ISRAEL: Gaza, my uncles and 'the cousins'

By Ashraf Khalil in Gaza City

Last week I took a vacation to Egypt to visit family, the first time I’d been back to Cairo since I was posted to Jerusalem in February.

My relatives peppered me with questions about life in a country next door that they know they’ll never visit.

What’s Al-Aqsa Mosque like? Have you crossed through the wall? How do “our cousins” (one of the more polite local euphemisms for Israelis) treat you at checkpoints?

Two uncles asked me what was the Palestinian, especially the Gazan, opinion on Egypt.

I hesitated.

“Well, do you want the honest answer or the diplomatic one?”

They wanted honesty, so I gave it to them.

“Ya amo (uncle), the Palestinians think that Egypt is an equal partner in the siege of Gaza and the suffering of the people there. Actually 'partner' is the wrong word. They think Israel and America are partners and Egypt is taking orders from them.”

Technically, there is a host of diplomatic commitments — some dating back to the original Camp David accords — that govern the status of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and the Sinai. But on the ground, there’s nothing to keep Egypt from unilaterally opening the border, something Cairo has done before to let in emergency medical cases.

At other times, the Gazans have initiated their own unilateral border openings, blowing open the border wall in January of this year and flooding into the northern Sinai for almost two weeks.

But the general status quo for more than a year has been Egyptian soldiers helping to turn Gaza into a massive boiling prison.

“If you were a lifelong Gazan,” I asked my uncles, “what would your opinion of Egypt be?”

They didn’t like my political interpretation at all. One uncle went on a five-minute rant about Palestinians that was more revealing than 10 years of Arab League statements about unity and brotherhood.

"Palestinians are untrustworthy and Gazans in particular are a community of thugs" was the general theme. Also they apparently want to take half of the Sinai for themselves, with Israel's blessing.

This week I was in  Gaza, with a chance to check the other side of the equation. I repeated the tale of my uncles to several people here, who found their perspective ridiculous.

They laughed: Why would they want to take over a barren desert like Sinai? They’d rather be in Gaza. They just want the right to come and go like anyone else.

One resident estimated that 300,000 Gazans had entered Egypt during the January border breach. Perhaps a couple hundred, he said, tried to stay behind and got rounded up by Egyptian police.

The bitterness toward Egypt was particularly acute among the university students I interviewed who could lose scholarships and chances to study overseas if they can’t get out of Gaza.

None of the students would speak about Egypt on the record, for fear of antagonizing authorities who control their fates. But their anger and frustration were obvious. Every year Egypt lets in thousands of Israeli tourists, they told me.  Senior Hamas leaders seemingly come and go from Cairo every week, but not a few hundred graduate students.

“Egypt could fix this in two days,” one student said.

Comments

[Robin]

It's interesting that Ashraf Khalil chooses towrite about his conversation with his family concerning Egypt's roll in keeping Gaza a "massive boiling prison" while at the same time giving airtime to his own family's low opinion of Palestinians. Certainly an article to stir the pot, the stuff this journalist chose to write about after returning from vacation.

On the other hand, Mr. Ashraf who was contacted both by email and by phone, (by myself on phone) chose not to write about something he promised he would do, if not in the LA Times proper, than at least here on Babylon and Beyond.

That subject is Mohammed Omer, Ashraf's fellow journalist who was detained at Allenby by Shin Bet, strip searched, humiliated, beaten then tossed in an ambulance, then spent a week in the hospital in Gaza. Mohammed was on his return trip home from a multi-European capital tour of Europe, where he spoke to the parliaments of Great Britain, Sweden and Greece, and received his second prestigious award in journalism, the Martha Gellhorn award.

Mr. Khalil supposedly was going to call Mohammed when given his telephone number the night before he was to leave to Egypt. Where's the story? Did he bring this up while his uncle was ranting on about "untrustworthy, thug" Palestinians?

I'm so glad Mr. Khalil is refreshed from his vacation and back at work. Now it's time to get on the stick and report about other things besides his uncle's racist rantings.

How about the story Ashraf? Are you up to it? Or would you rather wallow in your own family's muck while ignoring what happened to YOUR colleague at the hands of the Israelis that your home country willingly works with to oppress and starve?