‘Reconciliation Is Just a Lie’: Skepticism in Gaza at Yet Another Attempt at Palestinian Unity

GAZA CITY – Like their 21th century peers, Gazans have access to cellphones, YouTube and Facebook. But this is only a façade of access to global interaction: For the last 11 years, Gazans have been living under political siege.

That siege has led to a 46% youth unemployment rate. For graduates of local Palestinian universities the picture is even bleaker: of the 18,000 who graduate annually, the unemployment rate is 64%.

Those young Gazans and the millions of their compatriots have been waiting for more than a decade for a glimmer of hope. Has this faint chance now arrived, with the latest episode of the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation story?

Last Sunday, after negotiations with Egypt, Hamas government pledged to dissolve its year-old administrative commission, formed to rule the Strip, and expressed its readiness to hold elections. Hamas used its commission to run the internal affairs of the Strip, after accusing the PA of neglecting Gaza. In return, the Fatah-ruled PA accused Hamas of using this commission as a “shadow government” to deepen the political division between Gaza and the West Bank.

President Mahmoud Abbas had instituted a sequence of punitive measures against Gaza aimed at pressuring Hamas to relinquish control of the Strip, including cutting the salaries of Gaza PA employees and reducing the electricity supply to the Strip.

Now, Abbas has accepted Hamas’ decision. For the first time in three years, the Palestinian Authority will convene in Gaza on Tuesday as part of a push for reconciliation between the rival Hamas and Fatah factions.

For Palestinians in Gaza, the main divisions are between the optimists and the sceptics.
The optimists believe that if Palestinian reconciliation works this time, Gaza might still witness its best years. But those hopes are challenged by the sceptics, often those unemployed graduates, youth, heads of families, who recall the long history of previous reconciliation failures, the false dawns of meetings between Hamas and Fatah in Cairo, Moscow, Mecca and Gaza.

They believe that what’s going on between both factions is just barter, and the only ones benefitting from any coming reconciliation will the political movements themselves and their followers.

Ahmed Abu-Qamsha, 23, a Palestinian graduate from Gaza, believes that the reconciliation is never going to work, “because both parties are happy with what’s going on.”

“Any coming reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah would be just a lie, added to the already substantial volume of lies from both parties,” Ahmed added. “Hamas wants the reconciliation so its employees can get full salaries from the PA, and Fatah wants the reconciliation to control the Strip again. This Cairo agreement is no different from the previous ones.”

The last Palestinian-Palestinian reconciliation agreement was signed by the two parties in the summer of 2014, a month before Israel started its deadly offensive on the enclave. The subsequent war, lasting for 52 days, damaged Gaza’s weak infrastructure and killed more than 2,300 Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians.
Unlike Ahmed, Suraya Mahmoud, 33, a Palestinian mother from Gaza, thinks that this time is different.

“Hamas and Fatah are under international pressure from Egypt, Moscow and some European countries, even from the UN,” Suraya said. “So, the reconciliation is really real this time, and we are very hopeful about it.”

Speaking during a press conference at the UNESCO office in Gaza City, Special UN coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Nikolay Mladenov said that the United Nation is ready to supervise the Palestinian consensus government and its performance in the Gaza Strip.

Many states have exhibited the moral and political responsibility and readiness to support any overall solution in the Gaza Strip in order to end its 11 years of suffering, hopelessness and silence. But it is Hamas and Fatah who will have the final word – it is their actions that will be decisive in terms of what political configuration will emerge.
But for Gazans, the bottom line is not which political party is ascendant. The issue of reconciliation is largely academic. They only want an improvement in living conditions that would allow them to live like humans.

Patients waiting for medications to get into Gaza, students granted scholarships to study outside Gaza waiting for the border crossings to open, the crowds of the unemployed.  As we all used to hear from our grandparents: “A drowning man grasps at straws.

Mohammed Arafat

02-10-2017

The Depressing Consequences of Dating in Gaza

The besieged Gaza strip has a lot of hidden stories the media can’t properly access. Those stories are populated by individuals who won’t reveal their names and details to outsiders, out of pride, or privacy, or shame. Every story has its own shocking and surprising details. They need to be told so a wider audience can begin to understand, just a bit more tangibly and personally, what it means to live in the enclave.
In Gaza, we also fall in love.

Sometimes we fall in love with a cousin, a friend or even a student.
She was just 17 years old when she came to the educational center where I was volunteering as an English teacher. The head teacher asked her mother to choose the teacher who would instruct her daughter. But her daughter intervened. She pointed directly at me. I knew that would be the beginning of a love story.

Over the next eight months, she and I finally fell in love. Her family knew, but mine did not, because I knew my family was not financially ready for a marriage. Immediately, I realized the mistake I had committed by allowing such a deep attachment to grow.

I am my parents’ eldest son. They want me to marry so they can enjoy being grandparents, but they know that I don’t have a apartment to live in or a stable salary that would allow me, my wife and them to survive on. My father has been unemployed since 2005 when he, along with thousands of other Gazans, could no longer work inside Israel after its withdrawal. He became one of the 80% of all Gazans who depend on social assistance and international aid.

My girlfriend’s parents loved me so much that they said they could not live without me. “If you ever leave us, you will kill our souls,” her mom once told me. Her words made me cry for hours, because I already knew marrying her daughter would never happen.

I felt trapped between Scylla and Charybdis. I was afraid to be realistic and to tell her family that financial difficulties prevented me from marrying their daughter, and I was also scared to promise the girl and her family to wait for me, and for my situation to improve, because I did not want them to wait for years.

Between fear and hope, the relationship lasted for about two years, and she was almost 20 years old when her mother asked to meet me alone. I knew what her mother wanted to talk about. I met her in a restaurant in Gaza, popular with families, and she started talking about the social culture of Gaza  and how people regard young women when they pass the age of 20.

In Gaza, and in most of the Arab world, families consider girls over 20 as irredeemable spinsters. That means many have no chance of marrying – for several reasons. There is a gender ‘surplus’ of young  single women because so many young men immigrate to the West looking for jobs, because men disproportionately lose their lives in combat, and because men don’t have the financial means to get married.

“You know my daughter will soon be 20, and I still don’t know if you’re intending to marry her.” Her mother started her prepared speech. “You know we can wait for you for years, but your family should know and I need guarantees that you will indeed marry her!”

It was for her right to say that, and that day I felt the most guilty and oppressive person on earth. I realized how much her family was attached to me, and how much they needed me to be one of them. I couldn’t give my answer there and then. I asked her mother to give me a few days to think.

Gaza’s difficult financial conditions, including an unemployment crisis that exceeds 45%, one of the highest in the world, stifle the chances of hundreds of marriages ever taking place. That has led to the proliferation of organizations that facilitate weddings. Their main role is to help people who don’t have the financial means to marry. Because every wedding in the Gaza Strip costs at least $8000, these organizations provide grooms opportunities to pay in comfortable installments over two or three years.

I thought of going to register at one of these organizations, but I was very hesitant. I knew that everyone in the neighborhood would know I married through them, and that it’s considered shameful. I didn’t want anyone to talk badly about me. Moreover, I would not be able to pay the installments back, so I would fall in a dangerous financial trap; I would likely default, and I might even go to jail. So I eradicated the idea of marriage from my mind.

I called her mother, and told her that I would not let her daughter or her wait for me. I would not be able to marry for years. She cried over the phone several times, but I still felt I did the right thing.

That was two years ago. Until now my ex-girlfriend has refused every marriage proposal suggested to her. Her mom once called me and said that her daughter was suffering psychological difficulties. That day, I understood what living in the Gaza Strip means.

Mohammed Arafat

27-09-2017