The walls of Gaza are plastered with poster-sized photographs of “martyrs” shot by the Israelis. Many are pictured holding a weapon in front of the gold-topped al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. These are studio photos taken long before their deaths. The gun was a prop and the glittering mosque a carefully chosen backdrop. All that was real in these photos was the yearning of these young men to fight against Israel and for a Palestinian state—and to die. And for a moment, at least until the pictures fade or peel away, the slain youths will have their brief lives and heroism recognized.
Gaza, like Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, is a derelict, concrete slum where car exhaust mingles with the stench of raw sewage. There are 1.5 million Palestinians—70 percent of whom are either refugees from what is now Israel or the descendants of refugees. Half of them are now under 17. They live crammed into a dusty, flat, coastal area twice the size of Washington, D.C. Most are stateless and have never left the Palestinian territories and Israel. Families are piled in boxy, concrete rooms capped with corrugated tin roofs weighed down by rocks. They have little furniture. Water and electricity come sporadically. The population growth rate is one of the highest on the planet—a 3.7 percent annual birthrate, compared with 1.7 percent in Israel. Donkey carts crowd the streets, and orange garbage bins, donated by the European Union, overflow with putrid heaps of refuse.
The only route left for most young men in Gaza to affirm themselves is through death. I have attended countless funerals there. The decision of the young men, sometimes boys, to die is usually a conscious one. It is born of this despair and rage. It is born of a sense of impotency and humiliation. It is born of a belief that to not accept sacrifice, even death, is to dishonor those who have gone before, to neglect the family members, relatives and friends who lost their land, endured the decades-long humiliation and abuse of occupation, and suffered or died resisting.
The young in Gaza have nothing to do. There are no jobs. They have nowhere to escape to. They cannot marry because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. They sleep, sometimes 10 to a room, and live on less than $2 a day, surviving on United Nations or Hamas charities and food donations. Martyrdom is the only route offered to those who want to achieve a measure, however brief, of recognition and glory.
Palestinians have been nurtured on accounts of abuse, despair and injustice. Families tell and retell stories of being thrown off their land and of relatives killed or exiled. All can tick off the names of martyrs within their own clan who died for the elusive Palestinian state. The only framed paper in many Palestinians’ homes is a sepia land deed from the time of the British mandate. Some elderly men still keep the keys to houses that have long since vanished. From infancy, Palestinians are inculcated with the virus of nationalism and the burden of revenge. And, as in Bosnia, such resentment seeps into the roots of society for generations until it resurfaces or is finally rectified, often after much bloodletting.
“Tell the man what you want to be,” one of Rayan’s wives, Hyam Temraz, said to her 2-year-old son, Abed, as she peeped out of the slit of a black veil the last time I was in their home.
“A martyr,” the child timidly answered.
“We were in Jordan when my son Baraa was 4,” she said. “He saw a Jordanian soldier and ran and hugged him. He asked him if it was he who would liberate Palestine. He has always told me that he would be a martyr and that one day I would dig his grave.”
I was caught in a gun battle at the start of the second intifada at the Nazarim junction in Gaza. A few feet away Marwan Shamalekh, 19, was fatally shot through the back by Israeli soldiers. He was tossing homemade Molotov cocktails at an army outpost, the flaming bottles landing harmlessly against the concrete wall of the compound when he died. He had no firearms. I ran with Marwan’s companions as they carried his limp body down the road. We were fired upon by Israeli soldiers as we fled.
I stopped shaving and grew a beard as a sign of respect and mourning for the boy. I visited his parents. They pulled up a chair on the cement patio outside their tiny house. They served me plates of dates and demitasse cups of bitter coffee. Mrs. Shamalekh was unable to speak. She sobbed softly into a kerchief.
Abdel Razaq Shamalekh, Marwan’s father, clutched his 9-year-old son, Bilal. The boy stared at me vacantly.
“I had to carry Bilal to his bed after I told him his brother had been killed,” the father said. “He collapsed. Later I found him leaving the house with a knife he had taken from the kitchen. He told me he was going to Nezarim to kill Israelis.”
reprinted from TruthdigListen to Rob Kall's Jan. 6 interview with Chris Hedges about Gaza, Rayan, Israel and more by downloading the MP3 here:
Conference Recording (available until Feb. 5, 2009)
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