What did it mean for someone to grow up in a cramped, impoverished refugee camp in Gaza after the Nakba of 1948 or past the Naksa of 1967? Where does resistance start and where does it end in Gaza? Is it an exclusively Islamist choice?

 These are some of the key questions that Jamal Zaqout, a leftist Palestinian politician, attempts to answer in his lengthy but readable Ghazzawi: Saradiyat al Shaqa’ wal Amal (Man from Gaza: A Life of Hardship and Hope). At a first glance, Zaqout’s book could come across as the memoir of a Palestinian born in the mid-1950s who went through the ups and downs of hope and despair living first under the Egyptian rule following the Nakba and later under direct, suffocating Israeli occupation in the wake of the 1967 Naksa in which all of historic Palestine and other Arab territories were seized by Israeli military force.

 But Zaqout’s book is neither a memoir nor a recollection of the hardship that Palestinians in Gaza have had to endure every day of their lives, the sacrifices they make and the hope they hold onto that one day Palestinian land will once again belong to the Palestinian people. The nearly 400 pages of Zaqout’s book are rather a detailed account of the Israeli occupation, what it actually means and what it really targets: making life as unlivable as possible for as many Palestinians as possible, to force those who were not harshly evicted in the Nakba to make the decision to put Palestine behind their backs.

The setting of Zaqout’s narrative is one of the most famous refugee camps in the history of Palestinian diaspora: Mokhaiyam Al-Shate’i. It is the same venue where the recently assassinated chief of Hamas;s political bureau, Ismail Haniya, lived prior to exiting Palestine to live temporarily in Qatar. It was in this refugee camp that Haniya’s children and grandchildren were killed by the Israeli army during the current war that started on 7 October.  Zaqout recalls an early encounter with Haniya, who was brought up in the same refugee camp, during Islamist indoctrination sessions that he was “assertively” invited to by his Arabic teacher at the primary school. Later in life, and on the path of politics, Zaqout recalls meeting other Palestinian political figures, in political gatherings out of Gaza, including in Bulgaria where he studied medicine for a few years prior to the end of the Soviet Bloc, and in Israeli jails.

Throughout the book, the names of today’s leading political figures, controversial as they might be, keep popping up – either in a resistance context or in the course of political feuds. Nayef Hawtma, Mohamed Dahlan and Yehiya Sinwar are among the Palestinian politicians with whom Zaqout rubbed shoulders. His brief accounts of these or other political figures is often indicative of the choices that each and every one of them made during his political path – just as Zaqout himself, who was “spared” full Islamist indoctrination by his own father, and encouraged to embrace a communist line instead.

In a way, Zaqout’s book is a tribute to the dedication and political astuteness of one of Palestine’s older politicians: Haidar Abdel-Shafy. Abdel-Shay, Zaqout writes, was always very clear about where he stands and where he would go, away from any personal calculations or manipulations. Born in Gaza in 1919, Abdel-Shafi passed away in 2007. Apart from his role as a politician, Abdel-Shafi was a physician who worked at Al-Shifa hospital. Zaqout’s tone varies considerably. When he talks about Abdel-Shafi it is distinct from when he talks about Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas. It is clear that Zaqout has no taste for Islamism. However, he is far from condemning the Islamists or any other political group.  

Part of the point of this book is to emphasise that, when all is said and done, no matter their differences, all Palestinians in Gaza are joined by hardship and a certain foggy hope of liberation. He writes that all Palestinians, young and old, Islamists or communists suffer cramped spaces for large families, limited resources, including nutritional resources, lack of basic services, including running water and electricity, and lack of privacy including that of having a bathroom for each family. Even if things improved a few decades down the line at a refugee camp established in 1949, Zaqout writes, life at a refugee camp is always challenging for both young and old.

 In addition to recollections of the hardship of life in a refugee camp and the frustration of being unable to move in or out of Gaza without having to go through layered, complicated paperwork and officialdom that leaves Palestinians at the mercy of the occupation, Zaqout’s book — published last year — is a reminder that resistance, of all sorts and types, has always been a collective Palestinian choice, long before the 1988 establishment of Hamas in the wake of the first Palestinian Intifada.

 Zaqtout does not say it in so many words, but he certainly alludes to a sense of political isolationism he thinks marked the performance of Hamas and its leaders right from the start. In one incident, he recalled that Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a Hamas leader, attended a meeting with other political leaders to discuss support for the Intifada where he pressed on other factions “to stop everything that has been unfolding”: “From very early on, Mokhayam Al-Shatei saw considerable action of militant resistance especially of communist and leftist associations…. To quell the acts of the feda’yine [resistance militant operatives], Israel isolated all men above the age of 14; it then ordered all families to hand over the weapons they had in hiding and when they declined Israeli soldiers acted immediately to knock down every suspected house.”

Resistance, he wrote, was the choice of Islamists for sure but also – and equally – that of the communists who were in the 1950s, “along the same lines as the Arab nationalists and Nasserists”, at the forefront of resisting the transfer plan that Israeli hoped would remove all Palestinians living in Gaza to Sinai. However, in his book Zaqout recalled that the Israeli occupation authorities used to “expel the feda’yine from Gaza to Sinai” after the 1967 Israeli occupation of both,

 Moreover, he wrote, Palestinians of all political orientations, especially the communists in the  1950s and 1970s, were always under the close scrutiny of state security bodies in every country they went to, including Egypt. On the “firm suggestion” of state security in each, Zaqtout himself had to leave Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

 Zaqout’s book also recalls the impact and significance that Egypt had for Palestinians from Gaza, especially when it was in charge of the strip. He shares accounts of efficient medical treatment he was provided as a child by Egyptian doctors based in Gaza and access to secondary and university education that Egypt provided for Palestinians for free. Zaqout recalls a day in late September 1970 when all the Palestinians in Gaza, then under Israeli occupation, walked out in a long and huge march to bid farewell to Gamal Abdel-Nasser, their most admired Arab leader.

That said, Zaqout wrote that his father, who was always aware of Israel’s aim to eject Palestinians out of all of Palestine, was not a big fan of the propaganda arm of the Nasser regime, especially that of Sawat Al-Arab radio and its fiery anchor Ahmed Said. Zaqout said his father had no doubt whatsoever that Israel would end up defeating Arab armies one more time to complete its control of the entirety of Palestine; he believed the resistance was the way forward.

In many parts of the book, Zaqout writes anecdotally. The book is filled with details about the Gaza Sea and how people, especially young men and women, would enjoy long swims in the summer and how the kids loved to fly their kites by the beach. He talks of his days in Egypt where he came on a scholarship offered by UNESCO to study medicine and how many other Palestinians attending Ain Shams University enjoyed living in Heliopolis. He also talks of his life in Bulgaria, in the 1970s and 1980s, where he pursued the rest of his academic years, and how Palestinians were always welcome there.

He talks about a love life that was always anchored in politics and ended with marriage of Palestinian woman, Nae’ila, who joined him on the way back to Gaza where she was repeatedly held by the Israeli occupation, including when she was pregnant with their first child, and went through a tough miscarriage due to the torture she went through – and how the Israeli press was of help in lobbying for her release along with Israeli rights groups.

 With the early years of 2020, Zaqout wrote that there was not much left around that Gaza Sea that remained familiar. Gone was the golden sand of the beach and the clear blue water that he once would swim in to cast away all the frustration of the suffocating life of the refugee camp.

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 It was in 2016, almost two years after the end of the Israeli war on Gaza, dubbed by Israel Protective Edge, that Norman Finkelstein, an American political scientist who was born in the early 1950s to a Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, sat down to add a new volume to a considerable list of titles on Israel’s wars against Palestinians.

 It took Finkelstein a couple of years of incredibly diligent research, to put out a nearly 500-page volume, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. It is another attempt by the New York-born author to explain the full dynamics of Israeli political and military wars on Palestinians and all individuals and organisations, Israeli included, who support the Palestinians’ legitimate rights to see an end to occupation and aggression.

 In an introduction to the Arabic edition, which appeared in Ayman Hadad’s brilliant translation with the Centre for Arab Unity Studies, Noam Chomsky, another American Jew who has been critical of the Israeli occupation and aggression against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, writes that Israel deliberately imposed a long and harsh siege on Gaza, denying its population basic development, to drive them to give up their land and go.

In this sense, Chomsky argues in the introduction, which is based on a long review he had published of Finkelstein’s book, Israel is simply lying to the world’s face when it claims that its wars on Gaza are designed to avenge attacks by Hamas. In reality, he added, Finkelstein’s book shows that Israel is not acting in self-defence as it keeps telling the world but in an exercise of deterrence that it had always used against all Arab populations, especially Palestinians.

Finkelstein’s volume is essentially designed to examine several international reports that were issued on Protective Edge, including those put out by the UN, to show the level of violation of international law, aggression against civilians, especially women and children, and infrastructure, especially of health and sanitation, and against all significant urban elements, including cultural bodies. However, the essence of this title is not so much the devastating Israeli war on Gaza in 2014 – which he describes as the most horrific since the 2008-2009 war, dubbed Cast Lead – but explaining Israel’s destructive strategy against both Palestinians and peace.

 In reality there is no doubt that the through line of the book is that by destroying Gaza while having it under a suffocating siege, Israel is not just damaging the lives of over two million Palestinians but is also suffocating chances for peace – let alone those of Palestinian statehood.

According to Finkelstein, when Ariel Sharon, who had actually come up with the line on the need for Israel to be feared by all Arabs, decided in 2005 to pull his troops out of the inside of Gaza while keeping them in control of the skies and for most of the borders of the congested strip, he did not mean to give Palestinians in Gaza freedom. He meant, the author argues, to give the responsibility of policing Gaza to Palestinians who were willing to bow, all under the name of peace-making – something in truth is completely off the agenda of successive Israeli politicians, when it comes to Palestinians.

From the 1993 Oslo Accords through every subsequent peace negotiation that followed, including the 2000 Camp David summit with Ehud Barack, Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, Finkelstein says, Israel was just playing political games to force the Palestinian Authority and other Palestinians it had coopted one way or another to do its policing work for it. And when the time came, he argues, the Israeli politicians were always there to provoke Hamas in Gaza – despite the political evolution that the resistance movement had come through – to act in frustration to allow for a pretext for the Israeli army to start another devastating war there. In so doing, he concludes, Israel forced a halt to peace talks that it had no intention of completing anyway.

In subsequent chapters of his book, Finkelstein thoroughly reviews the content of several reports issued by UN special rapporteurs and rights organisations, including both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to support his argument about the nature of the damage that Israel always seeks to inflict in its wars on Gaza from December 2008 to November 2014. The author gives particular attention to the report of Richard Goldstone, a South African Jewish, and self-proclaimed Zionist, judge.

It was impossible, he writes, for Israel to play the usual game of throwing the antisemitism allegation in the face of Goldstone, whose report was a simple statement of indictment against Israel’s violation of international law and international humanitarian law at so many levels. However, he writes, in essence the Goldstone report is very compatible with previous and subsequent reports that were issued on the Israeli policies on Gaza, including the 2006 report of John Dugard, the UNSG special rapporteur on the occupied territories who firmly criticised the siege that Gaza following the electoral victory of Hamas in 2006.

Ultimately, Finkelstein is quoting Israeli officials who openly said that it is worthwhile to destroy all of Gaza just to make sure that Hamas will think twice before annoying Israel ever again. This, he writes, is the essence of the political and military creed of the Israeli authorities, no matter how hard they tried to deny or hide it. That said, Finkelstein says that Israel, more often than not, and usually with the very dedicated help of whichever US administration happens to be in office, including that of Barack Obama, was able, sooner or later, to actually deter the truth – not just Palestinians and peace.

Israel, he argued, put enough pressure on Goldstone to take back everything he included in the report he issued on the Israeli Cast Lead war. In the spring of 2011, Goldstone, Finkelstein writes, published an article in the Washington Post that basically disowned the findings of the report under the pretext of having had access to more information. Around the same time, he adds, leading international rights groups were forced to amend their language on the Israeli policies towards Palestinians, especially Gaza. Eventually, the reports of those organisations, he says, could far from directly blame Israel for deliberate wrongdoing. And, finally Israel managed to cut out foreign funding to Israeli rights groups that were exposing Israeli policies.

This change of attitude and language, Finkelstein explains in the last segment of the book, appeared in the reports on a 2010 Israeli attack on an aid flotilla that was heading towards Gaza when it was attacked by Israeli soldiers. Not only did that prevent aid from reaching Gaza but several volunteers who were aboard the boat were killed and injured as well. Subsequent reports on Israeli wars on Gaza were much less vocal and, in many cases, including those of UN reports, depended essentially on politically guided Israeli investigation reports that always cleared Israel from any deliberate wrongdoing.

 The result, Finkelstein argues in conclusion, is that Israel has been getting away with murder and will continue to do so. More importantly, it is naïve of not disingenuous of anyone to pretend that Israel is at all willing to make peace with the Palestinians.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly