The Gaza War:

Views from the Wrestling Mat of Humanitarian Advocacy...in Jerusalem and Washington, DC 

Witness  |  Joe Tsali, Dec-Feb 2010

www.Helo-Magazine.com

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Witness stories are considered biased viewpoints. If you would like to counter or clarify the argument, please write to the editors. Only well-written and well-argued stories or comments will be considered for publication. Also, here’s a great political cartoon, as well as a pasta recipe, which fits well with this Witness story: The cartoon is by Khalil Bendib.

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Before launching into our opening scene with me pining over V, an adorable, intellectual South American brunette at a crowded Flamenco performance at Mona’s in West Jerusalem, I should let you know what’s coming. This is not actually a story about lovely V, or me, or me and V. It’s not even a story about the politics of Israel and Palestine, per se. It is a blisteringly honest snapshot of the clusterfuck that was the international humanitarian advocacy and logistics effort in the wake of the 2009 Gaza War.

Brilliant and hardworking people of many species battled to do what was right for civilians in Gaza and its border areas in Israel-proper only to find themselves hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of US and Israeli regulations about how foreign aid could be delivered, stuck in the tar of fundraising for projects which were sometimes six-decades-old, or realizing after months of pushing that some of the people they’d been working with were pushing in opposite directions.

[Continued below]

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Hebron's old town, West Bank, Palestine, DJG.

 

To protect individuals from scorn, I use composites and pseudonyms and sometimes avoid naming agencies specifically. However, everything else here is absolutely true to the best of my knowledge as I type it out here, blasted on espresso late at night in an undisclosed wintertime café. In fact, my intention of telling this story honestly brings me to our opening scene at Mona’s.

V was an angel with youthful vitality. I was recently single, burned out, and sleepless after working on Afghanistan and other tragedies. I was already getting the newcomer’s blues and so why not ask V to run the gauntlet to Jerusalem for a fun night of her favorite, Flamenco, along with local red wine and easy walks through Jerusalem’s old town under the full moon? Screw peace.

We got a little tipsy. I’d been in a relationship for so long I’d forgotten how to flirt, so instead like an idiot I’d sip, make eyes at her, then ask her about her divorce. Once that ruined the mood, I grasped for a new topic: The Arab-Israeli peace. We lamented how awkward it felt sneaking out to enjoy a place where our Palestinian co-workers could not go in shiny West Jerusalem rather than hanging out with them in rusty Ramallah.  

Many rights advocates, diplomats, and aid workers do not arrive to Jerusalem—or Washington, DC, or Ramallah or Gaza City for that matter—as tireless champions of their cause. Often, even if they have devoted years to humanitarian advocacy, they still find their views on Gaza and the Middle East peace filtered through bifocals of existential realities, if not the bitter truth of being a temp.

Through the broad global lens, Israel was a delicious, exotic, sometimes sexy place full of passion for survival, intellectual discourse, and gorgeous and available people. Meanwhile, the Palestinian territories were full of incredibly honest and generous people but far fewer lifestyle choices for the global traveler. Through the magnified lens, Israel was a place one could get drunk, have Thai food, and swim at the beach. One could languish in long conversations full of dark humor about who’s dating who, who was cheating on who, and only then politics.

But in magnified Palestine, the entire visit, every conversation felt political and, even if one was among friends, was somewhat tense despite the lovely tea, sweets, or fried cheese snacks. This was not because of something about the people of Palestine. It was about the fact that getting to see one’s honest and generous Palestinian friends one had to go through a gauntlet of Israeli security checks, gates, blast walls, and scrutiny.

The result of this double view was that many of the foreigners who had power to play impartial, though not necessarily neutral, advocate for the hundreds of thousands of peaceful Palestinians as well as the hundreds of thousands of Israelis, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, and others threatened by violence and damage to the local economy simply did not want to shit where they ate.

That is, life in Israel was so comfortable, the people so fascinating and friendly, that many foreigners including me did not wish to stand up and state the obvious and be tackled to the ground. The obvious elephant being that not only are Palestinian extremists wrong for bombing civilians, but Israeli extremists are wrong for raising a maximum security wall around not only extremists but hundreds of thousands of non-aggressive civilians and then pounding them with artillery.

Complicating the matter was the nuanced truth that both sides needed to stop targeting civilians, but that outsiders continued to consent to at least one side or the other killing civilians, accidentally, as a least bad option en route to getting the bad guys. 

Those humanitarian advocates powerful and committed enough to tell truth to power were those who were too much associated to one side or the other and thus were unable to concede something to the other side in negotiations. The advocates who could be impartial were slowed down by their love for Israeli culture and the reality that they did not have to suffer the tension any longer than they chose to; they had homes to go back to, vacation time coming.   

V and I stayed in separate flats in Ramallah for a couple weeks. The local aid office was just around the corner from the Palestinian authority’s Ministry of Interior and the house of President Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas, so our many steps through the largely Christian neighborhood, for falafel, for coffee, for pizza, were under the polite gaze of rows of interior security guards. We’d come from Jordan through the robust Israeli security gate into the West Bank and landed in the predictable working class feel of Ramallah.

We arrived only a few months after Israel retaliated against extremist rocket fire out of Gaza by carpet bombing the territory and refusing to let civilians caught in the crossfire to flee. (If you question this, feel free to examine the many UN maps of artillery damage on ReliefWeb.) That was the Gaza War of early 2009.

Our agency was one of many that had been providing slow aid in the West Bank and now took the opportunity to join the fleet working to bring emergency relief to the civilians who had lost their homes and livelihoods in the crossfire. Right off the bat, we were at a humanitarian philosophy advantage and logistical disadvantage by having a Palestinian-dominated team based in Ramallah.

The Israeli government limited the number of permits it provided to Palestinians in the West Bank to allow them to travel through the Great Wall of Israel, the security wall built around and inside the West Bank, and into Jerusalem or Tel Aviv for aid meetings. Only three or four of the eighteen staff had such permits, and none of them were permitted to travel to Gaza, so each time foreign staff member like V or I arrived, we got the opportunity to represent the team. Right after the Gaza War, the agency submitted applications for us also to go into Gaza. Only one of us ever received that pass and made it in. For the three months until I left the agency, I never heard any response on my application.

It was in this context that V and I made our first visits to Jerusalem. An old friend of mine, A, had been working for the US government in Jerusalem for a few years. Inviting me to Mona’s for my first time, she shared some red wine, tales, and lamented the fact that US officials—arguably, I added, those with the most leverage to advocate for policy to improve life for Palestinians who were nonviolent—were for security reasons not permitted to travel even to peaceful Ramallah without a Madmax crew of armored cars and armed guards.

The few aid workers like V and I who were able to freely share cheese deserts with Palestinian friends in the ancient market of Nablus or hike Hebron or Dura were sometimes seen by the others as either too forgiving of Palestinian politics or naïve of the threats faced there.

From our point of view, it seemed that the US role in advocating for a just peace for both sides was handicapped severely by the fact that so few US officials were able to clearly and personally distinguish the globalist and kind Palestinian majority from the extremist radicals who had the concentration of weaponry and funding which allowed them to dominate politics.

The Flamenco band set up just inside Mona’s as V and I found refuge in the garden. The singer was lively and skilled, but V was disappointed. There was no dancing. It was a seductive scene, however. Gorgeous, passionate music, an intellectual crowd, a warm moonlit night, a lovely woman to spend time with who would inevitably break my heart just a little. My mind kept bouncing between the fantasy reality here with V and the real fantasy that all of this lovely affluent ambience was out of reach of our Palestinian friends in the West Bank in Gaza because of their blood relation to extremists.

We set out for good cheer and hiked uphill to the walled old town of Jerusalem. The ancient pathways were all walled, the passages a narrow labyrinth of stone. For a moment, the feeling made light of the Great Wall of Israel, which surrounds the West Bank.

We stumbled in past the Arab hawkers with buckets of religious paraphernalia. Get your crucifixes here! Five for twenty sheckles, I imagined them saying. We’ve got your bloody Jesus, your clean Jesus, your baby Jesus, mix and match. We sauntered past a Holy parking lot, where people could leave their car while praying at the Wailing Wall. Later I found Palestinian kids roller-blading so fast down the Via Dolorosa they were like flashes of light zipping by.

At last the moment came for me to let V know how I felt, but my head was spinning. Each time we began talking of each other, the conversation ended up twisting, turning, and then crashing into the Arab-Israeli conflict. I couldn’t help but empathize how terribly distracting politics must be for locals here. Finally, I decided rather than to kiss V I should instead invite her out again. Weeks and a swim in the Black Sea later, I did try to kiss her. And she dodged it like a bullet.

My unrequited desire for V is important to this story because it reminded me emphatically what a luxury modern versions of romance could be for those of us who have the means and permission to travel wherever we want.

War and peace was not only about rockets, death, and aid projects. It was also about love won and love denied, something intertwined with the motivations for political violence and yet it was treated as a side effect.

Soon after Mona’s, I traveled with Q, a far more experienced aid worker than me to a UN cluster meeting for logistics. The aid workers there were some of the most seasoned professionals. Each had that quintessential snark and perfume of pessimism. A few counterparts based in Gaza City were beamed in via skype conference onto a screen above the long table. The UN rep called the meeting to order. Although the talk felt conventional, cliché even, it focused on the very heart of the failure of humanitarian aid in the Palestinian territories.

First, UN and internationals reviewed a few studies on the effectiveness of aid. The writer was still fresh enough to illicit optimism while listing the many criticisms of the aid enterprise. Then the meeting turned into a review of how Israeli and US policies sorely limited the flow of lifesaving and recovery-empowering aid to Gaza. Thousands of people had lost their homes or relatives to the bombardment. Whether civilians believed in the Hamas party’s radical viewpoint, wanted a sustainable peace, or lit incense to the alien overlord X94A@y, no one deserved to have their roof blown to pieces, their cousin turned into a bloody pile of hair and intestines, or to have white phosphorus sprinkled over their farmland. However, those few hundred hooligans living among them who were launching rockets to blow up Israeli roofs and turn Israelis inside out the months before did need to be brought to justice. How was Israel to take down the rocket launchers without hurting civilians in the process?

Any rational study of the UN maps and graphs illustrating the bombing patterns, the casualty figures, and the refusal to allow civilians any means of escape brought up huge questions. But as for the quest of delivering humanitarian aid—shelter, medicine, food, childcare, items, and the means of being able to earn income despite the blockade—the current meeting had to be focused on logistics alone. Newcomers and Palestinians could barely keep from standing up and screaming.

Our agency was only trying to deliver food and some basic shelter and first aid items. That’s all. Yet we were caught on razor wire right out of the gate.  While our local team in Gaza very professionally negotiated with the Gaza government for permission to work and with local distributors to deliver services, we in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Washington DC had to pour through the language of US government policy.

No US aid was permitted to go through any entity controlled by Palestine’s Hamas Party, which won local elections despite refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist and encouraging militants who aim to murder Israeli civilians. It makes sense from the outside to blockade a “terror” wielding group. But just as the US discovered when dropping this rule in working with the bigger Fatah party, Iraq’s Dawa Party, Nepal’s Maoists, and Sudan’s NCP, it was virtually impossible to do anything more than drop food if that authority had control of all the ministries including health, education, etc. The locals had been living in isolation.

Many voted for Hamas because it was the least bad option, who else was going to provide them civil services when Fatah’s local reps were accused of corruption? Was a Gazan being punished with blockade simply for voting? Many Gazans had businesses and wanted to keep working, to be independent, but after losing so much to bombardment and blockade just needed help with medical costs or keeping their now homeless children on the local school curriculum. But US aid could not offer that.

Israel presented the larger barriers. For the sensible motivation of preventing items which could be weaponized from getting into Gaza, it overreacted by labeling nearly everything other than the most basic items “dual use”, thus banned. The list not only included pipes and fertilizer, but also certain kinds of bedding, pillows, pasta, and other normal life items. On some occasions Israeli security forces wouldn’t even let food in if it was from an Arab company. Just as challenging was Israel’s limit on Palestinian movement into and out of Gaza, not only able-bodied men but also old ladies hooked-up to dialysis machines, and mothers with children screaming for escape from barrages of artillery.

So here we were, global humanitarians just reviewing the rules of the game and fitting through whatever openings presented themselves. It wouldn’t, after all, be our fault if a few Palestinian hospital patients passed away who did not have to, if mothers had miscarriages, or if kids were stunted or sick, was it?. We were doing what we could given the limits, which is more than most people. There were, however, a number of people willing to press their heads against the wall and push.

Back in Washington, DC, I had the embarrassing experience of not being able to get into the State Department and join my first meeting alongside Interaction with Thomas Goldberger, Director of the Office for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs. The American guards at Foggybottom stopped me at the door, refusing me (humanitarian) access because it turned out that my driver’s license which I offered for I.D. had expired the months before without me realizing it. How could I argue a way in, purely on irony? Nevertheless, I made it to a few of the coming meetings and helped our agency present advocacy points for a collective phone call the heads of aid agencies had with US Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell.

Interaction, if you are unfamiliar, is the greatest and the worst mechanism for advocating for changes in foreign aid policy like the change humanitarians looked for in increasing the flow of recovery assistance for civilians in Gaza. Greatest because it allowed many of the US humanitarian aid agencies to speak as a team with members of the US Congress, to the State Department, the Pentagon, and even the President of the United States. Worst because of the same reasons.

While most of the aid advocates who showed up agreed on this progressive yet realist vision on subtle changes, primarily so as to keep Gazans from being dependent on aid rather than reopening their businesses, not all of the agency staff in aggregate agreed on policies friendly to Palestinians.

The IRC, Save the Children, Oxfam, and a few others had in fact been in the lead on advocacy with the US government for some time. Often they outpaced the others only to be perhaps a bit uncomfortable slowing down to train or debate details with newcomers. Even so a solid message such as, forgive my phrasing, “we believe allowing civilians in need of lifesaving medical care access both to US-fund support and free passage out of Gaza to Egypt for care is in the best interests of all parties” tended to arrive with righteous intentions on the desks of congressional staffers and assistants at state only to be revised dozens of times for consumption by the unconditionally-pro-Israel lobby.

By the time the nuanced point arrived on the desk of Envoy Mitchell, the Israeli Ambassador, or into a motion in congress it tended to come out much more generic. When I detailed this point for our agency’s participation in the conference call with Mitchell for example, there was  some debate about how much detail to present if our CEO only got a few words in. And so, ten similar nuanced pants were boiled down to, paraphrasing, “The US must uphold its responsibilities for the protection of human rights.”

Turned out our CEO didn’t have time to present any of the points I so anxiously and meticulously laid out anyway.

From Gaza to the West Bank, from the UN logistics table to Interaction’s advocacy guest in the US Congress and State Department, many people joined the column in support of facilitating improved flow of aid to Gaza. Much was getting through. Many lives were saved. Yippee kayay. Mashallah!

But the advocacy flow on finer points tended to peter out on its way back to Israel. No US lawmaker, even those agreeing with the advocacy points, was going to risk his career arguing what in an hour meeting bleached of nuance would look like a pro-Hamas anti-Israel policy change.

Instead, there would be a footnote. Perhaps a comment like, Mr. Netanyahu, of course you must protect your people from Gazan rockets, but how about letting a few hospitalized people get care in Cairo? And Netanyahu perhaps would realize as winner of the war it’s his choice how much and when to give. Yes, maybe we’ll have a few days each month to let a couple people in and out. We’ll see.

In Jerusalem, the humanitarians were cynical as Hell, or drunk, or both. Every straight forward logistical task—deliver A to B—was transformed into a complex puzzle of if not, then, otherwise divided by the quotient of political fallout to the cosine of peace, signed in triplicate and submitted to the war department for sub-committee to the analysis before… What is it you wanted again? It’s a self-fulfilling puzzle.

Many of those identified most closely with the Arab-Israeli conflict have absorbed it so deeply into their identity that they can’t imagine life or their own personal identity without that conflict.

In the Middle East, it is often said the region is divided between Arabs and Jews. But this is a fallacy. Ethnicity and religion are the cross-sections of a culture divided between those who embrace the winds of change and those who identify passionately with the entrenchment of conflict and historic claims. Unfortunately, it is the latter who are best-armed. And the rest often cannot get anything done without relying on them for state services, if not the rule of law.

HELO

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