These are the observations of an American in Palestine. I am not trained as a journalist. I have little experience as an activist. I am not an expert on middle-eastern affairs. I came to Palestine to see with my own eyes what life is like here, to see what kind of life we as Americans are supporting and to see what kind of life we are destroying. The people from the Democracy and Workers' Rights Center in Gaza were kind enough to provide me with accomodation, transportation, and translation services in order to help me see the situation here and write about it.

Most people in the world have no idea what life in Gaza is like. I have been here for a month now. I came here with a group of Europeans and Americans. One of the first things that I noticed is that there are no foreigners. Besides my group, I have seen only a handful of them. Most people here believe that the world does not care about them. It's easy to see why. The world is not here.

It's striking how different Gaza is from the stories I have heard about it. In America we hear stories of a barren and backward land -- a desert wilderness. We hear that Israel gave it life – that the settlers are pioneers, creating a new nation out of nothing. But here I am. Who are all the people who surround me? The one English word that every Palestinian knows is "welcome". The people here have welcomed me into their homes, overwhelmed me with generosity and kindness. Am I to believe they don't exist? When I see the distant red tile rooftops of the settlements, when I see the soldiers and tanks, when I hear the helicopters and fighter jets and machine guns sent to protect the settlers I wonder. Do the settlers really believe they are living in an unpopulated wilderness? Why do they think the army surrounds and outnumbers them? What do they think of the people that live here -- the people they can see with their own eyes? Do they even believe they are people at all?


There are many people here. The most densely populated place on earth, more crowded than Singapore or Hong Kong or even Manhattan, Gaza is a massive city of people that don't exist. When the settlers tell stories of how they are making the desert bloom in Gaza, they are speaking in code. By desert, they mean the most crowded city on earth, along with several small farms. By bloom they mean die.

The land here is very good for farming if you can water it. Typically, an extended family owns a small plot on which they live and grow everything imaginable. The water comes from underground. If the farmers are lucky, the nearby settlements will not steal their water from beneath their feet. Throughout all the fields and orchards lies a carefully laid network of irrigation lines. One of the most visible differences between these farms and the big industrial food-factories of America is the nearly complete lack of any machinery. A few of the hard jobs can be carried out by donkeys, but almost everything is done by hand.

The people here have utilized nearly every inch of their precious land to produce life. But it's not possible to travel far without seeing barren plots of dust and rubble. Whenever I encounter one of these, I ask my companions what it is. The answer is always the same. "The Israelis demolished some houses here." "The Israelis bulldozed this grove of orange trees." "The Israelis bombed this police station." "The Israelis destroyed this factory." These are the answers for the small places of destruction. And then there are many barren places I can see from far away. Any large patch of desert here is the unmistakable sign of a settlement.

I visited some farmers in the Al-Atatra area near Beit-Lahir. These farms were adjacent to the desert surrounding a settlement. On a hilltop was a newly destroyed field. A little farther down was a field of potatoes. This field was different than the rest. Most of the fields are green. This one was dried out and the potatoes were rotting in the ground. I asked why the farmers had abandoned it. There were two reasons. First, the farmers could not afford to maintain these potatoes and harvest them. Israel prevents farmers from exporting their crops, so they must find local markets for them. Israel also prevents people from going to their jobs in Israel, so no one has any money. And since there's no money, there's no market, and the potatoes must rot in the ground. The other reason that these farmers stopped maintaining this field is that the soldiers told them that they must leave it within a week. If they attempt to tend their field after a week, they will be shot. It seems that the settlers wanted a little more wasteland around their settlement. What is it about the sight of Palestinian farmers tending their crops that the settlers find so offensive? Perhaps if the settlers create a large enough expanse of desert around their homes, they can more easily believe the myth that they are living in an empty land.

There is a small Bedouin village in the north of Gaza. It looks much like the shanty-towns that sprang up in America during the depression. Most of the village is a ring of shacks around a small lake. The people here are desperately poor. Most of them make their living herding goats, sheep and cattle. One of the reasons the people here are so poor is that the nearby settlement decided to annex most of the land that these people used to use to feed their animals. If an animal wanders into the desert surrounding the settlement the villagers have little hope of recovering it. The soldiers shoot at anyone entering this area. Five people have been killed for entering this area.

But this is perhaps the least of the villagers problems. The people living around the lake are ill because there is no money to connect the village to the sewage treatment system.  Even if there were money, the settlers wouldn't allow these people to build anything so complex so near a settlement. They are also confined to their homes every night after 5:00 pm. Anyone seen walking the streets in the evening will be shot. And the soldiers can see everything from a tower in the settlement overlooking the village.

A few days after my visit to the north, I visited the middle and the south part of Gaza. Although Gaza is an incredibly small piece of land, it has been made even smaller for the people living here. First, nearly half of Gaza is off-limits to Palestinians. 42% of the land is either Jewish-only settlements, Jewish-only access roads to the settlements, buffer zones around the settlements, buffer zones along the border with Israel, buffer zones along the border with Egypt, and anything else the Israelis have determined to be of strategic importance. Not only do the people of Gaza have access to only 58% of their land. Their land is also divided into 3 parts, making travel within Gaza extremely inconvenient, if not impossible.

Travel between the northern and the middle area is usually only inconvenient. There is a large divided highway that runs the length of Gaza. But this highway is always blocked between the northern and middle area, since it is crossed by a Jewish-only road. There is a much smaller road that runs along the beach. Usually it is possible to travel between the two areas along the beach road. But this road was not designed to handle the capacity of all the traffic between the north and the middle, so traffic is usually heavy. It is very easy for the Israelis to close this road, as they often do. All they have to do is park a tank across it. Those fortunate enough to own a sport utility vehicle try their luck driving along the beach, though even with 4-wheel drive they usually get stuck spinning their wheels in the sand a few times. But often the beach is closed as well. Luckily, the beach road was open the day I traveled south to the middle. My companion was eager to return to the north before dark, however, so he wouldn't be stranded until the next day.

House demolitions are an occurrence we sometimes hear about in the news. Usually the Israelis claim that the demolished homes are somehow connected to the insecurity of settlers, and therefore must be destroyed. In America, we think of a house as a single family dwelling, inhabited by a handful of people. The typical American house is financed and insured against damage. People in Palestine, on the other hand, live in large extended families. A typical Palestinian house is more like an apartment building, several flats occupied by different members of the same family. They are often four or five stories high. The roof is unfinished so the home can be expanded upwards as the family grows. Because of Islamic prohibitions on borrowing money and charging interest, nearly all of these homes are paid for in cash that a family has spent a lifetime saving.

I met several people whose homes near a settlement had been destroyed recently. They are all living in tents on a vacant lot a few hundred meters from where their homes once stood. When I visited them, the heat was almost unbearable. They had no running water, no electricity. There were a few mats on the ground that did very little to keep the dust off of everything. The tents were full of holes, and did nothing to keep out the flies. All around were goats and chickens. Most people said they could not sleep at night because they had no way to keep out the mosquitoes. There was one toilet for all of the families living here. It wasn't so much a toilet as a small hole in the ground surrounded by a tent. The people here were all very depressed. They have no money to rebuild their homes. Most of them have no way of even earning money. And none of them believed anyone in the world was willing or able to do anything for them. I asked several of them if there was anything they wanted to tell people in America. They asked me what good it would do. The press had already been there and nothing had happened. In spite of their desperation, these people sensed that I was suffering from the heat and offered me a cold glass of cola and fresh oranges.

And just a few hundred meters away were the rest of the homes that had been spared. The soldiers came one day and told everyone that they would demolish 17 homes. This was collective punishment for a bomb that had been placed in a nearby road. The soldiers did not present any evidence that the bomb had any connection with the houses. The people living in the houses say that the soldiers know there is no connection. As in many places in Gaza, these people are not allowed outside of their homes after dark. The soldiers shoot at anyone moving. The soldiers have technology to see people in the dark. The residents of the area say that whoever planted the bomb was from somewhere else, that the operation would have been too sophisticated for any of them. Only 11 of the 17 houses were demolished because the people here appealed to the Israeli high court, forcing further demolitions to be suspended for now. But no one seemed confident that their homes would be standing for long. Even if their homes remain intact, their walls are no defense against the regular shelling by the soldiers.


The journey from the middle area to the south is far more difficult. All of the beach in the south of Gaza has been annexed by settlements, so the beach road is not an option. To travel to the south, one must cross a Jewish-only road. Because the journey is so difficult, most people make it only when absolutely necessary. Until recently, this crossing was open to Palestinians twice daily. For one hour in the morning, and one hour in the evening, cars would be allowed to cross one at a time. Only one direction of travel would be open at a time, and if any Jewish cars were within sight, the crossing would be closed until they passed. Often the crossing would be closed entirely for days at a time. Now that an overpass has been constructed for the settlers, the crossing is open more, though it is still closed most of the time. When I traveled to the south, I only had to wait two hours to cross. Also on the way back I only had a three hour wait. I was lucky. The day before I traveled, the crossing was not opened at all. As far as anyone can determine, there is no system for deciding how many cars can pass and when. No one is allowed to cross on foot. Cars are allowed one at a time. The crossing is only opened in one direction at a time. The times that the crossing is open seem to be entirely determined by the mood of the teenage soldier manning it. If he feels like letting people pass, everyone on each side fights for good places in line, hoping they will pass before the soldier's mood changes. If the soldier feels like making people suffer, everyone will bake under the desert sun in overcrowded taxis and on the backs of trucks. Whether the crossing is open or not, people are lined up in both directions for as far as the eye can see. Ambulances are always allowed to the front of the line, but whether they cross or not is also determined by the soldier's mood.



Raffa is the southern-most town in Gaza. Half of it, in fact, is in Egypt. I stayed in a house at the western edge of town. On one side of the street was a row of houses. On the other side, the shifting sands that are the sure sign of a nearby settlement. The houses on the southern end of the block have become uninhabitable due to the constant shelling by the soldiers. The families that lived in them, that spent their whole lives saving money to build them have been forced to abandon them and rent rooms elsewhere. I visited a house of eight flats where a large family used to live. The stairwells, living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens, were all full of bullet holes. My guide left me for a minute and returned with a handful of bullets. These bullets were different from the kind that penetrate walls. These were designed to bounce off of walls. They were shot through the windows and had each bounced three or four times off of different walls in the room before coming to rest on the floor. I saw the marks they had made in the walls and the ceiling as they changed course. It was clear to me that no one could survive here. Now this family of about 50 people shares four small rooms in Raffa.

At the southern end of Raffa is the Egyptian border. Since the border divides Raffa, there was once very dense housing built all the way up to it. One day the Israelis decided that nothing should stand within 200 meters of the border. As a result, over 1000 people lost their homes, and today there is a path of destruction along the border that looks much like the result of a tornado. Every few minutes a tank passes, perhaps to defend this wasteland against any intruders who might want to rebuild their homes. As usual, none of these people expect to receive any compensation.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from these experiences. Life is very bad here. It seems that the daily hardship and humiliation these people suffer at the hands of the Israelis can only lead to hopelessness. And people with nothing to lose are much more likely to take drastic measures than people who feel secure. I have met many people here who condemn the operations against Israel. Everyone I've met here says they want peace, that all they want is the right to live freely in their own land, that 60 years ago Jews, Christians, and Muslims all lived here together peacefully. Everyone I've met has told me that they believe this land is for all the people of the world to share. People here ask me what else they can do when everything they have tried has failed. I don't know what to tell them. The situation seems hopeless.

The ten agorot coin is the smallest value coin in circulation in Palestine and Israel. When I first saw this coin, before anyone told me what it was, I thought the image engraved on the back was a map with a menorah superimposed over it. Many Palestinians believe that this image is a map of the biblical land of Israel, a map of all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile, two-thirds of Iraq, all of Jordan, most of Lebanon, all of the Sinai Peninsula, and of course all of the West Bank and Gaza. Every Palestinian I have asked about the image has told me this. Yasser Arafat always used to carry these coins with him as evidence of Israel's expansion plans. The designer of the coin claims that this is not a map at all, that it is simply the outline of an ancient Judean coin, the smooth edges of which had worn away centuries ago. Any resemblance to a map, we are told, is purely coincidental. Even if the designer did not intend for this image to be interpreted as a map, it seems strange to me that no one bothered to see if Palestinians would find the image on the coin offensive before putting it into circulation. But it's not so strange really. Even if this coin isn't proof of Zionist expansion plans, it is definitely evidence of the State of Israel's insensitivity to the needs of Palestinians. Only a year ago the five agorot coin was taken out of circulation because the Israeli currency is declining so rapidly. Two years ago, the New Israeli Sheqel was worth about 33 cents. Today, it is worth just a little over 20 cents, a decline of over 30%. There are 100 Agorot in a sheqel. So this coin that has generated so much controversy is worth only about two cents today. About the only thing it can buy is a small piece of candy for a child. In fact, children are the only people I have ever seen spending one of these coins. When I arrived here a month ago, the exchange rate was 4.7 sheqels to the US Dollar. Now it is 4.9. Soon the ten agorot coin will be as worthless as its predecessors and will be taken out of circulation as well. If only the ideas it represents to so many people would lose currency as easily.