcher for Ir Amim and one of the founders of Engaged Dharma Israel. Aviv was with our producer Max Freedman when he visited Rashash to report "The shepherd and the settler." Listen to the full documentary to hear Aviv's close encounter with a settler on an ATV, then return to this episode to learn about how Aviv uses meditation to challenge the occupation, and why he no longer calls himself a "peace activist."
We're back with another extended interview from "The shepherd and the settler," produced by the Unsettled team for the BBC World Service.
Aviv Tatarsky is a researcher for Ir Amim and one of the founders of Engaged Dharma Israel. Aviv was with our producer Max Freedman when he visited Rashash to report "The shepherd and the settler." Listen to the full documentary to hear Aviv's close encounter with a settler on an ATV, then return to this episode to learn about how Aviv uses meditation to challenge the occupation, and why he no longer calls himself a "peace activist."
Unsettled is produced by Asaf Calderon, Emily Bell, Ilana Levinson, and Max Freedman.
Muhammad Jahaleen
This is the first in a series of extended interviews from "The shepherd and the settler," produced by the Unsettled team for the BBC World Service.
Muhammad Jahaleen is a 30-year-old Bedouin shepherd in the occupied West Bank, living with his family in a remote place called Rashash. Listen to "The shepherd and the settler," then return to this episode for more of Muhammad's story and more details about his life under threat from the settlement next door.
This is the first in a series of extended interviews from "The shepherd and the settler," produced by the Unsettled team for the BBC World Service.
Muhammad Jahaleen is a 30-year-old Bedouin shepherd in the occupied West Bank, living with his family in a remote place called Rashash. Listen to "The shepherd and the settler," then return to this episode for more of Muhammad's story and more details about his life under threat from the settlement next door.
Unsettled is produced by Asaf Calderon, Emily Bell, Ilana Levinson, and Max Freedman. This episode was reported by Max Freedman.
The shepherd and the settler
In this short documentary, originally aired on the BBC World Service, Unsettled producer Max Freedman spends the day in Rashash, a small herding community in the West Bank, with a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad.
Muhammad's family has been herding sheep and goats in Rashash for 30 years, and in Palestine for generations. But since Israeli settlers recently moved in nearby, it has become difficult for Muhammad to graze his flock undisturbed. After watching this conflict in action, Max sets out to understand what he saw in Rashash.
Unsettled producer Max Freedman spends the day in Rashash, a small herding community in the West Bank, with a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad.
Muhammad's family has been herding sheep and goats in Rashash for 30 years, and in Palestine for generations. But since Israeli settlers recently moved in nearby, it has become difficult for Muhammad to graze his flock undisturbed. After watching this conflict in action, Max sets out to understand what he saw in Rashash.
"The shepherd and the settler" originally aired on September 16, 2020 as part of the "Rulebreakers" series, a collaboration of the BBC World Service and the Sundance Institute. This story was produced by Max Freedman, Ilana Levinson, and Emily Bell, with editing by Ilana Levinson.
Energy (Gaza, ep. 4)
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip shapes people’s lives in many different ways. In this episode, we focus on the chronic energy shortage. Energy is needed for much more than turning on the lights; water, sewage, and hospitals, schools, farms, and factories — they all depend on a steady supply of electricity.
First, producer Max Freedman speaks with Tania Hary, executive director of Gisha, to learn why Gaza’s energy infrastructure can only meet about half of the demand. Then, the story of Majd Mashharawi: a young engineer and entrepreneur who is harnessing Gaza’s most plentiful natural resource — sunlight — to bring power to her people.
Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip shapes people’s lives in many different ways. In this episode, we focus on the chronic energy shortage. Energy is needed for much more than turning on the lights; water, sewage, and hospitals, schools, farms, and factories — they all depend on a steady supply of electricity.
First, producer Max Freedman speaks with Tania Hary, executive director of Gisha, to learn why Gaza’s energy infrastructure can only meet about half of the demand. Then, the story of Majd Mashharawi: a young engineer and entrepreneur who is harnessing Gaza’s most plentiful natural resource — sunlight — to bring power to her people.
This episode of was produced and edited by Max Freedman with Ilana Levinson. Original music by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music from Monem Awad and Blue Dot Sessions.
Tania Hary is the executive director of Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement. Prior to joining Gisha in September 2007, Tania worked on advocacy initiatives for not-for-profit organizations promoting human rights and the rights of refugees. She received her B.A. in modern literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.A. in international affairs from the New School in New York. Tania is relied upon as a source of information and analysis on the situation in Gaza by diplomats, foreign offices and international organizations, and appeared before the Security Council in an Arria formula meeting in 2015.
As a resident of war-torn Gaza, Majd Mashharawi observed the acute need for access to construction material in order to rebuild damaged buildings and infrastructure. She strove to meet this need by founding GreenCake in 2015,a company that creates environmentally friendly bricks from ash and rubble. In the summer of 2017, she developed SunBox; an affordable solar device that produces energy to alleviate the effects of the energy crisis in Gaza, where access to electricity has been severely restricted, sometimes to less than three hours of electricity a day. With SunBox, she was able to provide electricity to hundreds of people and recently awarded MIT Pan Arab competition for that. She received her BSc in Civil Engineering from the Islamic University of Gaza. In 2018 she was selected as one of the most creative people in business and spoke at TEDwomen 2018.
REFERENCES
Monem Awad AKA Fawda, “الشمعة بريئة (The candle is innocent)”
SunBox website
SunBox’s crowdfunding campaign on LaunchGood
“How I’m making bricks out of ashes and rubble in Gaza” (Majd Mashharawi, TEDWomen 2018)
“What is Green Cake and why did this woman invent it?” (BBC World Hacks, November 3, 2018)
“The Gaza electricity crisis - FAQs” (Gisha, updated January 2018)
“Hand on the Switch: Who’s responsible for Gaza’s infrastructure crisis?” (Gisha, January 2017)
“A Costly Divide: Economic repercussions of separating Gaza and the West Bank” (Gisha, February 2015)
“Gaza’s breadwinners defiant in the face of Palestinian Authority salary cuts” (Middle East Eye, February 20, 2019)
TRANSCRIPT
[MUSIC: “The Candle is Innocent”]
MAX FREEDMAN: The voice you’re hearing is Monem Awad, who lives in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City and raps under the name Fawda, which means chaos in Arabic.
The music video for this song is set in a dark apartment. In between shots of Fawda rapping to the camera and into a mirror, we see a small girl with a candle.
“We can only express our anger on Facebook,” he starts. The news suppresses the truth, politics is a trap. Eventually, he names three children: Rahaf, Yusra, and Nasser. “You are in heaven now,” he tells them, “and I’m sorry for everything bad you had to live through in this country.”
Then comes the chorus:
“Who is responsible and who should be blamed?
The candle is innocent. You are oppressed.”
Rahaf, Yusra, and Nasser Mohammed Ali Al-Hindi died on May 6, 2016, after their house caught fire from the candles they were using for light.
According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, between 2010 and 2016, 29 people in the Gaza Strip died in accidental fires that began this way. 24 of them were children. The reason families like this one have to use candles for light is because there is a chronic shortage of energy in the Gaza Strip.
This chronic energy shortage is only one consequence of Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007. The blockade shapes people’s lives in many different ways, but in this episode, we’re focusing on the energy crisis. Because we use energy for much more than turning on the lights. Water, sewage, and hospitals, schools, farms, and factories, all depend on a steady supply of electricity.
We’ll talk about why that steady supply of electricity isn’t available; and hear from a young engineer and entrepreneur who is harnessing Gaza’s most plentiful natural resource — sunlight — to bring power to her people.
My name is Max Freedman, and you’re listening to Gaza: a series from Unsettled.
[MUSIC: Unsettled theme]
MAX: Living in a city like New York, it’s easy to take electricity for granted. I turn on a light switch, I plug in my phone, and the power is just… there. Of course, nothing is just there.
In short, here’s how it gets there:
At a power plant, fuel — coal or natural gas or ideally something less destructive — is used to heat up water until it turns into steam. That steam goes into a machine which converts it into energy. That energy gets to us through what we call the grid: a massive network of interconnected wires and devices that your home or business is probably plugged into.
All of this infrastructure exists in the Gaza Strip. It just doesn’t work.
TANIA HARY: There are kind of government systems in place that are managing these mechanisms just like they are in in New York City.
MAX: This is Tania Hary, executive director of the Israeli NGO Gisha, which advocates for freedom of movement for Palestinians, especially Palestinians in Gaza.
TANIA: The difference is is that Israel controls the borders of the Gaza Strip and it controls all movement of people and goods going into and out of the strip. Of course there's the Egyptian crossing but all of the goods that would come in for the infrastructure are coming in through Israel.
MAX: The energy crisis is complicated, but in some ways it does actually come down to supply and demand. The supply of available energy in the Gaza Strip is only about half of the demand from the 2 million people who live there.
So why can’t supply keep up with demand?
[MUSIC: “Clay Pawn Shop”]
MAX: Let’s back up for a second: Gaza was directly controlled by Israel from 1967 to 2005. During that time, there was virtually no investment in independent energy infrastructure within Gaza. Gaza was completely dependent on Israel’s electric company.
Gaza finally got its own local power plant in 2002, but its potential was never fully realized because of limitations of the grid. Then in 2006, after the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, that power plant — the first and only power plant in the Gaza Strip — was bombed by Israel.
TANIA: And that was the real start of the crisis that we know today.
MAX: The population continued to grow but the infrastructure didn’t develop to keep up with that growth.
To make matters much worse, after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel began severely restricting the movement of people and goods across the border.
You can listen to the last episode of our series for more information about the rise of Hamas and how Israel has dealt with Hamas as a governing power in Gaza. Israel justifies its blockade of the Gaza Strip by citing security concerns. To put it bluntly: Nothing can come in that might be used for terrorism, and no one can leave who might engage in terror.
But many observers say the blockade is primarily political. Israel is punishing Palestinian civilians for having elected Hamas and putting pressure on them to stir up discontent against Hamas.
And what is allowed over the border says just as much about the blockade as what isn’t. For eight years, Gazan produce could not be sold on the Israeli market, stifling an important part of the Gazan economy. When that restriction was finally eased:
TANIA: Interestingly enough the two products the two agricultural products that could go out to Israel were tomatoes and eggplants. Now you could ask yourselves why tomatoes and eggplants. Why not strawberries which Gaza is famous for producing. And the reality was that at the time there was a shortage of those products on the Israeli market. There was a demand for them and when there was a will suddenly there was a way.
[MUSIC: “Clay Pawn Shop”]
MAX: Israel puts the most severe restrictions on what are called “dual-use items” - anything that could conceivably have a military purpose as well as a civilian one. This frequently means that necessary fuel and equipment can’t get into Gaza.
TANIA: The development of the infrastructure system is dependent on this movement of people and movement of goods. And of course it's also dependent on the economy. All of these things are interconnected. If people can't pay their bills you're not going to have enough sources of funds to maintain and develop infrastructure. If spare parts can't come in. You can't build lines and expand the network.
MAX: And yes, Israel has a heightened responsibility in this because of its ongoing control over access to the Strip. But there are other players, too.
There’s Hamas, of course, and its ongoing factional conflict with Fatah, which governs from Ramallah in the West Bank.
TANIA: Ramallah and Gaza have to cooperate basically to get anything done.
MAX: And because they don’t cooperate, they can’t get new projects off the ground, or even pay their employees who manage water and power on a daily basis.
Then there’s Egypt, which is supposed to provide a small percentage of Gaza’s electricity, but doesn’t maintain its power lines.
And then there’s international NGOs. They like to invest in projects, but not in ongoing costs. So for example, they might build a big desalination facility that they can put their name and logo on, but they're not going to necessarily pay for the electricity needed to run that facility.
Overall, there's not one central authority making decisions in a logical organized way on behalf of the general population.
TANIA: You have Hamas you have the P.A. you have the international community you have Israel and they're all playing a role and none of them can act independently. Right. So Israel can't plan a new system and then implement it. And nobody asked it to right. The P.A. is not that interested right now in investing in Gaza. The international community is afraid to invest because they don't want their investment to be bombed. And that's what's tended to happen during the military operations is like bombing of infrastructure. Hamas has other priorities. They think that their people can continue to kind of suffer through until God knows what. So they're not necessarily using their own money to invest in the system.
So it's it's like just lopsided and messy and chaotic and you have these companies the actual electricity company struggling in this situation of like four overlords basically trying to do what it can trying to get the budgets it needs trying to get the parts and trying to get the fuel. Suddenly there's a donation from Qatar. Suddenly there's a project that the U.S. is supporting. Suddenly there's this. You know.
[MUSIC: “Vulcan Street”]
MAX: All this combined is why supply doesn’t meet demand. So what are the consequences of the demand not being met?
TANIA: Everyone in Gaza rich and poor are dealing with the electricity crisis.
MAX: On the household level, that translates to anywhere between 4 and 12 hours of electricity available per day. If you have the means, then you can invest in a generator for your home, and buy fuel to power the generator, so that you can turn on the lights even when the electricity is out.
TANIA: But if you don't have the means and unfortunately most of the population doesn't have the means you're basically living in those hours when the electricity comes back on. And then it's a frenzy in those hours when it's on to try to get everything done that you need to do.
MAX: And lack of electricity impacts nearly every aspect of life in Gaza.
TANIA: First of all the water and sewage network. Water and electricity go hand-in-hand. You can't have clean water. You can't have sewage being treated without large quantities of electricity.
MAX: Some households only get water three or four days a week.
TANIA: You have for example raw sewage and untreated sewage being just dumped into the sea on a daily basis. It can reach over a hundred thousand litres per day.
MAX: Hospitals in Gaza have to juggle their electricity supply, prioritizing certain wards over others. They make up for inconsistent power by running very large generators, but that creates its own problems.
[Music: “Emmit Sprak”]
TANIA: There are a few seconds in between when the electricity coming from the lines turns off and when the generator power kicks in. And in those precious moments you have nurses and doctors who are literally hand pumping oxygen to patients in the hospitals praying for the electricity to come on quickly.
Gaza is a modern society. Of course it's a place that has been de-developed where there's a lot of poverty but it's a modern society and people are studying at universities there are hospitals there are businesses and um just like you and me they they need electricity in order to do the normal things that we do every day.
And so you can imagine that in a situation where you only have four hours per day eight hours per day twelve hours on the best of days you can imagine how that stunts growth. It stunts normal life. It stunts development and really for no good reason.
MAX: The scale of the problem can seem insurmountable. But not to Majd Mashharawi.
MAJD MASHHARAWI: So my name is Majd Mashharawi I'm 24 years old. I grew up in Gaza and I live in the middle of the city.
MAX: Her grandparents came to Gaza City as refugees in 1948.
MAJD: And our family in Gaza is one of the biggest families. Yeah.
MAX: So if I went to Gaza there are a lot of people with your name.
MAJD: Yes. You can just say like “Mashharawi family.” “Oh!”
[MUSIC: “Noe Noe”]
MAX: Majd is responsible for two inventions: Green Cake and SunBox.
Green Cake is an alternative to cement, which is hard to come by in the Gaza Strip. Majd figured out how turn ashes and rubble into building blocks.
And then there’s SunBox, which is her answer to the energy crisis we’ve been talking about. It’s a small, easy-to-use, and affordable solar energy kit that takes advantage of the fact that Gaza gets more than 320 days of sunlight every year. SunBox can supply a family’s electricity for an entire day without relying on the grid.
Again, Majd is 24. And she not only invented Green Cake and SunBox, she is the CEO of both companies. But she has always felt a responsibility toward her people.
MAJD: Since I was a kid I used to work for the community.
MAX: When Majd was 14, she started going door to door in the refugee camps, as part of a movement for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
MAJD: We failed. I tell you. At the end of two years we failed because when we visited every house in the camps in Gaza to convince them not to fight and to build their future they didn't convince. Why because they didn't feel real change. And that's what drove me to think to the business orientation just like I wanted to do something that will let people follow what they think.
Well I didn't want to be an engineer. I wanted to go to science college to study physics but when I entered that college was like “This is not my place. I guess I need something more practical.” So I entered engineering and I loved it.
In the fourth year of college I started to develop an idea of making a building blocks. I didn't know how what exactly to use but I thought that the main problem in Gaza that time 2014 war was the building material.
[SOUND: 2014 assault on Gaza]
MAJD: We had a huge shortage in building materials and we didn't have access to building blocks. So people wanted to rebuild their houses but they couldn't find the materials. I started making building blocks out of paper.
It was successful, it was good but it was super expensive. So people couldn't afford it. And I moved to making building blocks out of mud.
MAX: From paper she had moved to mud. And from mud she eventually moved to ashes. Ashes are everywhere in Gaza City. Majd explained why.
MAJD: People who's making mud pots. I don't know if you know them mud pots but we use them in Gaza to eat. it's a good industry in Gaza and many people are using it so those people who produce mud pots they throw all the ashes in the neighborhood and the people are always complaining like we we smell bad things and we wanted the municipality but the municipality said yaani “We had nothing to do yaani. Khalas yaani this is not our problem. This is your problem. You should solve it.”
MAX: She found herself solving two problems at the same time: access to building materials, and the environmental problems caused by these ashes and other unhealthy refuse. Eventually from ashes she moved on to using the rubble of houses that had been demolished and needed to be rebuilt.
MAJD: So if someone wants to build his house we just like come to us. We take the rubbles of their houses and we make new blocks out of it.
MAX: She called her invention Green Cake.
MAJD: Green because it's the first environmentally friendly building blocks in Gaza. We use something that goes to garbage.
MAX: And they call it cake because under a microscope:
MAJD: It looks exactly like the cake with bubbles.
MAX: Green Cake is a replacement for cement and yes, a literal building block – Majd took the rubble from demolished houses and repurposed it to rebuild those same houses.
But even after two years of research and experimentation to make a viable prototype that could be sold on the market, many in Gaza were not convinced.
MAJD: Every community has the resistance to change. In the beginning there’s like. “This is what are you saying is so silly. Like how can I build my house from trash. Are you crazy.” I remember some people told me yaani yaani “You will die under a wall one day. A wall of your made of your blocks.” Because they didn't believe that it can build a wall.
It's the same for SunBox. It was like, “Are you serious? Are you going to give me 24 hours of electricity with only three hundred fifty dollars. I can't believe you. Your system is not functioning.”
MAX: SunBox. That’s her other invention, which uses solar energy to power Gaza.
[MUSIC: “Clay Pawn Shop”]
MAJD: So SunBox mainly consists of two solar panels, my device, and a battery. It gives enough electricity to power the main appliances at home such as phones laptops lights Internet fan TV and the small refrigerator. And like they can do laundry. But with the small machines.
MAX: The device is easily installed, easily maintained, and maybe most importantly, it’s affordable.
Solar technology isn’t new in Palestine. But the solar market in Gaza has been completely out of reach for most people who desperately need electricity.
MAJD: There is some solar companies in Gaza but they offer big systems. Yaani the cheapest system is 1200 dollars and people can't afford it
MAX: For families that can’t afford solar — or a fuel-powered generator, or poor-quality batteries that need to be constantly replaced — the stakes are high.
MAJD: We have candles. Many many families yaani their houses was burnt because of because of candles. One of the people was our neighbor and his four kids were died because of the candles.
MAX: In the summer of 2017, Majd was invited to join a business incubator. She decided to use the opportunity to address the energy crisis.
MAJD: I didn't want just like to dive into the market with a huge number of units without being able to sell it. So we brought one prototype and we installed it in one of the camps in the south and the next day I came. I found the whole neighborhood was watching a football match using our device and was like “Wow I guess here we are. Let's go.”
[SOUND: Football match]
MAJD: I don't know how to tell it like it was yaani — my phone rings every 5 seconds. It's for me it's exhausting. I receive around like 100 calls a day 50 emails hundreds of WhatsApp messages. Which is like. It means that people are looking for what are you offering.
MAX: Majd had an ingenious design and people in Gaza wanted her product. But it wasn’t so easy.
[MUSIC: “An Oddly Formal Dance”]
MAJD: I guess our biggest challenge is to be in Gaza. Like making business in Gaza is something it's very very complicated and it's very exhausting. It needs too much support, it needs too much patience, you have to be very patient.
I believe in business. And what drove me to this orientation is because I worked with NGOs before and I saw that it's not sustainable. It's not changing anything. Khalas. So there is no benefit out of it.
We wanted to create private economy. We want to make the wheel of the economy in Gaza to move. It's not moving. There's no there is no you know there is no companies are growing up.
MAX: Her experience with Green Cake had taught her that having a good product was not enough; she needed a business plan. Majd spent six months on a market survey.
MAJD: We made market survey for six months and we knew that people can pay like 80 percent of people can pay up to 400 dollars. After six months, what happened is the economic situation collapsed. Why? Because more than 75 percent of people are employees and now they are not getting salaries from the government, from both governments because of the political situation. Like they are fighting and they wanted to put more pressure on the government in Gaza so they said okay there is no salaries for the PA employees.
MAX: The situation is convoluted, so let me break it down:
Basically, there are two parallel sets of civil servants in Gaza: one under the Palestinian Authority (controlled by Fatah), and one under Hamas.
The PA continues to pay the salaries of its own employees, even though many of them haven’t actually worked since Hamas took over and installed its own people in 2007. But over the last few years, the PA has regularly and without warning reduced those salaries by 30-50% or failed to pay them at all. Lower wages means lower tax revenue for Hamas, which is supposed to put pressure on Hamas to give up control.
Meanwhile, Hamas continually struggles to pay its own employees, as tax revenue and international aid are constantly fluctuating.
Then there’s the UN.
MAJD: And the UN you know because of the budget cuts in the US government that made so the UN just decreased the salaries and many employees lost their jobs.
MAX: In January 2018, the Trump Administration cut its contribution to the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees by 83%. And then in September, they cut it down to zero. At the same time, they cut 200 million dollars from the USAID budget in the West Bank and Gaza.
MAJD: So the ability to pay for our product just like you know dropped to the half. So people who said we can pay four hundred dollars now they can't pay more than two hundred fifty dollars. So how can we operate.
MAX: She had fought to get the price down to $350, believing that would be within reach for the majority of families in Gaza. Then suddenly, that was no longer true. Innovative technology was not enough: they needed a new business model.
MAJD: We reached out to organizations big organizations and we told them listen: we want you you want your support.
MAX: The idea was for these NGOs to subsidize the cost of a SunBox — not to pay for them entirely, but to offset the cost by $100 per unit.
MAJD: So instead of buying the unit for 350 dollars they can buy the unit for 250 dollars. At the end of the day you are helping people and the same time you're supporting the economy in Gaza. They said, “Okay, we can help you.”
MAX: But before these organizations would subsidize any SunBoxes, they wanted to see 100 units operational on the ground. This is typical of the nonprofit industrial complex. Before they give you money, they need to see you do the thing you need their money to do. Anyway, to solve this problem, she started a crowdfunding campaign.
CROWDFUNDING VIDEO: Since 2006, Gaza has been suffering from a severe energy crisis.
MAJD: In three weeks we raised almost thirty two thousand dollars from 50 different countries across the globe.
CROWDFUNDING VIDEO: We are a group of entrepreneurs from Gaza. We refuse to lose hope.
MAJD: From people we never met before. Just believed in the concept.
CROWDFUNDING VIDEO: We need you to donate and share our campaign. May the sun bless you, and may the sun bless Gaza as well. Thank you.
MAJD: Our goal was 50 now we're still raising like a hundred thousand dollars. After subsidizing for 1000 families we will go back to those organizations like listen. Now we have a thousand units on the ground we need your support to reach 5000 families.
MAX: But money can’t buy everything. When I spoke to Majd in August, she was waiting on 185 batteries held up at the border.
MAJD: We have several manufacturers in China. So we ship it from China to Israel, from Israel to Gaza. So it's now in Israel since 4 weeks and we can’t get it into Gaza.
MAX: Batteries, like construction materials, are considered “dual-use items” — meaning they could be used for military purposes rather than civilian ones.
But as Majd explained, just as often this has nothing to do with the nature of the items — and everything to do with politics.
MAJD: So the border situation is more like totally depending on the, what is going on in the country between Israel and Palestine. So if something happens in Area C let's say they would close the border. They open it and they close it whenever they want which is which is the main thing for business.
MAX: And if infrastructure and geopolitics weren’t enough…
[MUSIC: “Noe Noe”]
MAJD: So in Gaza there is they don't believe in women's abilities. When I started Green Cake in the beginning I remember my family was the biggest support for me but they were under pressure social pressure from the surrounding community. Like uncles talking them like “What your daughter is doing. She's wasting her life. She should get married.” One of them told me, “When I was at your age I had four babies.” Yaani I’m a bad investment for the family.
Also like working in an office with men is not allowed. So I had to have women with me or my brother as like. So it's it's very complicated. One time I remember that I had a fight with my family — as I said they are the biggest support but they are under social pressure from the community. So my dad told me yaani “You will bring a woman or you are not working.” I was like “Okay I'm not working.” And I closed the office for two weeks. I was like “I'm not going to work. Just like I don't believe in what you're saying. Give me something reasonable I can believe in.” And after two weeks it was like he allowed me to open it.
Sometimes I go to the houses when we install solar units. So the device is self-installable but I wanted to make sure that they install it perfectly and no problem. Usually I meet the man, the owner of the house, not women at all. He was talking to me but he doesn’t want to look at me. And he asked the engineer who’s working in the company to check if what I did was wrong or right. So they don't believe in the ability of us doing something.
I still have some troubles with the team itself even because it's men but it's it's fine yaani. I'm used to it. Our goal is bigger than being a man or a woman. Our goal is to create the change in our community.
So yes being in Gaza and running a business in Gaza it's not something easy at all and I always say if someone will be successful running business in Gaza he can run business anywhere. Just like all around the world. It's so easy to do business here in the US. It’s like this. I don't understand why do people sometimes say Oh it's too hard here. You have to come back home and see what does the hardship means.
MAX: Majd tried to leave Gaza for many years, without much luck.
MAJD: Before before Green Cake I tried to get out just to build myself seven times. I remember taking my my things to the border getting my visa my flight tickets everything and I couldn’t pass. And they called me a hopeless case.
MAX: Finally, after winning first prize in an innovation challenge, Majd went outside Gaza for the first time in March 2017.
MAJD: I went through the United Nations UNRWA to Japan. You can imagine life from Japan. From Gaza to Japan. It's totally unfair.
MAX: In Japan, she was able to technically refine Green Cake, to test the blocks in ways that were impossible back home.
MAJD: It was pure technical amazing trip. And after this when I went back home and I said listen the block is great but I don't know how to change it to business so I have to go for a business trip. And this is how I came to the U.S. And since then I'm not staying in Gaza, it’s like traveling all the time.
MAX: And what have you seen and how has it changed your point of view.
MAJD: I saw life. Yes. Yaani what I saw is life. What is life. I recognize that we are back home. We don't know anything about what is life. We thought we are alive but we are not. And sometimes I feel very sad when people yaani are happy to have 8 hours of electricity like we should fight for 24 hours. We shouldn't be happy with 8 hours. We should be satisfied with the max not with the minimum. So yeah.
[MUSIC: “Emmit Sprak”]
MAX: We originally spoke to Majd last summer. But facts on the ground have changed since then. Here’s Tania Hary again, from Gisha.
TANIA: People in Gaza have now since November had about 12 hours per day which is like the best that they can ever hope for. Hasn't been 12 hours in several years.
MAX: It’s 12 hours now because the government of Qatar spent 60 million U.S. dollars to purchase fuel from Israel to power the Gaza Strip. But as of this recording it’s almost April, and that fuel won’t last forever.
TANIA: So they're going to suddenly go back down again and I think it's going to again lead to internal protests more it's like once you get used to like a better standard of living and then you're knocked back down again. I think people are going to be angry rightfully angry and Qatar is saying like we can't just keep giving money for fuel. Something needs to change fundamentally.
MAX: As Tania explained it, one of the reasons that Qatar stepped in to give money for fuel in the first place was not only to provide immediate relief to the population, but also because if Gaza descends into a full-blown humanitarian crisis, that anger she’s talking about could boil over. The agenda of countries like Qatar and various international aid organizations is to preserve at least temporary stability.
But think about that: temporary stability. Is that really stability?
TANIA: It's hard because you know for outside audiences they're like OK crisis crisis crisis and people get accused of crying wolf because like well you know people aren’t dying it's not Yemen it's not Syria. But really the only reason why that is is because there is this constant investment. It's like a total mirage that things are kind of OK but it's everything is being propped up on on humanitarian aid essentially. So as soon as you're seeing like now we're seeing the dips in the aid supply mainly from the US then the system is starting to fracture and crack.
[MUSIC: “Olivia Wraith”]
MAX: What's the dream. If everybody has SunBox in their home, what is possible in Gaza.
MAJD: I can see the dream started from now when we installed the pilot. Yaani the amount of happiness I saw in people's eyes. It's I can't describe it here seriously. I remember one time installed a unit for a family and I went back to the office. I was like I felt I wanted to eat everything around me because I was so happy and I was so hungry. And is like yaani the amount of happiness I had it was just too much yaani. I felt like it's really changing life.
MAX: In September, all those batteries were finally allowed over the border, and SunBox has now installed about 800 solar systems on rooftops across the Gaza Strip.
The company is growing really fast: even though the stalled economy in Gaza has continued to cut into people’s ability to pay for her device, Majd has raised 60,000 U.S. dollars to offset her costs, and this month SunBox is set to install another 400 units. And as she said, this can really change people’s lives.
SunBox is also now getting into the business of powering large institutions like hospitals, universities, and water treatment facilities — one building at a time.
But at the end of the day, the energy crisis is really an economic crisis, and a political crisis. As long as people in Gaza can't afford to pay their bills, the system can never invest in long-term maintenance and development, and can never become self-sufficient.
TANIA: So I think that it's it's vital that movement restrictions are lifted on Gaza not just for the spare parts and not just for the technicians that need to come in and out. That that's too isolated. We need to look at the broader picture of of the economy allowing people to travel allowing goods to come in and out uh in order to restore economic activity. People want to be independent. They don't want to depend on charity and handouts. They want to be able to develop their own grid. And in the current situation they're not able to do so.
MAX: Majd Mashharawi has learned from experience to stay away from the fractious and often dangerous politics of Israel-Palestine. But the economic and even psychological impact of her work is also inherently political.
MAJD: Why do people yaani not thinking of changing their life or doing better things. Because they don't have the minimum things. Like people don’t have electricity don’t have food. They don't have income. So it's normal they will never thinking of think of a change. They only think how to have the food.
If you come to a Gazan on the street and tell him “Listen let's change our life. Let's make a youth movement then create a new government.” They will think I'm silly. “Are you serious. You have money and your family has money. That's why you think of this. You have nothing else to worry about.” One time, my friend told me, “You have nothing else to worry about so you want to make a revolution.” So yes it's true.
I want people to reach to this stage the stage where they can think of making a change themselves not waiting for others and being dependent.
I hate when people call us victims. I really hate it. I don't like when people yaani treat me as like. “Oh you need mercy.” Not true. Like we can create many things but we know how to fish but we don't have a sea. We really know how to fish. We have the talents we have the potential but yaani we can't find the sea.
[MUSIC: “The Candle is Innocent”]
MAX: Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Ilana Levinson, and me, Max Freedman. This episode was produced and edited by Ilana Levinson and me.
Our theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music for this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. The song you’re hearing right now is “The Candle is Innocent” by Monem Awad, aka Fawda. You can find a link to the music video, as well as Majd Mashharawi’s recent TED Talk and other resources about SunBox and Gisha, on our website, unsettledpod.com.
If you like Unsettled, please tell a friend - and let us know! Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or send your thoughts and questions to unsettledpod@gmail.com. You can also find us on social media — we’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
To catch the rest of our Gaza series, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss an episode of Unsettled.
—
MAX: Hey, remember way back in December 2017 when we featured the playwright and musician Dan Fishback on not one, but two episodes of Unsettled?
DAN FISHBACK: I believe in the liberation of the people of Palestine, and I believe in the liberation of the Jewish people. And those things are not just not mutually exclusive, they require each other.
MAX: Guess what — Dan has his own podcast! It’s called Sick Day with Dan Fishback, and you can find it wherever you’re listening to Unsettled right now. Dan talks to his favorite activists and theater people and activist theater people about art and politics, chronic illness, sexuality, and Star Trek. Check it out. Sick Day with Dan Fishback.
Hamas (Gaza, ep. 3)
Too many conversations about Gaza begin and end with one word: Hamas. And conversations about Hamas too often rely on reductive talking points.
In this episode, producer Max Freedman speaks with Tareq Baconi, author of the new book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. They discuss the origins of Hamas, its position in the Palestinian political landscape, and its governance of the Gaza Strip.
Too many conversations about Gaza begin and end with one word: Hamas. And conversations about Hamas too often rely on reductive talking points.
In this episode, producer Max Freedman speaks with Tareq Baconi, author of the new book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. They discuss the origins of Hamas, its position in the Palestinian political landscape, and its governance of the Gaza Strip.
This episode was produced and edited by Max Freedman. Fact-checking by Asaf Calderon. Music by Nat Rosenzweig and from Blue Dot Sessions.
Tareq Baconi is the International Crisis Group’s Analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict. His book, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was published by Stanford University Press in 2018. His writing has appeared in Arabic in Al-Ghad and Al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English in The New York Review Daily, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The Nation, The Daily Star (Lebanon), and al-Jazeera. He has provided analysis for print and broadcast media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC, National Public Radio, and Democracy Now!
REFERENCES
Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018)
Tareq Baconi interviewed by Rami Younis for +972 Magazine (January 11, 2019)
The First Intifada on CBS News Nightwatch (December 17, 1987)
Hamas’s original charter (August 18, 1988)
Hamas’s new political document (May 1, 2017)
TRANSCRIPT
MAX FREEDMAN: When we started planning our series about Gaza, we knew we’d have to talk about Hamas. And pretty quickly I realized I didn’t know anything about Hamas.
So when I found out that there was a new book out about the history of the group, I ordered a copy and started reading it.
So one day I’m on my way to work, I pull out this book to read on the train and suddenly I get nervous that people are going to see me reading it. A book about Hamas, in public.
Which is ridiculous, right? It’s a book. Written by an academic. I was just trying to learn more. So why did I feel that way?
TAREQ BACONI: There is an aversion to try to understand Hamas and to try to contend with the complexities that Hamas presents.
MAX: This is Tareq Baconi, who wrote that book.
TAREQ: The movement is seen as inherently toxic and one that people don't really want to understand or engage with or are too frightened of engaging with it.
MAX: To be fair, all that most Americans ever hear about Hamas from commentators and politicians is stuff like this:
RON DERMER: Hamas intends to harm Palestinian civilians and to harm Israeli civilians the more civilians they kill the better for them.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It's called the dead baby strategy. You use children and women you deliberately put them on the front lines. You make it impossible for Israel to defend itself without occasionally killing a woman or a child or an elderly person. And every time Israel accidentally kills somebody like that, Hamas cheers and celebrates because that's exactly what they want.
BEN SHAPIRO: The Gaza Strip is filled with people who want Israel destroyed and want to kill Jews. And those people have elected people in the Hamas government in order to do just that.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Hamas is like ISIS. Hamas is like al-Qaeda. / Hamas is like Boko Haram.
[MUSIC: “The Telling”]
MAX: This knee-jerk fear I had — that somehow this organization is so uniquely toxic that by allowing strangers to read the word Hamas over my shoulder I might as well be writing TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER across my forehead — it’s not uncommon.
But the fear of engaging with Hamas even as a subject of study means that the scary things people say on TV aren’t contested in the public sphere, and — as Tareq Baconi points out — that has consequences.
TAREQ: I think the misrepresentation that is prevalent on Hamas has become quite disturbing and has allowed a lot of realities to unfold particularly in the Gaza Strip in a way that is unchecked.
And so I think it's really important for anyone who's interested in Israel-Palestine to understand what this organization is and to understand what it stands for to understand the implications of the fact that it's in power governing two million Palestinians and to try to dig a bit deeper beyond the the the surface understanding of Hamas as simply a terrorist organization that merits marginalization and isolation. I think it's it’s much more complex than that.
MAX: So in today’s episode, with Tareq’s help, we’re going to get into some of that complexity.
Because the surface understanding of Hamas that he’s talking about can go hand in hand with a surface understanding of Gaza. So if we want to take a nuanced look at Gaza, we need to make a nuanced assessment of Hamas.
How has Hamas changed over the last thirty years? What is Hamas’s relationship with the people of Gaza? And if Hamas isn’t going anywhere, what does that mean for Israel?
My name is Max Freedman, and this is “Gaza,” a series from Unsettled.
[MUSIC: Unsettled theme]
MAX: Tareq Baconi is an Israel-Palestine analyst at the International Crisis Group. His new book is called “Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.”
TAREQ: So I decided to study Israel-Palestine as a way of learning more about an issue that's important to me on a personal level and that informed a lot of my life growing up.
MAX: Tareq was born and raised in Jordan, but he’s the grandson of Palestinian refugees. His book was published last spring, and it’s the end product of more than a decade of research. “Hamas Contained” is billed as “the first history of the group on its own terms.”
TAREQ: So I pretty much read every single document Hamas has ever issued over a 30 year period.
MAX: And before we go any further:
Tareq told me that he rejects without question the use of armed violence against civilians. In his work, he tries to understand the context, and to understand how Hamas justifies its violence against civilians, but he does not excuse it. He also rejects the use of violence against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli state.
When we started working on this episode, I really knew almost nothing about Hamas beyond the headlines. So when I had the opportunity to speak with Tareq in September, I asked him to start at the very beginning.
MAX: Where did Hamas come from. Why was Hamas started where it was and when it was. What was going on at that moment.
TAREQ: Hamas started in 1987.
MAX: 1987 was a key turning point in Palestinian history.
[MUSIC: CBS News Nightwatch]
CHARLIE ROSE: Simmering tensions erupted in violence this week along the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Some 650,000 Palestinians…
MAX: This was the start of the First Intifada: a spontaneous mass uprising on an unprecedented scale — mostly nonviolent, despite the tenor of news coverage at the time.
BOB SIMON: Senior Israeli officers say it can no longer be defined as a wave of disturbances. They’re calling it insurrection. U.N. officials are calling it the worst violence since Israel conquered the Gaza Strip in 1967. Palestinians are calling it the children’s revolt.
MAX: So in order to fully understand the significance of this uprising — and the origins of Hamas — we need to spend a minute talking about the broader Palestinian political landscape.
For twenty years leading up to this moment, the Palestinian cause had been led from abroad, by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO. The PLO is an umbrella group made up of different Palestinian factions, but historically dominated by one faction, Fatah.
TAREQ: And the PLO's message the PLO's ideology was the full liberation of historic Palestine through armed struggle. And over the course of the 60s and 70s, a great deal of violence was shed by the PLO all over the world against Israel and Israeli targets.
MAX: But by 1987, the PLO had been weakened by years of violent in-fighting. And from its exile in Tunisia, the PLO was relatively disconnected from the Palestinians who were living under occupation and facing the brunt of Israel’s military rule.
So part of what made the First Intifada such a watershed moment was that for the first time since 1948, Palestinians living in Palestine were at the vanguard of the resistance. And suddenly, the eyes of the world were on Gaza.
BOB SIMON: Gaza’s not only forgotten it’s unwanted. The Arabs all insist that the Israelis should pull out. But no one wants to take their place. Even the PLO has offered very little in the way of money or support. Which is one reason why the rallying cry in Gaza these days is Islam. The force is fundamentalism, the mosques are overflowing. Yasser Arafat is being replaced as spiritual leader of the strip by 51 year old Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
MAX: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was the head of the Mujama Islami: basically a chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. Up to this point, the Mujama Islami had adopted a very different theory of Palestinian liberation from the PLO.
TAREQ: They believed that if the Palestinians living in the occupied territories were more connected to their Islamic doctrine and Islamic belief that that would allow the Islamic nation the Ummah to prosper and ultimately within the Palestinian context to end the occupation.
When the intifada erupted, that belief, that independence would happen organically through living a more virtuous life, came into tension with reality on the ground.
MAX: Leaders of the intifada were calling for a complete boycott of all forms of engagement with Israel.
But Israel had actually supported the growth of Islamic organizations like the Mujama Islami — hoping they would provide an alternative to Palestinian nationalism and draw support away from militant groups like the PLO.
So the Mujama Islami was widely criticized within the Gaza Strip — not only for avoiding active resistance but for working with the occupation forces in order to get permission to expand their social, religious and educational services.
This criticism threatened to leave the Mujama Islami marginalized at what was clearly a historic moment in the national struggle.
TAREQ: And so in 1987, the founders of the of the Mujama Islami within the Gaza Strip got together in the house of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and decided that actually it was time to break off into a splinter group that would prioritize resistance.
MAX: That splinter group was called the Islamic Resistance Movement - better known by its acronym, in Arabic: HAMAS.
[MUSIC: “Envira”]
MAX: So at the time that Hamas is founded there is a charter. And you know a lot of the time when you try to talk to people American Jews let's say about about Gaza you can't get past the question of Hamas and if you want to talk about Hamas you can't get past the question of the charter. So can you talk a little bit about the charter what's in the charter and why it's such a flashpoint for these discussions.
TAREQ: Absolutely. And it should be. I think that charter should be interrogated and the charter is problematic on so many levels that it absolutely must be something that is brought to people's attention and discussed. Fundamentally it lays out what Hamas’s mission is. So it talks about Hamas being dedicated to the notion of jihad and it defines jihad not as a tactic but as a way of being, as a holistic way of life. The charter talks about how the movement derives its ideology and its beliefs from the Koran. And it talks about creating an Islamic state over the land of historic Palestine.
Now the problem with the charter. There are several problems but I think the problem you're alluding to is the rampant anti-Semitism in it. So it conflates Judaism with Zionism. There is no real sophisticated understanding of the difference between the two in in the charter. And it plays on all the anti-Semitic tropes that are well known. You know the Jews controlling global politics and controlling the U.N. and mass media and amassing wealth and it derives a lot the charter derives a lot of its interpretation of the Jewish people from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So it's in many ways the charter is a despicable piece of writing.
MAX: Well we're having a very kind of measured conversation about this. But I mean when I hear that those things are in the charter as a Jewish person should I not feel threatened by that.
TAREQ: Absolutely you should. Absolutely. And that's exactly what I'm saying. So this is a document that needs to be interrogated it needs to be challenged. I very much sympathize and understand with the worries that Jews or non-Jews have about the the charter frankly you don't need to be Jewish to be disturbed by this. I wouldn't ever say that Hamas has no anti-Semitism. But I do think that the charter isn't representative of Hamas’s political thinking today and isn't representative of the degree of sophistication they have in engaging with Israel.
MAX: Tareq interviewed many leaders of Hamas while writing his book: across different levels of seniority, in the occupied territories and in the Palestinian diaspora. And he explained to me that many of them do understand the difference between Judaism and Zionism.
TAREQ: Hamas's leaders at least the leaders that I interviewed and certainly many of the people that I spoke to have tried to distance themselves from the charter.
MAX: In fact, in May 2017, Hamas issued what they called a new “political document.”
MAX: Is it a new charter?
TAREQ: So in my mind and in the mind of many it is seen as a new charter but Hamas never officially renounced the old charter. And more than not renouncing it attached the old charter as an appendix to this new political document.
MAX: Okay.
TAREQ: But so the question about why Hamas wouldn't renounce the charter is one that is quite perplexing. I think many people have openly within Hamas as well have openly called on Hamas to renounce the charter. I think Hamas is still very much a populist movement and it is still very much connected to what they like to call maintaining the fiery roots. So maintaining a certain level of passion and a certain level of ground mobilization and I think that renouncing the charter would appear to be a concession or at least present Hamas in a way that might distance the political leadership from its rank and file.
MAX: When you say that they haven't renounced the old charter because they are a populist movement it seems to me what you're implying is that what is in the old charter is popular.
TAREQ: That's I don't think that's what I'm implying. I think that it’s it’s seen as a way of maintaining your ideological commitments. So I don't think I'm suggesting that Hamas's followers are believing in the anti-Semitism that Hamas’s charter portrays but I think they believe in Hamas's ideological purity and Hamas's refusal to bow to pressure.
MAX: This ideological purity and refusal to bow to pressure became so central to Hamas’s identity in part because of what was happening within the PLO at the same time that Hamas emerged.
[MUSIC: “Clay Pawn Shop”]
TAREQ: By the 1970s the PLO under the leadership of Yasser Arafat was starting to understand the limits of armed violence. Particularly when you're dealing with a state that had a very clear territorial level of control and institutions and an army that was developed and supported by the world's nations. So throughout the 70s and the 80s there was a process of transformation that was starting to take place within the PLO which was to contend with the need to enter the diplomatic fold to start engaging with Israel as a reality. That transformation obviously was one that took a significant period of time to come through. But it led to ultimately by 1988 for the PLO to make the decision to recognize the state of Israel.
MAX: Wait I'm sorry. The PLO recognized the state of Israel in 1988.
TAREQ: Yes. So in 1988 —
MAX: The reason I ask is because that's definitely not that's definitely not what I was raised to believe.
TAREQ: Yes. I know.
MAX: Tareq explained that in November 1988, Yasser Arafat gave a speech in Algiers declaring the creation of the state of Palestine.
[SOUND: Yasser Arafat in Algiers, November 15, 1988]
MAX: In this speech, Arafat agreed that the PLO would accept a state on 22% of the land of historic Palestine — effectively conceding the fact that 78% of the land of historic Palestine had indeed become the state of Israel.
I was surprised to find out about this.
MAX: So when I hear even today that a precondition for negotiations or what we call the peace process is that the Palestinians must recognize the state of Israel. What does that mean. If that happened 30 years ago.
TAREQ: Yes that's a good question. And if you look at the way that that demand is put forward so now for example it's not recognizing Israel it's recognizing Israel's right to exist which is very subtle but very different. Recognizing Israel's right to exist many legal scholars have scratched their heads to try to understand what that means because there is no nation state that has a right to exist. Nation states exist and come into being and falter and what is this right of a nation state to exist.
And then the demand changes in different guises. So for example Prime Minister Netanyahu today would condition any kind of engagement with the Palestinians on the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. So there are constant demands that Palestinians need to rise up to and that they need to fulfill before they are seen as legitimate partners. And the irony of course is that there hasn't been a recognition of Palestinian statehood yet in an official capacity by most Israeli political parties including the party of the current prime minister, the Likud.
So you're right to be bewildered. But the constant call on Palestinians to recognize Israel. To my mind is nothing but an exercise in ensuring that there can be no equity between Israel and the Palestinians and to keep demanding of Palestinians what they've already given.
[MUSIC: “Envira”]
MAX: So going back to 1988.
TAREQ: Yes.
MAX: How did this evolution of the PLO shape the kind of organization that Hamas became and its mission.
TAREQ: This is seen as a huge betrayal by Hamas. Hamas believes that the PLO had conceded central tenets of Palestinian nationalism and Hamas in a way rose to protect those to safeguard those tenets and to remain committed to what it views as the purity of Palestinian nationalism.
[MUSIC: “Envira”]
MAX: The end of the First Intifada led to the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the PLO between 1993 and 1995. Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, which was supposed to be temporary: the embryo of a future Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Hamas had become a powerful player in the occupied territories, not just in the Gaza Strip. And Hamas rejected Oslo. Hamas refused to concede 78% of historic Palestine, refused to renounce armed struggle, and spent the 90s trying to undermine negotiations with terrorist attacks — often suicide bombings, which Hamas referred to as its “signature” operations.
TAREQ: Of course there are people and scholars now who would say that even in a peaceful reality the negotiations wouldn't have produced a Palestinian state. But at the time there was for the Palestinians and I think for the majority of Israelis as well a very strong hope and belief that the peace negotiations would produce a two state solution. And Hamas played a significant role in spoiling that.
[MUSIC: “Emmit Sprak”]
MAX: A decade of negotiations and hope, at least for some, gave way to devastating violence with the outbreak of the Second Intifada in the fall of 2000.
NEWS ANCHOR: Clashes erupted at several flashpoints in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The death toll mostly Palestinians now stands at 236 people. Yasser Arafat made a rare public call today to restrain Palestinian gunmen. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak dismissed Arafat's words as inadequate and told Israelis they are in for a long struggle.
TAREQ: With the eruption of the second intifada and of course with the failure of that decade of negotiations Hamas remained committed to the idea that violence could work.
MAX: Suicide is considered sinful in Islam, but Hamas essentially rebranded suicide attacks as “martyrdom operations.”
And though Hamas was not the only faction which carried out suicide bombings during the second intifada, its attacks were the most destructive.
In August and September 2005, under the direction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel “disengaged” from the Gaza Strip. Jewish settlements were dismantled and Israeli security forces were withdrawn.
TAREQ: My reading of the situation is that the movement believed that the more pain it could inflict on the Israeli public the more likely the Israeli public would pressure their government to let go of the territories.
MAX: Well and in 2005 2006 they did let go of the territories. So were they right?
TAREQ: Hamas absolutely claims that Israel let go of the territories because of its armed attacks and for Hamas it has made the argument consistently that only force works. And when Ariel Sharon made that decision in 2005 he reinforced that message.
But until that withdrawal happened, the way that Israel dealt with Hamas's attacks was to carry out hugely destructive operations throughout the Palestinian territories to reoccupy Palestinian villages invade refugee camps and the numbers of Palestinians killed over the course of the intifada in terms of the violence of the occupation forces dwarfs the number of Israelis killed by the resistance of the Palestinian factions.
MAX: Most of Hamas’s senior leaders were killed during the Second Intifada — including its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
TAREQ: Hamas’s response to that level of reaction from Israel — the fact that the disengagement from Gaza happened within the context of a blockade that would then isolate the Gaza Strip — I think there was a moment of transformation within Hamas where there was an understanding that armed struggle wouldn't actually achieve liberation. It was an awakening that was very similar to the one that the PLO had gone through.
MAX: In January 2006, just a few months after the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, Hamas decided to run as a political party in Palestinian national legislative elections for the very first time. And much to everyone’s surprise, they won.
[MUSIC: “Noe Noe”]
MAX: For Tareq and many other Palestinians, this development raised a lot of questions.
TAREQ: How could a movement such as Hamas to be elected through democratic elections. How could a movement such as Hamas run in democratic elections. What did this mean for the Palestinian struggle.
MAX: After the surprise election results, most of the international community refused to recognize the new government led by Hamas. Israel began its blockade of the Gaza Strip — which we’ll explore in more detail in the next episode. And Fatah - the secular political party which had dominated the PLO and the Palestinian Authority — would not cede power to Hamas easily.
By the end of 2006, there was open violence between the factions, and in June 2007, the split became official: Hamas took control in Gaza, and Fatah created its own government in the West Bank.
For nearly two decades, Hamas had been defined by its rejection of mainstream Palestinian politics. Now, Hamas made the decision to embrace the democratic process and join the Palestinian political establishment. Hamas went from doing everything they could to undermine Oslo to taking responsibility for what Oslo had created: the municipal infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority.
MAX: It's hard to say that they have abandoned armed struggle.
TAREQ: Well I mean —
MAX: You know the line is, “Israel disengaged and they got rocket fire.”
TAREQ: Right. So Hamas didn't abandon armed struggle. Hamas still believes in armed struggle as a means of liberation and hence the rocket fire. But the kind of resistance that Hamas engages with today is very different than the resistance of the Second Intifada.
So through the Second Intifada Hamas was on the offensive in terms of invading Israeli cities and towns and settlements and carrying out suicide bombings and carrying out stabbings and carrying out various forms of armed struggle. Now for structural reasons including the fact that the wall is there and the the disengagement happened but also for strategic reasons that's not the kind of armed struggle that Hamas engages with today.
So you mentioned rocket fire. That's strategic and deliberate. That's done in a way to force Israel to renegotiate access into the Gaza Strip to pressure Israel into lifting the blockade or it's used in order to maintain deterrence. After Israel carries out their military incursion into the Gaza Strip Hamas would respond with rocket fire.
MAX: And aside from this strategic use of rocket fire, Tareq says:
TAREQ: Hamas today has become extremely effective at policing resistance.
MAX: I know what you’re thinking. Hamas is policing resistance? This is what Tareq's book is all about: how the leaders of Hamas have, in recent years, been willing and able both to keep their own members in line, and to stop other armed groups from attacking Israel when it doesn’t serve Hamas’s interests.
TAREQ: If Hamas wasn't in power whatever other faction or organization would come to power could be infinitely more hostile. Hamas has actually been a very effective party in terms of committing to ceasefires controlling rocket fire stabilizing the Gaza Strip.
[MUSIC: “Envira”]
MAX: What was it like for you personally to spend time there and to spend time with leaders of Hamas and do the research that you had to do for this book.
TAREQ: There's really no place that I'd ever visited that's like the Gaza Strip. I might disagree with Hamas's ideology and I might find a lot of what it stands for problematic but I also understand their thinking and their desperation and their their belief that they are engaged in a moral struggle that Israel is the invader and that Zionism is a form of colonialism that disenfranchised people of their land. I understand those things so I'm able to see Hamas and to see its leaders beyond the surface beyond this bloodthirsty terrorist organization and to try to understand this deeper reality that animates them and animates their following.
And beyond Hamas I think going to the Gaza Strip for me was a very difficult experience. But also what I felt was an enormous responsibility and an enormous privilege. To go into the Gaza Strip and and see the way that people are made to live in this age for political reasons and for demographic reasons for to to leave two million Palestinians penned on a side of a state because they're not Jewish.
For me the most difficult the most difficult thing for me about the Gaza Strip is that I could leave. And that carries with it a huge amount of guilt. Because you have two million Palestinians who can’t. And that's incredible to feel incredible in a very dark way.
[MUSIC: “Emmit Sprak”]
MAX: All four of Tareq’s grandparents were expelled from their homes in Haifa in 1948. They fled to Lebanon, and then because they were Christians, they were naturalized and given Lebanese citizenship. They lived in Lebanon until the civil war, when they fled to Jordan, where Tareq was born.
TAREQ: Just because by sheer coincidence when my grandparents were made refugees in 1948 because of their religion I can have a passport now that allows me to leave when I could have easily been one of the people there. That is a type of guilt that a still on a personal level I'm trying to address.
MAX: So as you said two million people are living in these conditions because they are not Jewish. I think some people would say they are living in these conditions because they are not Jewish and because they chose this group of people who hate Jews to represent them. So my question is why did so many people support Hamas in those elections in 2006.
TAREQ: So the first thing I would say is Gazawis didn't choose Hamas.
MAX: “Gazawis” is the Arabic word for Gazans — using a letter we don’t have in English.
TAREQ: Gazawis didn't choose Hamas. The legislative elections that Hamas ran in ran in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well. So it's certainly not just Gazawis and there were many people within Gaza as there were within the West Bank who voted against Hamas and who voted for Fatah.
So there are many reasons why Palestinians chose Hamas in 2006. There was a huge amount of dissatisfaction with the Palestinian Authority under Fatah's leadership.
MAX: Again, the Palestinian Authority is essentially a municipal government that runs the West Bank under Israeli occupation. The PA is distinct from the PLO, but they are both dominated by Fatah.
TAREQ: Fatah was seen to be a corrupt and elitist movement that was no longer connected to the needs of the people. What I think is that it's much bigger than that. Hamas isn't just its ideology and its charter. Hamas is a movement that is rooted in principles of Palestinian nationalism that go back to 1948.
So for example Hamas calls for the right of return. Hamas calls for the atrocities of 1948 to be recognized. In negotiations and in the two state solution that the Oslo Accords put forward the Palestinian Authority was dealing with 1967. It was dealing with the beginning of the occupation. It was calling for an end to occupation. Hamas in many ways goes further back than that to address the injustices of 1948.
So if you shed Hamas of everything that you or I or many Palestinians would disagree with there are still principles and values that animate Hamas that many Palestinians would identify with and openly support.
And you see that you see that. So for example in 2014 when Israel was carrying out its major operation in the summer of 2014 —
BRIAN WILLIAMS: After this 10 day back and forth air war Israel launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip tonight. This is a major escalation. Flames and flares and outgoing fire were visible in the night sky over Gaza.
TAREQ: Support for Hamas was low. I think it was about 35 percent within the Gaza Strip. But support for resistance and for armed struggle against Israel was 95 percent. So how do you explain that discrepancy. These are Palestinians who are saying, “Okay we might disagree with the fact that Hamas is in power or that Hamas is an Islamist movement or that Hamas has authoritarian tendencies but we believe in Hamas's right to use armed struggle. Because you know what? The blockade is an act of war and the blockade is violent and we cannot sit back and put up a white flag and allow to be starved to death. We believe that we have a right to defend ourselves.”
That's not Hamas. That's Palestinians living under occupation seeking dignity and a better life. And Hamas understands that and Hamas speaks to that. And so when Hamas comes out and says, “You know what? The Palestinian Authority has a police force that's committed to Israel's security and that will crack down on Palestinians in the West Bank when they protest the occupation. I protest the occupation and I will come out and support you and give you tools and give you weapons to protest the occupation.” Many Palestinians would choose Hamas over Fatah because of that. You're choosing between what has essentially become a subcontractor to the occupation and a movement that says, “You know what? There is a nationalist struggle here that's rooted in 1948 that hasn't been resolved.”
What I tried to do in my book is to understand that and to understand Hamas in many ways not as this sort of exceptional Islamist movement that if it didn't appear and if it wasn't there that somehow we would have justice and Palestinian self-determination. No in my mind Hamas is a continuation of Palestinian nationalism. And if Hamas gets quashed you know what you're going to get another political party that calls for the same thing.
MAX: How can Hamas continue to claim to the people of the Gaza Strip that violence, that violence works when the result of the violence from Hamas has been these incredibly destructive incursions from the Israeli army in which thousands of Palestinians have died and many many many more been injured and had their lives completely changed.
TAREQ: Did violence not work? I mean that is a question mark. Israel disengaged in 2005 and disengaged from south Lebanon in 2000. Israel has consistently reacted to and negotiated with Hamas in a way that undermined and undercut the Palestinian parties that were committed to negotiations and that were committed to achieving statehood through diplomacy. So I don't think Hamas has a very difficult task ahead of it in claiming that actually violence works certainly more than negotiations. I think Israel has been very good at rewarding some of Hamas’s policies and at least dealing with Hamas as the more powerful of the two parties.
MAX: Can you can go into more — I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that. That Israel rewards Hamas.
TAREQ: I mean look at some of the things that have happened over the course of the past decade. You have a Palestinian Authority that's sitting in the West Bank that is committed to negotiations. And what it gets out of that commitment is settlement expansion and signposts that are constantly moving out of reach. On the other hand you have in the Gaza Strip some of the most successful prisoner release negotiations happened between Israel and Hamas where a thousand Palestinian prisoners were released for Gilad Shalit. More than a thousand a thousand twenty seven.
MAX: Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, was kidnapped in June 2006 and held in a Hamas prison for more than five years before being released as part of a prisoner exchange.
TAREQ: This dwarfs any successful negotiation that the Palestinian Authority have had with Israel around prisoner exchange. And so it might not be seen as a reward by Israeli government officials but what's happening is a tacit agreement between Israel and Hamas where the two use violence cynically and openly to negotiate the relationship between them with the understanding that there are no ideological concessions so Hamas still hasn't recognized Israel and Israel still refuses to let go of the blockade. But the two parties use violence in a way that allows an equilibrium to be produced between them. Whereas if you look at the Palestinian Authority you have a complete subjugation. Instead of supporting the Palestinian Authority to lead and build a Palestinian state, Israel has used the openness of the PLO to enter into negotiations in order to entrench its occupation.
And so yes I do think that the manner in which the relationship has unfolded between those two Palestinian factions and Israel could very easily be read and portrayed and often is read and portrayed by Hamas’s leaders and Hamas’s followers as, “Israel only understands force. And Israel will only respect a Palestinian party that is able to inflict pain on it and that certain concessions will come.”
Now I personally would disagree with that reading and I would say that Palestinians in Gaza haven’t actually gained anything. Their life is as miserable as it can be and they're living under horrendous conditions and under an unforgiving blockade and in are suffering under a collective punishment.
There is a very high level of disenchantment and anger within the Gaza Strip at Hamas for dragging the Gaza Strip into or I should say opening the Gaza Strip to Israeli military assaults in the way that Hamas does. But for Hamas I think it can easily claim that Israel has rewarded its its refusal to engage with with Israel.
[MUSIC: “Drone Pine”]
MAX: How does Hamas govern.
TAREQ: Hamas governs in what is often called soft authoritarianism. So what that means is it doesn't allow for political mobilization by other parties. So Fatah for example is repressed within the Gaza Strip. Freedom of expression is often quite fragile. So they would allow certain forms of freedom of expression but not forms that are openly critical of the movement. There isn't always due process in terms of dealing with prisoners or in terms of dealing with Palestinians in Gaza that Hamas would see as opponents or criminals or whatever the case might be so there is definite authoritarian tendencies within the Gaza Strip.
I personally don't think that it is far worse or even not comparable to the authoritarianism we have in the West Bank. I think the Palestinian Authority has been increasingly repressive over the course of the past decades. I think that they have used their security forces against Palestinians in the West Bank in a very cynical way. I think freedom of expression within the West Bank is policed as well and not tolerated. Hamas and any kind of political opposition to Fatah and specifically to Mahmoud Abbas's power within the Palestinian Authority is not tolerated at all.
So the point I'm trying to make is that there is authoritarianism in the Gaza Strip and Hamas is in no way a model government. But the movement has a very active social and charitable infrastructure that ensures that the movement has open communication channels and is connected to the people it’s serving. And so I think that by default makes Hamas more sensitive to criticism.
So for example when I was there I interviewed a lot of human rights organizations and journalists that were active in the Gaza Strip and they talk about how Hamas invites them in to hear about their criticisms and their reports and to try to understand the grievances that Palestinians in Gaza might have towards it. I don't think the Palestinian Authority does that in a similar way.
MAX: In particular isn't it dangerous for Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip to try to engage in any kind of relationship with Israelis.
TAREQ: Yes. So in the same way that Israelis cannot engage with anyone in Gaza. I mean it's illegal for Israelis to go into the Gaza Strip and in the same way it's absolutely the issue of collaborators is taken very seriously by Hamas.
MAX: Well, maybe not exactly in the same way.
TAREQ: There’s no system of law here that would provide suspected collaborators with a legal approach that would safeguard their rights. I think Hamas often takes the suspicion of collaboration as sufficient to result in someone's execution.
[MUSIC: “Drone Pine”]
MAX: Hamas’s surprise victory in Palestinian national elections took place in 2006. Since then, there have been no new elections in Gaza. Since there hasn’t been an election since 2006, and since the majority of Palestinians in Gaza are under 18 and therefore would have had no opportunity to vote for Hamas — would it be fair to say that Hamas can’t accurately claim to represent the majority?
Tareq explained that Palestinians have a leadership crisis that goes beyond Hamas and Fatah, beyond the Palestinian Authority, to the PLO, the one organization that is supposed to represent Palestinians all over the world. Neither Hamas nor the PA nor the PLO really represent the Palestinian people — and that’s precisely why there is increasing authoritarianism in both the West Bank and Gaza.
MAX: One of the claims of your book is that really the status quo which seems to any reasonable observer untenable for the two million people living in the Gaza Strip but that the status quo actually works for Hamas and works for Israel.
TAREQ: Absolutely it works for both. I think the status quo. I think Israel benefits a great deal from having Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The dynamic that has emerged between Israel and the Gaza Strip what Israeli security officials call mowing the lawn which is that you carry out a hugely destructive attack on the Gaza Strip every few years to remove or destroy Hamas's military tactics or Hamas's military infrastructure excuse me is a way of actually ensuring stability. It doesn't destroy Hamas. It doesn't completely collapse Hamas.
MAX: And they don't want to.
TAREQ: Well they would then they would have to deal with having two million Palestinians with no government think about it. Hamas now addresses the needs and governs two million Palestinians that Israel wants nothing to do with. If Hamas wasn't there or if the Gaza Strip collapsed what would that mean for Israel.
MAX: You're asking me.
TAREQ: Yes. As in the status quo is one where two million Palestinians can continue to live governed by a Palestinian entity without Israel claiming any responsibility for them. And while maintaining the Gaza Strip as a separate entity from the West Bank which is the area that Israel is or the current Israeli government is ideologically committed to maintaining. Without a functioning government in the Gaza Strip there would be much more difficult reality for Israel to contend with.
So I think both Hamas and Fatah are engaged in a very short term game where they both try to have small victories without making any actual ideological long term concessions. So they're both involved in short term management of the conflict. And the external dynamic is that Israel benefits from the absence of reconciliation. So you see the Israeli prime minister claiming that there can be no peace because there isn't a single partner. Palestinians are divided. But when when in the past the Palestinians did reconcile the prime minister would then say, “Well, the Palestinians have chosen terror. There can't be discussions with them.” So there has been a constant effort by Israel to ensure that the division isn't healed and that's because this divide and rule framework has actually served Israel's purpose.
MAX: So if if this miserable status quo works for Israel and works for Hamas and works for Fatah how do what do we do. How do we get out of the, what you call this “equilibrium of belligerence.”
TAREQ: I don't think we do. I think that the current situation is what we will continue to see for a while until a major unexpected tipping point happens. And I think for me you know to answer your question about how was it for me on a personal level to deal with this research. That was the most difficult realization to accept. I don't think the situation on the ground can change in any fundamental way.
I think if we look at if you look at the way that in the way that discussions around the Gaza Strip has evolved particularly over the course of the past year. You see the Trump administration obviously working very closely with the prime minister's office in Israel talking about humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip. Talking about major infrastructure projects like desalination plants and sewage treatment plants and electricity generators. No one is talking about lifting the blockade. Which is the reason Palestinians in Gaza are suffering. And so you have a reality where the major world powers are accepting the structures of occupation. There is there's not only no cost for the blockade now there is also an EU power footing the bill of the blockade paying for the humanitarian suffering that the blockade is inflicting.
So in many ways the reality is sustainable. Israel has managed to — it's effectively outsourced its occupation. And I don't see why things would change. If I were sitting in the prime minister's office in Israel. It's a very comfortable seat. The economy is booming. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is completely subservient. And the Gaza Strip isn't their problem. There is no cost to Israel's occupation at all.
And I think until there is a major tipping point something that's unexpected which there will be of course because there are in those conflicts you know the Berlin Wall or or apartheid South Africa until there is a tipping point. I think the current reality is one that is likely to persist.
[MUSIC: “Slow Dial”]
MAX: What do you more than anything want to contribute to the public discourse and the academic discourse about Hamas.
TAREQ: I think the main intervention that I tried to do in the book is that saying that Hamas is a terrorist organization doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of understanding what is happening on the ground today. It doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of holding Israel accountable to the illegal ways it deals with the Palestinian people. I think that Hamas has become a very effective fig leaf that allows Israel to legitimate policies that are morally corrupt. And I think that we need to understand Hamas as a party despite a lot of the issues that are very troubling about the organization that has very legitimate political grievances ones that cannot be dismissed if we actually want a just outcome for Palestinians and for Israelis for that matter.
TAREQ: You know people who live in Gaza and who come from Gaza even if you speak to Gazawis abroad there is a pride and rootedness in their right to resist and their belief that they are on the right side of history that even with all the difficulty that they're going through now this long arc of justice will bend towards them. There is pride in the fact that they’re not the Palestinian Authority that it is quote unquote liberated territory that's free of the occupation within. Of course there is an occupation that is controlling it from the outside but on the inside that it has somehow purged Zionism. There is there is pride in Gaza that makes it a very special place.
MAX: Last spring, during the first few weeks of the Great March of Return, I was involved in a protest here in New York where we said the Mourners’ Kaddish for those Palestinians who had been killed by Israeli sniper fire. We got a lot of angry comments online in response, but one really stood out to me. “We don’t say Kaddish for terrorists.”
I can’t tell you exactly when or where I learned that Hamas was the Boogeyman. I grew up during the Second Intifada; I’m sure that had something to do with it. But I think the effect is that it gave me permission not to see the people of Gaza as fully human. And not seeing the people of Gaza as fully human makes it easier to brush aside what happens to them. Especially when it’s supposedly for the sake of the safety of Jews.
You know, I’ve never lived in southern Israel, but I can vividly imagine having to run to a bomb shelter when rockets begin to fall. And I can compartmentalize - even if I don’t like the current Israeli government and I think Ariel Sharon was a war criminal, I can still usually see Israelis as humans.
I’m not asking for a medal, I’m saying that I think for many Jews in the diaspora, it is more difficult to do this for Palestinians. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the portrayal of Hamas as nothing more than bloodthirsty fanatics plays an important role in circumscribing our empathy.
So of course, I acknowledge and condemn their use of terror. And I think it’s important to try to understand Hamas as a rational political actor. It might feel scary and complicated to do that — even just to read a book or listen to a podcast — but what’s the alternative?
On the next episode of “Gaza,” a series from Unsettled:
[MUSIC: “The Records”]
MAX: We’ve referred a few times in this series to the fact that Israel controls everything that goes in or out of the Gaza Strip. Why is that, and what’s the impact on daily life for Gazans? We talk to a young engineer and entrepreneur who’s trying to get electricity to her people.
MAX: What's the dream. If everybody has SunBox in their home. What is possible in Gaza.
MAJD MASHHARAWI: I can see the dreams started from now when we installed the pilot. The amount of happiness I saw in people's eyes. It's I can't describe it here seriously. I remember one time installed a unit for a family and I went back to the office. I was like I felt I wanted to eat everything around me because I was so happy and I was so hungry. And I was like yaani the amount of happiness I had it was just too much yaani. I felt like it's really changing life.
[MUSIC: Unsettled theme]
MAX: Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Ilana Levinson, and me, Max Freedman. This episode was produced and edited by me. Fact-checking by Asaf Calderon.
Our theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. Original art for our Gaza series by Marguerite Dabaie.
You can sign up for our newsletter on our website, unsettledpod.com. While you’re there, you’ll also find a link to Tareq Baconi’s book as well as other resources on the topics we discussed.
Don’t forget to follow Unsettled on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you like the show, you can rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, and of course subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss an episode of Unsettled.
Refugees (Gaza, ep. 2)
Hilmi Hammad was 18 years old in 1948 when Israeli forces entered his village. He became one of about 200,000 Palestinian refugees who ended up in the Gaza Strip at the end of the 1948 war. The site where Hilmi's village once stood is located today in the center of Israel, and though Hilmi has spent his life in Gaza, his home is still in that village, to which he hopes to return.
In the second episode of Gaza, a series from Unsettled, we hear from Hilmi and his son Isam. Isam was born in Gaza and is one of the organizers of the Great March of Return. Isam and Hilmi shared with us their history and talked to us about what it means to be Palestinian refugees in Gaza, still dreaming of returning to their native village.
Hilmi Hammad was 18 years old in 1948 when Israeli forces entered his village. He became one of about 200,000 Palestinian refugees who ended up in the Gaza Strip at the end of the 1948 war. The site where Hilmi's village once stood is located today in the center of Israel, and though Hilmi has spent his life in Gaza, his home is still in that village, to which he hopes to return.
In the second episode of Gaza, a series from Unsettled, we hear from Hilmi and his son Isam. Isam was born in Gaza and is one of the organizers of the Great March of Return. Isam and Hilmi shared with us their history and talked to us about what it means to be Palestinian refugees in Gaza, still dreaming of returning to their native village.
This episode was produced and edited by Asaf Calderon, with help from Ilana Levinson. Fact-checking by Ilana Levinson and mixing by Max Freedman. Music by El Far3i and from Blue Dot Sessions. Unsettled theme music by Nat Rosenzweig. Artwork for our Gaza series by Marguerite Dabaie.
Preview image: Palestine Open Maps
Isam Hammad is an engineer, graduate from Waterford Institute of Technology, wishing to see the world living in peace and free from hatred and wars. My dream is to return back to Sarafand, the little town we were displaced from by the act of war in 1948.
Hilmi Hammad was born in 1930 in Sarafand al-Amar, Palestine. Graduate of Haifa Vocational School. In 1948, he arrived to the Gaza Strip as a refugee. He started working with UNRWA Vocational Training Center in Gaza as a lathing instructor in 1952. In 1963 he became the institution’s director, and retired in 1990. He was one of the founders of the Islamic University of Gaza, and the Patients’ Friends Benevolent Society.
Leena Dallasheh is an assistant professor of history at Humboldt State University. She received her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at NYU. Her work focuses on the social and political history of Nazareth from 1940 to 1966, tracing how Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 negotiated their incorporation in the state, affirming their rights as citizens and their identity as Palestinian. She has published serval articles and book chapters, including “Troubled Waters: Governing Water and Struggling for Citizenship in Nazareth,” which appeared in IJMES 47 (2015). Before coming to NYU, she received a law degree from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
references
Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to remembering the Nakba and promoting the right of return. Check out their website for more testimonies from the Nakba, a map of pre-Nakba Palestine, and for thoughts and practical ideas about return.
Nakba Archive, a website that features testimonies of Nakba survivors.
The testimony of Yerachmiel Kahanovich, an Israeli soldier who participated in the occupation of Lydda and claims he had fired an anti-tank rocket into the Dahmash mosque.
The testimony of Binyamin Eshet, another Israeli soldier, who reported that Palestinian civilians were made to bury the victims of the massacre in the Dahmash mosque, and then they were killed themselves.
Jonathan Cook, Dylan Collins & Ezz Zanoun, “Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope”. Al Jazeera, 19 May 2016.
Tom Pessah, “Yes, the right of return is feasible. Here is how”, +972, November 7, 2017.
El Far3i, Palestinian songwriter, percussionist and vocalist based in Amman, Jordan.
TRANSCRIPT
[Music: “Madineh Haditheh”]
ASAF CALDERON: 1948. It’s a year I remember hearing about from a very young age. Growing up in Tel Aviv, 1948 was celebrated as the year in which we declared our independence, were attacked by the Arabs, and won the war despite all odds.
On Yom Ha’atzmaut, the Israeli independence day, My family used to hang the Israeli flag on our balcony, watch the fireworks and the kids would spray each other with silly string in Rabin Square. Like other nations, we were taught to cherish our independence, but unlike other nations, ours was in the making for the past 2,000 years. For us, 1948 was a celebration of a people coming home.
For Palestinians, 1948 means something entirely different. It’s the year that marks their expulsion from their homeland, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees, in an event they call the “Nakba” - which means “catastrophe” in Arabic.
Our episode today focuses on those Palestinian refugees who ended up in the Gaza Strip. Of the the approximately 1.9 million people who live in the Gaza strip today, about 1.4 million are refugees.
The places that these refugees come from are places that you may think of today as integral parts of Israel like Ashdod or Be’er Sheva, or even the neighborhood where I grew up in Tel Aviv.
How did they end up in Gaza, and why? And what does it mean to be a Palestinian refugee in Gaza and still dreaming of returning to your native village?
I’m Asaf Calderon, and you’re listening to Gaza: a series from Unsettled.
[Music: Unsettled theme]
ASAF: Before we continue, a word of caution: this episode includes descriptions of violence.
ISAM HAMMAD: Our aim is to return, regardless of who’s governing the area. Our main issue is the land. We want to return to the land.
ASAF: This is Isam Hammad. In the first episode of our Gaza series, you heard from Isam about his role in organizing the historic Great March of Return.
For Isam, that land he’s talking about is not an abstract idea, but a specific place. He was born in Gaza, but his parents were born in pre-1948 Palestine. In this episode, you’ll hear from Isam and from his father, Hilmi, who is 88 years old.
[Music: “Sunset at Sandy Isle”]
HILMI HAMMAD: I was born in 1930 in Sarafand village, Ramle district, Palestine.
ISAM: And I was born in Gaza in 1965.
ASAF: Sarafand Al Amar was a village located in the lowlands at the heart of Palestine. in 1948, it had a population of about 2,200. Sarafand hasn’t existed since the 1948 war. But to Hilmi and Issam, it’s home.
HILMI: It is impossible to forget your birth place. Impossible.
ISAM: I always sit with my father and he tells me about Sarafand and how my grandfather was living and he was the Mukhtar of the village, the head of the village. So we were an important family in Sarafand. I used to listen to the old men of Sarafand and listen to the stories how the life was, how beautiful the life was in Sarafand.
HILMI: It was a very clean village. Mostly red tiles covers the houses. And the streets are quite wide enough for any car to pass in. and most of the people used to own land and to cultivate oranges and other vegetables. We had a boys school established in 1921 and a school for girls established in 1947. It was a village that can depend on itself.
ASAF: Growing up in Israel, I was taught that before we came, Palestine was basically empty: a land without people for a people without land. If you asked me about 10 years ago, I’d tell you that before Zionism, Palestine was a basically a desert, and that the Palestinians just didn’t really know how to use it.
LEENA DALLASHEH: Well Palestinian society was by and large an agricultural society until the expanding incursion of the British, and along with of course the continuing land dispossession by the the Zionist movement.
ASAF: That's Palestinian historian, Dr. Leena Dallasheh. You may remember her from our Jerusalem series in 2017. You'll be hearing from her throughout this episode to debunk some myths and give us some background.
LEENA: Palestinians according to reports from the 1930s were basically working every cultivatable part of the country at that time.
[Music: “Sunset at Sandy Isle”]
HILMI: it was a good and busy village, we had orange orchards, we had land cultivate oranges and cultivate vegetables.
ASAF: Throughout our conversation, Hilmi kept referencing these oranges.
HILMI: I didn’t tell you the area of the orange orchard. It was 110 dunams. 110 dunams.
ASAF: It was important for him that you know the exact area: 110 dunams, equal to 27 acres of orange groves.
LEENA: The citrus industry was becoming more and more significant in the coastal plain. It was directed at international export and as such it actually offered a promise of a profit that made it into an important financial venue.
HILMI: Also one of the things that our village enjoys was that it falls on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road. So the main transport from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and from Jaffa to Lydda and to Ramle, used to come through the village. Also we were about seven kilometers far from Lydda airport, the main airport in Palestine. So the area we used to live in, it was a busy area. We can say that it was a village that is good for living in.
ASAF: Lydda, known in Arabic as Al-Lydd, was the nearest large town and a major transportation hub. It still is today, though it’s known as Lod, it’s Hebrew name, and most of its residents are now Jewish. The airport is still there, and we now call it Ben Gurion Airport.
[Sound: David Ben Gurion declares Israel’s independence, 1948]
ASAF: This is David Ben Gurion himself, the first prime minister of Israel, as he declares Israel’s independence on May 14 1948.
His declaration was based on a the UN partition plan approved in November 1947. This plan would have divided Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state - except for Jerusalem, which would have been under a special international regime.
In the Israeli narrative, the fact that the Jewish leadership accepted the deal while the Palestinians rejected it, is often used to justify the fact that Israel eventually expanded much further than the plan intended. But the Palestinian leadership wasn’t an elected body, and anyway, the plan didn’t reflect the demographic reality in Palestine.
LEENA: When the partition plan was issued the Jewish state received about 56 percent of the land and the Palestinians about 43. Within the Jewish state almost 45 percent of the population was Palestinian. So it was a very significant - whereas in the Palestinian state there was a very very small Jewish minority, almost insignificant in terms of scale.
ASAF: Though Jews were only about a third of the population, the Jewish state was supposed to control over half the land, including land where Palestinians were living. This is the deal that was rejected by the Palestinian leadership.
The approval of the deal by the UN General Assembly immediately led to a civil war between Palestinian and Jewish militias. Then, when the British finally left on May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence, and as a result, the neighboring Arab countries joined the war on the Palestinian side.
[Music: “Drone Birch”]
HILMI: When I left Sarafand I was 18 years old. We were forced to leave, because in… because you know on the 15th of May 1948 the Arab armies entered Palestine to liberate it, as they say.
ASAF: But none of the Arab armies came to defend Sarafand and its residents. Sarafand was close to a British army base which was handed over to the local Palestinian forces when the British left. But these forces alone were not enough to defend it.
HILMI: So the Israelis occupied it by force on the 20th of May. They bombed the village.
We sent the family, the ladies, and the children to the orange orchard because it was very near to Lydda. You see? And we kept in the village until heavy bombing started again. We left to take the ladies and the children to Lydda.
I felt sad. I felt sad and I mean - I couldn’t stay in the village. I felt sad but I was forced to leave. I was exactly forced to leave it. If I stay, I will be killed. And when I am killed the children will be sent to the orchard with the ladies, nobody will protect, stay with them. They need help.
So we stayed in Lydda for quite a while until July.
ASAF: In July, the Israeli forces arrived to Lydda, also known as al-Lydd, and to the neighboring city of Ramle. The Palestinian forces tried to fend off the Israeli soldiers…
HILMI: But they had no ammunition after 2,3 days they had no ammunition. The Israelis used to bomb the two towns by airplanes, so they occupied Lydda and Ramle and pushed the people.
They committed two massacres, one in Lydda at a mosque called Dahamesh mosque. They brought the people into Dahamesh mosque and they. killed them. In addition to that they passed the streets in Lydda and Ramle killing the people on the two sides.
ASAF: They didn’t teach us about this in school. I am 28 years old and I never heard about these massacres before Hilmi told me about them this fall.
So I looked it up.
The Israeli forces occupied Lydda on July 11, after a day of bombing and raiding. They soon faced resistance from the local people, who fired at the soldiers from inside buildings. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the soldiers were ordered to suppress the resistance with “utmost severity.” After they instituted a curfew, civilians who rushed into the streets attempting to escape were shot on sight. Some soldiers threw grenades into buildings where they suspected sniper fire was coming from.
At some point that day, Israeli forces opened fire on the Dahamesh mosque. Like just about every event of the Nakba, there are multiple accounts of exactly what happened there. But according to the recently published testimonies of Israeli soldiers who were there, Palestinian civilians were hiding in the mosque, possibly because they thought Israel would not attack a holy place. One of these soldiers admitted that he fired an anti-tank rocket into the mosque, killing everyone inside. The number of casualties is still unclear.
After the massacre, came the expulsion. When asked what to do with the Arabs of Lydda, Ben Gurion simply raised his hand, and pointed east.
[Music: “Emmit Sprak”]
HILMI: So they ordered the people to leave, to King Abdullah - they mean to Jordan. So the people started walking, it was at that time summer time and 8 of Ramadan, the people were fasting and they were pushed. Took about 8 to 12 kilometers. under the hot sun, with old people dying on the street and they, their sons couldn’t stop to give them any help, just only to pray Al Fatiha for them and put a stone under their head and leave.
ASAF: Between 30 and 70 thousand people, most of the population of Lydda and Ramle as well many people recently displaced from other villages in the area, were then expelled to the Jordanian-occupied West Bank. Among them were Hilmi and his family.
LEENA: Al-Lydd is actually a classic example of the systematic intended depopulation of the Palestinians. The Israeli army basically commits a massacre within the mosque and then forces the population thousands and thousands of people in July in the heat of July in Palestine to march in a very very clear instruction they're guarded by armed soldiers with no water or food. Men women and children elderly sick they're all forced to march, in a march that resonates with the Trail of Tears. Which I think is very important to kind of keep in mind or to bring especially to an American audience.
This is an image that we are not exposed to. We don’t hear that story. But Palestinians were forced out of their homes, sometimes put on trucks, but in this case, this was one of the starkest cases in which they were literally forced to march, leaving the city with a very very small number of Palestinian population which was then gathered all and put in one area of al-Lydd which then was called the Ghetto by the Israelis.
[Music: “Emmit Sprak”]
ASAF: After Hilmi and so many others were marched to the West Bank, only about a thousand people remained in Lydda, concentrated and confined in the area that the Israelis called the Ghetto. They were eventually released from the Ghetto but by then, their houses were already taken. Jews were now living in them.
HILMI: We ourselves went to Birzeit and stayed at Birzeit for about four months then we didn’t like to stay more than that. Because people said that the Jordanian army cannot protect people in Birzeit, so the Jews will come later and occupy it. People were saying and making stories that the Egyptian army is strong enough to fight and to protect people and so on.
ASAF: The Egyptian army at the time was in control of the Gaza Strip.
HILMI: We came to the Gaza Strip and then the road between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was cut, so we stayed in Gaza Strip.
ASAF: Hilmi was one of approximately 200,000 Palestinian refugees to end up in the Gaza Strip when the war ended in 1949. All in all, the UN estimated there were 726,000 Palestinian refugees.
At the beginning of the war, the population of the Gaza strip was only about 60-80,000 people. I asked Leena what the Gaza strip was like before the influx of refugees.
LEENA: It wasn't the Gaza Strip. For one. You know we are so our imagination is so used to this being the strip right.
[Music: “Envira”]
LEENA: Ashkelon - or what is now Ashkelon, Majdal - was right there. It was a continuation. It was a flourishing port city. It had very strong connections some of its leaders were among the leaders of the national movement. It was a city in many ways similar to other Mediterranean cities. It definitely was not this crowded. And it was also not only a city. What we think about as Gaza Strip now, we we automatically tend to think about it as one place. It was actually several places that now because of the density of the population have turned into one thing but Deir al-Balah was an absolutely different place.
ASAF: Though the newly formed Gaza Strip was under the control of Egypt, the Palestinians - both locals and refugees - did not receive Egyptian citizenship. Other than Jordan, none of the major host countries absorbed the refugees.
LEENA: I mean you have all these refugees and nothing for them no resources for them. Whereas in terms of discourse the Egyptian state championed the Palestinians and their cause and the Palestinian refugees, in practice there was not much done for them.
ASAF: The Palestinian refugees became dependent on the UN, who created a new agency for them, separate from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees which deals with the rest of the world’s refugees.
LEENA: Once the war settles and the U.N. realizes the magnitude of the Palestinian refugee problem, they create UNRWA, which is the U.N. agency specifically directed to handle the Palestinian refugees. It was created as a temporary solution to deal with the hundreds of thousands of refugees that are out there with no food or work or shelter. And the temporary became semi-permanent and 70 years later UNRWA still has to deal with the refugee camps because again the host states continue to not accept and not incorporate refugees within their responsibility and with the services and documentation and aid and - I mean UNRWA provides schools and health care and food and jobs for Palestinian refugees.
ASAF: In Gaza, most of the refugees settled in 8 makeshift refugee camps that were established across the strip.
LEENA: Even then there was already an overcrowdedness for the space which only escalated with time. And if you look at refugee camps if you see footage of refugee camps you'll see that the structures were clearly built as temporary. No one thought this place is going to expand and expand to become like this. And that's why it looks like a jungle because it was never intended to be a house for all that many people.
[Music: “Building the Sled”]
ASAF: Hilmi’s family had the resources to rent an apartment in Khan Younis, which is a town in the south of the strip, so he never had to live in one of these refugee camps. He found a job working as a mechanic for the Egyptian army, and after a few years he started teaching at an UNRWA vocational training center in Gaza City.
Though he never stopped thinking about Sarafand as his home, he made a life for himself in Gaza. He eventually rose to become the principle of the training institute. He also married Nada el Attar, another refugee from Sarafand. And in 1965, their son Isam was born.
ISAM: Maybe I was one of the fortunate boys in Gaza who live in the center of the town, the life of ours was a little bit different, or too much different than the life of my friends who lived in the refugee camps between the small homes and narrow streets and lack of services in the refugee camps and the harsh life actually in the refugee camps, so probably I was one of the fortunate people.
ASAF: But if it seemed like life was settling down for the Hammad family, everything would change once more in 1967.
ISAM: The first memory, I still remember it, in 1967 when the Israeli army came into our house I still see it, when I remember a scene actually. The Israeli soldiers attacking our home and entering to search for arms and for people in our home. This is my first memory which I still remember it until today. Two years I was.
HILMI: They call it 6 day war but I don’t think it was more than 6 hours war.
ASAF: The Gaza Strip was occupied by Israel along with the West Bank and parts of Egypt and Syria.
HILMI: You know, because the Israelis won the war, they did no borders between Gaza Strip and Israel. People used to go without purpose without anything and they used to have work there. Many people got the job there.
[Music: “Noe Noe”]
ASAF: It’s hard to imagine today, but Starting in 1972, the Israeli military allowed relatively easy movement in and out of Gaza. As the occupied territories became incorporated into the Israeli economy, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza started providing cheap labor for Israeli farms, construction sites and restaurants. And for the refugees, the 1967 occupation provided an opportunity to return to their homes - as visitors only.
HILMI: I went and visited our orange orchards, and went to visit the village. It was demolished except the school and very small places only. Houses.
ASAF: The orange orchards were still there, and Hilmi met the Jewish man who was now cultivating them.
HILMI: He was Iraqi, speaking Arabic. We told him we hope that by now very much money is kept for us because you are selling oranges every year and keeping the money.
ASAF: The man laughed, and asked Hilmi if he will pay for the losses.
HILMI: Yeah. [laughing]
ISAM: So I visited Sarafand so many times, I do remember it very well. On our land there’s a big military base now, and some other establishments for the army.
ASAF: Today, most of Sarafand lies under an Israeli army base called Tzrifin, which is an expansion of the old British base that was occupied in 1948. Other parts of the land are under the jurisdiction of different Israeli municipalities, and some are still cultivated.
Starting with the first Palestinian Intifada or uprising in 1987, Gazans’ access to 1948 Palestine became more restricted, and visiting became much harder. The greatest change, however, happened in 2005, when Israel retreated from the Gaza strip and evacuated its settlements there.
In 2007 Hamas took control of Gaza, and Israel began a siege, which has continued until today. Gaza became completely isolated. And over the years, its population kept growing.
[Music: “Drone Birch”]
ISAM: From misery to more misery. The simple reason - this is the reason: when the people were moved to refugee camps they were number, they very few. But now these people are one million 300,000 living in the same area. So inside the camps it is misery. it is absolute misery.
HILMI: You know because the area of the camp is limited and you cannot add to to any centimeter.
ASAF: The Gaza Strip is already one of the most crowded places in the world, and the UN foresees an increase of another 1.3 million people by 2030. Gaza was already declared unlivable by the UN, so there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that this situation is completely unsustainable. Israel has no real solution to this.
But the solution that Hilmi and Isam call for is return. For over 70 years, The right of return has been a hope and a yearning for Palestinian refugees- a deeply held belief in a future of liberation in their ancestral homeland. Israel refuses to grant Palestinian refugees this right, and at the same time it allows Jews from all over the world to immigrate relatively easily under the so called “law of return” - the return of the Jews to their promised land.
LEENA: Israel is invested in this idea of a Jewish state. And in order to maintain this idea there is a need for maintaining a Jewish majority. If the Palestinians were granted the right of return the Palestinians will soon become a majority between the river and the sea. And that is a scenario that Israel is not willing to contemplate. Any threat to a clear Jewish majority in the country is is what is rejected and has been rejected by Israel for generations.
ASAF: Even Zionists who oppose the occupation often oppose the right of return, because it will almost certainly shift the demographic balance back to a Palestinian majority.
Another concern that is often raised is space: there’s just no room for all of the refugees to return. Right?
LEENA: You know I grew up in Israel as well and I grew up in I was a teenager in the 90s and I remember the huge Russian waves of immigration. And I remember thinking, “Oh, OK. So there is space in this country. But it is a space that is very very specific. Right. You need to be the right kind to be able to return. Then there's space in the country.”
ASAF: The majority of the lands of abandoned Palestinian villages are not currently populated by Israelis, but are used as farmland or nature reserves. Sarafand is today mostly an army base, which can be moved relatively easily.
A lot of work has been done on the feasibility of return, and we will link to some of this research on our website. But regardless of how we might feel about the idea of return, the refugees of Gaza continue to show up every Friday to demand it - in the Great Return March, which we talked about in the last episode.
I asked Isam and Hilmi what return means to them.
[Music: “Sunset at Sandy Isle”]
HILMI: it means that we have to have our land back again. We cannot leave just like that because they occupied it. They took land with town, villages, roads, airports, railway stations - free of charge, they took it. They paid nothing for that. It’s impossible to accept that. We cannot accept that. We have to return back to our country. I myself, I expect that time will come that we return back to our home country.
ISAM: The right of return for me means that we move from death to life, I regain my identity and I start building my future and my children’s future in the land of theirs, the land that they own. The land that they belong to. The place that they must be. Here I am always a visitor and a person who is waiting to return back to his own place. It is our land by paper, by law, United Nations Resolutions, by history, by our narrative and by facts. And as my father said, I am in the younger generation waiting for the moment to go back to our land.
ASAF: Israel has always opposed the right of return, but in recent decades, a new argument became common, stating that even if refugees like Hilmi have the right of return, this right doesn’t extend to their children who were born in exile.
LEENA: The right of return is an individual right. So basically the only people who have the right to waive it are the Palestinians are the refugees themselves the individual refugees. So no one else theoretically if you were going to think about the legal rights no one else has the right to tell you that you will no longer have a right.
[Music: “Emmit Sprak”]
LEENA: So I don't understand why one would assume that there is some kind of you know what you call it that the passage of time would would nullify this this right. And if the parents didn't get the right of return so then why do their kids not enjoy it.
ISAM: When you ask me what does Sarafand mean to you or the right of return, I said to you I want to move from death to life. Why is that? Now, we are living in uncertainty. Now, we don’t know whether our children will finish this year’s school or not. Now… it is… you… we must live in uncertainty. We don’t know whether the borders are going to open. We don’t know if our needs are going to be fulfilled. We don’t know if we are going to live tomorrow or not because every day we are threatened with war from Israel. This is living in uncertainty is disaster. This is the problem of Gaza: loss of hope loss of… loss of life, completely. You cannot plan to your life at all.
You know every Friday I go to the return camps here in Gaza to the Great Return March. I tell you that my children are keen to go with me every week. And I am teaching them as my father taught me. He taught me how to love Sarafand. How I have to understand how important Sarafand is to us. I always teach my children how Sarafand is important to them. And I plant in them the love of Sarafand and anxiousness to the day they return back to Sarafand.
Home means, to me, the place you don’t fear dying away from. As simple as that.
HILMI: My home? Sarafand. Sarafand al Amar. I never forget it. Never ever forget it.
ASAF: For me, home is Tel Aviv. Though some neighborhoods existed before the Nakba, Tel Aviv greatly expanded after it, on the ruins of Palestinian neighborhoods, villages and orchards. I grew up among remnants of these places, and didn’t even see them. Only once I learned about what happened in 1948 I began to notice: a ruined stone house, a broken arch, an ancient grove of trees. They were hiding in plain sight, but once I started seeing them I couldn’t unsee them.
The Israeli narrative teaches us that if the Palestinian refugees return to their home, it will no longer be our home. Most Israelis think of the return of the refugees as a doomsday scenario. But it’s not so hard to imagine Jews and Palestinians living as neighbors: it’s already happening in cities like Yafa, Haifa and even Lydda.
What’s harder is to imagine is what life would be like if Jews were no longer in the demographic majority. But that is really a question about legal structures and governance and policy - and this is not that kind of episode. The least we can do, before we get into all of that stuff, the very first step towards a just future for Palestinians and Jews, is to see what’s always been right in front of us.
[Music: “Madineh Haditheh”]
This episode is dedicated to Nada Hammed, Hilmi’s wife and Isam’s mother, who passed away in 2015 in Gaza, away from her home village, Sarafand Al Amar.
Unsettled is produced by Ilana Levinson, Emily Bell, Max Freedman, and me, Asaf Calderon.
This episode was produced and edited by me, with help from Ilana Levinson. Fact-checking by Ilana Levinson and mixing by Max freedman.
The song you’re hearing now is called “Madineh Haditheh,” by Palestinian artist El Far3i. You can check out more of his music linked on our website.
Other music you heard in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig. Original art for our Gaza series by Marguerite Dabaie.
In this episode we presented a glimpse into the life of a single family, from one village. There are millions of Palestinian refugee stories, each with its own unique perspective, and there is so much more to be said about the Nakba and about the different Palestinian refugee diasporas. There is also a lot more to discuss about the right of return, and what it implies for the future of Israel Palestine. Check out our website, unsettledpod.com, for testimonies and other resources.
Don’t forget to follow Unsettled on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and sign up for our e-mail newsletter. And of course - subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss an episode of Unsettled.
In the next episode, the one subject that hangs over all conversations about Gaza: Hamas.
[Music: “Slow Dial”]
TAREQ BACONI: Saying that Hamas is a terrorist organization doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of understanding what is happening on the ground today. It doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of holding Israel accountable to the illegal ways it deals with the Palestinian people. I think that Hamas has become a very effective fig leaf that allows Israel to legitimate policies that are morally corrupt.
The Great March (Gaza, ep. 1)
American and Israeli politicians, religious leaders, and dignitaries met in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018 to mark the United States moving its embassy there. While they celebrated with songs about peace, thousands of Palestinians assembled at the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip for the Great March of Return. This mass demonstration was originally planned to last six weeks, but has continued to this day. How did it all begin, and who are the protestors that continue to risk their lives to participate?
In the first episode of Gaza, a series from Unsettled, we hear about the Great March of Return from one of its organizers and two young participants.
American and Israeli politicians, religious leaders, and dignitaries met in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018 to mark the United States moving its embassy there. While they celebrated with songs about peace, thousands of Palestinians assembled at the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip for the Great March of Return. This mass demonstration was originally planned to last six weeks, but has continued to this day. How did it all begin, and who are the protestors that continue to risk their lives to participate?
In the first episode of Gaza, a series from Unsettled, we hear about the Great March of Return from one of its organizers and two young participants.
This episode was edited and produced by Ilana Levinson, with help from Asaf Calderon and Sophie Edelhart. Music from Blue Dot Sessions. Unsettled theme music by Nat Rosenzweig. Artwork for our Gaza series by Marguerite Dabaie.
Photo credit: Issam Adwan
Isam Hammad is an engineer, graduate from Waterford Institute of Technology, wishing to see the world living in peace and free from hatred and wars. My dream is to return back to Sarafand, the little town we were displaced from by the act of war in 1948.
Ahmed Alnaouq, 24, graduated from Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, with a bachelor's degree in English literature. Born in the middle Gaza community of Deir Albalah, he says his dream is to advance the cause of Palestinian human rights and to expose the “human face” of the Israeli occupation. He serves as project manager for the Gaza team of We Are Not Numbers. He also is a freelance journalist and writer for a number of international media outlets.
Zahra Shaikhah is studying English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and is in her senior year. Unlike many students, Zahra actually likes researching English literature and wants to eventually become a university professor. When she is not studying, reading and writing are her passions in life. Zahra uses reading to "heal my soul" and writing as a way of fighting back. Philosophy, psychology and fiction are her reading interests. She also likes going to the beach; it's her main refuge in Gaza. Finally, having a cup of coffee with a friend and a deep conversation make her the happiest creature on the planet!
Tareq Baconi is the International Crisis Group’s Analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict. His book, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was published by Stanford University Press in 2018. His writing has appeared in Arabic in Al-Ghad and Al-Quds al-Arabi, and in English in The New York Review Daily, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, The Nation, The Daily Star (Lebanon), and al-Jazeera. He has provided analysis for print and broadcast media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, BBC, National Public Radio, and Democracy Now!
REFERENCES
Ahmed Abu Artema, “Time to March to Palestine.” Arabi21, January 10, 2018. (in Arabic)
Video: “Celebrating the Great March of Return.” The Electronic Intifada, May 7, 2018.
“Situation Report: occupied Palestinian Territory, Gaza.” World Health Organization, October 21-November 3, 2018.
Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, May 2018).
“Palestinian killed in 40th week of Gaza's Friday protests.” Al Jazeera, December 28, 2018.
transcript
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our ceremony.
ILANA LEVINSON: On May 14th 2018, American and Israeli politicians, religious leaders and dignitaries met in Jerusalem to bring into effect the unprecedented decision made by U.S. President Donald Trump the previous December.
DONALD TRUMP: The United States finally and officially recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel. Today we follow through on this recognition and open our embassy in the historic and sacred land of Jerusalem.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We have no better friends in the world. You stand for Israel and you stand for Jerusalem. Thank you.
SINGER: [singing] Peace will come upon us. Peace will come upon us. Peace will come upon us and everyone.
ILANA: While the Americans and the Israelis celebrated with songs about peace and shared their hopes for a brighter future, just fifty miles away…
[Sound: sirens, voices of protestors]
ILANA: Thousands of Gazans assembled at the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip for what would turn into the bloodiest day of the Great March of Return.
And despite the risks, people from Gaza would continue to participate in the Great March, week after week, for months. Who are they? What are they hoping to accomplish? And what can we learn about life in Gaza from their demands?
I’m Ilana Levinson and you’re listening to "Gaza: a series from Unsettled.
[Music: Unsettled theme]
ILANA: This is the first of eight episodes in our series on Gaza. But before we dive into our story, I want to give you a little bit more information about why we’re doing this series.
Last spring, our team at Unsettled watched as thousands of Gazans took part in the Great March of Return. And we realized: only one episode of Unsettled is about life in Gaza. That’s in part because Gaza and the people who live there are hard to access. It’s close to impossible for ordinary Gazans to get in or out of the Gaza Strip. And - until recently - Gaza was getting less than five hours of electricity a day. So it’s not easy to have a Skype call with someone living there.
But there’s something else.
Gaza is a really hard conversation to have within the Jewish community. In my experience, emotions run high and people respond viscerally. For instance, if you bring up the blockade, you'll be accused of not caring about the Israelis in the south who live in fear of Hamas rockets. And If you as far as acknowledge the existence of refugees who wish to return, you'll be told that you seek the end of Israel.
These conversations get so heated because the stakes feel so high. But the stakes are even higher for the people of Gaza.
The Gaza Strip has a population of nearly 2 million people living in just 139 square miles. It's governed by Hamas, which is locked in a seemingly never-ending cycle of violence with Israel. The UN counts 70% of the population as refugees from cities and towns within Israel. And many have hopes of returning to those places - an aspiration that a lot of Israelis see as an existential threat. And though Israel officially pulled out all of its military and settlements from Gaza in 2005, it still controls everything that goes in and out of the Gaza Strip - leaving it economically strangled.
These issues are complicated - and it doesn't help that young Jews aren't likely to learn about them from their schools, families, or communities. Mainstream news outlets aren’t much help either - they tend to speak about Gaza only in terms of buzzwords and body counts. And that makes it hard to engage.
But this year, it’s been impossible to look away.
In the spring of 2018, thousands of Gazan protesters came to the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel for the Great March of Return. The protests were originally planned to last six weeks. Instead, they’ve continued until today.
After the first few Fridays of the Great March of Return, I heard a lot of people trying to paint the protesters as violent militants by pointing to the few who threw rocks and burned tires. But the vast majority of the Gazans at the Great Return March were there peacefully demonstrating for their rights. And in this episode, we’ll talk to two of them.
But first, a few notes about why we chose to start our series with the Great March of Return. One, because the protests have captivated an international audience. But beyond that - when you look at the demonstrations for what they are, and not with the intent to label protestors as either victims or aggressors, you find a window into Gazan culture, history, the conditions they’re protesting, and the barriers they face - both inside and outside of Gaza. We’ll jump in --with how it all got started.
ISAM HAMMAD: Why do I participate? [laughing] You know why I am laughing? I am one of the people who started the Great Return March on January 8th of January 2018. This is why I am laughing.
ILANA: We actually didn’t intend to talk to Isam Hammad about the Great March of Return. Our producer Asaf, was talking to him for the episode you’ll hear after this one, when he just so happened to mention he was one of the organizers of the March.
He said it all started with an article from the writer Ahmed Abu Artema. Isam had never heard of him before reading his article last January.
ISAM: But when he wrote in the magazine Arabi21 in his article that he is dreaming that all the Palestinians could march returning peacefully to their lands, I went and I searched for Ahmed Abu Artema, and then I got his contact, I spoke to him on Messenger, and I told him I want to meet you.
ILANA: Isam manages a medical equipment company in Gaza City. He’s also the founder of a political group in Gaza called National Appeal, which focuses on local issues, like infrastructure, waste and water. National Appeal was set to run candidates in the 2017 Palestinian local elections, but the elections fell through because of clashes between the rival factions. But Isam continues to dedicate much of his time to political activism. So when he heard the news about the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem last December, he felt that it was an affront to the Palestinian people. For so long he’d heard the United States lecture Palestinians not to make unilateral moves - and now here they were, doing exactly that.
ISAM: I felt that we have to do something… we have to do something.
ILANA: After he contacted the author of the article, Ahmed Abu Artema, through Facebook Messenger, they made a plan to get together a couple days later. The first planning meeting for the Great March of Return was just a couple people sitting in one of the organizer’s homes. But as the group started to promote the idea, more and more people quickly came on board, and not just people in Gaza.
ISAM: So we had some guys from Turkey, some guys from Malaysia, some guys from London. We created something called the International Committee for the Great Return March. And then we started the meeting over Skype every few days in order to organize ourselves and this is how it started.
So we started talking to to everybody we could talk to. Me and Ahmed, we started visiting a nongovernmental organization to talk to the heads. We started to appear on TV.
ILANA: By the end of January, everyone in Gaza was talking about the Great March of Return. Isam even set up a Great March of Return radio program to reach Palestinians all over the world.
[Sound: Great March of Return radio]
ILANA: The International Committee for the Great March of Return was ready to take the idea to Palestinian political leaders. Thirteen Palestinian factions hold a joint weekly meeting in Gaza. So Isam and other Great March of Return organizers went, prepared with a press release.
ISAM: [paper shuffling] Yes, this is the first press release. We published many of it and we started approaching people. This is it.
ILANA: While we were talking, Isam found the press release on his office desk and held it up to the camera so I could see it. I’ll read you some of the English translation. Quote: “the refugees’ lands, villages and towns beckon their return; some of them were never inhabited since the Nakba. So why can’t they exercise their right when they still possess the deeds to their lands and keys to their homes?”
ISAM: We prepared this long before we published it because we were talking at that time with the Palestinian factions to take a decision whether they want to join or we will go ahead. So they were late giving us the answer so we published. We went ahead. [laughing] After we published the press release they immediately answered.
ILANA: All thirteen of the political factions at the meeting eventually backed the idea. So they set out to create a unified message for the Great March of Return through a set of principles.
ISAM: We have written in the principles that we want to remain in peaceful manner. That we will not shoot a bullet; we will not throw a stone; we will not fight with anybody. We will only walk with bare feet on the table towards our land. This is it. This is it. Peacefully, absolutely peacefully.
ILANA: And Isam worked to spread that message. He even went on TV hoping to reach the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
ISAM: Telling him that there is no point of opposing this movement. There is no point. Palestinian people have decided to return back according to international resolutions. They are not doing something opposite to the law. They are not. They are doing something with the law so we want to cross.
ILANA: The international resolution Isam is talking about is UN Resolution 194, which says: “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.”
ISAM: The vision we had is that we are... we the Palestinians are armed with international resolutions. So if we try to be violent then the international community will criticize our violence. But we do not want to be violent. We just want to walk down cross. We want to go back to our land, to our homes, to our farms that we were uprooted from.
ILANA: Finally, on March 30, 2018, Isam set out in the morning to attend the first day of the Great March of Return.
ISAM: When I reached the the camp there at ten past ten, I didn't believe was what's happening. I thought there's nobody when I saw the scene. There was nobody in Gaza in his home. Everybody was in... in the camp. I didn't believe the numbers. People did not believe that somebody could make their dream to return back to their homes and lands that they were uprooted from become a reality.
So if everybody went to the marching camps to be there for that historical moment, I myself could not believe my eyes. Honest to God, I could not believe my eyes.
ILANA: Thirty thousand demonstrators came out to participate on the first day and many thousands more have come out to the weekly events that followed.
In the summer of 2018, we talked to two young members of the organization We Are Not Numbers to hear what the marches looked and felt like from their point of view. We Are Not Numbers tells stories of Palestinian youth from their own perspective.
AHMED ALNAOUQ: My name is Ahmed Alnaouq, I’m 24 years old, and I was raised up in Dir Al Baleh in the center of the Gaza Strip.
ILANA: Ahmed first went to the Great March on the second day, and he went back many times after.
ZAHRA SHAIKHAH: My name is Zahra Shaikhah. I am 21 years old. I live in the middle area in Gaza Strip, in a particular place called Al Bureij.
ILANA: Zahra went once, on April 6th. Zahra, like Ahmed, went to the march as a participant and to document the experience.
ZAHRA: So I was a little bit scared or afraid because it’s a new thing and couldn’t expect what could happen. This was my first time to go to a protest.
AHMED: When I heard about the idea, I didn’t get excited for it actually because I thought people would… this will never work. People will not protest for one month and a half. This is me being honest. When I went there and saw that amount of people, numerous amount of people, I was shocked. I was amazed like, all these people do not want hatred; they want peace, they want to coexist with Israel, they simply want to go back to their homes and lands, that’s it.
ILANA: If you’ve been following the news about the Great March of Return, you might not picture a joyous cultural celebration. The coverage around it has focused mainly on the violence and bloodshed. Zahra and Ahmed will talk about that, too, at the location they describe as “the front of the march.” But at the “back of the march,” far away from the fence and the Israeli snipers...
[Sound: singing “Al Yom”]
AHMED: You would go there and you would find like close to an Arab market. Lots of vendors, maybe restaurants who are on vans, you know. Where people buy things, eat things, enjoying. You would find like entire families: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, even kids, infants, even very old men and old women. They were all gathering there buying ice cream.
ZAHRA: It was like a festival, literally a festival, because there were trolleys that selling sandwiches, drinks. The people, most of the people at the back, they were enjoying actually, they were laughing, talking, taking pictures.
[Sound: singing]
AHMED: There are some cultural events happening in the March of Return, like dancing dabke, folklore, and the people are starting to doing some creative things.
[Sound: clowns performing]
ILANA: Like a group of clowns in bright colored overalls, painted faces, and big floppy hats performing for children. There were also jugglers and acrobats putting on shows for the crowds.
But it wasn’t all fun and games at the back of the march. People were there protesting too.
[Sound: women chanting]
AHMED: But when I went closer to the fence, these gestures of life started to disappear a little.
[Sound: sirens and shouting]
ILANA: Before the march had even begun, the Israeli Defense Forces announced that its snipers had been ordered to shoot live fire at anyone who tried to breach the fence.
AHMED: The more I get close to the fence the more I saw ambulances, and camps for doctors, the sounds of bullets.
When I went close to the fence, I was like 300 meters away from the fence, and I would see other entire world, lots of people raging against the occupation, dozens of people throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers but they were like 1 meter away from the Israelis you could say. The Israeli soldiers hid behind like hills, only you could see their rifles and their helmets from behind the sand.
ILANA: Zahra also went close to the front, to document the march for We Are Not Numbers.
ZAHRA: There was a good distance between our spot and the front lines and the Israeli snipers. But it was close enough.
ILANA: She was with her closest friend Hanin. They were looking for a good place to shoot a video when the soldiers started firing in their direction.
ZAHRA: We were walking forward, getting closer to the fence and the burning tires. And then all of a sudden we saw a man running backwards. And couldn’t recognize at my mind that they are shooting, the snipers, the Israeli snipers they are shooting. Until I heard a voice. I heard someone saying, “run, girls.”
I didn’t, I didn’t actually look back to see if he was a real man or it’s an imaginary voice in my head. And I started running. Hanin was next to me. We had no escape, only but to run. And even running at that specific moment wasn’t assuming, wasn’t assuring that you’re going to live in the next moment.
ILANA: Once they did get to a safe place, Zahra noticed her friend Hanin was crying.
ZAHRA: I went, I held her, told her that we didn’t die. It’s OK, we are alive. After she settled in and got her balance back, I started laughing. It was a hysterical laugh, I couldn’t just control myself. I only laughed because - for god’s sake, what we… what just happened a few seconds ago?
After Hanin got her balance back and stopped crying, she asked me a question, she asked me, “Is my eyeliner OK? My eyeliner, is it OK?” So I was laughing and telling her, “For God’s sake! This is not the time for makeup.”
ILANA: Thankfully, Zahra and Hanin survived. But not everyone did.
AHMED: And the more you stay there the more you stay there, the more you see people getting shot, getting killed. And I never forget that kid - he was ten, twelve years old and he got a bullet in his belly and he died instantly. And even the people who are not throwing stones, some of them are eating ice cream and they get shot. For doing nothing.
ILANA: For Isam, as an organizer, seeing all the the violence from the very first day made him want to end the march right then and there.
ISAM: And then at eleven o'clock we started to have casualties. Eleven o'clock, only forty minutes. It was a Friday and then I went to a friend of mine, one of the factions, I think the People's Party. I asked them, “We have to stop it.” He said, “Why?”
I said, “In the in the first day, we wanted to send a message. I think the message has been received. We don't want people to die.” So at eleven o'clock I was calling to end this day to start the next day with a sit-ins. But unfortunately there was no way to control people at all.
ILANA: Isam couldn’t stop the protesters from getting close to the fence, so he tried his best to get a message to the Israeli snipers on the other side of it, through an Israeli television correspondent he believed was working with Israeli intelligence. She called him on May 12, and he said:
ISAM: “Please advise the intelligence to let the people cross. They will cross for a few hours and then they will return. Don't shoot at them. The worst is that they will sit in in one of their cities beside the fence for one day, for two days. And even if they stayed, let them feel that they have done something. Don't kill them.
ILANA: Since the first day of the march, at least 175 protesters have been killed, according to an Associated Press report from December 2018. Both Hamas and Israel have claimed a large portion of those killed by snipers were Hamas militants. But among the dead have been kids as young as 11, medics, and journalists.
Local Human Rights Watch director Omar Shakir told the AP that the protestors’ affiliation with a militant group doesn’t make a difference; what matters is that they were unarmed.
A staggering number of protesters have also been wounded at the march. In a November 2018 report, the World Health Organization counted over 24,000 injured. Doctors in Gaza have reported especially severe gunshot wounds; by December, 94 protesters had needed amputations.
AHMED: So many protesters at the March of Return were athletes. One of my friends was the best actually soccer player in the Gaza Strip and he was shot in both knees and he can never play soccer again - he lost his future. So many Palestinians from the protest are now are now without limbs because they only participate in this peaceful approach. And what’s their only fault? Because they were born on the other side of the fence.
ILANA: Ahmed remembers seeing an Israeli soldier high-five the person next to her after shooting one of the protesters. It made him wonder if the soldiers on the other side of the fence even saw him as human.
AHMED: We have feelings and we love, we cry, we die, and we have families that grieve for us when we get shot and when we are killed.
ILANA: Zahra and Ahmed are two of the many thousands of peaceful protestors who participated in the Great March of Return - the vast majority of whom were there singing songs, waving flags, and using other nonviolent efforts to send the message to the world that the people of Gaza demand their freedom.
That might come as a surprise to those who’ve only heard about those protestors who were throwing Molotov cocktails and flying burning kites over the fence. The Great March of Return has been characterized by so many as a violent Hamas-led effort to break into Israel in order to harm Israeli Jews.
And it’s not that Hamas has had no involvement in the Great March of Return.
TAREQ BACONI: Hamas understood the power of the Great March of Return.
ILANA: That’s Tareq Baconi, author of the new book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.
TAREQ: The Great March of Return was able to do what Hamas had believed only its rocket fire could, which was to negotiate with Israel and to pressure Israel and to bring Gaza back into the fold and the agenda of the international community. Civil society was able to do that through a popular resistance movement.
ILANA: You’re going to hear more from Tareq later in the series: about what Hamas is and how it came to govern the Gaza Strip. But for now, here’s what he said about Hamas’s role in the Great March of Return:
TAREQ: There were instances of people, particularly Hamas members, either using Molotov cocktails or trying to break into fences. But by and large - we're talking about thousands of people here. By and large, these were nonviolent movements that Israel used clearly violent means to try to suppress.
ILANA: Tareq is referring specifically to the six weeks that the Great March was originally planned for: from March 30 until May 15, when Palestinians mark the anniversary of the Nakba. And there was no rocket fire from the Gaza Strip during this six-week period. However, burning kites were sent over the fence, which caused forest fires in southern Israel, and rockets were fired starting on May 29. Still, thousands of protestors maintained nonviolence. How was that possible?
TAREQ: For me personally, this is the power of mass mobilization. This is the power of of peaceful peaceful resistance.
And the way that Hamas dealt with that was initially to come out as the party that was supporting the protests. So they would provide the infrastructure for the protest; they would bus people to the fence; they would provide entertainment at the fence; food; organize. So it became the fabric of the civil movement.
The irony is that Israel began calling it a Hamas movement before the protests had even begun. The protest was meant to begin on the first Friday of March 30, and Israel began the propaganda of calling this a Hamas movement on the Wednesday. So there was already an effort to conflate the two. And it was an effort that was very much put forward by the Israelis and which Hamas very much jumped on the bandwagon of. I think Hamas needed to maintain its legitimacy as the government or the movement that is in charge of securing Palestinian rights in the Gaza Strip so it very rapidly hijacked the movement.
ILANA: Here’s Isam again:
ISAM: We from the beginning have made a deal with Hamas not to be the main player. We want the people to do but we are living in poverty. Who is going to pay for the buses? Who is going to pay for the logistics? Who is going to move the people? To be quite honest. So we do understand: if if Hamas did not come to do this, they would have no Great Return March. This is the reality.
ILANA: Then, there were some non-militants who breached the fence for other reasons. Isam explained:
ISAM: Some of the people, believe it or not, want to go to the fence in order to die. We have seen things like this. I am honest. I have seen people who prepare their statements on Facebook and they prepare videos and they go there to end their lives, to die.
This is it. When you look at people in a prison and their home and let them live in absolute misery - no electricity, no pure water to drink, no jobs, no crossing points to leave - this is what you are left with.
ILANA: I asked Isam how he feels about the March, looking back.
ISAM: Look, I have mixed feelings. I will speak now with honest. I have mixed feelings. First of all, I’m very very proud that we have moved the Palestinian issue now and everybody is talking about. But the other thing also is that I feel very sorry for the people who have been injured in the Great Return March, and some of them have actually incurred permanent disability.
ILANA: Ahmed and Zahra, on the other hand, do not have mixed feelings, however difficult the experience was.
ZAHRA: Going to the march is a good thing. Even if you stayed at the back of the march, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you went. You had the courage to go there. It caused me a trauma. I couldn’t imagine like - the idea of running from the live bullets is scary in itself. But I’m not regretting going to the march. I mean, after going to the march I just sat with myself and started to think, what did I gain from going to the march? Did I really feel that it’s something good to go there? Did it add any good things to my personality? At that time I couldn’t figure out, but now I can say yes, I am a new person now. And running from the live bullets made me stronger and I think there will be no hardship destroying me in the future, because for God’s sake, I faced death.
AHMED: Yes, it’s worth it. I think it is. We have to get rid of our chains, or we do not deserve life actually. If you go through the whole history, you will see every time there are oppressors and oppressed people the oppressed people never agree to surrender. Look for example, at the Indian people, led by Gandhi. So many of them got killed. The Algerian people lost more than one million in their fight against the French occupation and the French colonization, but they never give up. They kept on fighting until they get their freedom. We might be at risk, we might lose our lives. But the next generation will live on. And the next generation might have a chance to live free.
[Sound: singing “Al Yom”]
ILANA: During the fall of 2018, violence escalated between Hamas and Israel, with Hamas rockets followed by Israeli air raids and an Israeli ground offensive. One Israeli civilian and five Palestinians died in November as a result.
To this day, nonviolent demonstrations are still happening at the fence in Gaza, and they are still violently suppressed by Israel. At the time of recording, the last Gazan protester who died was twenty six year old Karam Fayyad, on December 28.
[Music: “Sunset at Sandy Isle”]
ILANA: If you’re here, at the end of the episode, and you have more questions than answers - I’m with you. We'll be diving deeper into some of the topics raised in this episode throughout our series on Gaza. Next up, we'll hear again from Isam, this time in conversation with his father about what it mean to be a refugee in Gaza. Stay tuned.
ISAM HAMMAD: I used to listen to the old men of Sarafand and listen to the stories: how the life was, how beautiful the life was in Sarafand.
HILMI HAMMAD: It is impossible to forget your birthplace. Impossible.
[Music: Unsettled theme]
ILANA: This episode was produced and edited by me, Ilana Levinson, with help from Asaf Calderon and Sophie Edelhart. Fact checking by Asaf Calderon. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Ali Abusheikh, Issam Adwan, and Rushdi Seraj.
Unsettled is produced by Emily Bell, Asaf Calderon, Max Freedman, Yoshi Fields, and me, Ilana Levinson.
Our theme music is by Nat Rosenzweig. Original art for our Gaza series by Marguerite Dabaie - check out her work at mdabaie.com.
Don’t forget to follow Unsettled on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and sign up for our e-mail newsletter - you'll find a subscription link on our website, unsettledpod.com. While you're there, consider supporting Unsettled with a one-time donation. You’ll also find links to more information about what you heard in this episode.
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