Gaza, the UN and me (written in February 2008)

That the United Nations is both the seat and symbol of world hegemony was no more obvious than from the events that have transpired over the past week. After days of some of the worst violence between the Israeli army and Palestinians in years, in which 3 Israeli soldiers and 116 Palestinians, including many women and children, have died, the Security Council issued a resolution condemning Iran for continuing its uranium enrichment programme. A stroke of genius, no doubt, for those leaders and their cronies who have already reaped the benefits of recent WMD scaremongering, which range from legitimizing the invasions of select countries to shifting international attention away from more pressing issues. Significantly less fortunate for those masses who are doomed to bear the brunt of such a decision, either directly as a result of sanctions, or indirectly as a consequence of abstraction and omission.

A small contingent of the latter were gathered outside the two-metre high concrete walls that surround the UN House in Beirut on Monday. Approximately one hundred protesters waving Palestinian and Lebanese flags shouted slogans condemning the escalating violence in Gaza and the lack of UN attention given to the matter. Children from UNRWA schools were bussed to the site, as often happens at pro-Palestine demonstrations, but instead of passively waving flags or partaking in the chanting, they contributed a more powerful aspect to the protest: one by one, they suspended children’s toys and clothes soaked in red paint from the barbed wire that sits on top of the big, blue security walls. A strikingly grotesque reminder of the many children who have fallen victim to Israel’s careless military tactics: first, on Thursday, Mohammad al Buri, the six month old baby struck by shrapnel in the wake of a rocket attack . On the same day four boys aged 10, 12, 13 and 15 were killed while they were playing football. Then on Friday, Malak al Kafarna, the one-year old girl killed alongside Eyad al Ashram, a senior Hamas official . And these are but a few amongst the 19 children that Rana al Hindi, a Save the Children spokeswoman, said had been killed as a result of Israeli attacks over the weekend . In the time since, it is estimated that one fifth of the total dead were children.

As I sat at my desk reviewing a document on peacebuilding and conflict prevention, the voice on the megaphone drifted through the building. Leaving my windowless cubicle, I walked to the window facing the front entrance and stared blankly at those flags. Because of the security wall, that was all I could see. I couldn’t see the faces of those voicing their frustration at the UN’s inability to assure in real life the very topics that I had just been linguistically processing, those that are routinely expressed in endless agreements, reports and resolutions. And while I am normally grateful for the security that the big blue wall provides for us (the absence of which proved tragic in Algiers), in my mind, I could not help but equate the separation and veritable blindness that it enabled with the similar vertical structure that snakes across the West Bank: the ‘security barrier’ for some, the ‘partition wall’ for others. Despite the fact that the conditions of construction of the two walls differ significantly, the purpose of all walls is to physically delineate the abstract criteria that differentiates “us” from “them”. And as I stared out at the partially visible protesters, I could not help but feeling that here I was, on the inside, a minute cog in the immense machine that is the self-styled beacon of international peace, security and stability; while there they were on the outside, under a grey Monday sky, the children and grandchildren of those dispossessed by occupation, watching the deaths of their countrywomen and men be met with gross global apathy.

My thoughts were interrupted by a colleague who patted me on the shoulder and motioned towards a blue UNRWA flag draped over a school bus. “There are your kids”, she said. And it immediately dawned on me that those children who had come from the UNRWA schools to protest could very well be the same ones that I would be meeting up with in only 3 hours time to tutor in Maths and English, during my bi-weekly stint as a volunteer at the Shatila refugee camp. That thought made the bleak irony of the whole situation darker, as I suddenly felt like I was, in some way, living a double life. On the one hand, there I was performing a relatively banal administrative task for the mammoth that is the UN, suspending my moral judgement of its (in)action in order to pursue a career. On the other hand, I felt that I could in some way express my anger at the injustice of the situation of Palestinians, both inside and outside Israel, constructively through education. And for a couple of months, the two activities had seemed compatible.

But now I was being directly confronted with the double-standards of my own existence. What would happen if, when I walked into the classroom later that afternoon, the children were excitedly talking about their day’s outing? What would be my reaction? Would I hide the fact that I had been inside that very building, looking out at them, and feeling heavy guilt for my affiliation with this vestige of post-WWII world order that still pays lip service to the post-colonial powers by choosing to denounce Iran instead of Israel? Or would I attempt to divert attention away from its idle witnessing of the slaughter of innocent civilians by defending the empty ideals of justice and equality as expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of the Child that hangs in the entrance of the NGO?

Do I admit to them, and to myself, that the reason why we need our big blue wall is because “we” were the vehicle that enabled their dispossession, that authorised their living as refugees in conditions of squalour, and that continues to ignore their pleas for protection? Or do I say: “It isn’t me. Just like it isn’t the people who teach you at your schools, which are also part of the UN. It isn’t your teachers or the security guards or the typists that are to blame, but the big wigs sitting round that big table in a basement in New York that need to have desiccated teddies hung from their rear-view mirrors”. Do I, like the many Palestinians who are employed here at the UN House in Beirut in administrative tasks, separate my immediate professional function from the bigger picture of the UN, whose decisions, as we know, are made by an exclusive elite anyway?

Where do we draw the line that demarcates where our immediate self-interest ends and our compassion begins? Indeed, that is the question for many people who compromise their principles in order to eat, support a family or pay for their studies (I think here of the debate surrounding university students who strip of lap-dance to fund their education). A question that may receive satisfactory answers in our own minds, rationalized in such terms as ‘priority’ or ‘the lesser of two evils’, but how does one explain such a compromise to children?

When I did go into my class that afternoon, some of the students were late because they were coming back from a demonstration in a different part of Beirut, and I was relieved when I learned that none of them were the ones who had been outside the UN House earlier on. So we went about our afternoon as usual, learning grammar, vocabulary, and the difference between “Palestine” (noun of place) and “Palestinian” (adjective).

The only real problem was the tri-hourly power cuts that lasted for five minutes each, plunging the classroom into darkness. One thing I noticed during those power cuts: the children were completely non-plussed by them. They did not scream, they did not hide under the table, nor did they make a big deal out of it as one would expect the average 8 to 10 year old to do. Rather, they continued with their usual laughter and banter and as if nothing had happened, repeating phrases after me in the darkness. Their ambivalence was testimony to the constant lack of essential services that they have always endured, just one example of the hardships of refugee life.

Similarly, their direct involvement in the protests against the situation in Gaza or other incidents of Palestinian oppression could also be seen as another recurring aspect of these refugees lives, one that serves to simultaneously assert and consolidate their identities as Palestinians and balance their anger with hopes of a better future. Because even though the Security Council may be deaf to their voices, many branches of the UN and the individuals inside it, are not. And to a large extent, the children know this: though the syllabus and methods of the UNRWA schools leave much to be desired, most children are very keen to learn and grateful for their opportunities in education. On the part of people like me who walk the fine line between hypocrisy and naivety, we can act for Palestinian justice in many ways without necessarily reducing our lived to a paradox. That, in turn, helps to demonstrate to the children that in life, nothing is black and white, and we all have to make constant compromises in order to balance our responsibilities and convictions.

Three days later, the toys and garments placed by the children still hang there. On the way to work this morning, I stopped to take a close look at them. Teddy-bears, splattered with red, their stomachs slashed and their cotton insides hanging out, dangled by the fishing line attached to their necks and stared up with vacant plastic eyes at the blue wall set against the blue early-morning sky. Jackets, trousers, shoes, and a singular white sandal topped with a pink flower sway limply in the mild breeze. The material fragments of children’s lives scattered like the flesh and bone they represent.