I know you've seen a ton of pictures of Palestinians standing next to rubble in Gaza. This picture's not about that. It's about the civil society that still exists in Gaza, despite cruel persecution.
The location is the beautiful garden of the Marna House, where internationals love to stay in Gaza City; and the woman at the left is Taghreed El-Khodary, the correspondent for the New York Times in Gaza, whose noble work is a model for all journalists caught up in such huge events. I'll be getting to El-Khodary in a day or two.
The guy at the right is her softspoken friend, Fares Akram. Akram writes for the Independent, and works for Human Rights Watch– Gaza is such a small society, and the liberal sphere is so small, that Akram has dual roles.
After breakfast, he took us on a tour of the industrial zone in eastern Gaza, where the Israelis destroyed factory after factory before they left in January. Here he is showing us through the Al Hadad tile factory, which the Israelis yanked down at the end of the war for no reason at all.
If you want to sense the devastation that Israel wreaked in the industrial zone of east Gaza, here's a video of Akram's tour, the beginning of it anyway. The quality sucks– I seem to have shot out of my armpit– but it will give you a real feel for the destruction, and for Akram's precise manner.
We spent all day with Akram before we understood how much the war had touched him personally. At 6 o'clock we were standing on the roof of a house in Beit Lahia that the Israelis dropped white phosphorus on when Akram pointed at the farmland north of us, near the Israeli border, and told us that it was where his father was killed on January 3, 2009.
Then a few days after his father died, Fares Akram and his wife Alaa had a daughter. He wrote at the time:
My mother joined us in the hospital. She managed to hold back the tears
but I knew she was sad, thinking of my dad who would have been so happy
to see his new granddaughter. And yet, I know that as one family member
leaves us, another is born. It reminds you that life is a circle, a
continuous thing.
Akram told us that his father was a judge who did not want any part of the Hamas administration of Gaza. He left his job a couple of years back. He was at his farm because he needed to care for livestock and it was too dangerous to go back to town, when an F-16 struck the farm, killing him and a 17-year-old student.
Human Rights Watch has called for an investigation of the killings. I notice that John Mearsheimer referred to the Gaza onslaught as a "massacre" in his speech at the Detroit mosque on Saturday night. And Norman Finkelstein has called for the application of international law. These are important concepts and principles. They will only be applied, I believe, when Americans begin to look on Palestinians as fellow human beings.
