The Gaza Strip: First Impressions

One leaves the Gaza Strip unsure whether to categorise the experience as witnessing real life in surreal conditions, or life by mirages of banality under normalised conflict. The answer is probably a mixture of both.

From the outset, Gaza City fiercely interrogates one’s sense of surreality. First of all because there is no way of knowing what to expect. Gaza suffers an excess of definitions from but a dearth of normal contact with the outside world. The competing definitions – prison camp, animal pen, laboratory, breeding ground for terrorists, enemy entity, potential humanitarian disaster zone – along with the only reportage and images we see from the strip being warfare-related mean that one enters and is genuinely surprised by everything normal: trees! buildings! billboards! cars! When banality is what is most surprising, it is probably time to rethink these definitions, for what one finds is not a society of prisoners, animals, terrorists; but just people.

The situation and the borders around the Gaza Strip must be what is surreal, then. Except that they are violently real and patently part of Gaza’s reality. Thursday night sees the Gazan elite socialising at the ex-Moevenpick (now an Arcmed, the 5* hotel is empty, but the leisure facilities service the local population). One night, during the usual scene: people sipping juice cocktails, children playing freely, a toddler dances on a table. Behind her a few blocks north, two Qassam rockets rise and fall towards Ashkelon. What I take for Iron Dome activation sets off next, rockets with orange flare tails headed back into the strip, and then a heavier strike on the Qassam launching ground, all thuds and flashes. Adults pause to look but quickly return to their juice cocktails. The toddler never stops dancing. I could not help but think of the same scenario from the Israeli side, they will have been ushered into bomb shelters, underlining that what is going on outside is not to be considered normal life. There are no public bomb shelters in Gaza. They built open air night spots instead.

This is not to say that Gazans are all hardened against threat, that they do not appreciate the danger of their situation, nor that they necessarily could build state of the art bomb shelters if they wanted to. Psychological problems are rife here, many suffer from some kind of ongoing trauma distress. And as a visitor here, soon you will too.

Experiences vary throughout the strip, the middle area around Deir al-Balah sees more incursions of actual ground troops, but if you live in Gaza City you will not see an Israeli. However they are a pervasive mental presence, piqued by occasional deadly physical reminders. They mostly come at night, the drones. Disrupting television signal if the electricity is working, or barely disturbing sleep. And then their target is fired upon. A strike a block away will blow your windows open and have you leaping for the exit if this is your first time. Perhaps, like me, you’ll find yourself mustering alone in a hotel corridor with your trusty towel until you slope off back to bed realising you’ve experienced nothing special. At least in Gazan terms. You get on the Gazan twittersphere and are reassured by some strange kind of human contact after proximity to being collateral damage. It will be over a week before you can sleep properly again. Once out of Gaza, it becomes a novelty and delight to take in that not every loud noise is an air strike, that there are passenger planes in the air, not drones and F16s, and that there is electricity available all day long. This is a conflict that blurs your sense of warfare with the everyday and domestic. It is disturbing.

This must be why the international United Nations workers mostly opt to spend some of their danger pay on weekends off in Tel Aviv. It’s just up the coast and visible from Gaza City on a clear day. That those who can do flit between the Gaza Strip and Israel brings the borders back into surreal territory. The actual workings of the borders are a mystery and occupy the same space in small talk as the weather does in British conversation: is Rafah open? Will it open later? What is Erez like today? The meteorology of Rafah is based on Egyptian politics, bureaucracy and Hamas permits, it is somewhat predictable by a crude barometer measuring these influences. The same cannot be applied to the Israeli ones, and indeed to the reasons behind the ongoing blockade that was designed to put pressure on Hamas to release an abducted Israeli soldier and to weaken their ability to govern, but which achieved the total opposite of both goals, is something nobody can explain to their children when they inevitably ask that awkward question.

One leaves the Gaza Strip unsure whether to categorise the experience as witnessing real life in surreal conditions, or life by mirages of banality under normalised conflict. The answer is probably a mixture of both.

Lucy spent 10 days in Gaza in June - hosted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme – as part of her PhD research.

Tagged blockade, Gaza, Gaza City, Gaza Strip, Hamas, Iron Dome, Israel, Palestine