To the reader
I met Tahani at her own birthday party in October 2014, two weeks after her arrival in England. Tahani was turning 26 that day. Like me, and many others, Tahani is a student and, that evening, that was all that really mattered: in the small college kitchen we had cake and drinks, we sang, people danced. That evening a friend wanted to display her skills at salsa. Tahani is from Gaza. Like a few Gazan students every year (according to the Israelian NGO GISHA, these students were a few dozen in 2008 despite hundreds of applications of students accepted in universities, the current number being difficult to evaluate), she managed to be admited in a foreign university and actually exit Gaza to study. It is the first time she leaves her country. Three months before we met, Gaza was yet another time going through a war, which caused the death of 722 Palestinians and 66 Israelis fighters, but mostly of 1 483 Palestinian and 6 Israeli civilians. From Europe, this new war had an abstract dimension: we saw the images of fighting, we saw people gathering on hills to see Gaza destroyed, we saw the faces of the teenagers whose murder started the bloodshed. We discussed yet again about who was rightful and who was not. We denounced the Hamas and criticised the Israeli army. Like every other time. We are used to seeing wars there, they come and go, can focus our attention span for a few weeks.
As usual, we saw nothing. For all the "sides" (as if the conflict were a football game with its supporters) in that very euro and Americano-centred debate, Gaza is not really a place with people in it. It looks like an idea: for some, an idea of injustice, and for others an idea of terrorist threat. Many have complained, rightfully, that the voices of the Gazans were silenced once again during and after that war. Reduced to statistics or clichés, the singularity of the Palestinians as individuals is generally forgotten, even by “pro-Palestinian” activists. So I have asked Tahani for an interview. She agreed on meeting me, for about an hour, to talk about her experience of Gaza, of the war, and of leaving. Let the reader be warned that this document does not seek to present an objective truth. As an interview, it is partial and subjective. It focused on that one person, whose experience is unique. It contains its fair share of clichés and simplifications. It does not seek objectivity or representativeness. I leave that to others. This is the story of Tahani, or at least part of it.
Chapter One: No future
As soon as the topic of Gaza started, Tahani talked about unemployment. It almost annoyed me: like most Europeans, I have been fed by spectacular images of the destruction of the Palestinian society, shown every now and again at the occasion of wars, but not used to seeing this question through the small scale of the everyday life, where the real, almost boring destruction happens. The ruins have become part of the identity of Gaza, but these images hide how the destruction is before all a social and economic one.
What she said
First, could you tell me about who you are, who’s your family, where’d you grow up and so forth?
I grew up in a small city and my family is a middle class family. They live under the poverty line, just like 80% of the Palestinians in Gaza. I have three brothers, five sisters, my parents and grandma. My father was working before the war in Israel for years, but after 2000 he… lost his job because of the closure [of the border]. So he’s doing some simple work now. My brothers are done with the university but they can’t find a job. I completed my education at first in the university and I’m in the UK now to conduct my Master degree in translation. I worked as a translator for four years, and I was considered lucky among my friends because they got no job after their graduation. But this doesn’t really help, because of the economic situation in Gaza. As a woman, I don’t know, my job doesn’t really help my family. I’m not talking about the financial side, but as related to my brothers. For example, in that cultural context, a girl cannot keep working and earning money for the family while the brothers are just doing nothing, because they can’t find a job. And this is a factor of depression in every family in Gaza when it comes to this.
It’s hard to accept that you work and earn money, for your brothers?
Not really, but when my brothers will work that will be better, because I can’t just go out and work and just see my brothers doing nothing. This is really affecting, not our relation, but the views of my brothers. My brother couldn’t find a job, and I’m sure he’s thinking about his future, when will he get a job, when will he save money, when will he have a family, his own house and his own work. When it comes to men, in particular, it’s really depressing. It’s depressing for women as well, but there are possibilities. But for men, because of the culture, the cultural side considers that the men are much more supposed to work than the women. I mean they cannot afford money for the future you know. They go out. They chill out with their friends, but what next? When you look into the future you really get depressed: you don’t have a job, you don’t have money. They know they can’t get married because they can’t have their own house, their own life. They will not stay with the family or with my parents for ever. And really there is no hope, I mean things are just getting worse and worse in Gaza and whenever we say that things will get better, they don’t.
In your family you’re receiving support from UNRWA?
Yes we do. We receive food assistance, but my father can afford and manage to find a job from time to time. It is not a permanent job but it helps. And sometimes he still goes to help even though the pay is bad, because he doesn’t want to stay at home because that will make him nervous and bad. We have a garden also, that is far from our house there are some chickens there and he plants vegetable. But at least he was able to afford to give us money for the transportation, and we used to get university loans, so we were depending on these loans.
What is it like, the place you grew up in, your house?
It is a three-stories building where my uncle has his own small flat. All of us, the eight members are living in this one flat. It’s a very crowded area, the neighbourhood is very crowded. But things are good, at least when it comes to family relations, we are fine. We just worry about the future and what’s coming next. That’s where I grew up. My childhood was really nice. I mean the time of my childhood there was no tensions, or that concrete conflict in Gaza. But when I was fourteen, the Second Intifada erupted and things started getting worse when my father lost his job. But you know it is not like life and childhood in any other country. But it was nice, and because we were children we didn’t have to think about the future. When you finish your high school or your higher education you start thinking about that, and how the economic situation affects your future. And you start worrying. Really when I started my university I started worrying.
Until 2000 it was quiet? Is it the Intifada itself that changed things?
Actually things were bad before that. But tensions started to increase. The Israelis assassinated some political leaders in Gaza, and people stopped trusting the leadership. This affected even the behaviour of the people. I mean, there were more than 80 000 people who worked in Israel, they got deprived of their jobs because of the closure [of the border]. Israel didn’t allow any Palestinian to enter, so people lost their jobs and consequently this has affected their family. They got poor, and this reflected on their behaviour towards their friends, their children. When you cannot afford to support your family you will be under pressure all the time and this will affect your relation with people around you. Just think about it on a wider scale, and you can imagine how people started to become weak because no one is capable of having a good life or good relations. They just think about themselves and how to support their family, they became selfish. This is the normal case in any country where this happens. If you lose your job and can no longer support your family and feed your children, you will become violent, your reactions will be violent because you’ll keep worrying about your family and this is reflected to other aspects of your life. The unemployment in Gaza is about 40% now, and most of those who are employed are women so I don’t know they are trying to destroy, Israel has sort of a systematic approach, to make people, I don’t know, to dismantle the Palestinian society, to make people weak, no one can stand the other ones, they no longer accept each other. This is systematic and this comes by time and it’s not a sudden situation.
Did you see that happen to your father?
At certain times yes. During the three years that followed the Second Intifada, when he didn’t find any work he was nervous and sad all the time. And he was depressed, he stopped talking to the family. Then he started making other works like gardening. Before that he was a builder in Israel, and he used to work, he did some money you know. In Gaza it was different, he started doing gardening and harvesting for other people. So people started knowing him so he got more jobs. Psychologically it got better and he got to his normal state, and now he’s fine. But I can just look around me, at two of my uncles, my neighbours, people I know who don’t have jobs. I can tell you how bad the relations with their children and wives got, because they are under continuous pressure, because they can’t find jobs, they don’t have money. Some people choose just to stay at home or just meet their friends and do nothing. And you know what, the UNRWA is helping them to stay in that state because they are giving a monthly assistance for workless people. This has been happening since the UNRWA was established in Gaza. This makes people survive, but not live, because life is not about eating only. I know many people who couldn’t continue their education because they couldn’t afford paying the fees. They just finished their high school, which is free until grade 12. Some people prefer to make their daughters get married, because they know they will not be able to pay the fees for the university so they prefer to arrange for them to be married when they’re 16 or 17. Because of this economic situation. It has nothing to do with religion, or tradition or culture, it’s due to the economic and financial concerns.
What I thought
Tahani’s anguish shows how bombed buildings and dead bodies are horrible realities, and yet merely the tip of the iceberg. I remember hearing from a Lebanese professor during the 2009 war that the Israeli army had bombed the sole flour factory in Gaza. While he took it as an example of war crime, the question of why there was only one flour factory to provide X people did not seem to appear. The insistence Tahani had to begin with this topic is essential: often, as foreigners, when confronted to the life of Palestinians, refugees or not, we barely dare to ask the essential question of how they go through the day. Not because of trauma or violence, of the memory of the Nakba (the catastrophe, how Palestinians relate to their eviction from Palestine in 1947 – 1948) or the denial or right they are victims of in Palestine, Israel and the surrounding countries, but in a very practical sense: unemployment is rampant, and not perceived as a personal issue. The garden, the “small jobs” Tahani talks about are also located in a universe in which one does not really have a job, but many different sources of income, mixed between unregistered employment, self-consumption production, and relief.
Tahani’s way of talking about this economic precariousness hits on several points. First she showed how geopolitical relations, and especially here the Israeli government’s decision to close its borders after the Second Intifada in 2000 worsened the situation of Gazans. We generally think of the situation in Palestine through abstract images: the famous map of the colonies, visions of invaded houses with tents in front of them, and mostly the almost surgical vision of the Wall going through the hills of the West Bank, photographed from afar. Tahani talked about what happened to people when the border was shut down, signifying a loss of jobs for 80 000 Gazans. In the interview, Tahani always related to wide, political phenomena through the direct experience of her relatives. The meaning of the relation between Gaza and Israel only took sense, as she says, after 2000, when she saw her father and brothers start to despair. She also hinted the very bizarre relation that developed between the Palestinians and UNRWA, the UN agency created ex nihilo in 1952 to manage the Palestinian populations in the Near East. UNRWA is, in the discourse of some Palestinians, like a two-faced idol. On the one hand it is a provider of services: education, a part of the public services, and more importantly direct financial relief are provided by UNRWA, be it as a donor to other organisations, or directly. But this does not mean that the Palestinians are entirely relying on it, either economically (with the importance of informal economy) or morally. Tahani is very critical of UNRWA, this agency who encourages people to stay at home and do nothing while their mental health and social relations deteriorate.
Gaza has been seen through the lens of extremism, and reduced by some to an equation in which misery induces political radicalism. This may be true, but from what Tahani says it feels as if she sees the situation in an even worse condition. Is it my feeling or hers? Can a strong woman like Tahani actually give up? It may be my own pessimism, but as I was listening over and over to this first part of the interview, I couldn’t help myself but to think: Radicalism is something. Self-satisfied humanitarianism, as pitiful, imperialistic, and disgusting as it is, is still something. Here, it feels as if there was nothing. No hope. No opening. No future.