VUE WEEKLY: Your blog focuses much of its attention on the commonplace in Gaza. Why was it important for you to show this side of life in Palestine?

 

LAILA EL-HADDAD: When I first started writing my blog I was in Gaza and I had given birth to my son and it was at the suggestion of a tech-savvy cousin of mine who said, “Well this is a good way for Yassine [El-Haddad’s husband] to keep in touch with you guys and Yousuf’s development,” because he couldn’t go back with us to Gaza—he was finishing his studies and because he has a refugee passport Israel won’t allow him to come with us. So I said OK.

 

When I began it was just purely personal, and then I started a separate blog to talk about the situation in Gaza. Then, gradually [they came together]. It happened, I think, once when I was stuck at the border crossing into Gaza for about a month and a half because Israel had closed the border off. I didn’t know when they were going to open it and [my son] Yousuf and I were just waiting and waiting. That was sort of a turning point in my thinking about my blog and what I wanted to say, and that’s when I started talking about the personal becoming the political and I merged the two blogs into one. 

 

For me it’s a way to illuminate the lives of Palestinians. The everyday situation for Palestinians is that the ordinary is extraordinary, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gaza or Ramallah or the Arabian Gulf or a refugee camp in Lebanon, we are all Palestinian and that manifests itself in different ways. I wanted to demonstrate that in the mundane details of everyday life the occupation affects them and manipulates them, and also to humanize the situation and show it’s not just about an Israeli bombardment and that’s it—it’s something continuous and ongoing and very pervasive to the very mundane details of life.

 

VW: Will your keynote address focus on these mundane elements, or will you be focusing more on the political plight of Palestinians?

 

LH: It’s always tricky, because often people want me to speak about my own experience and my own journey and about being a mother and a Palestinian and a journalist in Gaza. But my inclination, even though I write about that all the time, is not to speak about myself but rather to speak about what I’ve seen and what’s happening, because I just feel that my life—well, it might seem remarkable to an outside observer, but I feel very trivial and I feel very small compared to the lives of so many other Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere. That being said, I hope to find some sort of happy balance between the two.

 

VW: The name of the event you’ll be giving your address at is “Israeli Apartheid Week.” Apartheid is a loaded term and one that has caused some controversy in being applied to the situation in Palestine. Is apartheid an apt description of what’s happening?

 

LH: Of course everything is taken within its own political and historical context, but I think if one were to attempt to convey the nature of what’s happening within the occupied Palestinian territories then apartheid would be the most salient comparison in recent history. 

 

When we’re talking occupation it’s not just military occupation, it’s not just bombs and border closures. In 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they ran a population registry and they issued ID cards that still exist today. But if you were not present in those territories at the time for whatever reason—if you were studying abroad, or working or visiting family and you were not physically present—all of a sudden you couldn’t go back. It’s pretty remarkable if you think about it in that way. 

 

And these permits exist today—and this is where the apartheid comparison comes in. I have what’s called a huwiya, an ID card as a resident of Gaza, which means I can’t go to the West Bank without Israeli approval, which has always been almost impossible to obtain and now it pretty much is impossible. A West Banker has a different ID card and that does not enable him to come to Gaza or, now, East Jerusalem. An East Jerusalemite has a different ID card and the same restrictions apply, and for them it’s even harder. It used to be that all of us had to renew our ID cards on a yearly basis. Now we don’t have to do that on a yearly basis, but East Jerusalemites do, and if they don’t renew their permits they lose their right to return to their own homes.

 

For Jewish residents of the city the same restrictions do not apply. This is significant, because people will often say, “How can you claim that a Palestinian refugee who is a third-generation refugee is still a refugee, still has a right to the land?” Any Jew who can claim their Jewish ancestry maternally four generations back has a right—even if he’s never been to Israel, never seen it, doesn’t know anybody there—to set foot there and get citizenship. 

 

Also, now the Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank have exclusive roads, a whole network of highways and byways and accessways exclusively for them—Palestinians can’t use them. That just gives you a little bit of an idea of why the apartheid comparison—the racism that’s institutionalized.

 

VW: How will the election of Benjamin Netanyahu affect the Palestinians?

 

LH: For a Palestinian it’s almost like the lesser of two evils—you always hear that refrain. If you ask any Palestinian what they expect they always say it’s two sides of the same coin and it’s just which is going to be less evil for them. We continuously hear [about] these conditions that the Quartet placed on Hamas if they want to enter into negotiations, which is they have to recognize Israel, they have to renounce violence and they have to accept past peace accords. Palestinians are saying that preconditions have never been placed on other groups who enter into negotiations like the Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, or for that matter on Israel—why are the same conditions not placed on Israel? It’s significant because Netanyahu is part of the Likud party and their charter specifically says that the government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of the Palestinian state. Of course this is problematic when you’re dealing with a government that’s now officially in place harbouring those views, because they will continue to project this facade of peace, that they want peace, but a peace that represents Israeli interests. And they can say that they want a Palestinian state, but it would be a fragmented, unviable, noncontiguous Palestinian state. 

 

The other interesting thing is that he’s forming a coalition with what’s been referred to as a fascist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, whose head Avigdor Lieberman openly advocates the transfer of Palestinians from Israel—that’s also something very problematic, obviously. Before, the racism may have been buried between the lines and beneath the policies but now it’s just in your face and in the government.

 

VW: This is the first time an Israeli Apartheid Week has been held in Edmonton—how do you think events such as this help the Palestinian people?

 

LH: People often feel impotent in the face of such inhumanity and horror and one of the ways that they can help—obviously they can’t physically deliver aid or prevent Israel from doing what it’s doing—but there are many levels of activism and one of them, I think, is holding conferences to educate people, because ultimately the more people you’re able to educate about the situation, the hope is that that will work its way up the system.

 

So I think it does [help]. I often feel, like I said, weak and impotent and overwhelmed by all the stuff that’s happening and what you on an individual level can do that will actually make a difference. Though I’ve always been overwhelmed by the response I get from people after I speak or after I participate in a conference or even people at my blog that say to me, “You’ve really opened my eyes to what’s happening, I never thought of it that way.”