Gaza Above the Siege: Reflecting on the Blockade 15 Years Later with Hadeel Assali and Toufic Haddad
As Israel’s brutal closure, blockade and siege of Gaza continues into its 15th year, Palestinian scholars Hadeel Assali and Toufic Haddad joined Adalah Justice Project (AJP) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in a virtual public conversation last week to reflect on how the blockade as a policy has shifted over time, what allows it to persist, and who the players are that contribute to its continuation.
Since 1948, the Gaza Strip has grappled with numerous episodes of isolation, closure, and blockade as part of Israel’s policy of collective punishment. In 2007, the harshest chapter of Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza began as Israel imposed a land and sea blockade on the Gaza Strip. After 15 years of the blockade, Palestinians in Gaza suffer from abject unemployment and poverty, a debilitated health-care sector, and extreme environmental hardship in addition to brutal Israeli military assaults.
According to Toufic Haddad, Palestinian academic and author, at its core, the draconian blockade on Gaza is an attempt by Israel to effectively freeze the peace process and thwart new Palestinian political currents from overtaking the movement and threatening the status quo.
“Once it’s blockaded Gaza, you have a series of attempts (by Israel) to basically smash Palestinian nationalism,” says Haddad.
Gaza is central to Palestinian liberation and, in fact, a symbol of the political conflict and microcosm of the key issues at hand – particularly, that of Palestinian refugees. The Israeli blockade recognizes this reality, and functions precisely to push the question of Palestine and Palestinian liberation down the road through its isolation and imprisonment of more than two million Palestinians in the 140 sq. mile territory – a population which is expected to double within 30 years.
How effective have these attempts to crush new Palestinian political currents been? “In a way, this has been very effective, certainly fragmenting the Palestinian political fabric, cutting off Gaza from the world, cutting off the question of Palestine from the world, attempting to keep down the new Palestinian political currents…(but) the movement is somehow in a strange way being strengthened, because the political weight of the movement now is more and more effectively around Gaza, the issues in Gaza with Hamas as its political leadership,” emphasizes Haddad.
“The Gaza blockade is both effective but also doesn’t solve any problems for these powers, it just kicks them into the long grass. Eventually, not only is the Gaza blockade catching up with the western powers as a political issue….the question of Palestine and the question of Gaza is not going away,” continues Haddad.
Hadeel Assali, Palestinian anthropologist and former engineer, reminds that, “Gaza Strip as a territorial entity is a false one,” which was created with the specific purpose to contain refugee populations following the Nakba. Today, the vast majority of the inhabitants in Gaza are refugees from surrounding areas – areas which they do not have access or the right to return to under Israel’s siege.
A historic marketplace and site of exchange, Gaza has also “always been a site of intense resistance,” says Assali. A prime example of Palestinians’ agency and economic liberation in Gaza are the vast networks of tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, continuing the legacy of exchange and marketplace. “Palestinians themselves have been agents in producing the space that they’re in and maintaining the relations that they have. Attention to that can help us rethink and reimagine Gaza outside of the Gaza Strip,” continues Assali.
While Israel has had many creative ideas and visions for the Gaza Strip as part of its process to displace, disenfranchise, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land under the occupation, Assali points to the urgent need for those fighting for Palestinian liberation to fundamentally change the discourse and broaden their imagination on what Gaza is and could be.
“Because these discourses of humanitarianism, war, and terrorism are so deafening, we don’t hear these other stories, these other ways of understanding Gaza. That this is a criminal act, even that this entity exists. It has not always been this way, Gaza has a very deep history of exchange, of a marketplace, of a place of pilgrimages. And if we can get our imaginations to push for that, then I think that the way we politically organize might change as well,” says Assali.
“Israel benefits from this situation because they have gotten rid of the politics so far because the narrative is holding,” echoes Haddad. However, according to Haddad, the tides are changing. “Israel used to with impunity, shoot, kill, bomb Gaza not even ask questions about it and the media would never even pay attention to it…that’s not the case anymore.”
Haddad emphasizes that while the movement must draw on lessons on steadfastness and resistance from Palestinains in Gaza, the path to Palestinian liberation must be a global effort and hold Western powers accountability for their complicity in upholding the Israeli apartheid regime. “Gaza by itself doesn’t have the ability to liberate Palestine. The struggle is in Gaza but it’s also in the West Bank, it’s in Jerusalem, it’s in ‘48, and it’s in the diaspora - it’s in the West - a key place where it is, it’s with you guys, because your countries are the ones that are giving the political, diplomatic, military, and financial umbrella to allow Israel to continue what it’s doing on the ground.”
“We need to understand where centers of power are and we need to lead effective movements to be able to challenge that and challenge the basic contradictions of, why should American tax dollars go to support apartheid and occupation and this barbarity in Gaza?,” continues Haddad.
Last week’s conversation took place on the eve of the 8 year anniversary of the start of the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, a summer where Israel brutally murdered over 2,200 Palestinians with impunity. Just last May, the world witnessed yet another deadly assault on Palestinians in Gaza in response to the Unity Intifada. Adalah Justice Project produced a video about the promise of Gaza in the aftermath of that latest war and the continued resistance of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, narrated by Palestinian artist Malak Mattar. Watch the 3-minute video on AJP YouTube.
If you are looking for ways to support Palestinians in Gaza, consider contributing to AFSC’s campaign to raise money for back to school supplies for students in Gaza at: https://secure.afsc.org/a/help-buy-school-supplies-children-gaza-n?ms=WEB22SB0001PI.
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Panelist Bios
Hadeel Assali is an anthropologist and former engineer whose work focuses on the colonial legacies of geology and on Palestinian anti-colonial relations with the earth. Her current research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University focuses on ways to decolonize the earth sciences. She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work has drawn heavily from her family stories based in Gaza, Palestine.
Toufic Haddad (PhD.) is a Palestinian academic and author of Palestine Ltd.: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territories. He completed his PhD in Development Studies at the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 2015 and has worked in various capacities across Palestine as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher. He currently lives in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem where he directs a British research institute.
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Adalah Justice Project is a Palestinian advocacy organization based in the U.S. that aims to shift public discourse and policy on Palestine. We work towards collective liberation. No one is free until all of us are free.
American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization devoted to service, development, and peace programs throughout the world. Our work is based on the belief in the worth of every person, and faith in the power of love to overcome violence and injustice.
