Karl Schembri Walking down the main street of Gaza City this week, I realised how quickly I had adapted to the overwhelming destruction as a new setting for everyday life.
Two weeks since my arrival here, I have begun to appreciate that this is the backdrop to which Palestinians, young and old, have learned to somehow get on with life in the besieged Gaza Strip.
In a place where street names change according to who is giving you directions, the only reliable way to get to your location is to ask for landmarks. Parliament, for example, is the landmark everyone refers to for central Gaza City.
However, there now remains only the skeleton of the once-imposing Parliament building after it was bombed by Israeli forces last January. Al Jundi Square – the Square of the Unknown Soldier – just in front of the Parliament, still has the pedestal of the former monument, but there is no soldier above it. Yet ask any taxi driver to drive you to Al Jundi and that is where he will take you.
Nine months since the 22-day assault, none of the reconstruction has started, as construction material and equipment remains banned from entering the strip.
That is why you find modern blocks of windowless apartments, others only half-finished, and others belonging to luckier owners who repair tiles and windows with different styles and colours according to what is available.
Generators outside shops and offices are part of the street furniture. The electricity goes out so frequently that mobile generators are just left outside on the pavements to keep business moving. Sometimes you only realise there is no electricity because of the sound of generators.
All desktop computers in offices are equipped with UPS (battery back-ups) just so their users don’t have to restart between every blackout and the starting of the generators.
Watching TV is also a different experience. As spy drones and surveillance planes fly above Gaza’s air space, satellite signals get scrambled giving you pixellated pictures or leaving you without sound for a long stretch of time. No TV movie can be enjoyed in Gaza without these exasperating surprises, which also become normal after a few days.
Gaza is one of the oldest cities in the world, yet there is little evidence today of the different civilisations that have passed through it. Indeed, Gaza is a place of extremes. Resistant to almost every occupier that tried to seize it, the many wars and battles have repeatedly levelled Gaza’s buildings, which then had to be rebuilt from scratch.
People may greet you with open arms, some just happy to have a foreigner to speak to, some glad to have someone to practice their English with, others amused that a non-Arab speaks their language. Like Hamada, the total stranger I stopped in the street to ask where I could buy a top-up card for my mobile. He took me by the hand and accompanied me to the shop, made sure I got the card I wanted, noted down my number and called me later just to check my mobile was working and to say hello.
But people may also greet you with suspicion verging on paranoia. I catch a lot of people staring at me, asking each other who I am and what I am doing in their city as they assume I don’t understand them.
The total blockade has meant that only a handful of foreigners make it into the Gaza Strip, mostly UN workers. In contrast with older generations who used to work in Israel, a whole generation of children is growing up having never met a foreigner, further strengthening the siege mentality. The only Israelis they have seen in their lives are soldiers keen on destroying their homes and killing their parents.
Billboards everywhere rarely show adverts, but the absolute majority of them show pictures of Palestinian “martyrs” carrying machine guns or RPGs; the only role models left for a society that seems to have nothing left to lose. Children beneath them play with their toy guns, mimicking their heroes.
Only last Thursday, the United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees revealed that the number of Gazans living in “abject poverty” had tripled to 300,000 this year, or one in five residents. The agency’s chief, John Ging, did not mince his words: it was a “man-made crisis”, he said.
But he depicted the extent of the crisis best during a meeting with foreign activists a few days earlier. “If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said.
That too may risk becoming all too normal in Gaza.
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