The
sign on the way out of Gaza really says this. Yes. Greetings.
Welcome to a half a mile of concrete barriers and barbed wire.
Welcome to electrical wires and fortified soldiers' bunkers. Take
no notice of the machine guns pointed at your head. Follow the
arrows and obey the signs. Put your hands up, leave your bags
behind you, walk slowly, show us your passport, tell us what the
hell you think you're doing in this human garbage dump. No, you
can't be trusted. You're living in Gaza.
Welcome
to the Erez Crossing. Make yourself at home.
A young, blue-eyed soldier with a crew
cut and a machine gun watches me enter the main office at Erez.
I say a meek "shalom"; I don't want to get into a conversation.
But he wants to know where I'm from and what's my name. His eyes
pierce mine and he grins in an unpleasant manner. He looks like
the stereotype of a Nazi soldier, I catch myself thinking. Don't.
Don't have that thought. It's not allowed.
Outside,
another hundred meters away, is the last guard post. I pass by
it easily, handing over my gate pass, and feel relieved to see
that my taxi is waiting for me. But in between me and my last
few steps at this God-forsaken transit point is a family of four,
a mother, father, and two young children –sitting on the
pavement in the sun, the 100-degree-Fahrenheit, humid Gaza sun—waiting
for the master boys in uniform to deign to let them back into
prison. How many hours have they been kept there in the withering
heat?
The soldier
at the gate shouts for the father to approach in the tone of voice
used for disobedient dogs. I feel sick. "I'm so sorry. I
know my country is paying for this." They're the only words
I can find and I utter them in broken Arabic. The father looks
at me surprised. "Never mind. It's not your fault."
Worthless
lives can sit for hours at the gates of an inferno. No one will
ever know. And the man who waited at Ben Gurion airport for ten
hours to get permission to return to his Gaza hovel was finally
allowed in –without his wife and daughter, who were threatened
with deportation for no apparent reason. You never heard about
him either or the hundreds with similar stories. Or about the
woman sitting in the back seat of a taxi with her child one early
morning this past June: Soldiers in a nearby outpost fired bullets
through the window of their car killing them both. They have no
names, no faces, no relevance.
More
than 150 people have been murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces
in the Gaza Strip just since the middle of March. Three made news
in the US. The New York Times labeled them "suicide bombers"
though they had no explosives on their bodies. They were 14 and
15 year old boys stupidly driven to trespass into the Netzarim
settlement, illegally situated on their land. They were shot in
the head and chest, ridden over by an armored vehicle that disemboweled
and utterly disfigured them, and left to the mercy of dogs until
the next afternoon. Do you remember them?
Are we
really surprised that an F16 warplane would drop a 2000-pound
bomb on a family home at midnight killing 15 people, nine of them
children and two of them mothers? Where has the outcry been up
to now that over a million human beings –treated like refuse,
spoken of like vermin, drained of the trappings of basic dignity—
live in a ghetto walled off from humanity surrounded and strangulated
by an occupying army that kills them at will and with complete
impunity? Why should fifteen more deaths matter when the hundreds
of others never did?
Because
this time the killers were so purposefully indiscreet.
When
I step into my taxi for the weekend trip to Ramallah my Arab Israeli
driver greets me tentatively at first. I thank him for being at
Erez so promptly; for not making have to wait in that miserable
place. Anguish fills me when I turn back to look at the entrance
to Gaza. Let me try to forget for a while. "Where are you
from," I ask the driver in Arabic, in an attempt to focus
my thoughts elsewhere. "I am Palestinian," he answers
me in a voice of controlled calm.
Erez,
it seems all your greetings have failed.
