Many people in Gaza envy the birds

Carl Stellweg

With  a few Facebook posts in 2018, Palestinian writer and activist Ahmed Abu-Artema from the Gaza Strip sowed the seed for the largest-scale peaceful Palestinian protest ever: the Great March of Return.

Two years later, with hundreds of fatalities and thousands seriously injured, the harvest is bitter. But the Great March of Return has once and for all made it abundantly clear that the Palestinians will never accept the occupation.

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Abu-Artema visited the Netherlands at the end of January 2020. The study association FFIPP and the Dutch Palestine Committee organized a public evening with him in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

Prior to this event, I met up with him.

Borrowing his own poetic imagery – which perhaps we may, as he politely rejects the status of poet some media ascribe to him – you could call him a bird that recently escaped his cage, while still being unfree.

A bird with a painful mission, soon to return to prison to brave his oppressors once again, with his numerous fellow sufferers.

How? Well, peacefully, at any rate. While recognizing that many of his fellow Palestinians struggle to share this view, Abu-Artema maintains only nonviolent resistance will offer his people a way out.

Ahmed Abu-Artema (35), born and raised in the Gaza Strip and one of the initiators of the Great March of Return, left his home a few months ago for a trip across Europe that took him to Turkey, Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and recently the Netherlands.

Logistically, his trip was an ordeal. Since Israel would never have let him pass, he had to navigate along the southern border past the unpredictable Egyptian authorities. And he couldn’t point to triumphs.

He had nothing but bleak results to offer: the Great March of Return, which began on March 30, 2018 - Yom al-Ard (Day of the Land) - and took place each Friday along the fence that separates Gaza from Israel, yielded 260 Palestinian casualties and myriads of injuries caused by Israeli snipers.

This is the manner in which media tend to report these data, making it sound as if the Palestinians were victims of an ongoing natural disaster, instead of being killed, maimed and maltreated by an army that did not even act out of self-defense.

After all, there were no victims on the Israeli side , except for a handful of lightly wounded soldiers.

In brief, Israeli military action was habitually excessive. Witnesses spoke of a shooting-gallery operated by cowards where even medics were deliberately targeted.

Several politicians expressed their disgust, and yet Israel got away with it; there wasn’t the slightest increase in political pressure on the country.

One might call the Great March of Return a tragic failure. There is good reason why these demonstrations were suspended since December 2019.

As Abu-Artema admits, the toll has been too heavy and the response of the international community too meagre: it was high time for a strategic rethink. He expects the demonstrations will resume next March 30, but only on a monthly basis.

However, anyone who dares speak of failure is not fully aware of the Palestinians’ plight. Nothing is a failure when you are left with no choices; and where hope is scant, idealism is the only thing to fall back on.

Perhaps that is ultimately the message Abu-Artema has to offer his European interlocutors: that the Palestinians will not ever accept the occupation - no matter what tribulations Israel subjects them to, and will keep subjecting them to, with impunity.

Due to his recent wanderings, Abu-Artema may see himself as one of the better traveled inhabitants of Gaza. It is well-known that most of them can hardly leave this piece of land of less than 400 square kilometers (and close to 2 million souls) because of the Israeli (and Egyptian) blockade that has lasted for more than 12 years.

Abu-Artema was 26 when he was first given the opportunity to leave the open-air prison that is his home. "The Muslim brotherhood had come to power in Egypt and travel restrictions were relaxed.

So I ended up in Cairo and saw planes going over the city. I told my Egyptian friends: "Never before have I seen planes in the sky that are messengers of life, rather than harbingers of death."

Like many activists, Abu-Artema did not seem to be cut for activism at all. He came into the world in 1984, three years before the eruption of the First Intifada, and his youth – as that of so many Palestinians -  was marked by lengthy curfews, banging on doors by the military in the dead of night, raids, vandalism of houses, not to mention endless amounts of tear gas.

But he tried to stay out of trouble, found solace in books, discovered the power – and suspected the force - of words, of imagination, and of ideas. When he was in his early twenties, he started writing himself, because he wanted to share his thoughts with others.

"I believe in the imagination, in the creative value of ideas. We can shape the world out of the things we imagine. If we share this with one another, it may become reality. Words are more than just letters on paper or hot air. Doesn’t the Bible state: In the beginning was the word? "

The Gaza Strip sparks the imagination in a peculiar way. Says Abu-Artema: "You drive from west to east – from coast to gate - in 15 minutes; from north to south in less than an hour. That’s it. 

When your world is so limited, you’re bound to realize the absurdity of borders and the value of freedom. More so, I suspect, than if one is able to travel unimpeded over long distances, like in Europe."

The tipping point came one day in December 2017. President Trump had announced he would move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, defying international law. 

A few days later, Abu-Artema took a friend on a walk near the fence. Not because he wanted to participate in the protests against Trump's decision, but simply to enjoy nature and the great outdoors. 

“And then this friend said to me: Look, Ahmed, that fence is there to keep us captive, but the birds you see flying above still can go wherever they wish.”

At that point in time, it first dawned on Abu-Artema why he would never accept the occupation of Gaza. "Because it is destroying my dreams. A bird can fly wherever it pleases. Why can’t I?”

Ahmed entrusted his bird metaphor to Facebook and received lots of responses. It turned out that there are many people in the Gaza Strip who envy the birds. 

He elaborated on his thoughts and wrote: "What if we, with 200,000 people, would peacefully pull up to the gate, open it and build a city just across the border called Bab-al-Shams - Gate of the Sun - after the famous novel byLebanese writer Elias Khoury? Do we, residents of Gaza, most of whom are refugees, not have the right to do so? Isn't that better than dying in silence?"

The thing got started, he emphasizes, as a flight of fancy, a thought experiment, tagged #GreatMarchOfReturn. But the seed for the largest-scale peaceful Palestinian protest action in history had been sown.

The Israeli war machine responded promptly, with a relentlessness that took even those who knew its reputation by surprise. 

The Israeli propaganda machine soon caught up. No, this Great March of Return wasn’t peaceful at all; it was orchestrated by HAMAS, the hasbara blurted, and it was an outright threat to the Jewish State.

Ahmed Abu-Artema resolutely rejects this view. "The Gaza Strip is a lot more than HAMAS: if the Great March of Return has shown anything, it is this: HAMAS is but one of many factions. All factions participated, but first and foremost the initiative sprang from civil society. Palestinian society has shown itself to the world in both its diversity and unity. "

“Moreover, people are not robots, they are not remote-controlled. Do you expect tens of thousands of people to pull up to the fence on HAMAS’s say-so? And there was no question of a threat to the Jewish state. The statistics unambiguously prove this: hundreds were dead and tens of thousands injured on the Palestinian side, and only a few got slightly injured on the Israeli side. So there is no justification for what Israel did, HAMAS or no HAMAS."

An injured boy shot by Israeli soldiers is carried off during the Great March of Return @Photo Mohammed Zaanoun https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/inpictures/great-return-march-months-protests-gaza-strip-180926122828814 .html

This is Abu-Artema’s final comment on HAMAS: "Israel's emphasis on this movement is nothing but a smoke screen. Before 1987 - the year HAMAS was founded - occupation and oppression were firmly in place. So HAMAS is not a cause, but a result. "

Has the reaction on Israel's part surprised him? Yes and no.

"I never doubted that Israel would react by force. But the extent to which it did upset me. In hindsight, I understand. Precisely the peaceful nature of the demonstration was the thing Israel detested most, because the world would see that Palestinians are ordinary people with an all too understandable desire for freedom. "

Israel would like to keep the Palestinians in a cycle of violence, Abu-Artema argues. 

"The shooting of peaceful protestors was a provocation, an attempt to incite counter-violence. Absent that violence, a painful contradiction emerges. Israel likes to advertise itself as a democratic constitutional state. Then why doesn't it treat unarmed refugees in the same humane way that European countries have treated refugees from Syria? "

Isn't there even a glimpse of victory to be discerned for the Palestinians? Al-Jazeera's documentary on Abu-Artema (Witness - Between Fire and Sea: The Man Behind Gaza's Great March of Return; September 2018; 30 minutes) shows how hard it is for him to convince young men of the need for peaceful resistance. Israel only understands the language of violence, is what he hears.

"I disagree," says Abu-Artema. "We can’t equal Israel’s military power. That is why we must rely on the justness of our story. That is our only strength, the only thing in which we are superior to Israel. 

But I understand all too well why many Palestinians are lured by the call of violence. The suffering of the occupation has not left one Palestinian family unscathed. In each family, someone has been killed, injured, imprisoned, or demolished by Israel. This has led to the belief that it is necessary to make Israel suffer. To make it pay for what it keeps on doing. "

Even so, The Great March of Return did not allow the overwhelming majority to be tempted into the violence Israel was hoping for - couldn’t this, again, be called some sort of triumph?

Abu-Artema shrinks from such an interpretation. "I would be embarrassed, given the number of victims, if I indulged in any kind of triumphalism."

What, then, should be the final assessment?

"This is how I see it: The Great March of Return is – or perhaps was – an episode in the Palestinians' struggle for equality and equal rights. It wasn’t the first episode, nor will it be the last. Failure or not, nothing alters the fact that we must continue. We have no other choice. "

Palestinian football team of amputees. They lost a leg due to shelling by Israeli soldiers.  ©Mohammed Asad Middle East Monitor

Indeed, but for how long?

Abu-Artema sighs. "Who can tell? Maybe ten years, maybe twenty. As I said, we have no choice. However, the international community does have a choice: it can side with power or with morality. I’d like to remind you that there are two types of international community: the official one and the unofficial one. The unofficial is made up of citizens and increasingly on our side. The official one, consisting of governments, still clings to Israeli power. 

The greater the disconnect between morality and brute force, the more likely brute force is bound to break. And that is what we should continue to strive for. Indeed, until the bitter end."

This interview first appeared (in Dutch) in SoemoedJanuary-February 2020 | No. 1 and also here, and here. 

Many thanks to author Pim Wiersinga for this excellent translation from Dutch into English!