Gaza Is Outwardly Rebuilding, but Inwardly Fearful
Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 10:22PM https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-hamas.html
By Ian Fisher 21 February 207 New York Times
The trailer in Beit Hanoun where Samaher al-Masri lived with her family for two years. Gazans are rebuilding after living through wars, but some still live in makeshift housing. CreditWissam Nassar for The New York Times
BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — In her new home, finally finished after she lived two years in a trailer across a dirt road, Samaher al-Masri, 40, showed a video on her cellphone of a cute preschooler: her son Majdi. He was singing:
“I am a son of Palestine, I have a right and a cause …
Even if they shoot me and I die as a martyr, I will not forget the cause.”
Majdi, who was 6, lived through two Gazan wars, though his old family house was toppled by bulldozers in the 2014 fighting with Israel. But the day after he ended kindergarten last year, he caught his hula hoop in a metal door in the trailer. The door was heavy, the frame shoddy. It fell on him and crushed his skull, killing him.
“Something is missing,” his mother said eight months later, in the living room of her house, built on the rubble-cleared plot of the old one. “You asked me if this is better. Yes, it’s better. But I’m missing him. His bedroom was waiting for him.”
So it is in Gaza, outwardly rebuilding and moving on from war, inwardly far from recovered. Gaza seems at a loss for what might be next. After so many years of isolation, residents of Gaza find themselves ever further from Palestinians in the West Bank, their future clouded by rising doubts that they could ever unite and work toward a lasting peace.
Two million tons of rubble have been cleared — about a ton for each person who lives in this cramped coastal strip. Two-thirds of the 160,000 damaged homes have been rebuilt, as have half of the 11,000 that were destroyed. Roads are better, travel faster. People gawk at their first real mall, with a food court and 12 escalators, both rarities in Gaza.
The Capital Mall has a food court and 12 escalators, both rarities in Gaza. CreditWissam Nassar for The New York Times
As has been the case for a decade, the strip remains encircled. Israel tightly controls most going in and out: food, building supplies, people. Two children died recently for lack of drugs or medical access, one of cancer, the other of a heart problem.
“The blockade of Gaza is something I can compare to the Middle Ages and the besieged castle that can fall at any moment,” said Dr. Fadel Ashour, a psychiatrist in Gaza since 1994. “People in Gaza are not satisfied with who governs this castle. They lack the tools to change it. They live with armed militias, and the institutions are not clear as they are in the West Bank. They know they are paying a price for something they don’t want. Or deserve. This increases their depression and hopelessness.”
It is unclear how the flickers of change elsewhere in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will ripple to Gaza, which is surrounded by Israel on two sides, by Egypt to the southwest and by the Mediterranean. With President Trump in office in the United States, Israel’s right seems to feel empowered and is likely to push more settlements in the West Bank, even to toy with annexation, despite Mr. Trump’s call to slow the pace.
The Palestinian Authority, which has wide backing in the West, seems to be looking abroad for ways to push its immediate future, including persuading the world to recognize a state of Palestine, threatening action in the United Nations and encouraging Israeli boycotts.
Leaders of Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the United States and by many other countries, do not have the same backing from the West. Interviews with political and business leaders, academics and ordinary people can divine only a basic strategy: improve the lives of frustrated residents as its leaders put off as long as possible what they see as the next inevitable war, then fight when it happens. (Life could be better, Hamas’s critics contend, if the group spent less on war preparations.)
Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official, said that with years of failed talks, settlements expanding across the West Bank and Mr. Trump’s apparent ambivalenceabout a Palestinian state, “You have two options: either to cooperate with the occupation or the resistance. There is no option,” he said. “Where is the two-state solution?”
Interviews make it clear that there is a growing distance between Gaza and the West Bank — a central reason cited by Israelis for the impossibility of negotiations. Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and took control of Gaza in 2007.
“Now, Gaza is something and the West Bank is something else,” said Ibrahim al-Madhoun, a columnist for the Hamas-affiliated news outlet Al Risala. “It’s a fact. You can’t connect the two realities. You will get lost. Things have changed.”
Mr. Madhoun and several others raised a possibility, a very long shot, one that could conceivably be acceptable to Israel’s far right: Someday Gaza — with defined borders, no Israeli occupation and no settlers — could become the basis for a Palestinian state as settlements gnaw away at the West Bank.
“If there is going to be a Palestinian state, it’s going to be Gaza,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, associate professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. “Politically speaking, it’s not right. But this is what’s coming.”
Otherwise, he said, “I don’t think there is a grand strategy where Gaza is in 10 years or 20 years. I know Hamas will never want to give up Gaza as long as it is capable of keeping control.”
Residents say they are focusing on getting by. Industrious and, for the most part, educated, they have cleared and rebuilt to the point that in places it is hard to tell there have been three wars in six years. One giveaway is that the concrete on the houses is fresh dark gray, rather than sun-bleached and weathered. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have underwritten minicities, as caravans and tents slowly empty. The Islamic University has patched the two buildings bombed in two wars and, with great effort, installed an impressive array of 450 solar panels on the science building, even though there is a fear the panels and the building might make a big target in the next war.
