Birding in Gaza
Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird culture than I am make a distinction between birdwatchers -- anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a few local species like the handsome rock dove, better known as a pigeon -- and birders, people who devote time (and often money) to the practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely maintain a birding life list of every species they've spotted.
Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago. They began posting their pictures on social media, eventually visiting marshlands and other sites of vibrant bird activity in the Gaza Strip. They're not trained biologists, but their work documenting the birds of Gaza was crucial to the publication of that territory's first bird checklist in 2023.
If it weren't for the Israeli occupation -- and now the full-scale war that has killed more than 34,000 people, 72% of them women and children, and damaged or destroyed 62% of all housing -- Gaza would be ideal for birding. Like much of the Middle East, the territory lies under one of the world's great flyways for millions of migrating birds. Its Mediterranean coast attracts shorebirds. Wadi Gaza, a river-fed ravine and floodplain that snakes its way across the middle of Gaza, is home to more than 100 bird species, as well as rare amphibians and other riparian creatures. In other words, that strip of land is a birder's paradise.
Or it would be a paradise, except that, as the Daily Beast reported a year ago (long before the current war began):
"Being a bird-watcher in Gaza means facing endless restrictions. Israel controls Gaza's territorial waters, airspace, and the movement of people and goods, except at the border with Egypt. Most Palestinians who grew up in Gaza since the closure imposed in 2007, when Hamas seized control from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, have never left the 25-by-7-mile strip."
Gazan birders encounter other barriers, as well. Even if they can afford to buy binoculars or cameras with telephoto lenses, the Israeli government views such equipment as having "dual use" potential (that is, possibly serving military as well as civilian purposes) and so makes those items very difficult to acquire. It took the Sirdahs, for example, five months of wrangling and various permission documents simply to get their birding equipment into Gaza.
Getting equipment in was hard enough, but getting out of Gaza, for any reason, has become nearly impossible for its Palestinian residents. Along with most of its 2.3 million inhabitants, the sisters simply couldn't leave the territory, even before the present nightmare, to attend birding conferences, visit exhibitions of their photography, or receive awards for their work. They were imprisoned on a strip of land that's about the size of the island in Massachusetts where I've been watching birds lately. When I try to imagine life in Gaza today, I sometimes think about what it would be like to shove a couple of million people into this tiny place, chase them with bombs and missiles from one end of it to the other, and then start all over again, as Israel seems to be about to do in the southern Gazan city of Rafah with its million-plus refugees.
Wiping Out Knowledge, and Knowledge Workers
The Sirdahs collaborated on their bird checklist project with Abdel Fattah Rabou, a much-honored professor of environmental studies at the Islamic University of Gaza. Rabou himself has devoted many years to the study and conservation of birds and other wildlife in Gaza. The Islamic University of Gaza was one of the first institutional targets of the current war. It was bombed by the Israeli Defense Forces on October 11, 2023. Since then, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the project of wiping out Gaza's extensive repositories of knowledge and sites of learning has essentially been completed:
"The destruction of Gaza's universities began with the bombing of the Islamic University in the first week of the war and continued with airstrikes on Al-Azhar University on November 4. Since then, all of Gaza's academic institutions have been destroyed, as well as many schools, libraries, archives, and other educational institutions."
Indeed, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights has observed that "with more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as 'scholasticide,'" U.N. experts report:
"After six months of military assault, more than 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors have been killed in Gaza, and over 7,819 students and 756 teachers have been injured -- with numbers growing each day. At least 60 percent of educational facilities, including 13 public libraries, have been damaged or destroyed and at least 625,000 students have no access to education. Another 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years of history. Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza, was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January 2024."
I wanted to know whether Professor Rabou was among those 95 university faculty killed so far in the Gaza war, so I did what those of us with Internet access do these days: I googled him and found his Facebook page. He is, it turns out, still living and still posting, most recently about the desperate conditions -- illness, pollution, sewage rash -- experienced by refugees in temporary shelter centers near him. A few days earlier, he'd uploaded a more personal photograph: a plastic bag of white stuff, inscribed with blue Arabic lettering. "The first drop of rain," he wrote, "Alhamdulillah [thank God], the first bag of flour enters my house in months as a help."
The Sirdah twins, too, still remain alive, and they continue to post on their Instagram account.
Along with scholasticide, Gaza is living through an ecocide, a vastly sped-up version of the one our species seems hell-bent on spreading across the planet. As the Guardian reports, Gaza has lost almost half its tree cover and farmland, with much of the latter "reduced to packed earth." And the news only gets worse: "[S]oil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins; the sea is choked with sewage and waste; the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter." Gaza has become, and could remain for years to come, essentially unlivable. And yet millions of people must try to live there. At what point, one wonders, do the "-cides" -- scholastic-, eco-, and the rest -- add up to genocide?
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