I Complain, therefore I am

Just came back from Detroit where I attended the ADC-Michigan annual awards gala, during which I received the Literary Leadership Award for my work in Gaza Mom. During my allotted two minutes, I read a selection from the book with which many be familiar, called “I Complain, therefore I am”, from 2006 (and which first appeared in the Guardian).

At the time, I wasn’t yet aware of Newt Gingrich’s disgusting Palestinians-don’t-exist comments, but given the circumstances, re-posting my entry seems timely. As an aside, the [lack of] response to Gingrich’s comments is simply appalling, as was the thunderous applause he received when he unabashedly restated his beliefs during the Iowa Republican debate.

Well Newt, this piece is for you.

I’m fairly certain I exist.

Descartes tells me so, and before him, Ibn Sina. And when my son drags me out of bed to play with him in the pre-dawn hours, I really know I do.

So you can imagine how distraught I was when my existence was cast into serious doubt by a major airline.

After booking a flight online with British Airways out of Cairo (the nearest accessible airport for Palestinians here, eight hours and a border crossing away from Gaza), I attempted to enter my “passenger details”, including country of citizenship and residence.

Most people wouldn’t give this a second thought. But being the owner of a Palestinian Authority passport (which one can acquire only on the basis of an Israeli-issued ID card), I have become accustomed to dealing with Kafkaesque complications in routine matters.

And sure enough, in the drop-down menu of countries, I found the British Indian Ocean Territory, the Isle of Man and even Tuvalu – but no Palestine.

Now, I understand “Palestine” does not exist on any western maps, so I would have settled for Palestinian territories (though Palestinian bantustans may be more appropriate), Gaza Strip and West Bank or even Palestinian Authority, as my “pursuant to the Oslo accord”-issued passport states.

But none of these options existed. And neither, it seemed, did I.

I was confused. Where in the world is Laila El-Haddad if not in Palestine, I thought? Certainly not in Israel (as one of many customer relations representatives casually suggested).

I sent an email of complaint to BA humbly suggesting that they amend the omission. Several days later, the reply came: “We are unable to assist you with your query via email. Please call your general enquiries department on ba.com…then select your country from the drop-down list.”

Frustrated, I sent a follow-up email and was told to contact my “nearest general enquiries department” (if I was to take that literally, that would be Tel Aviv). Instead, I opted for customer relations in the UK, whose web support told me there was no guarantee I would ever get a definite answer.

I relayed the tale to my friend, whose own status as an east Jerusalemite is even more precarious than mine as a post-disengagement Gazan. “Could it be,” she posited, “that there is no definite answer because we aren’t considered definite people?”

I’ll leave that for British Airways to answer.

How Congress is crushing Palestine

A few weeks ago, I emailed an old friend in Gaza, a thirty something economist, to seek out his expertise. Years ago, when I was living in Gaza, he and I frequently exchanged thoughts on the situation, particularly during the frenzy of the Disengagement, and I always valued his opinion. That was then.

I was writing a side-bar on the economic situation for my forthcoming book, The Gaza Kitchen, and was trying to remember a phrase he had frequently used to describe the paradoxical way that the Palestinian economy as a whole, and particular in Gaza, functions, where aid dependence is nearly 80%, yet where prices on par with a developed country.

Was it “lopsided economy” I asked him in an email, a response to a “happy holidays” message he had sent out to all his friends?

His response, which had nothing -and everything-to do with my question, took me by surprise:

Hi Laila. Things haven’t been good in Gaza lately. I was laid-off work 2 months ago when the US Congress decided to freeze aid to the PA. So the US company I was working with laid-off 30 of its employees, and I was one of the unfortunate ones. The Gaza job market is still going through a dry spell. Imagine a market that does not produces more than 10 vacancies / month at best!

I am trying to apply outside Gaza, but opportunities without good connections and a foreign citizenship are very difficult to get. In 2009, I tried to renew my Egyptian residency and move out of Gaza for good. However, the Egyptian authorities denied my request. So I am left struggling here applying for whatever jobs there are even if they are a down-grade from where I used to be.

I hope that you, your husband and the kids are all well. Anyway, sorry to respond with a very gloomy email, and I still believe that one has to keep faith and try to survive the ups and downs of life.

Gaza is commonly associated with gloom, so the email, one might argue, should not have caught me by surprise. After all, two in three Gazans live in poverty; three-quarters of the population is food insecure or vulnerable, and roughly one-third of the work-force is unemployed-a figure that nearly doubles when one takes into account the youth, who make up more than half the population. 30, 000 people join their ranks every year.

In spite of this, the most secure have always been the urban elite (or else, one might argue, anyone with an excellent command of English and a fixer contract. Media is the one enterprise that seems to thrive in such dark times), but in particular those who work with the countless international organizations and NGOs, who increasingly over the past few years have come to rely on local hires.

Yet here is one of these so-called “western minded moderates”, to quote a frequent and favorite refrain of Congress, educated in Cairo’s American University,booted from his job as a direct result of this same Congress’s policies aimed at, what exactly? Punishing the PA for its statehood bid? For attempting to reconcile with Hamas? Or simply in deference to Israel, their masters?

The West Bank, the conventional thinking might go, is a different story: we have become accustomed to hearing glowing World Bank reports about how well Fayyad’s Ramallah is doing. Earlier today, I came across a TIME blog post which depicts a similarly gloomy outcast, one that many Palestinian analysts have argued was a long-time coming:

In a donor economy – which Palestine emphatically is – tides and waves are governed by the whims of distant overlords as much as by global finance. Since 2007, Washington has sent some $4 billion to the West Bank, intent on encouraging the moderate governance of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whose secular Fatah party the militants of Islamist Hamas had just chucked out of Gaza. While Israel enforced a siege on the coastal strip in hopes of making Hamas less popular, the international community gushed dollars into Ramallah. Thus did the city just north of Jerusalem take on the look of a boom town, its hills stippled with construction cranes and flashy new restaurants, especially on the north end, where aid agencies and “non-governmental organizations” set up shop…the effort put money in the pockets of the educated, Western-oriented locals who worked there. Those are the people being laid off now.

The memories we keep

Sometimes, when I am deep in thought while performing some banal task like folding the laundry, I wonder what memories Yousuf will harbor from his brief but continuous trips to Gaza. Will it merely be waiting on borders? Will it be factional infighting that scarred our living room windows? Or spontaneous artillery shelling that scarred our nightly slumber? 8 hour electricity outages? Or maybe he will simply forget Gaza as he becomes more and more immersed in suburban America, the way we all slowly forget a place it when it has no presence on our air waves.

You can never really get a straight answer out of 6 year olds-you never know what they are thinking. So I let him live and “experience” Gaza for it is, the reality, the beauty, the horror, without trying to prod and poke and mold his experiences for him. I tried to get him to keep a writing journal this summer, but he was too hot, most of the time, and too busy watching cartoons or swimming the rest of the time.

Yesterday were parent-teacher conferences at Yousuf’s school. Yousuf is a stellar student, told me his teacher. She was stunned-in a good way- to learn we only speak Arabic to him at home, that he didn’t know his ABC’s when he went into KG (part of our Arabic immersion technique). What about class participation, I inquired-is he shy? “Oh no-he is quite the chatterbox-he likes to share just about everything he does, all the extra-curricular activities, bowling…swimming…karate”.

Later that day, I asked what else he shared with his class. “Did you tell the class about your trip to Gaza this summer?” I asked.
“Yes! I did” came the enthusiastic response.
“Oh really? And what did you share?” I continued.
“I told them how I got to go the stores by myself! I also told them I saw a soldier. But I don’t remember- was he a Jewish soldier or Palestinian?”

I smiled. Yousuf remembered Gaza. And for him, the highlight of the trip there, the memory he kept, was the fact that he was able to walk all the way to the store two blocks down the road, down from the bank, across the fading election posters and the ever-present donkey tied to the orange Municipality trash bin with “Sharon” spray-painted on it, with his little sister, and buy things by himself from the shopkeeper that knew him when was a fetus in my womb, and then a nursing babe in my arms. It was this memory that he kept, despite the suffocating summer heat that enveloped us with no reprieve, despite the twice weekly shelling that shook the city streets he shopped on, despite the fact that his father was unable to come with us.

We had just read a story about a boy in Johanessburg, South Africa together-and noted how little things he did in his routine were different-like riding to school in the back of a pick-up truck, while others were the same.

“I guess you can’t do that here in Columbia, can you?” I joked.

We both laughed, as we remembered Gaza. And the memories we keep of it.

Mainstreaming Gaza

Firstly, apologies for utterly ignoring my blog…its been a busy few weeks and I fear will be busier still in the coming month. Just came back from an energizing series of talks I gave in Chicago. Tomorrow, I head to Minneapolis to speak with Edward Peck in commemoration of the two year anniversary of the Gaza Assault, a series of events sponsored by American Muslims for Palestine.

For now I leave you with a superbly edited montage of my talk/reading in NYC’s New School last month, along with a performance(s) by Musician Rich Siegal (I wish they had his other piece-Laji’ (refugee), sung in Arabic!).

Lizzy Ratner and I discuss the Goldstone Report on GritTV

A lively discussion about the Gaza Assault and the Goldstone Report two years on. To learn more, please see the new book on the subject by Nation Books, which Lizzy co-edited, and I contributed an essay to: The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict visit goldstonereportbook.com.

The book contains an edited version of the original Report along with essays from a wide range of leading experts, activists, and journalists. They include Archbishop Desmond Tutu; human rights activist Raji Sourani; legal expert Jules Lobel; Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal; historians Rashid Khalidi and Jerome Slater; congressman Brian Baird; policy analyst Henry Siegman; authors Ali Abunimah, Naomi Klein, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin; and myself!

I will be posting a teaser essay soon…