After three years away, Gaza stays in sharp focus

Rana Baker returns to Gaza to find that freedom of movement for Palestinians is even more curtailed

Palestinian fishermen prepare their net before fishing at the seaport of Gaza City. Suhaib Salem / Reuters

Loathed as Gaza may be by its own residents, after a while abroad one cannot but yearn for certain aspects of it. The seaside cafes, for instance, and the crashing of waves on the shore. There are the weddings and gel-haired young men dancing on rundown lorries during wedding parades. There are certain odours as well, such as that wafting out from the portside fishery which one recognises quite a distance away.

It has been almost three years since I last left Gaza. I thought it would be a year-long estrangement, but studies kept rolling on. That, in itself, is a pleasure I would not want to quit. Ivory towers as they may be, university campuses and classrooms are exhilarating to be part of – there is so much theory to mull over.

To be sure, there are also all the Palestinians I could never have met in Gaza because, as it goes, they were born in the West Bank or elsewhere within the boundaries of historical Palestine.

Those, I realised, did not deserve all the romanticism I wrapped them in for many years. They are just as annoyingly Palestinian and as disarrayed as anyone else in Gaza.

On the bright side, however, I have got to know the Palestinian cities and towns they come from with more diligence, such as Nazareth, which I can now describe with unprecedented accuracy, including the opening hours of its markets.

In Nazareth, I have also learnt, Russian Jews are offering to buy up land from the Palestinian owners or simply forcing themselves on Upper Nazareth.

Still on the bright side, it has been delightful to cast Palestine aside sometimes and to develop unmitigated contempt for identity politics.

There is little more wasteful, even idiotic, than huddling together in one group perpetually feeling itchy whenever a foreign member makes an appearance or says something about “our” subject. An inward-looking people will inevitably doom themselves to the murderous ills of nationalism, a prime example of which is the inward-looking state of Israel.

I often think that the inward-looking must have never mourned. The inability to mourn becomes vengeful, on a mass scale to be sure, when it is turned into a national affair. It does seem to me that Israel is permanently remembering the Holocaust, its prime ministers attending memorials, its tycoons donating to museums, but it is not mourning.

This inability, or lack of will, to mourn is then pushed on the Palestinians, in the various forms military aggression takes, to deal with.

There is some comfort in mourning what one irrevocably loses or does not get to experience from close by. There are not just the deaths, but the births, adolescences and weddings that those of us abroad are literally prohibited from witnessing precisely because someone else made their inability to mourn a national affair.

As the bitter paradox goes, it is easier for a Palestinian from Gaza to travel throughout most parts of the world than to visit their own home town.

As a matter of fact, I started this piece in New York, resumed it in Geneva, and concluded it in a little town in France. For three years, however, I have not been able to set foot in Gaza.

It all must be temporary. Until then, we cannot allow ourselves to collectively mourn. Mourning, on some level at least, indicates the coming to terms with an unwanted situation or some morbid condition.

We cannot come to terms with the fact of our oppression and mourn it as if it was no longer or as if we have a rough estimate of our losses. Our oppression still is and our losses are a constant occurrence afflicting every layer of our being.

But we must mourn once we know and once the storm has cleared. We must mourn our personal losses and allow others to mourn theirs without interfering, without, most importantly, telling them that the only way to protect ourselves is to erect an everlasting monument of our oppression, namely, a nation-state.

Rana Baker is a doctorate student and teaching fellow at Columbia University