At the border crossing into Gaza a middle aged woman sat next to me looking rather pale. She was accompanied by what looked like her mother, even frailer than her. Between her hands the sick woman grasped a pack of six tea glasses. It seemed a bit strange of an item to be bringing back into Gaza with so few permitted to make this rare excursion beyond Gaza’s borders. Later that day, after a large welcoming lunch and over tea in plastic throw away cups I found out that tea glasses like so many other things had run out in Gaza. A single glass had nearly reached the cost of the price of a whole set and for my hosting family this was simply not affordable. Much of my second day I spent at the beach. The one outlet for a majority of Gaza’s population is still very much a reality and on summer days like this one, hundreds of people flock to the beach to forget the daily routine. Every occupation has its winners and losers, those that profit and those that lose almost everything. Recently I have been reading Marx who considered the making and the writing of “history” to be based on class divisions. According to Marx, the world was not so much explainable by the acts of God on passively receiving humankind, as a world that was driven and lead by the acts of people. For Marx, these acts of history were determined and received their meaning by the division of classes. By the evening I had been invited to a gathering of some of Gaza’s elite society. For some of them, the recent re-opening of the borders was a monkey wrench for their monopolies in the market. A ton of cement was now back down to 520 shekels, a week ago one 10kg bag had cost 270 shekel. As soon as cement was allowed back into Gaza, the Hamas government- showing some rather socialist colors- set prices in order to undermine such monopolies and make prices accessible to the common population. That night we had duck, chicken and chicken wings, large plates of dessert and watermelon. Throughout the co... [Read More]

The last time I saw Rami we were at the beach near Gaza City. A group of us were in the water and I was trying to force Rami under water. Rami was a big man, weighing at least twice what I do, needless to say, I did not manage to get him to budge. When he in turn came after me all I could do to protect myself from suffocating under him was flee. Eventually I was able to sneak up on him under water and pull his legs out from under him and then escape again.


There are around 3000 Christians living in Gaza today. Rami was the office director of the Teacher’s bookstore, a Christian bookstore in downtown Gaza City. The store sells Christian books and offers computer and language lessons, which are attended by Palestinians from across the Gaza Strip. When I would visit the place on occasion Rami was always there on his swivel chair cracking jokes. Few people entered that did not already know him. Gaza can be a place of sadness, Rami always reminded me much more of the mentality of Egyptians laughing and joking no matter how depressing life becomes.


On Saturday afternoon Rami closed his shop as he always did at 4:30. He had told his brother that three days earlier he had sensed he was being followed home after work but had not made much of it. Two hours after closing up he called his wife and told her with much uncertainty that he hoped to be home in two hours and not to worry. He was not able to say where he was or why he was there. Rami never came home. Friends and family searched for him until late into the night. At 5:30am on Sunday morning his body was found beaten, a bullet through his head, another through his chest. His wallet, ID and watch were gone.


No one has made any statements, no group has taken responsibility. This is the first time in Gaza’s recent history for a Christian to be kidnapped and killed. Sadly, such incidents do occur in revenge killings usually of political nature but never with r... [Read More]

The 4km stretch of land was squalid, with no water, no food and nowhere to take shelter. The strip of land truly did justice to its name, No Man’s Land. Roughly 400 refugees were located there with no way of returning where they had come from, the hell of Iraq, and without permission to continue on to the police state of Syria. The people that inhabited this No Man’s Land were paperless and stateless.


The border between Iraq and Syria was the only space on earth where Karim was given permission to exist. It was July when Karim arrived at the border, escaping a death threat and having left his family and all that he knew behind, he was making an attempt at reaching his mother’s homeland that he had never visited, Syria. During those four months, with the sun beating down on the hundreds of people stuck there, the most immediate concern was a mere drink of water. Karim’s only travel document was a Palestinian passport issued by the Palestinian Authority in 1994, but never acknowledged by Israel who holds the official registry of all Palestinians within the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians residing outside of these areas have no “right of return” while Europeans, Americans, Russians, Ethiopians… really anyone who could trace their family origins back to the Jewish people was given access and legal rights to live, work and die in Israel, the land of historic Palestine.


Four months after arriving at the border, on November 8th, Karim’s mother picked him up, driving him to their new temporary home on the outskirts of Damascus. His skin was like leather she said as every drop of water he was able to find during those months was barely enough for dri... [Read More]

In recent weeks the Jordanian Option has been floated in the media as a viable way forward in negotiations to resolve the current Palestinian statelessness. Haaretz ran the initial large piece explaining that Jordanian officials, supposedly with king Abdullah’s blessing, had been in Israel recently as well as Washington in order to float Jordan’s ideas of a confederation.


"According to the plans of the king's assistants, the Hashemite monarch - as the direct descendant of the prophet Mohammed - will serve as the president of the confederation, in addition to his position as the monarch of the Jordanian kingdom; and a federal government will be set up together with an elected parliament that will be composed of both Jordanian and Palestinian representatives.


The security forces will come under the control of the federal government, and this will supposedly allay the fears of Israel about the activities of independent Palestinian military forces. The condition for the establishment of the federation, Abdullah's aides say, is an Israeli-Palestinian agreement over the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Only after that will the independent state be invited to join the proposed confederation."


An unrelated article on the Israeli secret service operated site Debkafiles concerning the release of 250 Fatah prisoners in a deal doctored by Israel in order to “boost” Abu Mazen’s support in the West Bank after the Hamas takeover in Gaza, mentions this account from July 15,


"According to our sources, Gen. Dayton has promised these apparently reformed 178 terrorists - not smart suits and ties, but advanced military hardware, armored vehicles and 4x4s equipped with state of the art communications gear for them to lord it over the ... [Read More]