The bombs start again. Israel, as if on a timer, begins to pulverize Gaza. The bombs strike from one end of the country to another, a warning against the protests that have been ongoing for a year. There is a shudder from Gaza, phone calls to friends who say that they are fearful that this bombing run will escalate. Nothing is beyond Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, who will use these bombs as an advertisement for his campaign to be reelected as Israel goes to the polls on April 9. The phone lines carry the sound of scared children and anxious adults, a building demolished, the warplanes shrieking overhead.
In January of last year, the Palestinian journalist Ahmed Abu Artema sat at his computer in his home in Rafah (Gaza, Palestine). He had just returned home from a walk in this 365-square-kilometer (141-square-mile) enclave that sits on the Mediterranean Sea. There is a hint of paradise in Gaza -- the sea on one side, the citrus groves on the other. But the entire piece of land -- populated by 2.2 million Palestinians -- is hemmed in by the Israeli occupation. The land is dotted with barbed wire fences and ditches, with armed guards on alert to shoot where and when they will, and the sea is patrolled by Israeli naval vessels, which routinely stop and arrest Palestinian fishermen. Paradise is encircled by barbed wire and gunboats. Abu Artema decided to write a plea.
"No one stopped the birds," he thought during his walk as he saw a flock of birds fly across the perimeter fence. The Israeli occupation, he felt, "clips my wings" and "disrupts my evening walks." What if a Palestinian from Gaza decided to "see himself as a bird and decides to reach a tree beyond the fence," he mused? "If the bird was Palestinian, he would be shot."
So, this journalist -- a father of four young children -- wrote the following simple question: "What would happen if thousands of Gazans, most of them refugees, attempted to peacefully cross the fence that separated them from their ancestral lands?" The answer, plainly, was that they would be shot.
In 1976, the Israeli government announced the seizure of 20,000 dunams of land in the Galilee. The government declared a curfew so that it could proceed with the land theft without protest. It miscalculated. Pressure grew from below, so Tawfiq Ziad -- the mayor of Nazareth (the largest Palestinian city inside Israel's 1948 lines) -- called for a general strike. The strike on March 30, 1976, was almost total, with the Israeli State reacting to it with ferocity. The land was seized, but March 30 became a monumental day, Land Day, an annual commemoration of the struggle against the Israeli occupation.
Abu Artema's plea made in January 2018 became real on March 30, 2018, when the Great March of Return began. The initial plan was to start the protests on Land Day and then continue until May 15, the day to commemorate the Nakba or the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. But the energy opened up by the Great March of Return could not be contained. This protest, held each Friday, began with 30,000 Palestinians on Land Day in 2018 and continues with tens of thousands of Palestinians each week.
When Abu Artema took to his Facebook page, he would not have been able to drink water -- even if boiled -- from his tap. That month, the Palestinian Water Authority warned that 97 percent of Gaza's water was undrinkable because of high levels of sewage and salinity. It was lucky that Abu Artema was able to get on Facebook. Gaza only gets power for about four hours per day. The Israelis blame the Hamas government in Gaza for these problems. Such a story is only possible for someone with no memory.
In each of the punctual bombings of Gaza since Operation Hot Winter (2008), Israel has targeted Gaza's power plant and its water sources (wells, water towers, sewage pipelines and sewage treatment plants). Millions of dollars of damage are done to Gaza's infrastructure, which then cannot be repaired because Israel prevents materials from entering the enclave. Because of the Israeli bombings and Israeli embargo, Gaza, the United Nations has found, will become "uninhabitable by 2020."
It is no wonder the Great March of Return has seen such large crowds, so many people -- including children -- coming to the fence each week despite the Israeli snipers and the tear gas. Palestinians set up tents out of range of the snipers so that they could feed the protesters and heal them. The destruction of infrastructure put a heavy burden on Palestinian women, which deepened their political commitment and brought them to set up and work in these encampments.
Medical personnel and journalists would be on hand, thinking that their professions gave them immunity. It did not. The Israeli snipers fired at them: two journalists were killed, 184 journalists injured; three medics were killed, 181 medics injured. Hind Khoudary, a journalist, said that her work has been "more than [a] nightmare. I would have never imagined I would see people shattered into pieces."