Gaza, attack on modernity

Beaches forbidden to women, artists under fire. But also beatings on a daily basis and cellars turned into torture chambers

GAZA – He is asking the foreign pacifists who are promising to resume their ship voyages to carry, along with the aid for the Palestinians, a mixer for his musical group. But he is doing it against the wishes of the same regime, in the Gaza Strip, which the pacifists are more or less indirectly assisting against the embargo imposed by Israel. “Our old mixer was taken away by the Hamas police,” he explains, fearful that the new one will suffer the same fate as the first. “We are victims of a repressive theocracy which, in the name of its distorted reading of Islam, prohibits free music. We don’t like anything about their Allah in green.” This is the ironic paradox lived by 20-year-old Basher Bseiso, a singer from the “Peace Group” (Fariq Salam), very popular among young rap-lovers in Gaza. The paradox is well summarized by the appeal which Jamal Abu Al Qumsan, the 43-year-old director of the most famous art gallery in “Desperation Strip”, sends out from his home: “Thanks to all of you democratic people, from all over the world, who are fighting the Israeli embargo of Gaza. But please, at the same time, could you also denounce the Hamas repression of intellectual freedoms?”

ATTACKS AGAINST YOUTH ORGANIZATIONS - Theirs are only two of the infinite number of stories which can be found in the region. The “hottest” and most recent of these stories concern is the attacks against youth organizations. Those attacks took place on May 23 and June 28, when some 28 armed, masked Hamas militants set fire to the summer camp organized by students on the United Nations Beach. And in late May, on the very same day as the blitz by the Israeli commandos against the pacifist flotilla, which caused nine deaths, the Hamas police here closed down no less than five local non-governmental organizations. The most famous, Sharek (17 branches in the Palestinian territories, five of them in the Gaza Strip), had two of its student summer camps on the beach burned down. One of its leaders, Mohammad Aruki, accuses: “They want to force us to close the mixed camps. They tell us that boys and girls have to be separated. This is how they aim to eradicate secular culture; they are seeking a monopoly on education.” This is the nth  campaign of the culture war in recent times. The more extremist wings of the religious front want to close the beach to girls; they forbid any privacy for unmarried couples; they consider Western music and fashions as a danger to public “morality”. If you ask the spokespersons of Hamas for explanations, the response is usually the same: “The Government ministers, our civil authorities, don’t want to get involved. You would do well to ask the police.” But the only thing heard from police agents is “no comment”. The most explicit statement was made by Ahmed Yussef, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and President of the Committee Against the Embargo: “Israel has a monopoly of power. Hamas is much weaker; the only thing it is trying to do is to impose its sovereignty in the Strip.”

THE TRUE REGIME - The worst problem is that the witnesses, the victims themselves, are afraid to talk about it. Hamas has now imposed a “Godfather” regime on its own people. Punishment doesn’t only mean prison, or even torture; rather, it means ostracism, losing one’s job, denigration, social isolation. Bseiso speaks with rage of having been beaten up on April 28. “I was riding my motorcycle when a group of Ezzedin Al Qassam militiamen came up alongside me, knocked me to the ground and beat me with sticks. A few days before, they had broken into our studio and confiscated VCRs, video cameras, cassettes. Now, with makeshift equipment, I am preparing a song of accusation against the Hamas repression,” he says. His fellow group member, Ibrahim Ghonem, recalls that up to 2005, when Gaza and the West Bank were governed by the same PLO authority, formed by Yasser Arafat in 1994, the situation was much better: “In that period of time, at least five rap groups came into existence in Gaza. Nobody interfered. Now they tell us that we are agents of the American Satan, that we corrupt young people. And the result is that anyone who can get out just goes – emigrates. I have just learned about a few friends from other rap groups who took advantage of invitations to concerts in other countries and ‘took to the woods’; they won’t be coming back.” Jamal Abu Al Qumsan had worse luck. Until a few days ago, he couldn’t sit down or lie on his back, due to the beatings which he suffered at intervals between May 5 and May 12. His punishment was strange, but very common. He was summoned to the police in the prison centers. He didn’t have much of a choice. The infamous Saraya, in the heart of Gaza City, was razed to the ground by the Israeli bombardments in “Operation Cast Lead” in January 2009. But the Mashtal, the five provincial prisons, and Ansar, where the heads of the security service work, are still standing. That is where the interrogation began. “From 7 a.m. until late in the evening, sometimes after midnight. The most common punishment is when they stand you up against a wall, all afternoon in the hot sun, and make you do observe exercises. For example, you’re ordered to ‘ride a bicycle’; they make you pretend to pedal for hours and hours. Then they send you home. That way, you’re not on the list of prisoners, and they don’t even have to feed you. Only a glass of water every so often. And the next morning, you have to be right on time in front of the gate,” recalls Jamal. But things went badly for him. “They accused me of corrupting young girls, of allowing them to smoke water pipes on the premises of my gallery, even of sexual abuse. They beat me with straps and sticks.”

TORTURE CHAMBERS -But it could have gone worse. He could have ended up in the former beach house of the President of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Abu Mazen; he could have stayed there in isolation for months. They say here that the cellars have been turned into torture chambers for the “enemies of Islam”. They use sophisticated techniques. There are spies mixed in with the prisoners. They use tactics learned directly from the Israeli prisons. There are no Palestinian militants over the age of 30 who have not experienced these techniques on their own skin. The psychological pressure is often much more effective than the physical pressure. Up to this point, everything is “business as usual”. In the Fatah prisons on the West Bank, where the hunt for Hamas militants is still going on, the techniques used for persecution are quite similar. “The innovation in Gaza lies in the growing influence of the systems used by the Iranian Basiji. The ‘skinheads’ in the elite units of Ezzedin Al Qassam were directly trained by them. The objective is to impose a kind of total and totalitarian conformism, on the political and the cultural level. Anyone who doesn’t blend in past to know that he’s at risk. And there aren’t many heroes. A few veiled threats are often enough to obtain the desired effect,” emphasizes a well-known local commentator, speaking under a promise of absolute anonymity. Asma Al Ghuol, a journalist engaged in the defense of intellectual freedoms, recently had her computer taken away and was personally threatened for having made an “amoral” public denunciation of censorship against musicians and authors. A woman colleague of hers, who works with the al-Arabiyya television station, was arrested a few days ago when the police found her traveling in a car, accompanied by a young man who was not a member of her family.

A SCENARIO SIMILAR TO IRAQ - Abu Omar (a pseudonym), a former Palestine Liberation Front militant, expresses his dissidents in private: he secretly makes wine in the Jabaliya refugee camp and sells 100 meters per year. “This is my challenge against the ban on alcohol imposed by the Islamists, against the invasions of our privacy,, as if we were under the Taliban,” he says, showing us a photograph of Hassan Mohammad Hajazi, his friend and fellow activist, who was assassinated in January 2009 by Hamas members taking advantage of the chaos caused by the Israeli attack. “The tragedy is that, if I show this photograph on the street, I’ll be arrested.” These are the perverse effects of the Israeli embargo: a scenario which closely resembles that imposed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1990s and up to the 2003 war. The economic blockade, the isolation, the finger-pointing cause enormous difficulties on the international level for the affected regime, but strengthen it internally and indirectly provide it with legitimization for even the worst of its abuses against its own population. Atef Abu Saief, a brilliant lecturer in political science at the local university, Al Azhar, claims: “The Hamas is controlling Gaza much better than a few years ago, even if its popularity is shrinking. But we can’t verify that last point. Free elections, like those of 2006, are now impossible. At best, if we go to the polls, we’ll see an under-the-table agreement to split the votes with the Fatah. The Hamas theocracy is marking the end of the democratic dream.” A famous journalist, working for the foreign press agencies, who asks to remain absolutely anonymous, comments: “The difference between this and Iraq is that, in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, the parliamentary elections of January 2006 were cleanly won by the Hamas against the Fatah. The Western leftists are correct to point their fingers at their governments, who rejected those elections. In a democracy, it’s not possible to accept only the results that you like and to reject the unpleasant ones. But now, people aren’t noticing that the popularity of the Hamas in Gaza is in free fall. It’s a strange situation, which reflects the old Palestinian inclination to always take sides against whoever wins. If we were to go to the polls today, it’s possible that the Hamas could obtain the majority in the West Bank, but the Fatah would win in Gaza.” “The Hamas is like Hitler, or better, like the Islamists in Algeria,” emphasizes Saief. That’s why Yasser Arafat, to the day of his death in November 2004, always refused to allow elections with the Hamas. He knew that, once the Islamists were in power, it would never be possible to vote freely again, for the very evident fact that the doctrine of the Muslim Brothers attributes no value whatsoever to democracy.” As he sees it, this was Abu Mazen’s weakness: allowing the Hamas to participate in the 2006 elections. He was under the delusion that he would beat his rival in the local PLO, Mahmoud Dahlan, who, in his capacity as Arafat’s chief of police in Gaza and because of his close ties with the CIA, was extremely unpopular. But he didn’t understand that he was opening the doors to the Hamas. Now we should go back to the polls. But we’ll never have a clean election again.”