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The Documentary Podcast - Episode Summary
A People's History of Gaza
Podcast Title: The Documentary Podcast Episode Title: A People's History of Gaza Hosted by: Tim Whewell Date: [Insert Date] Producer: BBC World Service
Overview This episode explores the complex history of Gaza from the establishment of the territory in 1948 to the present day, through the eyes of ordinary people, including teachers, musicians, doctors, and refugees. It delves into their personal stories and experiences during wars, invasions, and political turmoil, providing a human perspective on the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Key Themes and Discussions
- Historical Context
- Creation of Gaza (1948):
- Gaza became a home for a large number of refugees following the Arab-Israeli conflict.
- Palestinian historian Jihad Abu Salim highlights that the Gaza Strip did not exist as a defined area until 1948.
- Demographics:
- Post-1948, the population of Gaza swelled as refugees arrived, outnumbering the original residents.
- The territory became central to Palestinian identity due to this demographic shift.
- Life in Gaza
- Living Conditions:
- The initial conditions for refugees were dire, with makeshift shelters and limited resources.
- Over time, some improvement occurred, but many Gazans lived in overcrowded and inadequate conditions.
- Cultural Identity:
- The episode highlights various cultural aspects, such as bird-watching, music, and education, as forms of resistance and identity for the people of Gaza.
- Wars and Intifadas
- Significant Wars:
- The Six-Day War (1967) led to Israeli occupation, changing the dynamics of life in Gaza.
- The first (1987) and second (2000) Intifadas marked significant uprisings against Israeli control, with widespread violence and civilian casualties.
- Impact of Violence:
- Personal accounts from Gazans reflect the trauma and loss experienced during these periods of conflict.
- Political Developments
- Hamas' Rise to Power (2006):
- The episode discusses the election of Hamas and the subsequent political divide with Fatah, leading to increased tensions and violence.
- The impact of Hamas' governance on everyday life in Gaza is explored, including how they gained support among the populace.
- Blockades and Restrictions:
- After Hamas came to power, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, exacerbating humanitarian crises and economic hardships.
- Personal Stories and Resilience
- Narrative of Ordinary People:
- The episode presents individual stories that illustrate resilience in the face of adversity.
- Accounts from people like Iseldin Abu Elish, a doctor who lost family members in conflicts, highlight the personal toll of ongoing violence.
- Cultural and Social Struggles:
- The struggles of artists and musicians in expressing their identities under political and social pressures are also covered.
- Recent Events
- The episode culminates in discussing the current state of Gaza, touching on the ongoing violence and humanitarian issues exacerbated by conflict.
- Personal stories of survivors, activists, and those who have fled the region are shared, demonstrating the continuous cycle of hope and despair.
Conclusion The episode “A People's History of Gaza” presents a nuanced view of the Gaza Strip, emphasizing the human experiences behind the headlines. It captures the richness of life amid hardship, the complexities of identity, and the enduring hope for peace and stability.
Key Takeaways
- Understanding Gaza's history is essential to comprehend the current geopolitical landscape.
- The personal narratives of Gazans provide profound insights into the impact of conflict on everyday lives.
- The resilience of the people amid adversity is a recurring theme, highlighting their enduring spirit and cultural identity.
Listening Information For more insights on global stories and unique perspectives, listen to The Documentary Podcast available on [BBC](http://www.bbc.com) or wherever you get your podcasts.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. Police! From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
1:00Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07Thanks for downloading this documentary podcast from the BBC World Service. After two years of devastating war, Gaza's at another crossroads in its history. Now, perhaps with a better future ahead. I'm Tim Hewell. I've reported from the Strip as a BBC correspondent and what's always struck me is the energy, the sheer vitality of the place, despite all its problems. I've got to know some of its people, but I didn't know much about Gaza's history back to when the Strip came into being as a separate territory full of refugees in 1948. So, in the middle of the war, with some difficulty, I tried to find out, talking, usually remotely, to ordinary people.
1:50Here's the result, a people's history of Gaza. It's sometimes sad, sometimes surprising, occasionally even hopeful.
2:03From the beginning, there was a long strip of sand where Asia meets Africa. The desert reaches the sea, a geographic corridor. Look up in any spring till recently, and it wasn't drones or fighter planes you saw.
2:24In March, there are so many migratory birds. When we were younger, storks decorated the sky. Gara Sirda is a garden bird watcher.
2:40Thousands and thousands of them flying in beautiful waves. We wouldn't even see the blue of the sky. It was just covered in birds. Lack Lack. Storks are named in Arabic after the clattering of their long red bills. This is A People's History of Gaza with me, Tim Hewell, here on the BBC World Service. It's mainly recent oral history within living memory. It doesn't explain all the ins and outs of the conflict. It's mainly personal, bottom-up history, the experience of ordinary people, not politicians. and it starts with people looking up at storks because for storks, the beach extends much further along the eastern Mediterranean than the 40 kilometres of the Gaza Strip.
3:30We got used to thinking about Gaza only through the lens of the Strip, as a standalone territory, as if it was always been there, isolated from the world. But of course this is wrong. Dutan Halevi, an Israeli historian of Gaza. The town the Strip's named after goes back to biblical times. It sits, or sat, between dunes and, north of the desert, rich green fields. For many centuries it had been mostly cultivated with barley. Barley for beer, supped with gusto by thirsty Britons, as brewing boomed in the heyday of empire. Do, do, come and have a drink or two Down at the old Bullenbush Gaza supplies barley exactly the time when it is in shortage in Britain.
4:22And the Gaza barley, it has a character, and it is even called in British grain markets Gaza barley. But crash followed boom in the 20th century. Drought withered the barley, and Gaza was ruined in the First World War when the British fought their way north along that coastal corridor to take Palestine from the Turks. During the year 1917, Gaza suffered bombardments from destroyers at sea, from airplanes, from cannons. You'll still have ruins from World War I scattered within the city up until the 1940s. In 1945, the town's population, overwhelmingly Muslim, was only about 35 ,000, smaller than in 1914.
5:07But it was capital of a sub-district of Palestine, then run by the British under a League of Nations mandate, with more than 60 towns and villages, an area three times larger than today's Strip. The Gaza Strip, as a geographic entity, did not exist before 1948, before the establishment of the State of Israel. Palestinian historian Jihad Abu Salim. Gaza ended up the only part of the Palestinian coast that wasn't conquered by Israeli forces in 1948. In the first Arab-Israeli war, here's a Palestinian who was 12 at the time. My name is Aish Abdul Khaliq Muhammad Yunus from the village of Barbara, 12 kilometres north of Gaza City.
6:00It was famous for its grapes, its wheat, corn and barley. A friendly British soldier taught Aish to box, but otherwise the outside world intruded a little. We didn't know anything about politics until one day in late 1947, a maths class at the village school. The teacher just sat at his desk without saying a word. We chattered amongst ourselves. Then, after a whole hour, he stood up and asked, do you know why I didn't do the lesson today? There's a general strike over something the whole Arab world is talking about. The Jews are taking over Palestine. That was the Arab view of the United Nations vote for two states in Palestine.
6:56Partition of Palestine and seven months of deliberation by the United Nations and 2 ,000 years of political homelessness for the Jews. The plan gave the Jewish state slightly more than half the land, though Jews were then only about a third of the population. Most Jews in Palestine accepted the decision. Arabs said no. Soon there was civil war, And the day the British left in May 1948, Jewish leader David Ben-Gurion declared a new state, Israel.
7:33But it didn't define its borders. Next day, neighbouring Arab countries invaded what had been British Palestine. The Egyptians advanced up the coast, taking towns and villages, including Barbara, Aish's home.
7:51The Egyptian army promised we would be safe. They disarmed us and they took some of our lads to fight with them. But when they started to withdraw, we had no means to fight the Jews. So we all started to leave. The Israeli army, newly formed from existing Jewish militias, forced the Egyptians back south towards the town of Gaza. the people of Barbara followed. Was there like an order to leave? Was it from the Egyptians or was it from the Jews? No one told us anything, but we were scared for our lives.
8:36I rode away on a camel with my grandmother along a sandy road and I started to cry. We all felt the same, young and old. The future was dark. We had no idea how our lives would turn out. Raish's whole extended family left. They took only mattresses, some sacks of flour and their mehmas, the little pan for roasting coffee beans. When they got to Gaza, they arrived in this new territory. It's void of resources. It lacks the ability to sustain even the original residents, in addition to 200 ,000 who joined them.
9:25Jihad Abu Salim, one of the few historians of Gaza who grew up there. The strip of coast the Egyptians still held was nowhere more than 12 kilometres wide. Its population, before the refugees came, was about 80 ,000. It was just over 1 % of the area of historic Palestine, with none of its greatest cities. And it was separated by Israeli territory from a much larger area that remained in Arapans, the west bank of the River Jordan. Yet, from its very creation, the Strip became key to the wider conflict. Dutton Halevi. It is not Jaffa, it is not Haifa, it is not Jerusalem, it is Anablus. But out of this place of marginality, Gaza becomes the place where the concentration of Palestinian refugees is the highest.
10:14So Gaza becomes very central within the Palestinian experience and Palestinian identity, because this is where the majority of population is a result of the dispossession of 1948. Of what Palestinians called the Nakba, the catastrophe. In Gaza, unlike the West Bank, refugees outnumbered the original inhabitants. Nearly a third of the 700 ,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled when Israel was created were crammed into the Strip. How would they survive? We had bits of wood, which we propped against the walls of a building to make a shelter. But they didn't think they'd be staying long. And briefly, in late 1948, Raish and his family did return.
11:02But there was no more Barbara. No one there at all. Just a transit point where people could collect their basic possessions.
11:16went to the olive trees because it was harvest time. But Jews spotted them and started shouting, Aravim, Aravim, Arabs, Arabs. Then they were caught and dropped back near the border. By the following spring, the Gaza Strip had been formally demarcated in an Israeli-Egyptian armistice agreement, and the UN was establishing refugee camps. It filmed them in 1950 for a documentary Sands of Sorrow. Sprawling settlements of makeshift tents, patched with burlap and tar paper. A grave health menace exists in every camp. Few have adequate supplies of unpolluted water, and it is not unusual for these women to walk five miles for a day's supply.
12:05One learns to wait in refugee camps. Bukhra, tomorrow, will always get here. Seldom does one hear complaints, for the Arabs endure their misfortunes in silence. These are the themes which the world has not had an opportunity to see. The precious youth of a race being wasted. Death is no stranger in these camps. Later, tents were replaced by mud brick or concrete houses with asbestos roofs.
12:37Iseldin Abu Ileish was born in one, in Jabalia camp, in 1955. We had no electricity. We were studying on the kerosene lamp. There is no water, running water at home. Even the washrooms, the toilets, it's public. You don't feel your childhood at all. I used to wake up at 4 a.m. to go to the humanitarian centers to collect milk in order to sell it. We used to lie and to sleep. Nine people in one room, three meters by three meters. When one of my sisters was born and my mother was running after my brother because he did something wrong. He jumped while she is, you know, in the cradle there. The cradle.
13:27He jumped there and she passed away. Because of this small space in the room, she died. Falling from the cradle. Yes, that's the life in which we were born and lived. Everything around me in Jabalia Camp was shaped by loss, exile, by the stories of village left behind. My parents used it to tell us about the freedom, the wealth they have, the thousands of sheep and goats. They lived on this memory in the sudden to be refugees waiting for a humanitarian aid. It was very painful. Many refugees, like the dignified man in the black jacket, are college-educated graduates of American and Arab universities in Cairo and Beirut.
14:17This man is a mudir, once in better days the mayor of his town. His issue of flour, rice, margarine and beans is no larger than that for the humblest refugee. He gets no meat, for there is none. Their only identity was Palestinian. Jordan annexed the West Bank and gave refugees there Jordanian citizenship. But Egypt didn't do the same in Gaza. So the Strip remained officially the last remnant of what the UN had voted for in 1947 as the Palestinian state, Jihad Abu Salim. Under this Egyptian administration, Gaza was home to a short-lived old Palestine government that was declared in 1948 and continued to issue Palestinian passports.
15:07Perhaps after 1948, the Gaza Strip was the only part of Palestine that proactively embraced Palestinian nationalism on many levels.
15:25It was a Gazan poet, Haroun Hashim Rashid, who wrote the words of Sanarju Yoman, We will return one day, released in 1955 by the great Arab diva Farouz.
15:44But the same year, the Egyptian authorities violently suppressed mass protests against a plan to resettle some refugees in Egypt. The plan was revoked, but organisers were arrested. Later in the 50s, Egypt dissolved the all-Palestine government. By then, the cycle of cross-border violence was well established. Half a year ago, the Egyptians shelled our kibbutz. That's an Israeli interviewed by the BBC in 1956. The head of the milk herd was killed and two members had their legs amputated. They're now both in England having artificial limbs prepared for them and learning to use them. On the other side, young Palestinians the BBC talked to were clear what they wanted.
16:29I'm sure that we will go back home because Jamal Abdel Nasser said... The Egyptian president. We tried justice everywhere, but we failed. But he said, I found it. I found it. And it was the weapon, the weapon, the weapon. Do you think there ought to be another war then? Yes, we are asking war from the Egyptians. We are saying to them, welcome for war. We are the soldiers for the coming war. And how old are you? I am 14 years old. And what do you want to do when you grow up? I want to be a soldier to beat the Jews and take our land from them.
17:08The same year, Israel's army chief, Moshe Dayan, stood on the Gaza border and gave a eulogy to a young Kibbutz security guard, Roy Rotberg, murdered by Egyptian-backed Palestinian fighters. It's one of the most famous speeches in Israeli history. Dayan talked of Gazan refugees watching as the land they used to live on was transformed by Israelis, though those lines were missed out when he later recorded the speech for radio. He went on to say Israelis shouldn't flinch from seeing the hatred that filled the lives of Arabs around them. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.
17:54War came later in 1956.
18:03President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. In response, Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt. Israel occupied Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in what Israel said was an attempt to root out Palestinian fighters. But it withdrew after four months. And Gaza saw a decade of relative quiet, even modest development. Egypt made it a free trade zone. The money earned is invested in land, and this is why the citrus industry is flowering.
18:40More oranges, more lemons, and more graduates. Gaza had no university, but President Nasser gave Gazans scholarships to study in Egypt. Raish Yunis, who'd arrived by Camo in 1948, was in Cairo finishing his literature degree when the Israelis reoccupied Gaza in 1967. That was in the Six-Day War, when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, Jordan and Syria, believing they were about to attack it. Isoldein Abu Elish, then aged 12, saw the Israelis arrive in Jabalia. The Israeli army, they called the people of the camp, all of them together, and they started, of course, to arrest the young men, and I thought it's the end of the world.
19:28Ghazan's feared a repetition of the 1956 killings. This time, though, Israel soon released most of those it had rounded up, but the Israelis were to stay much longer than before. What was the difference between life under Israel and life as it had been under Egypt? Under Egypt, we were poor, displaced, and decrowded, but we were among our own, among our people. And the tone then was one of short Arab grief, not domination, but everything changed in 1967. Suddenly, there were uniforms, guns, curfews, soldiers in our street. It wasn't just that our lives were restricted. It was that our very existence became a threat in the eyes of those who ruled us.
20:21In the Gaza Strip, Israel basically is reintroduced to the people it dispossessed in 1948. So Israel has to think very hard of what to do with this. Israeli historian Dottan Halevi. Of course it cannot annex formally the Gaza Strip because otherwise it would have to give citizenship to this enormous population of Palestinians. So Israel will try to integrate them economically into Israel, allowing Palestinians to work in Israel in order to make life more bearable. So it opened the border and kept it fairly open for 20 years to the benefit of Gazans and Israelis. I'm Ronnie Kedar. I live in Ativa Asara, which is the closest village to the Gaza Strip.
21:10People came to work with us. It was quite a normal situation between the boss and his workover in a nice way, definitely. We'd invite them over when we had a family event. Some of the Israelis went through as well. They went to a dentist in Gaza because it was more convenient, nearer and much cheaper. and there was an industrial area with Israelis and Arab people from Gaza working together. Cabinet makers, manufacturers of school bags, different types of uniforms. The early years of the Israeli occupation brought electricity and piped water to some homes in the camps. Ayish Yunus, now graduated, became a teacher in a school run by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
22:00His son Ahmed studied medicine in Egypt and in his vacations worked in Israel in a fish restaurant run by an Iraqi Jew who liked the same Arabic music as him.
22:21I didn't feel that I am in Israel, to be honest with you. I felt that I am in an Iraqi village. Not everyone fell on their feet. Isoldein Abu Elish says he worked like a slave tenting geese in Israel, aged 14. But many older Gazans remember those years, the 70s and early 80s, as the best in their lives. During that time in Israel, people were paid very well. And this is the period of time where the Palestinians made most of their money. Refugees could replace their basic UN-built homes. We built two storeys' house. The first storey was concrete and then the second storey was asbestos. We increased the rooms to nine rooms, including the kitchen and bathroom.
23:10His family needed the space. We are 18 brothers and sisters. How many? 18. And we are considered to be the largest family in the whole Palestine from one father and one mother. Ten boys and eight girls.
23:31Between 1967 and the end of the century, Gaza's population almost tripled to more than a million. Women were having as many babies as in much poorer parts of the world. But in Gaza, more survived, thanks in large measure to UN humanitarian services. And many grew up to be very well educated. My dad insists that we will have a degree. Every single one except Fadia, who said, I want to marry, I don't want to study. Ayesh's son, Ahmed, he became a specialist in spinal cord injuries and now lives in London. His brothers and sisters became engineers, nurses, teachers, several of them outside Gaza. I have a brother living in Saudi Arabia, two sisters as well in Saudi Arabia, brother living in Abu Dhabi, brother living in Oman.
24:24Hey, handsome, you're going abroad, you'll get rich, you'll forget me. Many Ghazan families are as scattered as Aish is. In the Strip, under Israeli occupation, there wasn't the investment to create enough jobs. Dutton Halevi. What Israel is trying to do is to enable prosperity on the expense of development. It means enabling the circulation of cash money in the Strip. People can buy refrigerator and watch television. However, Israel restricts development of businesses within the Gaza Strip. Israel do not allow banks, Arab banks, that would give loans. And by the 1980s, half of Gaza's labor force is working in Israel, Only as unskilled labour, but not in professions like lawyers, like engineers.
25:20Palestinians are not allowed to compete, Israeli professionals. So Israel constructs the Gaza Strip as a complete dependent economy. But similar restrictions didn't apply to one set of Gaza residents who arrived after 1967, Jewish settlers such as Lorenz Beziz. I'm originally from France. I lived for 19 years in the Gaza Strip. The government encouraged people to go. We were farmers and basically everything was built on sand dunes, barren sand dunes. That was maybe also what brought people there, that feeling of building everything from scratch, like pioneers. Eventually, more than 8 ,000 Jews, religious and secular, lived in a network of settlements in the south of the Strip called Gush Katif.
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26:12In Hebrew, literally, the Harvest Block. One was on the site of a Jewish village abandoned in 1948. They grew vegetables and flowers in greenhouses, mainly for export to Europe. It was beautiful to live by the seashore, the palm trees, the dunes and the seashore. You had to shake the sand off your feet every night before you went to bed? More or less, yes. We had a lot of problems with our washing machines because everything would always be sent. The washing machine very often would not be able to work afterwards.
26:54Chol bagarbaim, Sand in Your Socks, is the title of a collection of children's songs about Gush Katif. How come in the middle of Gaza, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, we know it's a really very kind of densely populated area in general, how come there was so much space? Because even if the Arabs are also farmers, no one wanted to be in these sand dunes because they say, you know, we cannot grow anything. By the early 2000s, according to Israeli statistics, settlers were using eight times as much water per person as local Palestinians. Israeli planning policies favoured settlers and tried to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza, or at least to move out of refugee camps.
27:41They came by midnight and they asked us to evacuate our house. It has to be demolished at 8am. Isolde and Abu Elish, remembering Jabalia in 1970. Israeli military commander Ariel Sharon was widening streets so his forces could move more easily. When the bulldozers, they come, this is the most difficult moment in my life. And they asked us if we want to go to Al-Arish in Egypt because Al-Arish at that time, it was under the Israeli occupation. They want to give us money to go there and we refused. We didn't go there. We went to my uncle's house without any compensation. The idea, as it is conceived by Israel, is that what basically cemented the refugee identity is the living conditions.
28:37And when they are miserable, they are holding to an imagined paradise lost as Israel sees this. Historian Dutan Halevi. So Israel sees this and said, OK, so basically the refugee camps are a replica of Mandate Palestine. However, if we will give them newly built neighborhoods, they will not be refugees anymore. They will just be inhabitants of Gaza. So it is conditioned upon refugees that wants to move to these better neighborhoods that Israel establishes to destroy their former houses in the refugee camp by their own hands. Make it sort of a symbolic and all the way to the 1990s. People are moving into these neighbourhoods, not maybe in the amounts that Israel planned.
29:24However, of course, it has nothing to do with a different development of consciousness or Palestinian identity because history is not freezing in time in the meantime. Even young people whose lives were improving materially, such as Ahmed Yunus, whose family kept their expanded house in Barbara Camp, chafed under the surveillance of the occupation forces. I do remember when I started to be a teen-ager, really. just walking in the streets, an intelligent officer from the Israeli side will stop next to any sort of young adult, and he will hand him a paper. It's happened to me. Come, I would like to interview you in my office.
30:01And if you did not go, in the middle of the night, soldiers will come to arrest you. They would like to know what you are doing, what you are thinking, who are your friends. And if you have seen anything, you must come and tell us. Almost like ask you, can you be a collaborator with us. It's like the people start to be suffocated. Something has happened, and the first intifada happened. You're listening to A People's History of Gaza from the BBC World Service with me, Tim Hewell, the backstory of the Strip since its creation more than 70 years ago, told mainly through the memories of ordinary people.
30:39We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts. America is changing and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.
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32:11The first intifada, or uprising, began in Gaza, in Jabalia camp, in December 1987. An Israeli truck had workmen waiting to go to their work and hit them and killed them. This was the straw, actually. Four Palestinian workers were killed. Israel said the crash wasn't intentional.
32:34but it sparked nearly six years of riots, rock throwing and civil disobedience. More than 150 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, some in suicide bombings. Israeli forces killed more than a thousand Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Tyres are flaming in the middle of the roads everywhere. Tyres flaming and demonstrations, people in the streets and then we start to have all these injured people from either gunshot or being beaten, coming to the clinic for treatment. Ahmed was by then working as a doctor. I myself consider myself, I was part of the Intifada, not because I was throwing stones on the Israeli soldiers, but I was treating people who were being injured.
33:19I found myself, I can do something now, I am doing it. The Intifada ended as a new peace process gained momentum. The exiled Palestinian leadership recognised Israel, and in 1994 a Palestinian authority was established. It would administer parts of the West Bank and all of Gaza. Israeli troops withdrew from population centres in the Strip, but still protected Jewish settlers. Not everyone wanted peace. A group founded by refugees in Gaza in 1987, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or to use its Arabic acronym, Hamas, was pledged to the destruction of Israel, and it knew how to work a crowd.
34:04In this comedy sketch for supporters in 1996, they're poking fun at a cheeky smoker who wants to buy his cigarettes on credit. Of course, there was nothing funny about Hamas, which would later be prescribed by the US, the UK and other countries as a terrorist organisation. It had already killed scores of Israelis in suicide attacks. But, as the 20th century drew to a close, the overall mood in Gaza was of unprecedented optimism.
34:41Institutions of Palestinian nationhood were created, including a police force with ceremonial bagpipes. Then, to cap it all...
34:53I was in the school and they said that Clinton will come tomorrow. Rami Amman was then 13. And we went to the street, I think waited for two or three hours, raising the American flags. Yeah, I was very happy. This was my dream about Gaza. The President of the United States and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, accompanied by Chairman Yasser Arafat and Mrs Suha Arafat.
35:23And I would like to give you the honour to cut the ribbon to announce the inauguration and the opening of Gaza International Airport. An airport, the promise, surely, of a shining future. Everyone was watching on television with a smile on their face because opening the airport was the peak of the beauty of Gaza and the success of Gaza, honestly. Hamis Abushaban, also in school then. In the golden moments of Gaza, Gaza was going only up, only up from 1994 until 2000. Gaza was heading up and then the curve started going down for Gaza. Everything went wrong. What went wrong after that? Intifada.
36:14My mother woke me up. She said, there will be no school today, my son. There is an intifada. That day was when everything started to change. Everything. What is intifada? She said, you know Sharon, he went into Al-Aqsa mosque and there were clashes and everyone was angry. A second intifada. Like the first, 13 years earlier, it was triggered by one event. This time a tour by Ariel Sharon, by now Israeli opposition leader of Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. But behind that again was deep frustration. The peace process had stalled. The Palestinian Authority hadn't led to a Palestinian state. When the Second Intifada started, I was 12 years old, 13 years old, September 2000.
37:11Historian Jihad Abu Salim, then growing up in Deir al-Bah, in the centre of the Strip. This Intifada lasted four years, about 1 ,000 Israelis were killed, and about 3 ,000 Palestinians killed by Israelis. In the middle of the school day, when the news arrived of 10 or 15 people getting killed in Gaza or in the West Bank or in Jerusalem, the students, including myself, will gather in the center of the school and we chanted for the prisoners. We chanted for sometimes revenge. We chanted, The gates of the Aqsa mask are made of iron. They can only be opened by the martyrs.
38:02There were students who wanted to march to the nearest Israeli settlement and participate in, you know, throwing stones or carrying signs. And of course, there were also funerals every day. So we would leave the school, go to the mosque, accompany the precision to the cemetery. The Intifada led to the closing off of Gaza. Just three years after its triumphal opening, its international airport saw the last flight depart in 2001. Soon afterwards, the Israeli military bulldozed the runway for fear planes could bring in weapons and the Strip's land borders were tightening, as Khamis Abu-Shaban remembers.
38:44In the 90s, we travelled every year in the summer vacation to Jordan through Israel. But after the Antifada, you have to go through many, many checkpoints and you have to register before you travel and maybe you will get banned from travel. So it started to be different. Hamis's friend, Mohamed Ramani, a budding musician, had a way of escaping everyday reality within the strip. But gradually he lost that too. I was going to the north and the east of Gaza just to smell the flower of orange and lemon trees. It filled all the place. But after that, Israel pulled off all these trees because they don't want any of the resistance to hide.
39:31They want to see the view is clear. Orchards near the border were launching sites for missiles. We ask God to bless these rockets. May they make the Zionists taste the severest torment, this Hamas militant says, before firing.
39:53their target often was nativa sarah the home of ronnie cadar and everything we did was always at the back of my mind is there a nearby shelter do we know where to run to if not we have to lie on the ground with our hands on our heads and hope for the best But there were still settlements inside Gaza, Israeli settlements. And that was when Ayersharon decided that he is going to take all the Israelis out of Gaza, leave Gaza completely. And then, he said, then I'll be able to retaliate any way I can to stop the rockets from coming across. In 2005, Sharon, by then Israel's prime minister, ordered the removal of all settlers, including Lorenz Beziz.
40:45I don't think I cried. I cried after a lot and before. For the kids, I just wanted maybe to look a little strong or whatever. But some settlers did cry. By what right? By what right? This woman's screaming at soldiers. And some resisted, clutching prayer books as they were dragged away by soldiers. But Lorenz says most kept their dignity. 80 % of the families came out of their homes singing, holding hands, holding on to the house, until the last minute I can, even embracing soldiers, understanding that they are doing their job. In Katif I live here, and what I want to say to the soldiers, that I love them.
41:35But I'm also doing my job of showing my love to the land of Israel. We sing a lot of holy songs, deep words of comfort, of distress. These, from the prophet Isaiah, speak the word, but it shall not stand, for God is with us.
42:04When they'd gone and their homes had been dismantled, Palestinians flocked to the site, some to root, as Rami Amman, by now a journalist, remembers. Some of them, they want to take anything. You will find food, you will find alcohol. Yeah, they were happy about the alcohol, I still remember. The mangoes, electrical generators, others they come to see. To stare at the greenhouses, the lawns, and enjoy the magnificent beach and wetlands beyond that were open to Palestinians for the first time in a generation.
42:42We were stopped from visiting it when the settlements were still there. There were barriers, checkpoints. Laura Sirda, who with her twin sister Mandy, was keen to get bird watching again. So after 2005, did you go there? I'm just interested, what did it look like? The vegetation was so beautiful. It was so rich in wildlife because there are natural aquifers there.
43:13We documented so many migratory and resident species. There were Palestine sunbirds, the Sirdar twins' favourite, their small, iridescent turquoise with down-curved beaks, black-crowned night herons, quails and sand partridges. More recently, in the last two years, that same rare ecosystem in Al Mawasi was covered by a vast tent city, sheltering hundreds of thousands of people. But back to 2005. Who would govern a Gaza without Israelis, though they still controlled its borders? In January 2006, elections were held in Gaza and the West Bank. Jihad Abu Salim, now aged 18, was a monitor. Everybody in Gaza was excited.
44:03Everybody wanted to take part in what we deemed than the most important democratic event in our lifetime. I was there, I was wearing my badge and a special hat that they gave the people who were engaged in monitoring. I was there at 6 a.m. And I saw how people were coming in queues, in lines, very organized, going into the booths where they voted. I remember all the representatives of Fatih, the political party that had the majority then, they were all confident that there's no way Hamas would be able to win. And I was there as the votes were being counted. And seeing the faces of the, you know, Fatih delegates, it became obvious that there will be a different winner this time.
44:47And I remember the next day when it was announced that Hamas had won the elections.
45:03We want a state, peace and safety. I want to sleep without fearing a Jew will take away my husband or children, a woman at a Hamas celebration shouts. Hamas got slightly less than half the votes cast, 44%. But that was enough for victory. How had they done it? Before this period, we don't know about Hamas. Musician Mohamed Romani. But in the Second Intifada, it was a good environment for them to absorb people and absorb people's mind because they were showing that they were fighting for the land. I don't mean that the people like the resistance life. No, but actually the Palestinian Authority, they don't have anything to solve the problem with israel so at this period hamas like took the the spotlight and when the election start they collected a good money to make a good publicity they're sending buses to people to take them to the election place people start thinking that hamas is taking care of us hamas is giving money for people hamas is trying to save this land from Israel, and this is why Hamas won the election.
46:21The Black Day. It was the most fateful turning point in Gaza's recent history. International powers had pushed for the elections. They thought Hamas would lose. But when it won, they were categorical. They wouldn't recognise a Hamas government unless it committed itself to renouncing violence and recognising Israel, which wasn't going to happen.
46:50A year later, Hamas and Fatah, the losers in the elections, were fighting in the streets for control of Gaza. Hamis Abu-Shaban was trying to concentrate on his final school exams. But I know that everything is changing around me. No one goes to the streets. There were armed people in the house next to me, hiding in the bushes, preparing their weapons, because there is a battle in the next street. Exactly one day before the final exam started, a friend of mine was shot in the heart and he was killed. The closest friend to me. He was not part of the clashes. They were marching and holding flags that says no to the division between Fatah and Hamas.
47:33And he was killed while trying to help his friend who was also shot and left to die in the street. so he was, you know, crawling to help him. I saw a video of him getting shot and I saw him dead. You face death and you see death with your own eyes. Eventually, I finished my exams and now Hamas is controlling. From then on, Hamas ran Gaza, while Fatah took control in the West Bank. Israel and Egypt closed Gaza's borders, and Israel imposed severe restrictions on the movement of goods in order, it said, to put pressure on Hamas and prevent arms smuggling. Hamas continued sending rockets across the border.
48:22In what it said was an attempt to stop them, Israel launched an unprecedented offensive in Gaza, Operation Cast Oled, at the end of 2008.
48:34ISALDIN ABOU-ELEISH from Jabalia was one of very few doctors from the Palestinian territories with a job in Israel. Now he rushed home to the camp to make sure his children were safe. And we stayed at home and the continued attacks, drones, F-16. And then after one week, they started the ground operation. They disconnected us from electricity, from water, from everything. So I started to think how to organise my children at my home. Three to sleep under one wall, three under the other wall, and three on the other, in case they bombarded us, not all of us to be killed. The house is shaking. The doctor was often invited on Israeli TV to describe the war, but this time, live on air, he broke down.
49:39He just found three of his daughters, Besan, age 21, Mayar, 15, Aya, 13, and his 17-year-old niece, Nour, dead in the next room, killed by Israeli tank fire. Their heads had been blown off their bodies. An Israeli military investigation later said that figures suspected of directing sniper fire against Israeli troops had been spotted on the roof of their house. Two days later, Israel ended its operation. 13 Israelis and well over 1 ,000 Palestinians had been killed in the three-week war. Dr Abu Elish buried his daughters, and the blockade of Gaza intensified. People use cooking oil for cars, not to use gas.
50:25Israel even they used to measure the calories, what kind of food, how many calories each Palestinian needs in order to survive. That estimation, 2 ,279 calories per gazan per day, came in an Israeli defence ministry research paper in 2008. The ministry denied it ever used it to limit supplies. but the UN said only a quarter as many goods were being allowed into Gaza as before the blockade. Soon, an alternative supply route developed under the Egyptian border, close to Ahmed Yunus's family home in Rafa. You will see the tunnels bringing ceramic from Egypt, another tunnel bringing meat and crisps and another bringing out flour.
51:12I remember the Gaza people, they really lived a very good life because during that time everything that was in Gaza was produced in Egypt and prices, almost half the price from the Israeli price. Cheese, cement, whatever you think, everything was smuggled from the tunnels. On a visit to Rafa in those years, I met one of the army of smugglers. Mohammed, aged 18, worked 10-hour shifts underground, constantly terrified that the earth above him would collapse.
51:46It's death work. Exhausting. Yesterday I walked 500 metres carrying a car on it. I was sweating all over. There is no ventilation down there. You feel you can't breathe. You can't carry on. That's why you take tablets. Like many Gazans, Mohamed had become addicted to the opioid painkiller Tramadol. He suffered side effects including fits, sleeplessness and suicidal depression. But Hamas profited from a tax on tunnel imports. And though shops had cheap goods, the blockade forced productive businesses to close. So the people start to lose their jobs more and more. Ahmed Yunus. The only people who can employ you is Hamas.
52:32Either being a soldier, being a policeman, being a doctor if you are a nurse. Ahmed had moved abroad long before Hamas took control. But when he returned on a visit for medical aid for Palestinians, he was shocked. When I met with the Minister of Health in Gaza, and then when I saw the people and all the people around him, they were from Hamas background. Hamas family is Hamas background, yeah. Hamas will give the priority to the people they belong to them. Gaza had Hamas families, Fatah families, and many families like the Eunices who wanted nothing to do with politics. Ahmed's father, Aish, had become a mukhtar, a local headman.
53:11He wasn't appointed by Hamas, but they respected him. Gaza's rulers, however, didn't respect younger people who were pushing back against increasingly conservative social norms. Watar Band, formed by musicians Hamis Abushaban and Mohamed Lamani, was finding it ever harder to perform, as Hamis recalls. They started to say that if you want to make a concert, you have to register at a police station. And later on, they started to talk about girls and how girls should be participating or not. I remember the last group whom we played with them in 2009, we actually held this concert on the rebel of Red Crescent Centre, destroyed during the war of 2008-2009.
53:59And then everything started to change. Hamas was putting rules. If you make a group with girls, you will be put to jail. And maybe the girls also will be put to jail.
54:16The people want the fall of the regime. That was the slogan across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, in the Arab Spring. But in Gaza, where many felt oppressed by both Hamas and Israel, there were no major protests.
54:35And though some small ones started later, the slogan was, the people want an end to division. They meant Palestinian factionalism, A student, Roba Salibi, from a new group, Gaza Youth Breaks Out, told me. The biggest problem which was made by the division in the last four years is the culture of hating. The brother is from Fatih and his brother was from Hamas, so he should hate him. The two factions tried repeatedly to reconcile in the following years, but failed. And the cycle of Palestinian-Israeli violence triggered two more wars in Gaza, Eight days in 2012, seven weeks in 2014. Through it all, Hamisa Bouchaban and Watar Band went on making music.
55:22As the bombs drop over Gaza, patience has just escaped me, escaped me. We teach life, so we teach life. Their song, We Teach Life, was composed in 2012. It speaks about a conversation between a Palestinian person and an Israeli soldier. Eventually, the Israeli says, you teach your kids to come and die, to kill themselves. She replied to him that we teach life, sir. No one teaches kids to die. But the journalist Rami Amman believed that's just what Hamas was trying to teach Gazans. Shocked by its reaction to the war of 2008-2009, he'd become a peace activist. Hamas celebrated after the killing of 1 ,400 Palestinians in 2009.
56:21For me, no, it was, how come it's a victory? Hamas said it's a victory. And in 2009, I decided to be what I am now. No more wars. And yeah, we started an initiative called Skype with Your Enemy in 2014. Skype with Your Enemy? Skype with your enemy, yeah. The music was beautiful. Your words were beautiful. One enemy he Skyped over the following years was Rani Kedar, the Israeli farmer who lived just over the border. Then one day I saw on television a summer camp for children in Gaza run by the Hamas. Young children of 13, even 12 maybe, with rifles in their hands, shouting, get rid of Israel and so on.
57:07And Asha sat there crying. And I called my friend Rami and I said, Rami, I want you to take children out to nature and let them play and dance and draw. Rami and his group, Gaza Youth Committee, organised activities like that. Open protests against Hamas were rare. Until 2017.
57:33When an electricity shortage, Gazans were getting just a few hours a day, triggered demonstrations against mismanagement by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Thousands of people went to the streets asking Hamas to solve the electricity crisis. Some clashes happened. Hamas security started to fire. Then everyone ran. and then they started to arrest many activists and Gazans.
58:09In 2018, independent activists, this time soon backed by Hamas, began a series of anti-Israel protests near the border. They called it the Great March of Return, demanding to go back to where refugees came from in 1948, and some tried to breach the border fence. Ronny Kedar was watching from the other side. I could see it was masses of people coming across with Palestinian flags and saying, they're coming back. It was loud, it was very loud. They were also sending the balloons and the kites across with all kinds of small bombs and trying to set fire to all the fields around us. Burning the wheat that had replaced the barley the region was once famous for.
58:56Roni called a Palestinian friend, Ahmed, on the other side in a conversation captured in a documentary. Hello, Ahmed. Hi, I'm here with you. And I'm looking across to Gaza. And I see the smoke and I see the houses. And it's still not quiet. How are you? I'm OK, but some tears from my eyes. Gaza is like a hell now. People number one increasing day after day to the border area because of the difficulty of their family life situation. His eyes are tearing from the gas that's thrown on them. Just then, a soldier came up to me and he said, don't you know what happened here yesterday? Someone was shot there.
59:45You can't stand here and talk. You must get away. The protests lasted nearly two years. Israeli troops fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition at people approaching the fence. They aimed, Israel said, mainly at demonstrators' legs, but more than 200 were killed. Israel said many were militants from Hamas and other factions. Through it all, Rani, in Israel, went on talking to Gazans. All right, Ahmed, I have to end the talk now. I may call you back and I may not. I'll speak to you anyway. Bye-bye. That snapshot of two ordinary people divided by a fence is perhaps the moment to draw this backstory of Gaza to a close.
1:00:32Five years later, in October 2023, Hamas fighters would break through the fence, kill 1 ,200 Israelis, many of them at a dance festival, take 251 hostages and trigger a devastating war. Roni Qedar, hiding in a safe room in her village, Netiv Haasara, survived the attack. 20 people were murdered. 20 people we all know extremely well. I'd still get up at night sometimes thinking it's difficult even to conceive to understand how we managed to escape. She still works for peace, though some of her family can't understand why. One day I'm in the light and one day I'm in the dark. But I can't give up that hope.
1:01:23I just can't. Tim, we can't go on like this. Her activist friend in Gaza, Rami Aman, was arrested by Hamas in 2020 for his contacts with Israel. They held him for six months, sometimes under torture. They will treat your body with all things, your legs, your hands, insult you. Rami now lives in Egypt. Meanwhile, Aish Yunus, who came to Gaza on a camel in 1948, is now 89. The name Aish, by the way, means alive. The four-storey house his family eventually built in Rafa is now destroyed. Aish lives again in a tent, as he did when he first arrived in the strip. One of his daughters, Fadwa, was killed in crossfire in the Fatah Hamas clashes of 2007.
1:02:17But his other 17 children have survived. Nine in Gaza, eight abroad, and he has 79 grandchildren. As for the musicians, Hamis Abu Shaban and Mohamed Omani, they're now composing and performing in France. And Dr Izzeldin Abu Elish lives in Canada, his family home in Jabalia, a pile of rubble. The graves even of my daughters were destroyed which were the first thing when I go back to Gaza to visit And the sea? That's still there of course I took my daughters before the war I took them to the beach to show them a piece of land that I bought that we can build a new house there and they laughed and they started to write their names on the sand and every now and then the wave to come to clean their names.
1:03:18That's why for me the beach in Gaza holds my own boyhood wonder, my daughter's laughter. It holds what was, what is and what could be.
1:03:35The Seadar twins Lara and Mandy, haven't been able to go out bird-watching much recently. This spring, they did go out on the beach with their binoculars, but there were no stalks. The bombing, I think they were too scared to come, and the places they would normally land have been levelled.
1:04:00No, this year we didn't record a single one.
1:04:11A People's History of Gaza was produced and presented by me, Tim Hewell, with sound mixing by Neil Churchill. The production coordinator was Katie Morrison and the editor, Penny Murphy.
1:04:25We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
From the publisher
The back-story of Gaza, from the 1940s to the 2010s, told through the personal experiences of a wide variety of ordinary people - a teacher, a smuggler, a bird-watcher, musicians, doctors and others. Tim Whewell finds out how the tiny territory was created, how it first filled with refugees, how people lived, worked and died, how they survived invasions, wars and blockade, how hopes for peace rose and fell - under the rule of Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas. How did refugees arrive in Gaza in 1948? Why is the Strip so important to Palestinian identity - and the wider Palestinian-Israeli conflict? How did living conditions gradually improve? How did the 1967 Six Day War change people's lives? Why did the two intifadas of 1987 and 2000 break out? When were the best times for Gazans in recent history? What changed for them after Hamas took control in 2007? Tim asks these and many other questions in this journey through the recent history of a sliver of land that has often dominated world news.
