The wide slivers of plastic snap in the invisible wind that whistles through a long corridor closed off by slabs of cement eight meters high. Slivers of plastic and slabs of cement at Erez are the funerary monument of the Oslo Accords and of an ideal of economic development that had once seemed to be emerging over the horizon. This ideal had been realised in those Israeli industrial zones that had arisen in border areas, where Palestinians arrived from Gaza in the morning, provided cheap labour, then returned to the Strip in the evening. Then, when the conflict became even harsher at the outbreak of the Second Intifada, queues of Palestinians – in ever-dwindling numbers – began to appear throughout the long Erez corridor along the northern border between Gaza and Israel.
In the unreal silence of the Erez dawn, one can nearly hear the footsteps of those workers, a black plastic bag in their hand with their food from home. All lined up, like legions, hundreds, thousands, waiting to pass through the Israeli military checkpoints at the border. Now there is no one left in this corridor. Even the plastic and cement has disappeared: by 2010, in one of the seemingly never-ending “aesthetic” changes to the Erez crossing, the 200-meter-long corridor has transformed into a path edged by a metal net and a corrugated iron roof. Despite the changes, the silence remains the same.
At Erez, silence is amplified from the other side of the wall that separates Gaza from Israel by the improbably high ceilings of the enormous terminal that lies alone as though it is some kind of exhibition: a beautiful terminal, styled like an airport, and completely empty. As fate would have it, the terminal was completed after the dream of a transborder industrial zone had already been shattered by the failure of the Oslo process, by the Second Intifada, and by terrorism. All that remains of that pained humanity that crossed the border to earn its daily keep are the snapshots taken by photographers for the agencies.
Not even the few remaining porters, often little more than boys, can break the stony silence of Erez. Without words, they help the few Palestinians who try to cross: the sick with their applications to be hospitalised beyond the border, the employees of international organisations on missions to Israel, and a few businessmen with special permits. They are the ones who belong to the select few “special categories,” the only Palestinians who have the good fortune of being able to leave Gaza. Ever since the summer of 2005, when the Israeli pullout from the area crystallised the frontier with Israel to the north and west, no one else has been allowed to leave the Strip. The roughly 9,000 settlers who used to live in Gaza – who, thanks to Tel Aviv’s good offices, had established three settlement blocs in the Strip – are no longer there.
Before falling into a coma, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made the most momentous political decision since the Israeli pullout from southern Lebanon in 2000 by also withdrawing from Gaza, again unilaterally. Hamas’s electoral victory of January 25, 2006, came a few short months after this unprecedented change, after Sharon had ordered the end of the Israeli presence in the Strip. And it was precisely in Gaza that Hamas had its stronghold.
Hamas’s strength was one of the most important reasons given for the quarantine under which Israel increasingly placed Gaza until, in June 2007 – in the move that would bring Hamas to power in the Strip – Gaza was completely sealed off from the rest of the world. But even in previous years, the number of Palestinians who could manage to get work permits in Israel had been steadily decreasing to the point of disappearing entirely, while an authorisation to attend a university outside the Strip – whether in Egypt, in the United States, in Jordan, or in Europe – has always been considered a lottery prize, one to be claimed by only a few lucky ones among the thousands who graduate each year.
A few others earn their keep working as porters at Erez. They work for years and years, and they wait for ever-fewer customers, most of them severely sick Palestinians who received a permit from the Israeli authorities after passing through a long procedure. The porters help elderly women and mothers with sick children, accepting a few shekels to physically transport them on wrecked luggage trolleys. The porters – who lived through the still-ongoing changes at Erez – greet the few rare guests who arrive from the other side of the wall: VIPs, journalists, nongovernmental organisation (NGO) volunteers, diplomats, spies – all high-risk specialists, the only ones who care about the destiny of a place so distant from the daily life of the rest of the world. From the few experts who still pass through Erez, the young porters hope that apart from some loose change, they’ll get a few cigarettes – one of the most expensive goods in the Strip, under the increasingly strict isolation imposed by the Israeli army and economy.
Welcome to Gaza. Welcome to one of the most desperate places on the planet even well before Hamas’s rise to power. The records only half describe Gaza’s predicament: the highest population density in the world, the most consistent demographic increase in the region with over five children per woman, and since the second half of 2008, the unfortunate distinction of the highest unemployment level on the planet.
A smack in the face, squarely delivered when the sun, sand, and dust break the desolation of Erez’s long corridor. Off to the right, the empty shells of buildings destroyed by the Israelis for “security reasons” appear, destroyed so that the military’s control might extend a few kilometres in from the wall at Erez, up to the buildings funded by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the old ruler of the Emirates who passed away in November 2004 at virtually the same time as Yasser Arafat.
A solitary red flag used to fly here – at least until the end of 2007 – above the ghostly shell of rooms and pillars, atop the steel skeletons of the destroyed buildings of the broken industrial dream that was Erez: neither the green flag of Hamas nor the historical yellow flag of Fatah, but the adventurous banner of the PFLP, the “reds” of the Palestinian political arena, their banner flying and ready to take on the Israeli army’s guns all by themselves. That red flag, borne up by the wind, didn’t last long. Just a few months and it disappeared. And along with it, the last building next to the wall that marked the border, completely flattened in order to allow the Israeli army a perfect view.
All that remains now, immutable, is the rhythm of Erez clicking along. Godot’s silence, the silence of those who wait in fear for something to come along to break the monotony of desolation: tanks entering the olive groves of Beit Hanoun, a Qassam rocket launched toward the towns of the Negev, there, just beyond the border, and the Israeli Air Force’s missiles ready for targeted assassination. Or an entirely different situation, like the massive attack code-named “Hot Winter,” which took place over the space of barely six days between February and March 2008.
The incursion resulted in 130 dead and 350 wounded among Palestinians, as well as two dead Israeli soldiers who had penetrated just over the horizon of Erez under tank and air cover into that selfsame Beit Hanoun of Sheikh Zayed’s buildings, and a little farther down into Jabalia, once a refugee camp and now a populous town. It was said at the time that the operation was a response to the Qassam rockets, and to the more sophisticated Grad, which had been launched toward cities in southern Israel. And the rockets, in turn, were often launched as reprisals for a targeted assassination carried out not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, to demonstrate that at least as far as the armed factions were concerned, the two Palestinian entities were still united. A few days’ closure, with hell breaking loose next door. A few days during which that paradoxical silence and everyday routine are broken in a way that only low-intensity conflict can break them.
It is in these moments that Erez changes, if only for a few days, before once again closing that doorway into hell, replacing Charon’s sunken eyes with the tired face of a taxi driver, who drives you to Gaza’s new reality: Hamas’s political and administrative control of the tiny Palestinian strip along the Mediterranean coast. As time passes, Hamas’s power becomes more stable, as can be seen in the thorough, polite yet lengthy check of the visitors done by the newly appointed Islamist government’s bureaucracy at the new gate a few hundred meters from Erez: a few border offices, policemen, and uniformed personnel carrying laptops with webcams to register the newcomer’s name, passport, and face.
Excerpted with permission from Hamas: From Resistance to Regime, Paola Caridi, Seven Stories Press.
