Debriefing: Lawrence Wright on Gaza
Samantha Henig
It’s only twenty-six miles long and seven miles wide, but once again Gaza has the world’s attention. The Israeli military’s raid of a Gaza-bound flotilla in international waters raised questions from abroad: who attacked whom, who was armed, and was there any legal basis for landing commandos on the ships? (Nine people on the flotilla were killed, one an American citizen.) But beyond all that loomed a larger issue: Why does Israel’s blockade of Gaza exist, and should it be eliminated?
That’s a controversy that Lawrence Wright took on in a piece for the magazine in November. Wright, who spent three weeks in Gaza, tells the story of Hamas’s rise to power; the capture of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier; the theory behind Israel’s sanctions; and the way they have played out on the ground. Wright discusses the recent Gaza developments in this week’s Out Loud podcast. He and I talked further about life in Gaza, whether the flotilla passengers were “Code Pink grandmas” or “Islamist radicals,” and better ways to run blockades. Edited excerpts follow.
When you were in Gaza, what was the public feeling about the blockade?
The whole black market was doing quite well, but the legitimate economy had been destroyed. There were no construction materials allowed into the country to rebuild, so essentially it looked like the day the war stopped.
Given the rampant smuggling through tunnels from Egypt, which you describe in your piece, what’s the point of having a blockade at all?
Egypt was in the process of building a new security fence that was sixty to ninety feet deep to block off those tunnels, so the last remaining outlet for Gaza was being choked off. Egypt’s main goal in all this has been to insure that Gaza remain Israel’s problem.
Egypt has now, because of the incident with the flotilla, opened its border with Gaza, so essentially the blockade has been lifted. Egypt would desperately like to close that door again, I’m sure, because they are very worried about contagion from Hamas affecting the Islamist movement inside Egypt. But there’s going to be tremendous domestic pressures to keep that access to Gaza open, so I can’t see Egypt closing the door any time soon.
Do you think that Israel made a mistake by raiding the ship?
I thought it was a diplomatic catastrophe in so many ways. It’s alienated not only its close friends but its strategic allies, such as Turkey. Turkey was Israel’s best friend and best hope in the region, and this action has placed terrible strains on that relationship. Moreover, it has also created real strains with the U.S. Turkey has been positioned as a bridge between the Islamic region of the Middle East and the West, and as such it has played a very constructive role. Now that role may change to some extent, depending on Israel’s future actions.
Why did this particular incident involve Turkey so much?
The Gaza blockade has been very unpopular in the entire Muslim world, it’s not just in Turkey. It may be because of domestic political considerations that Prime Minister Erdogan has cultivated the Gaza issue, but it’s also possible to believe, as many people do, that there are real humanitarian issues here, and the world has pretty much turned its back on the million and a half people in Gaza who are trapped there. So it’s not surprising to me that the Turkish people, if not the Turkish government, would do something to try to call attention to this, and they’ve succeeded beyond their best dreams.
What have you thought about the media coverage so far? I’m struck by the difference in words people use for the people on the flotilla, whether they’re “activists” or “humanitarians.”
I used to be a student of linguistics, and it reminds me of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if I can trouble you with explaining what I mean by that.
Oh, please do!
It used to be that trucks that were carrying gasoline said that they were inflammable, and as it happened a lot of people, even people who worked around these trucks, would be found lighting up cigarettes and unfortunately blowing up the trucks. Why would they possibly do that? A pair of linguists discovered that there was this unconscious association with this word inflammable, which they thought meant not flammable. So now all gasoline trucks say “flammable,” which wasn’t even a word beforehand.
I think the Israeli subconscious hypothesis is that they were dealing with “peace activists,” and in their mind that meant Code Pink grandmothers, and that’s not who was on those boats, or at least that wasn’t the entire population of those boats. Now the Israelis are stressing that these are “Islamists” and “radicals”—it’s the very opposite perspective. Language is so charged and so fraught in the region that every way the flotilla and the Israeli response are characterized fails to encompass exactly who these people were on those ships and the multiplicity of perspectives that are actually involved.
That multiplicity of perspectives is also clear in the different versions of videos that are circulating. Do you think there’s any way to get an objective read on the situation?
We’ve entered a new age of a kind of a YouTube dialogue that adds information without necessarily adding perspective. It’s really helpful, it’s eye opening, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to the wise responses that are called for.
What do you think of America’s response so far?
I think it is confused and divided. The Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is pointing out that the Gaza situation is unsustainable, which is correct, but Vice-President Joe Biden is taking up the Israeli response.
The thing that is most frustrating to me about the Israeli-Palestinian issue is it’s not as hard a political problem as people like to say it is. If you look back at South African apartheid, on paper that was a much more difficult political problem to resolve. But given intense international pressure, the two sides did come to a resolution. It hasn’t succeeded brilliantly, but it’s better than the situation they had in the past, and it has allowed that country to still function. The despair that defeats all potential resolutions to this problem has got to be rooted out. That’s the first thing. This is a problem that can be resolved, given international commitment to resolving it, and honestly acknowledging the problems that both sides face.
You talk in your piece about the three-state solution.
One state, two states, or three states are all better solutions than the continuing Israeli occupation, which is not only degrading to Palestinians but has profound moral consequences for Israel as well.
Do you think the news that one of the people killed was an American will change the way the story plays here?
Not a lot. It takes the focus off the idea that this was strictly a Turkish venture…. There’s an accumulating international consensus that the blockade in Gaza has to be lifted. But within that consensus there’s very little attention paid to the real security concerns that Israel has, and that’s the reason, I think, Israel feels so angry and isolated.
Would it be so hard to have a checkpoint system that blocked weapons and allowed everything else?
That’s not hard at all, and that’s the way it’s usually done. Netanyahu said, if we open up the blockade, Gaza will become a port for Iran. But it’s completely possible to maintain a ban on weapons just by inspecting what’s coming into the country without shutting out everything. Unfortunately, among the materials they consider dangerous are building supplies, which might be used, the Israeli authorities say, for constructing weapons. For instance, in the handmade missiles that were such a feature of the Hamas artillery, cement was used as ballast. On the other hand, people’s homes are destroyed, they are living in tents or under cardboard shelters, there’s a desperate humanitarian need to provide shelter, which is why cement and other building supplies are so urgently needed. As long as people are forced to live outside in handmade shelters with minimum daily calories and no work to do, radicalism will flourish.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/06/lawrence-wright-on-gaza.html#ixzz0qNTTJhJ5