A Month by the Sea by Dervla Murphy Read Free Book Online Page B

Birzeit University often points out, ‘Hamas is a
very
pragmatic political institution.’
    By then ISIs had proliferated and were doing much to relieve the Strip’s multiple miseries. The unscrupulous Israeli/US-led vilifying of Hamas (shamefully backed up, since Oslo, by the Palestinian Authority (PA)) presents these charities as a ‘front for terror’. In 2003 the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs circulated a report entitled ‘The Exploitation of Children for Terrorist Purposes’. It claimed:
    In addition to the encouragement of children through the media, the Palestinian educational institutions and summer camps are also involved in brainwashing and indoctrinating Palestinian children and youth. Children are indoctrinated with extreme Islamic ideas, calling for support and encouragement of the Jihad against Israel … Pictures of martyrs are hung in every place. In this way, the seeds of hatred towards Israel are planted in the children.
    Many outsiders seem unaware of the deep roots, within traditional Islam, of ‘social institutions’ linked to a Muslim’s duty to donate to the needy a fixed percentage of his income. With an obstinate sort of blinkered cynicism, most English-language commentators present all ISIs as an integral part of the ‘terror’ machine. Yet Hamas’ political/military leadership has never had close relations with individual ISIs, though obviously their steady support for the whole system burnishes their image on the Strip – and elsewhere. (The ISIs are so autonomous and diffuse one can’t refer to them as a ‘network’.)
    The best analysis of this contentious issue comes from Sara Roy, a US Jew and senior research fellow at Harvard, whose intimate knowledge of the OPT (especially Gaza) extends over the past twenty-five years. She writes:
    Islamic social services organisations typically
had no (political) ideological criteria as conditions for access to Islamic social services, or for membership in Islamic social organisations;
evinced no desire or intent to create a strictly Islamic society or to implement any Islamic mode;
desired greater practical cooperation with the Palestinian government, itself reflecting an openness on the part of the Islamists for better state–society relations and not an attempt to challenge, alienate, or sabotage state authority; and
prioritised professionalism over ideology.
    … Hamas’s post-Oslo internal shift arguably represented the beginning of a new ethos of civic engagement, a limited pluralism, as it were. It further points to what the scholar Amr Hamzawy calls ‘the inner secularisation of the religious discourse’ as a means of adapting to existing social, political and economic realities.
    * * *
    On Day Two I walked indirectly to the beach, at first along wide streets carrying light traffic. The pavements were ankle-deep in fine golden sand, many of the office blocks, engineering works, stores and restaurants looked either partially used or abandoned. Years ago normal business life came to a halt and while the blockade continues no one is going to invest in Gaza. An occasional shop offered meagre stocks of Egyptian junk food. Commercial animation was confined to al-Majdal Street’s busy roadside stalls, loaded with cheap Chinese goods. I was to discover that a specific item – not seen for weeks – could appear all over the city withsudden abundance when one importer’s order had just come through a tunnel.
    Most Gazans are monolingual but keen to help a stranger. When I asked the way to the beach by miming swimming two amused men directed me down a long, slightly sloping passageway between tall slummy tenements – the edge of Shatti camp. Then, from a low embankment, I could see Ashkelon’s tall factory chimneys smoking a few miles away to the north, in Israel. It was two and a half years since I’d walked along that unwelcoming beach on a cold windy Sabbath morning – I remembered gazing gloomily at Gaza, not believing I