Book review: A prison called Gaza: new book offers a startling insight into everyday life in the territory
A place of spacious
dimensions, and large population, with fine bazaars. It contains numerous
mosques, and there is no wall around it.
Donald Macintyre: Gaza: Preparing for Dawn
To the modern reader,
this is perhaps one of the more striking descriptions the medieval Moroccan
traveller, Ibn
Battutah, offered of the places he visited. Not because it contains
anything shocking, but because of the town it portrays: Gaza. For the city, and the
war-torn strip of coastal land with which it shares a name, are today defined
principally by the walls around it. Gaza has been held under siege for the best
part of the last decade, since Hamas came to power in the territory.
Recent political
developments, in the form of a unity government, mean that there may be more
future movement through the southern border, with Egypt. Still, Gaza remains
fenced in to the north and east by the Israeli Army, which vastly outguns any
enemies it has in the territory. To the west lies the Mediterranean. Some
shores of that sea are famous for tourism; stretches of its eastern edge are
more readily associated with armed conflict, human suffering and wasted
potential. Gaza definitely falls, along with Syria, into the latter category. Without the beaches,
life in Gaza would surely be immeasurably worse. The currents there make
swimming hazardous; winter storms can be surprisingly violent. Yet the sky and
the waves offer some relief in the form of light and air to a place where life
can seem suffocating.
Flared, and died: As Donald Macintyre
observes in his important new book, Gaza:
Preparing for Dawn, the sea might also offer economic salvation. The
discovery offshore of a gas field, Gaza Marine – estimated to hold a trillion
cubic feet of natural gas – promised the solution to many of Gaza’s economic
and energy woes. Perhaps predictably,
politics and conflict have conspired to stop that happening. Gaza Marine
remains unexploited. Like the “telegenic background of a huge gas flame
shooting into the air” – against which Macintyre describes the late Palestinian
leader, Yasser Arafat, announcing unfulfilled plans to draw the wealth from
beneath the waves – it has flared, and died.
It was into that sea
that I watched for the final time a bright orange sun set in the spring of
2004. Since 2002, I had been the BBC’s correspondent in Gaza. At the time, I
was the only international journalist permanently based in the territory. The
kidnapping of my successor, Alan Johnston, in 2007 just as he was due to finish
his posting, means that while correspondents continue to visit, they do not
live there. Johnston’s experience
reporting “the descent into anarchy of which he himself was now a victim” (as
Macintyre puts it) was a journalistic challenge which Johnston took on
admirably. His fate – thankfully he was released after 16 weeks – ensures,
however, that managing editors have since been rightly nervous about basing
their journalists in Gaza ever since... read more:
