BOOK FEST: Lock and Irving. Gaza: Beneath The Bombs

Sharyn Lock with Sarah Irving
Gaza: Beneath The Bombs
2010

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians,” activist turned author Sarah Irving told a packed crowd at the opening show in Amnesty International’s Imprisoned Writers Series on the first day of the Edinburgh International Book Festival this afternoon.

Irving and her co-author Sharyn Lock are here to promote their new book Gaza: Beneath The Bombs, and their statement – while apparently jarring coming from one half of a team of committed pro-Palestinian activists – sums up the humanitarian message of the book.

“Israelis don’t oppress Palestinians...the Israeli government oppresses Palestinians,” Lock elaborated. “While a lot of racism undoubtedly exists if you speak to Palestinian taxi drivers in the West Bank many of them will tell you that some of their best friends are Israelis.

“However, such relationships are becoming more difficult because it’s hard for an Israeli to travel to the West Bank. Ariel Sharon actually made it illegal for some Israelis to travel into the West Bank, and it was a deliberate effort to cut these ties and foster separation and resentment.

“The vast majority on both sides are just people trying to get on with their lives, but one side is systematically having everything they hold dear stripped away from them.”

Both Irving and Lock have been visiting Palestine for the best part of the last decade, and their eyewitness accounts confirm many of the horror stories that continually flow out of the embattled Gaza strip and West Bank.

“I actually worry more about the West Bank than I do about Gaza,” adds Irving. “Despite the bombing going on in Gaza the extent of the institutionalisation and acceptance of Israel’s ongoing programme of settlement building concerns me.

It’s like it’s become a part of life, but I’m continually shocked by how large these settlements have become even in the last nine years that I’ve been visiting.”
Irving’s persistent activism has taken an awful toll on her health. Hobbling in on crutches she explains that her legs are slowly deteriorating from an injury she sustained after being thrown to the ground by an Israeli soldier.

Irving and Lock told the crowd of their experiences crouching in parsley fields dodging bullets, and getting drenched by Israeli water cannons firing on Gazan fishing boats. The boats fire putrid water which, the authors claim, is laced with some form of poison which makes the fishermen sick and contaminates the fish destined for an area where food is scarce.

Lock emotively related her experience to the comforts of home. “I often forget that the planes flying overhead are actually death machines, and sometime catch myself imagining that they’re actually passenger planes full of eager holidaymakers like the planes back home.

“I sometimes mistake Israeli tanks for roadworks. The noise is very similar and I suppose in a sense they are road works – they’re unmaking the roads.”

While much was said about the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians, little was said about the counterpart governments in Gaza and the West Bank that arguably play their own part in oppressing the Palestinians by stoking Israeli anger – the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and corrupt secularists Fatah.

Speaking after the event, Sharyn Lock explained why Hamas has yet to show its true colours – for good or for ill – in Gaza because the area has been under constant blockade and frequent bombardment since Hamas took power in free Palestinian elections in 2007.

“No one can really decide how well Hamas are doing because they’ve got nothing to judge it against. Any progress Hamas makes is immediately bombed out of existence by Israeli planes.

“What many people forget is that there is no such thing as a welfare state in Palestine, no health care or child support, and for a long time Hamas was the welfare state. They organised help for the communities suffering under the occupation.

“And while there are stories about Hamas forcing women to wear the veil it’s not something I’ve seen myself. Some women do wear the veil but no more than in previous years, and nobody seems to make a big deal about feeling oppressed under Hamas because they’re all so focussed on the infinitely larger oppression their suffering at the hands of Israel.

“It’s got to be remembered that 50 per cent of Palestinians are under 18, so you’ve got a community full of children who don’t engage in politics and don’t have any idea about elections. Those that did vote for Hamas had watched as the Fatah controlled Palestinian Authority failed to secure any gains for the Palestinians.

“Faced with no other option they thought – like many British people in the last election – ‘These guys aren’t working for me; let’s see what the other guys have got to offer.”