January 27, 2006

Finally, after several years of wanting to go to Gaza, Dunya and I managed to spend two days there under the auspices of election observation. It didn’t take very long for Dunya to observe that the elections in Gaza City were far cleaner than those in Ohio in 2004, where she was working at the time. Lack of democracy is not Palestine’s problem.

We stayed in Gaza City with Khaled Nasrallah and his family, one of the two families who had been living in the house in Rafah that Rachel Corrie was killed defending in March 2003. They now live in an apartment in Gaza City while a new house is being built, with the help of the ‘Building Alliance’. Most of the people in Gaza who have been displaced by home demolition have been displaced at least once before – in 1948 – and some of them more than once. They’ve lived in a constant state of terror for the past five years, and according to some, it got worse after the “disengagement�. Israeli shelling is not uncommon, not to mention the sonic booms that only started since the settlers have left. A 9-year-old girl was shot and killed by the Israeli army on Thursday in Gaza, probably just a few miles from where we were.

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