Everything I know about Gaza I learned from...

Thanksgiving

Ellen Freeman — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:22:17 +0000

Unfortunately, the delegation’s plans to travel to Gaza from Nov. 26^th – Dec. 1^st have had to change. Although we began applying for security clearance with the Egyptian Foreign Ministry months ago, we received final notice yesterday that we had been denied permission by the Egyptian government to cross the border at Rafah. The group, the organizers, and especially Solidarity Bridge (our Gazan university student counterparts), who spent the last month working so hard to make this delegation happen—arranging homestays, getting permission from the Hamas government for our entry and protection (which we received) and organizing a week’s worth of programs, tours, and forums that we were to participate in—are all extremely saddened and frustrated.

We were given no concrete reason by the Egyptian government for the denial of permission to enter Gaza despite repeated appeals. All they will tell us is that the border is “officially sealed” for Eid Al-Adha (the high Muslim holiday that falls on this weekend.) However, we know this to be incorrect because Palestinian students from the American University in Cairo are crossing the border to visit their families for the holidays and pilgrims are being let out to go on Hajj (the yearly Islamic pilgrimage.)

While past delegations to Gaza have definitely experienced frustrating bureaucracy and hang-ups at the border only to be let in after waiting there for a few days, we are, as far as we know, the only small-scale, non-protesting, student delegation to be flat-out denied permission. We can only speculate about a number of reasons that may be keeping us from gaining access to the border: the recent bombings by Israel of tunnels at the border and inside Gaza, the fact that the Ministry is currently overwhelmed with plans for Code Pink’s large-scale (1000+ people) march to Gaza on Dec. 27^thand doesn’t want to have to deal with us, the potential in the near future for the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit (although in recent days it appears that this is probably not going to happen), the fact that no one wants to work on a holiday including border guards and that the border might actually be closed (yes, this is a possibility although the Ministry knew the dates we were planning on going for the past few months), or even that one of our organizers has dual citizenship in America and Egypt and, though she was born in American and holds an American passport, they don’t want to allow an Egyptian to go to Gaza because of their political stance with Israel.

Our delegation is left with a few options:

First, we can take “no” as an answer. In this case we would transfer the medical aid we already purchased to be taken in with the Code Pink march (and I will either purchase blankets if they are willing to take them in or entrust them with the remaining donation money.)

Second, we can not take “no” as an answer, and try to go to Gaza anyways. The delegation came to a consensus that this was not a good option for us because the Ministry has warned us that going against their denial will only cause problems for us and will most likely be futile in terms of trying to enter Gaza. I also disagree with this option because what attracted me to this delegation originally was first and foremost a humanitarian effort, as cooperative with the governments involved and non-political as a delegation to an occupied territory can be. I believe that going against the government’s warning and trying to enter after being denied permission would be a political escalation in terms of the tone of the delegation. It was very important to me to go to Gaza to educate myself on the reality of this issue and because I still haven’t done that, I don’t feel yet that I am able to take an accountable political stance.

Third, we can take the border being closed for the Eid holidays as fact and re-apply for permission to enter at a later date after the holidays. This would be Dec. 1^st and luckily our university extended our holiday break until the 6^th because of swine flu worries so we will still be able to spend as much time in Gaza as originally planned. While I know Egyptian bureaucracy to be extremely slow and convoluted and am doubtful that we would be given permission after already being denied, they did tell us to re-apply (although they said, arbitrarily, after one month.) I don’t feel comfortable with giving up so easily on the people of Gaza who were expecting our aid and witness, but unless something changes suddenly, we receive access through the border and things return to the state they were in before we got denied, I don’t think that I will be attempting to still get into Gaza. The program we had arranged with Solidarity Bridge will have passed, and the ‘legit-ness’ of the entire operation in my eyes has deteriorated.

In the meantime I will be traveling through Israel to visit the West Bank, leaving tonight. Some of the organizers have contacts there with NGOs that they will be putting us in touch with. I’m going to transfer the remaining $300 in donations from PayPal and if I find an organization while I’m there that I believe to be providing relief work and medical aid I will donate it to them. While the trip to Gaza is no longer a guarantee, I still feel that educating myself on this issue with firsthand experience is of the utmost importance, so visiting the West Bank—although it is of course important to note that it has a completely different government and relationship with Israel than Gaza—is the most relevant back-up plan I can choose.

I think if we’re going to take away anything from this experience, it should be this: while our delegation is very upset that we will not be able to cross the border into Gaza, it is important to remember that there are over 1.5 million Gazans who have experienced this disappointment daily for the past years of occupation. Although as Americans we had a chance at being able to cross the border, for them entering and exiting Gaza to visit relatives, receive adequate medical attention or attend foreign universities is most often not even a possibility. As we give thanks today and eat turkey and stuffing (oh god I wishhhhhhh, I’ll probably just eat a shwerma sandwich, let the bread get really soggy and slap some jam on there), let’s recall the people of the Gaza Strip, many of whom are also struggling to celebrate a holiday as best they can (http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/11/26/world/international-us-palestinians-gaza-eid.html) and continue to question the Egyptian Foreign Ministry’s policy regarding the passage of medical aid through the Rafah border.

p.s. this was my horoscope today!!!!

Ellen, Today it is the younger folks who may prove the most creative and productive in the workplace, especially if you are involved in New Media or the Internet. Keep an open mind about someone’s radical ideas. With their passionate support, you may be surprised what you can accomplish.

less history, more “buzz”

Ellen Freeman — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:52:29 +0000

Joel sent me these links and I read them all (!) instead of doing my Arabic homework:

-A few interesting New York Times articles about opportunity in Gaza and the tunnels (which I will be visiting inshallah), and an Op-Ed by Jimmy Carter (I recently used the bathroom of an expensive restaurant that he ate at in Cairo!!)

-An Independent article about drug abuse in Gaza.

-Two Guardian articles, one illustrating the need for sustainable humanitarian aid in Gaza and one an alarming but sort of hopeful description of Hamas’ conflict between imposed sharia rigidity and international acceptance.

p.s. we’ve now raised < $800!!!!I haven’t turned in about $300 of it and after reading those articles it looks like supplies for getting through a cold winter with minimal shelter might be as imperative as medical supplies, so I’m going to look into spending the remainder on something like this (but I want to make sure it’s something they’ll let cross the border first.)

Comparative Literature

Ellen Freeman — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:46:16 +0000

On the train to Alexandria this weekend, my friend Rachel bought an issue of Al-Ahram, the English language version of the leading, most widely-circulated newspaper in Egypt. The cover story (remember we were reading this on a train) wasn’t the only alarming thing we found. I’m not sure if it’s a ‘lost in translation’ kind of issue (I’ve tried reading the Arabic language version with little success), but the quality of many of the articles, including this one on the rising incidence of Egyptian polygamy is hilariously poor. Conjecture, misinformation, and lack of sources sort of stops being funny, however, when the content is dealing with ‘more serious’ issues like the one I’m attempting to educate myself on here. This article on Israeli-Palestinian clashes at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem made me especially curious about the level of propaganda perpetuated by local news sources. Of course bias in the media,whether that manifests itself in inaccurate portrayal, exaggeration, obvious sympathies, or, you know, racism, is far from being new or particular to the region, and there’s obviously no way of knowing what really happened without being there. I’m just interested in the discrepancy between sources in the reporting on this issue and what that points to in terms of how people here at and home think about what’s going on.

Charged terms and editorialist language like “crack Israeli soldiers”, “savagely beat”, “manifestly provocative acts”, “descend to the Islamic holy place and wrest it from the hands of the ‘goyem’”, really have no place in journalism, and it’s surprising to find them here in the leading Egyptian newspaper (and, since Egypt is one of the leading Arab countries in terms of cultural and media influence, one of the leading Arab news sources). So that sent up a red flag for me, and I decided to use the three-hour break during which I’m stuck on campus in “New Cairo” (not a city) to ‘surf the web’ and try to find media coverage of the alleged raid on reputable Western sites. The best that I could come up with were two articles from the BBC and the NYTimes dated October 25th about arrests made at Al-Aqsa on that day. The differences in the coverage of the event were pretty obvious:

-I guess probably the most glaring issue is that BBC and NYtimes quote sources from both sides, while Al-Ahram quotes only Palestinians and one “foreign observer”.

-Al-Ahram says that “Israeli soldiers stormed the Al-Aqsa site,” and gives no motivation for the attack. The BBC states that police did not enter the mosque, and says that the Israeli police acted in response to Palestinian youths throwing rocks at non-Muslims entering the site (they were supposedly tourists–what unbeatable souvenirs!) The NYTimes also says that no serious injuries were reported. It’s pretty hard to believe that if Israelis had ‘savagely’ beaten Muslim women and children there would be absolutely no mention of it. (It doesn’t seem like the BBC has any problem reporting on human rights violations in the area–see this report on Palestinians being denied water.)

-The Al-Ahram article calls what Muslims refer to as the Noble Sanctuary (or “Haram al-Sharif” in Arabic) an “exclusively Islamic holy site”, while both the BBC and NYTimes define the location as a holy site for Muslims and Jews, explaining that “The site houses both the al-Aqsa mosque and the Jewish holy site, the Western Wall.” You can learn anything on the internet–my 16 year-old self is still really thankful to mxtabs.net for teaching me ‘Fuck and Run’ by Liz Phair and that really hard beginning part of by Dispatch’s ‘The General’–and I found out via a bunch of old articles from the 90′s out that this particular part of the issue is not at all new and both sides, backed by archaeologists, have been making different claims about the origins of this site. My favorite part is that all of the reports rank the holiness of the site–looks like it’s coming in at 3rd place for Muslims and 1st for Jews!

It’s probably stating the obvious that it’s important to look into more than one source for your news, but I guess I’m just disappointed that Al-Ahram, the newspaper I see stacks of on every newsstand here, would harken back to memories of the Sellwood Middle School Panther Press… guess their use of Comic Sans font in the Living section should’ve tipped me off!

A little conviction never hurt anyone.

Ellen Freeman — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:57:55 +0000

Yesterday I told Mom and Dad that I’m going to Gaza for Thanksgiving/Eid Al-Adha break. Well, first I told Dad to confirm that he wouldn’t tell Mom, but I ended up telling her later that day anyway, partly because she has swine flu (her diagnosis) and when we Skyped she sounded so pitiful that I couldn’t lie, and partly because she’d find out anyways because I’m sending out the fundraising e-mails as soon as PayPal confirms my bank account (hurry uuuurrrrrrrp!). Dad was as supportive as he always is of any venture of mine that doesn’t have anything to do with friends, Beyonce, or thespianism. He said: “Mostly it just makes me very proud,” which felt good. Mom said: “Well, we’ve never been able to stop you from doing anything you want. It’ll be a great week-long weight-gain and hair-graying program for me.” Then she asked if any ‘adults’ are coming.

As an overview of why I’m going, here’s the e-mail I’ve sent to send to ‘friends and family’ for fundraising with a few explanatory notes by the author:

“I’m writing to you because I was recently accepted to be part of a student delegation to Gaza over Thanksgiving break. We are a group of American students tentatively called either “Students for Gaza” or “Students in Solidarity with Gaza”, traveling there on an invitation from the UN and in conjunction with Code Pink.”

I need to admit that right now I know very little about Code Pink (more on this theme to follow), except a lot people think they’re nuts and I heard that the author of “The Color Purple” (can you not underline book titles on blogs because people will get confused and think it’s a link?) is a member, which is really funny.

“We are staying with host families in Gaza City and bringing much-needed medical supplies across the Rafah border between Egypt and Gaza to hospitals that are currently being denied many of the supplies they require by Israeli sanctions. We will also be traveling around the Palestinian settlements to meet with local communities and see firsthand the living situation of people there and the effects of the recent conflict on their lives. Though it is very hard to remove politics from a trip to such a charged region, this is NOT a protest, and it’s not an activist campaign–it is first and foremost a humanitarian effort to bring aid and, when we return to our own communities, witness to the effects of this longstanding conflict.”

This is where it starts getting pretty real:

“For me, however, this delegation is more than just an aid effort. I’m a comparative literature student, not a political sciences student, and politics have always been something that I’ve sort of shrugged off as being boring, or immutable, or ‘over-my-head’ or whatever. But, having spent two months in the Middle East and feeling sort of like an ignorant idiot every time someone brings up the Israel-Palestine conflict (which is all the time, and even moreso now that Ramadan is over and people are getting a little beer in them), I can’t help but start to take notice of the blind–well maybe not blind by at least ‘sunglassed’–eye I’ve been turning. Suddenly, it feels pretty dumb not knowing what’s going on–and especially ‘not knowing what’s going on’ by choice of apathy rather than a lack of information or opportunity. The more opinions I hear from college students, journalists, etc., the more I realize that the majority of these opinions are coming from sources removed from the situation, rather than firsthand experience, and often from truths taken from someone else who took their opinion from someone else and so and so on. I now have the opportunity to educate myself about this issue (and afterwards if I feel compelled, to educate others) in the best way possible–by going directly to the source.”

Then I ask them for money. (Thank you SO much to those who have contributed. I hope that I can prove that it was worth your while through this blog or whatever comes out of this trip–more on that later.)

It feels really weird to quote myself saying something like this, and weirder to have actually gone through the process of thinking it. Some might blame my decision to go on this trip on my confirmed case of acute F.O.M.A. (Fear of Missing out on Anything) syndrome–and I’m a self-confessed fomo–but that’s incorrect because when I found about the delegation I was really excited to go but got scared out of it for a while and was completely content with missing out on it. (I don’t want to admit to myself how much of a determining factor it might have been that my informational meeting with one of the student leaders was at 9:30 AM on a Saturday morning.) But the truth is, the more I thought about it, heard about it, talked about it with others who were both applying for the delegation and not applying, I felt like I had to apply. Maybe it’s this sort of Freshman Year 2.0 that study abroad has been in terms of meeting a ton of new people all the time and figuring out which portrayal of myself I’m going give to them that made me start thinking again about ‘What I Believe’ or ‘What I Know’. Those are reallllllllly big, anxiety-ridden categories, and spending 5 days in Gaza is certainly not going to come close to defining them, but it could be the catalyst to start considering why it is that I like/dislike/believe in/don’t believe in/know/don’t know things, beyond my usual answer which is ‘on principle’. _____-ing things ‘on principle’ is funny and sort of cute, I guess, but it’s probably not enough.

Mom wrote to me in an e-mail recently, “When you were little you had such a love of learning. You ate up everything, read vociferously, subscribed to all those magazines, wanted to go places, see and learn as much as you could: camps, programs, etc. I felt that as you got to about 5th grade that love got lost somewhere…” A little heavy, and I hope it’s not THAT bad, but if it was ‘lost’ at age 11, ten years later shouldn’t be too late to pick it back up, right? Maybe the 5-page Rolling Stone article on Pink that I made myself read last night was a good start—yeah right, still think she sucks!!

Everything I know about Gaza I learned from...

Thanksgiving

less history, more “buzz”

Recommended Reading (or if you’re Kari Freeman probably don’t read any of these until I get back)

Comparative Literature

A little conviction never hurt anyone.