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Posted By Ramzy Baroud
February 1, 2007
In a radio interview prior to the US
invasion of Iraq, David Barsamian
asked Noam Chomsky what ordinary
Americans could do to stop the war.
Chomsky answered, “In some parts of
the world people never ask, ‘what can
we do?’ They simply do it.”
For someone who was born and raised in
a refugee camp in Gaza, Chomsky’s
seemingly oblique response required no
further elucidation.
When Gazans recently stormed the
strip’s sealed border with Egypt,
Chomsky’s comment returned to mind,
along with memories of the still
relevant - and haunting - past.
In 1989, the Bureej refugee camp was
experiencing a strict military curfew,
as punishment for the killing of one
Israeli soldier. The soldier’s car had
broken down in front of the camp while
he was on his way home to a Jewish
settlement. Bureej had previously lost
hundreds of its people to the Israeli
army and killing the soldier was an
unsurprising act of retaliation.
In the weeks that followed, scores of
Palestinians in Bureej were murdered
and hundreds of homes were demolished.
The killing spree generated little
media coverage in Israel.
I lived with my family in an adjacent
refugee camp, Nuseirat, at the time.
Characterised by extreme poverty, it
was a natural home for much of the
Palestinian resistance movement. Our
house was located a few feet away from
what was known as the ‘Graveyard of
the Martyrs’. It was an area of high
elevation that the local children
often used to watch the movement of
Israeli tanks as they began their
daily incursion into the camp. We
whistled or yelled every time we
spotted the soldiers, and used sign
language to communicate as we hid
behind the simple graves.
Although watching, yelling and
whistling were the only means of
response at our disposal, they were
far from safe. My friends Ala, Raed,
Wael and others were all killed in
these daily encounters
During Bureej’s most lethal curfew
yet, the sound of explosions coming
from the doomed camp reached us at
Nuseirat. The people of my camp became
engulfed in endless discussions which
were neither factional nor
theoretical. People were being
brutally murdered, injured or
impoverished, while the Red Cross was
blocked access to the camp. Something
had to be done.
And all of a sudden it was. Not as a
result of any polemic endorsed by
intellectuals or ‘action calls’
initiated at conferences, but as an
unstructured, spur-of-the-moment act
undertaken by a few women in my
refugee camp. They simply started a
march into Bureej, and were soon
joined by other women, children and
men. Within an hour, thousands of
refugees made their way into the
besieged neighbouring camp. “What’s
the worst they could do?” a neighbour
asked, trying to collect his courage
before joining the march. “The
soldiers will not be able to kill more
than a hundred before we overpower
them.”
Israeli soldiers stood dumbfounded
before the chanting multitudes. While
many marchers were wounded only one
was killed. The soldiers eventually
retreated to their barricades. UN
vehicles and Red Cross ambulances
sheltered themselves amidst the crowd
and together they broke the siege.
I still remember the scene of Bureej
residents first opening the shutters
of their windows, then carefully
cracking their doors, stepping out of
their homes in a state of disbelief
breaking into joy. My memory - of the
chants, the tears, the dead being
rushed to be buried, the wounded
hauled on the many hands that came to
the rescue, the strangers sharing food
and good wishes -reaffirms the event
as one of the greatest acts of human
solidarity I have witnessed.
The scene was to be repeated time and
again, during the first and Second
Palestinian Uprising: ordinary people
carrying out what seemed like an
ordinary act in response to
extraordinary injustice.
The father who lost his son to free
Bureej told the crowd: “I am happy
that my son died so that many more
could live.”
Later than day, our refugee camp fell
under a most strict military curfew,
to relive Bureej’s recent nightmare.
We were neither surprised nor
regretful. We had known the right
thing to do and “we simply did it.”
Now Palestinian women, once more, have
led Palestinian civil society in a
most meaningful and rewarding way.
Just when Israeli defence minister
Ehud Barak was being congratulated for
successfully starving Palestinians in
Gaza to submission, ordinary women led
a march to break the tight siege
imposed on Gaza.
On Tuesday, January 22, they descended
on the Gaza-Egypt border and what
followed was a moment of pride and
shame: pride for those ever-dignified
people refusing to surrender, and
shame that the so-called international
community allowed the humiliation of
an entire people to the extent that
forced hungry mothers to brave batons,
tear gas and military police in order
to perform such basic acts as buying
food, medicine and milk.
The next day, the courage of these
women inspired the same audacity that
the original batch of women in my
refugee camp inspired nearly twenty
years ago. Nearly half of the Gaza
Strip population crossed the border in
a collective push for mere survival.
And when people march in unison, there
is no worldly force, however deadly,
that can block their way.
This “largest jailbreak in history”,
as one commentator described it, will
be carved in Palestinian and world
memory for years to come. In some
circles it will be endlessly analysed,
but for Palestinians in Gaza, it is
beyond rationalization: it simply had
to be done.
Armies can be defeated but human
spirit cannot be subdued. Gaza’s act
of collective courage is one of the
greatest acts of civil disobedience of
our time, akin to civil rights marches
in America during the 1960’s, South
Africa’s anti-Apartheid struggle, and
more recently the protests in Burma.
Palestinian people have succeeded
where politics and thousands of
international appeals have failed.
They took matters into their own hands
and they prevailed. While this is
hardly the end of Gaza’s suffering,
it’s a reminder that people’s power to
act is just too significant to be
overlooked.
* Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)
is an author and editor of Palestine
Chronicle. His latest book is The
Second Palestinian Intifada: A
Chronicle of a People's Struggle
(Pluto Press, London). |
