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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
15, 2006
Alice in Erez
The
Gaza Crossing
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
A clear and warm November evening; sun
sets in a violence of color to the west over the sea and a full
luminescent moon on the rise over Beit Hanoun in the northern
Gaza Strip. As if on cue, the buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead
begins as their nightly circling ritual gets underway. The taxi
driver's hands grip the wheel of the car more intently as we
speed along the winding road to Erez past the village huddled
in the shadows a few hundred meters away to our right. At the
Palestinian side, the driver gets out of the taxi, my passport
in hand, and takes it into the shack of an office where a handful
of scruffy, uniformed security figures are sitting. Darkness
is creeping in from the East.
There is a problem, the driver explains to me in broken
English. They won't let you through. On the other side
of Erez where the gatekeepers sit in their park-rangers' office
with the neon lights and the coffee-machine, my number isn't
blinking approval on the computer. Or something like that. A
furious volley of phone calls on my behalf commences between
the driver, friends in Gaza, PA security and the masters in
Israel. Sorry, not coordinated. Sorry, it will take a while;
sorry, you can't leave. Sorry, no. An American citizen in
the Gaza Strip will stay with the prisoners for now because the
keepers are not ready to let her out of the cage. Revenge for
your audacity, I think. Live with the others since you like
it so well; eat their dust and shower in their sewers. You wanted
to go to Gaza, no?
Darkness covers half the sky and the drones sound hungry. The
driver shouts into the phone to my friend, Khamsa Daqa'iq!
Khamsa Daqa'iq! (Five minutes! Five minutes!) He'll wait
only 5 more minutes, he says, before returning me to Gaza City
but I know better. He'll wait until his life is in danger
trying to help me get out. And sure enough, it is 45 minutes
later when he looks at me beseechingly and says we must return.
The wardens are not cooperating. My number is not approved. Now
it is night.
Drones can't tell a taxi from a car full of 'militants.' In the
darkness on the road they won't know who we are-or at least it
will make matters easier when the explanations for two dead civilians
come in the next day, one of them an 'international'. It was
dark, you see, and they were 'suspicious.' The suitcase might
have been full of explosives. Therefore no investigation will
be necessary. Therefore it was OK. Therefore it was our fault
for being out. Therefore you should not go to Gaza. Is the message
clear?
The trip back is a roller coaster ride with the wrong kind of
thrills. Friends meet us on the curbside outside their home and
we all tip the driver better than he'll ever get again in his
lifetime. He is breathing again; an old man with white hair,
looking apologetically into my eyes.
In the tall apartment building teeming with prisoner families
of Gaza, friends call back and forth to Israel for me in
their Hebrew and English. The ghosts of Kafka and Lewis Carroll
are hovering about us bemused and mocking: prisoners of the
Gaza Strip trying to arrange the release of an American citizen.
They all have to give the Israeli authorities their names. I
finally take the phone to speak to the boss and, for the first
time in the history of my excursions to this god-forsaken land,
an Israeli apologizes.
Sorry. Forgot to give your number to Security at Erez. You
can leave in the morning.
What a blessing: Six-thirty in the morning I am ready again,
suitcases in tow, just in time for the explosion down the street;
just in time to view the melted mess of a once-automobile and
four once-human beings smoldering in the middle of Gaza City,
boys picking at the wreckage and ambulance sirens closing in.
State-of-the-art incineration tactics: a gleaming helicopter
gunship straight off the defense industry's spankingly efficient
assembly line and loaded with glimmering precision-guided missiles.
Tourist attractions are never-ending. If they'd only let more
people in who would need Hollywood?
This time on the Gaza side of Erez I am free to go, pulling my
wheeled suitcase behind, concrete walls on either side of a cavernous
tunnel covered by a canvas roof. My steps echo, there is nothing
in sight but the tunnel and the first row of steel bars that
segment the crossing into sections. Security cameras hide in
the corners and a Voice from nowhere directs:
Please push open the gate.
I'm past the first jail doors and clacking on toward the second
set. Here, a steel-barred revolving door interrupts the even,
steel-barred gates. The Voice sounds again.
Go through the turnstile.
Monotone, passionless Voice.
Put your bags on the belt.
Don't even think about disobeying.
Step into the glass x-ray machine with your arms outstretched
and your legs apart.
The glass doors spin closed, high-tech sound like the elevators
in the Mall of America. I am x-rayed along with my bags as they
inch through the baggage tunnel.
Please step back.
Please step in again.
Please step forward.
Please take your bags.
Please walk forward.
What a polite Voice. It says "please".
Don't touch the glass.
The Voice sees everything I'm doing. It sees through my clothing
and my leather back-pack.
You dropped something, the Voice tells me. Hint of humanoid
at the other end. I pick it up.
Go on.
The next set of steel bars appears. The final tunnel chamber
is divided into three corrals: one for the sub-humans from Gaza
currently not allowed out at all; one for the pain-in-the-ass-visitors
they haven't figured out how to dispense with altogether like
me; one wider than the other two- for the VIPs with diplomatic
status who still have to be treated like guests. Anyone who has
passed through Erez will find no hint of exaggeration in this
description. Anyone who has ever raised a question about this
sprawling, grotesque steel and concrete military-industrial guards'
complex will have been told it is for their security that this
must exist. Anyone who has set foot in the Gaza Strip will know
at once what a revolting load of crap that is.
This monstrosity is not for your security. This neo-fascist,
Stalinist, gulag Guantanamo is there to keep you out, to keep
you from even trying, from even wanting, to go in. It is there
so you will not see the torn up streets, and ruined land; the
bombed-out buildings and poisoned soil; the bull-dozed houses
and bullet-holed refugee camps; the back-up generators chugging
away; the destroyed central power transformer, the wrecked factories
and shops; the caved-in mosques and unfinished clinics; the pressure-less
water pumps; the lots full of rubble and trash; the wretched
horse and donkey-carts and beggar-children; the worn out mothers,
the humiliated fathers, the unemployed young men; the young girls
holding whole families together; the exhausted teachers, the
pay-less civil servants, the street vendo rs with last week's
produce; the heaps of rust and stench of rot, the overcrowded
book-and-desk-deprived schools full of troubled youth, bed-wetters,
ptsd children; the travesties-of-hospitals; the wards of the
sick and wounded; the morgues full of the dead; the merciful,
silver-trayed freezers in the morgues where rest finally takes
you unaware.
The prison compound of Gaza was built to push half a nation to
the brink of death, to suck out its resistance, to squeeze out
its breath. They want us to suffer, not to die. The words
of the mayor of Rafah sound like a broken record in my head.
And they are succeeding, he said without emotion.
Why? Because this blockade on human traffic into Gaza, this travesty
of an experiment in collective human torture, is sanctioned,
supported, condoned and blessed by the United States, the European
Union, the United Nations, the Arab League, the G-8, the corporate
masters, the "international community"; by heads of
states, presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, kings; by foreign
ministers and their trusty delegations; by politicians and diplomats,
executives and organizations, academies and institutes, think
tanks and centers for the study ofs; by departments of foreign
affairs, interior, education and finance; by media lords, newspapers,
radios, television stations, journalists, analysts, commentators
and publics who don't dare open their mouths, write out their
shock, register their objections, express their disgust, squeak
out their "no's" lest they suggest that Israel's apparatus
of inhumanity is an abomination on the face of the earth.
Servility to power, obsequiousness, righteous barbarism, elitist
racism, cowardice, complicity and denial fuel the engine of this
dreadful machine, and those with the power to stop it at once
refuse to utter a sound.
So outside at the end of the tunnel the soldiers greet me. Standard
procedure. All in day's work. Normalcy. Take your bags over
there. Yet another series of x-ray machines and tables. Every
item from toothpaste tubes and contact lens cases to dirty socks
and tee-shirts, from blue jeans and turtlenecks to embroidered
shawls and purses, is dumped onto the table and sifted through
with meticulous care as the backpack and suitcase, the handbag
and plastic sacks are sent through x-ray machines again. Three
and a half hours after my journey began, I am dismissed to the
Erez rangers' terminal where my passport is examined for the
5th time. I have two hours to get to the Allenby Bridge before
it closes at ! noon. Good thing I didn't leave Gaza at 8.
The beauty of the Jordan valley is stunning. The desert hills
are white and yellow and amber, swept by winds, patterned and
dancing, palm trees at the bottom near the Jordan River. The
warm autumn sun bakes out sorrow. Finally, the last security
check of the day my presence delays a van-load of VIPs hoping
to return to Jordan on the early side. Here we go again. I
guess it's because I was at Erez, I say to the Israeli attendant
looking at me quizzically when they take my passport away.
Where? She asks.
Erez.
A blank stare.
EREZ. The entrance of Gaza, I say.
She doesn't know what I'm talking about.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford
University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked
in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively
throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance
journalist and a human rights activist. She can be reached at:
amadea311@earthlink.net
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