Ships set sail for Gaza | First Rafah tournament kicks off

In between The Job and The Baby, there’s been a couple of projects I’ve been helping out with a little. One is a soccer tournament in Rafah, Gaza. The other is a project for activists to sail to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli blockade at sea. The latter has been a long time in development and the former was hatched in a shorter amount of time. Both are coming into their own now and warrant wider attention. Both speak to the larger problem Gaza faces as it remains a prison due to the Israeli occupation and US foreign policies. They also seek to help remedy some internal issues such as factioning and in-fighting, both resulting from the prison-like situation.

There is no such thing as too much cynicism in analysis of the situation involving Gaza. Take your pick of topics and you can’t really go dark enough. Some of the more macabre stuff out there refers to what Israel is doing to Gaza as “The Experiment.”

Here, we look briefly at The Experiment, and at the two projects I’ve had the good luck to be a small part of:

The Experiment

Neve Gordon wrote back in February that “The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day.” He goes on to elaborate on the steps of The Experiment and comes up with his own conclusions, but among his stats are (February 2008 figures):

“It is about showing them who is in control, about breaking their backs, so that they lower their expectations and bow down to Israeli demands,” Gordon surmises.

Two years previous, Uri Avnery made reference to The Experiment as well: “The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there.” There, Avnery also said the point of the experiment was to solve the following equation: “What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?” He goes on to name the scientists involved. “Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres – are bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to political science.”

In using The Experiment comparison, the intended, unstated analogy underpinning all this writing is clear. The comparison draws the mind to “medical” experimentation taken place by so-called doctors in Auschwitz and elsewhere during the Holocaust. These that Avnery and Gordon refer to are social experiments.

Two projects are taking place to counter The Experiment. By comparison to the massive social pogrom targeting the ghetto we call the Gaza Strip, these seem rather modest. They don’t have the massive US government subsidized budgets or corporate backing that the occupation has, but resistance has historically never enjoyed the cash flow which the Powers That Be can access.

A ballgame

Operating on a low four-digit budget instead of the billions of dollars pumped into the destruction of Gaza, a group of people in Rafah teamed up with some people in the US and UK to raise some cash to put in a soccer tournament to start the first week of Ramadan. The basic notion is that while factional in-fighting and the paranoia that comes from living under constant siege, there’s still a unifying love for the sport that everyone but people in the US call football, and a venue that brings people together can open lines of communicaiton long shut off by the occupation and its effects. We received vocal support from the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project in the US and Islington-Yibna Twinning group here in UK. Yibna is a large refugee camp in Rafah. Half the tems or more are from there. We also received funding from a number of individuals, the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and others. Quickly, with a minimum of fuss or bother, the money has been raised and folks in Rafah can put on something vital to community wellbeing, with the help of organisers at Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

Our US organizer of fund raising John Harvey wrote about the project. He recently returned from a trip to Gaza from Olympia, WA, to visit the Rafah half of Olympia-Rafah: “This February I had the privilege of spending a month with the people of Gaza, Palestine. As a representative of Sister Cities International, I was working to establish the foundations for sister city relations between cities in Gaza and the United States. I met with government representatives and social support groups, made new friends, and despite the dire circumstances, spent many memorable evenings sharing the fine hospitality and warm company of the good folk in Gaza.”

It was during this trip the the plan for what they decided to call the “Rachel corrie Football Tournament” was created. John spent a good deal of time with the families of our friends Khaled and Adnan. He said it was Adnan’s “dream is to create a space for youth and families to gather safely and have some fun.”

“Our playground is not the only one in the area,” he explained, “but what makes it distinct is that young people from different political colors [Fatah, Hamas, or PFLP factions] come almost every day, not to talk about politics, but to practice sports with each other. Other playgrounds attract only those who are affiliated with a certain political line.”

The great fear is that factional divisions are driving the young in the wrong direction. “There is an increase in rage amongst the youth as a result of infighting and lawlessness that have recently taken place in the Gaza Strip,” Adnan told me. “The result is a retreat from the basic values of good citizenship, democracy, participation and humanitarian action, all replaced by the exchange of accusations and violent actions.”

You can find out all there is to know about the project here.

55 donors came up with $6,000, about twice the expected budget, to pay for field preparations, jerseys for the teams, soccer balls and equipment, signs, banners and local community promotion. The organizing we had to do from abroad is little compared to putting on an event of any kind in Gaza and our friends there have a lot to get done before things kick off, but in the end it represented what we can do from abroad. Simple, quick activity to bring about something positive where there seems to be very little of that sort of thing going around.

The chief component of the occupation of both Gaza and the West Bank has been the deterioration of living standards. It seems to me, from seeing what sort of ideas come from our friends in Rafah, that one of the chief forms of confronting the occupation has been in the attempt to formulate community spaces amid the divisions that have been forced on them. Taking a field demolished by tanks and missile bombardment and turning into a football pitch. Identifying the internal divisions that have sprumg up from the situation and coming up with ways to break them. Rebuilding homes and public garden spaces. Much more of the isolation policies that Israel and the US have enforced on Gaza has been a tactic that plays as much on the mental wellbeing of the people there as it does on the physical wellbeing.

We don’t have to guess at what the intended outcome is of The Experiment. And to be honest, it doesn’t really matter. We can look at the reality of life in Gaza, look at the steps that got things to this point and see what the grand scheme is. In Palestine as well as Iraq, instead of taking what the occupiers say are their intentions, we can look at the realities on the ground, decide that the people responsible for them are not entirely uneducated and then surmise that this may be exactly the result they saw coming. And if we do that, the methods of opposition become much more clear.

In Gaza the people who have seen what life is like first hand have decided opposition comes in the form of creating community space, bringing people together and keeping Gaza as more than a prison, but also rebuilding it as a home.

Setting sail

The other project related to a direct challeng of the status quo is the Free Gaza movement’s Break the Siege flotilla.

My involvement on this has been tenuous at best, providing a little technical support where needed.

The whole press release is here. But to summarize:

“Forty-six international human rights workers are now sailing to Gaza through international waters with one overriding goal: to break the Israeli siege that Israel has imposed on the civilian population of Gaza. Any action designed to harm civilians constitutes collective punishment (in the Palestinians’ case, for voting the “wrong” way) and is both illegal under international law and profoundly immoral. Our mission is to expose the illegality of Israel’s actions, and to break through the siege in order to express our solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza (and of the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole) and to create a free and regular channel between Gaza and the outside world.”

The plan is not without its detractors and doubters but I remain a supporter of the idea even if I can’t actually be on board this go around. Again, it’s direct, simple in concept if a little more complicated in the details. The occupation of Gaza is focused on isolation as both a physical punishment and a mental one. Again, if we look at the resulting experience of people living there, the solution presents itself: Get some people over for a visit. The group on board these vessels have been trying to visit Gaza, and the West Bank, by air and by ground and have been turned back by Israel, and one wonders what the point of that is. It stands to reason that a few more people dedicated to nonviolence might be a welcome addition to the region. But if the goal has nothing to do with a lack of violence, if it has nothing to do with encouraging building community, then keeping people out becomes an imperative. The solution then presents itself: Keep sending folks over.

There is no political, economic will to bring about an end to this or most other ongoing misery in the world. And in this particular case there is no shortage of political, economic and even a smidgen of religious voracity to keep the status quo in place. At the start of this year Gaza Community Mental Health Programme put out a blanket invitation to people: Come over. It wasn’t because they thought people would actually get in for the most part, or even in small numbers. It’s that the people there are vastly ahead of a lot of people in realising the limits that governments can achieve in ending conflict. It ends when enough people decide to end it. It can happen when enough people try to take part in otherwise ordinary things, like getting on a boat, or supporting a community sports event or fudning construction of a home or playground.

Think how benign the act of taking a cruise, organizing a soccer match, building a house, a playground, a garden or a greenhouse sound if you hear about them taking place in any town in the US or UK. Then wonder why they should suddenly be embued with political significance by taking place in Gaza. These are the things that aren’t supposed to be taking place in a place like this. It’s off message. Not part of the dominet narrative. And that’s the precise reason they should be.

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