Did you see Huda?

“Did you see Huda?”

Everywhere I go, this is the first question people ask.

“Did you see Huda?” They are asking if I’ve seen the pictures. They are asking if I’ve seen the footage of the 12-year-old girl pounding the sand next to her dead father’s body. They are asking if I know that this girl lost her entire family while trying to have a nice day at the beach. They are asking if I know that the occupation in Gaza is more intense than ever, that the Israeli government/army murders more and more people each day without consequence, that the world continues to blame Palestinians for engaging in a democratic process.

“I saw her, yes.”

Twelve people killed that day, 6 the next, 14 the next. And the shelling and bombing continues. Fatah blames Hamas, Hamas blames Fatah, and young men from each party find themselves fighting each other in the streets of Ramallah as the cars drive around and the drivers laugh and say, “For about 2 hours each day it’s like this, then everything goes back to normal.”

I learned how to say “divide and conquer” in Arabic the other day. The Israeli government must be sitting back and laughing over how well things are going for them these days. Israel murders civilians, annexes land, builds the Wall, prevents money from entering Palestine, watches the Palestinian population slip into dire poverty and begin to fight each other, and the people have yet to rise up with violence against Israel. Or even any kind of effective nonviolent campaign. People are talking, sure, but that’s about it. They are talking, and they are trying to survive (its own form of nonviolent resistance). They are talking about how Olmert and Peretz are worse than Sharon and Mofaz, how people are unable to live now, how they don’t know how they will continue with no salaries and no cooking gas.

That’s right, there’s no cooking gas in much of the West Bank now (I don’t know about Gaza but can only imagine things are even worse there). One Israeli company supplied all the cooking gas for the West Bank, and announced last month that they would no longer do so. Most people I’ve talked with have no idea why. My friends in Dheisheh refugee camp said something about the Palestinian Authority owing money to the company and this is punishment. I have no idea whether that’s true or not. Either way, the people are suffering.

I was talking with my friends about the importance of boycotting Israel, both a worldwide boycott and a Palestinian boycott, and we repeated a conversation we’ve had many times before.

“We can’t boycott Israel,” they say. “We can’t live without Israel.”

“You can boycott some things,” I say. “You don’t need to buy Tapuzina [Israeli juice]; you have Marawi [Palestinian juice].”

“Sure,” they say, “we can buy Marawi, but what will that do? All the basic necessities come from Israel. They’ve taken our water and now they sell it back to us, the electricity is from Israel, the gas is from Israel, what can we do?”

And so, in the absence of any hope for change from external political campaigns, they blame Hamas. Not everyone, but some people. They tell me that Hamas is unwilling to compromise with Fatah, Hamas doesn’t want a solution, even that Hamas is starting to become corrupt like Fatah was. Or maybe not exactly like Fatah was, but apparently many Arab and Muslim countries have offered money to Palestine, and there hasn’t been a way to get it here. The United States has threatened banks that transfer money to Palestinians and people who have tried to bring large sums of money through Rafah have been turned away (so much for an “open border” that’s supposedly not controlled by Israel). So individuals have been bringing small amounts of money, not enough to help all the people, so Hamas takes the money and distributes it to Hamas members in the form of small relief items (again, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, it’s just what I’ve heard…).

And meanwhile, everyone says, meanwhile the children are suffering. “I didn’t vote for Hamas,” one friend told me, “and my children certainly didn’t vote for Hamas.” “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Even if you did, why is that a reason to make you suffer?” It’s strange to find myself defending Hamas to my Palestinian friends, but of course I’m not suffering from a lack of basic necessities. Most people here are more practical than ideological, so of course they’ll think about all possible ways to change their situation. They can’t change American foreign policy, they can’t change Israeli policy, so they look closer to home and wish that Fatah and Hamas could come to some agreement that might be accepted by the world.

I’ve asked people what they think of the proposed referendum. Most seem to think it won’t lead anywhere, for one reason or another. One friend spent ten minutes trying to convince me of something I already believe: that consensus is the best way to make decisions. If Fatah and Hamas agree on something, he said, there is some hope. If the proposal goes to the people without the approval of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, even if 99% of the people vote for it, one person blows himself up in Tel Aviv and Israel will call all Palestinians terrorists and Palestinians will find themselves in a situation they all too often encounter: They will have made huge compromises, put in writing their willingness to give up some of their rights for the sake of peace, and this will become the new status quo, the new bottom line, as Israel continues to refuse to give up anything because not every Palestinian individual is behaving as they think he should.

Of course, all of this is my thinking, my construction of the political story based on conversations with people who aren’t all thinking this way right now. They are thinking about where there next meal will come from. They are wondering when their next paycheck will come. They are trying to figure out how to get from one place to the next through roadblocks, checkpoints, rising gas prices, and a permit system that is more restrictive than ever.

And they are thanking God for what they still have, thanking God that they are not Huda.

Did you see Huda?