My group got into Gaza two days ago, and it feels like a month already. I think the most significant impression I can convey is my surprise at how vibrant and alive the place is. I'd steeled myself to see endless destruction. Certainly every image of physical destruction that we saw last December and January can be found; but the shock is the realization that Palestinian life goes forward with incredible perseverance and charm and dignity. Downtown Gaza city is vibrant, full of street life, and the traffic is now and then interrupted by a flatbed truck going by with a wedding band banging drums on it, and a Mercedes carrying the bride and groom in tow.
It is not that the world's blockade of Gaza is not evident. It is evident at almost every turn. Most buildings downtown are dark at night. Generators go in the street. Store shelves are thin, and the sense of high unemployment is everywhere at hand. The commerce feels like that of a dusty Caribbean island.
But the essential spirit of the place seems unaltered by recent events. In fact, people tell you that they insist on being engaged with life so as to be able to imagine a different future than what is right in front of them. And that includes the university student whose father was dragged away to an Israeli prison three years ago for no good reason and the young graduate who chokes tears as she tells you that four times she saw scholarships abroad evaporate because she could not get out of the country.
And I should add that no one seems to be starving. No one we have seen yet. The markets are not crowded but they're not empty either. We see piles of watermelons by the side of the road and trucks filled with potatoes, and donkeys going by hauling wagons of tomatoes. Now and then you see a gleaming motorcycle. The tunnels are in fine fettle along the border with Egypt. There are so many of them, and they are so obvious, that there must be some complicity on the part of Israel in their continued existence: they serve to lessen the horror of Gaza's condition, in the eyes of the world, and so they serve Israel too.
Of that horror I will have much to say in the days to come. This is an emotionally exhausting trip. From one hour to the next we hear one tragic story after another of persecution. That's the word that keeps coming to mind: persecution, of the Palestinians, by the state of Israel. I find myself drawing closer to the Jewish members of the trip, if only to remind myself that they feel as outraged as I do by the affliction carried out in our name.
I remember during the Gaza slaughter that some tried to stop commentators from comparing Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto. Now I am here and I find the analogy helpful. In the Warsaw ghetto, and in slavery in the south, or in Jim Crow 100 years later–in any of these historical episodes of persecution that had a racist component–it wasn't as if the victimized people laid down and died. No, the blacks of the south created a rich culture on whatever terms were afforded to them. And the books my mother gave me of the Warsaw ghetto conveyed the treasure of Jewish life and culture that persisted even under the most humiliating circumstances. So in Gaza, with Israeli jeeps creeping up one border and gunboats cruising along the other, and bomb craters everywhere, and no one allowed to pursue their dreams, Palestinians are still leading engaged, serious, and even at-time joyous lives. Last night I watched the European Cup finals with about 100 of them in a crowded restaurant. The cruelty of the fact that a global festival that calls on talent from across the world is in no real way open to the people in the place was lost for an hour or two amid the shouts for Messi and Barcelona.
