Mourning Palestinian-Israeli friendships lost
Posted: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 3:38 PM
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Tel Aviv, Israel
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Correspondent
TEL AVIV – Once upon a time in Gaza. And not so long ago. There were no border controls between Gaza and Israel.
Israelis happily went shopping in the Gaza market and ate cheap meals at fish restaurants on the Gaza beach, while Gazans drove to Tel Aviv to work and to play. Fear was rare then and friendships were common.
Customs were different, of course. In 1983, my NBC friend and colleague, Jim Maceda, sold his blue Peugeot 504 station wagon to a Gazan merchant. Jim and his friend, Amikam, drove to the man's apartment on the ground floor of a building. The Gazan opened the wide doors, cleared the living room. They drove the car inside, parked it by the TV, and the doors were closed again. Then they sat looking at the car, and drank tea to celebrate.
But as an Arab friend told me today, "Those were the good old days before the peace process."
The first of many battles
When Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, the relationship between Israelis and Gazans became one of occupier and occupied. But as far as daily life was concerned, the relationship was more one of amiable neighbors, even though Gaza was clearly the poor cousin.
Over the years Palestinian resentment against the occupation grew and finally exploded in the first Palestinian intifada in December 1987, when the occupied rose up against the occupiers. Palestinians hurled rocks and molotov cocktails, and Israeli soldiers did their best – as their Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin recommended at the time – to break their bones.
After three years of violent riots and violent response, frustration and hatred grew. Israelis couldn't visit Gaza in safety, while Palestinians only crossed into Israel to work after going through stringent security checks.
Later the 1994 Oslo peace process formalized passage between Gaza and Israel, although it was mostly Jewish settlers living in Gaza and Palestinians working in Israel who passed through the ever-increasing border formalities.
After Israel evacuated all the settlers three years ago, when Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza, the border clanged shut; it was opened only periodically to allow groups of Palestinian workers in, depending on Israeli needs.
Mourning friendships past
But talking to Israelis this week in Ashkelon and Sderot, two of the towns bearing the brunt of Palestinian rockets, I heard a generous dose of nostalgia for those good old days, mixed with some anger and lust for revenge.
Two women in Sderot, a town which has been hit by 5,000 rockets from Gaza in eight years, shared a hill with me overlooking the bombing of Gaza. Their fury at the Hamas rockets and concern for their soldier sons fighting inside Gaza was mixed with regret for a lost way of life: They remembered with fondness the days of neighborly relations with the Palestinians less than a mile away.
Pnina and David Yamin in Ashkelon reminisced about weddings when Gazan friends joined their celebrations. Their fear of the bombs today is mixed with concern for their old Palestinian friends, with whom they have lost contact.
Today, with all the rockets and bombs and deaths and horrific wounds, friendly coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians seems a forlorn memory. But it happened once, and Pnina’s dream is that it could happen again.
Read more of Martin Fletcher’s gripping account of his decades of international reporting in his book "Breaking News" published by St. Martin’s Press.
