Posts Tagged ‘Asmaa al-Ghoul’
Women biking in Gaza? A Battleground
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 26, 2016
In Gaza, Bicycles Are a Battleground for Women Who Dare to Ride
SALAHUDDIN ROAD, Gaza Strip — The four women pedaling bicycles with jammed gears and wobbly chains up Salahuddin Road, Gaza’s bumpy main highway, on a recent morning caused quite a stir.
The driver of a three-wheeled tuk-tuk slowed down and a teenager on a horse-drawn cart sped up to match the women’s pace.
A jeep filled with Hamas gunmen beeped and cheered as it passed, and a pack of men on motorbikes left a wake of catcalls.
The sight of women on two wheels was so unusual that Alaa, 11, who was grazing sheep on the grassy median, assumed they were foreigners and shouted out his limited English vocabulary: “Hello! One, two, three!”
Ms. Suleiman, center, and other women with their bikes in Gaza on Friday. Credit Wissam Nassar for The New York Times
The women ignored the hubbub as they pedaled from Jabalia, a crammed cinder-block town in Gaza’s north, to the Hamas checkpoint before the heavily restricted border crossing into Israel. They dumped their bikes in a nearby olive grove and sat down for a picnic of cheese sandwiches.
By DIAA HADID and MAJD AL WAHEIDI. FEB. 22, 2016
Amna Suleiman, 33, the little cycling club’s leader, offered some wisdom to the other riders, a decade her junior. “Listen, girls, there’s nothing left in my orchard except firewood,” Ms. Suleiman said, using a Palestinian saying for being a spinster. “But you are young. I want you, when you get married, to make riding your bikes a condition of marriage.” (written in the contract and the breech can be reason enough to ask for divorce)
The younger women erupted in laughter at the suggestion. “He’ll give me a beating!” exclaimed Asala, 21, who spoke on the condition her last name not be used.
The women, who began riding together in December, are the first in years to pedal publicly in Gaza, where the nearly decade-long rule of the Islamist Hamas movement has been accompanied by various initiatives to restrict the modest efforts of women hoping to practice sports.
Hamas barred women from running in a Gaza marathon in 2013, leading to its cancellation, and once tried to prohibit women from riding behind men on motorbikes. Female athletes practice in closed stadiums. Gyms are either single sex or have strict hourly divisions by gender
In 2010, a Gaza journalist, Asmaa al-Ghoul, was spit at and threatened when she and three friends who were foreigners biked about 15 miles from Gaza’s southern tip to Gaza City in protest of the unwritten rule barring women past puberty from cycling.
Ahmad Muheisin, assistant undersecretary in Gaza’s youth and sports ministry office, said that women riding in public represented a “violation” of Gaza values, but that he would not try to stop them unless religious leaders addressed the matter with a fatwa.
Many Palestinians frown at the idea of women bicycling in public because men might inappropriately leer at their legs moving up and down or ogle their bottoms. (So what?)
Female cyclists are a fairly unusual sight throughout the Arab world, though women participate in group rides in Cairo and Amman, and in Beirut, women pedal rented bikes on the Corniche, the pedestrian strip along the Mediterranean.
Atef Abu Saif, a Gaza-based writer, said that until the mid-1980s, “it used to be normal” to see women riding bikes in Gaza. “They did it for pleasure and fun, by the sea,” he said.
That was before Ms. Suleiman moved to Gaza, as a teenager in the 1990s, but she had cycled as a child in Damascus, Syria.
Her riding revival began with a bet: She and two girlfriends created a competition to see who could lose the most weight in two weeks. Ms. Suleiman, who also swims and plays the keyboard, shed 11 pounds by cutting out bread, rice and pasta, and collected $75
“It was like ‘The Biggest Loser,’ but the Amna version,” she said.
She decided to buy a bicycle, figuring it would help her keep losing weight. And, she said, “I wanted to remind myself of my childhood, which was without problems,” recalling that she would sneak off with her neighbor’s bicycle for forays around their Damascus enclave.
At first she rode in Gaza only around her own neighborhood at dawn, when few would see her. She encouraged her friend Sara Salibi, 24, whose teenage brother taught her how to ride, also at dawn. The women shared a similar defiance against Gaza’s limited expectations of women, although they are otherwise quite different
Ms. Salibi smokes, though only in private; reads Milan Kundera, the Czech author; and hums tunes from Jimmy Fallon’s television show. “I like to dance, but I don’t know how to dance,” she said. “I want to learn how to dance.”
For the daring adventure up Salahuddin Road on Friday, Ms. Salibi wore a 1970s-style blue-and-black track suit, her hair poking out from a wool hat she had halfheartedly pushed on her head.
In contrast, Ms. Suleiman, who teaches the Quran to children and volunteers in an orphanage, dressed modestly in a red Islamic head scarf, long red coat, wide black pants and spotted red socks.
“Riding a bike makes you feel like you are flying,” Ms. Suleiman said. Ms. Salibi echoed that sentiment, saying, “I feel free.”
They were accompanied on Friday by Ms. Salibi’s 21-year-old sister, Nour, and her friend Asala, whose brown head scarf matched her Converse sneakers.
The group cycled past a building whose facade included gaping holes covered with plastic, still unrepaired from the 2014 war between Gaza militants and Israel. The women wobbled past empty lots piled with rubble that indicated where a bombed building once stood.
Nearby, a fighter in the militant group Islamic Jihad who was waiting for a friend described the women as “detestable and ugly.”
“The role of our women is to obey their husbands and prepare food for them inside the house, not to imitate men and ride bikes in the streets,” said the man, 33, who refused to give his name but echoed the view of many Gaza men interviewed, and of multiple comments on social networks, after news of the cycling group reached the Palestinian news media.
A distinct minority approved, including Abdul Salam Hussein, 53, who was sitting near a cement factory. “So what if a woman rides a bike?” he exclaimed. “People have reached the moon already!”
Haniya Hamad, 51, a mother of nine, watched the women in Gaza from her vantage point on the back of a horse-drawn cart clopping down the road. Pointing at one of her young daughters, Ms. Hamad said, proudly: “She rides a bike, too. She takes it from her brother.”
But Ms. Hamad had told her daughter she could not keep riding as she grew, lest it invite gossip and scorn. Now the girl wore a wide grin.
“When she saw them,” Ms. Hamad said, “she said, ‘Mama: Look, there are women who are riding bikes!’ ”
Not in the mood to hear of peace right now
Posted by: adonis49 on: August 17, 2014
Not in the mood to hear of peace right now
Never ask me about peace again
Tears flowed abundantly when I received a telephone call on Aug. 3, informing me that my family had been targeted by two F-16 missiles in the city of Rafah.
Such was the fate of our family in a war that still continues, with every family in the Gaza Strip receiving its share of sorrow and pain.
My father’s brother, Ismail al-Ghoul, 60, was not a member of Hamas. His wife, Khadra, 62, was not a militant of Hamas. Their sons, Wael, 35, and Mohammed, 32, were not combatants for Hamas. Their daughters, Hanadi, 28, and Asmaa, 22, were not operatives for Hamas, nor were my cousin Wael’s children, Ismail, 11, Malak, 5, and baby Mustafa, only 24 days old, members of Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or Fatah.
Yet, they all died in the Israeli shelling that targeted their home at 6:20 a.m. on Sunday morning.
Their house was located in the Yibna neighborhood of the Rafah refugee camp. It was one story with a roof made of thin asbestos that did not require two F-16 missiles to destroy.
Would someone please inform Israel that refugee camp houses can be destroyed, and their occupants killed, with only a small bomb, and that it needn’t spend billions to blow them into oblivion?
If it is Hamas that you hate, let me tell you that the people you are killing have nothing to do with Hamas.
They are women, children, men and senior citizens whose only concern was for the war to end, so they can return to their lives and daily routines. But let me assure you that you have now created thousands of Hamas loyalists, for we all become Hamas if Hamas, to you, is women, children and innocent families.
If Hamas, in your eyes, is ordinary civilians and families, then I am Hamas, they are Hamas and we are all Hamas.
Throughout the war, we thought that the worst had passed, that this was the pivotal moment when matters would improve, that they would stop there.
Yet, that real moment of pain, of extreme fear, was always followed by something even worse.
Now I understood why the photographs of corpses were so important, not only for international public opinion, but for us, the families, in search for an opportunity to bid farewell to our loved ones, so treacherously killed.
What were my family members doing in those last moments? What did they look like after their death?
I discovered the photos of my dead relatives on social networking sites.
The bodies of my cousin’s children were stored in an ice cream freezer.
Rafah’s Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital was closed after being shelled by Israeli tanks, and the Kuwaiti Hospital that we visited just a day earlier had become an alternate venue, where this freezer was the only option available.
Al-Najjar’s director, Abdullah Shehadeh, told Al-Monitor, “We decided to move the patients when shells hit the main gate. Some patients, out of fear, ran out, despite the gravity of the security situation. We are now working out of this ill-equipped hospital.”
The Emirati Red Crescent Maternity Hospital, west of Rafah, has been transformed into a large container for corpses, with fruit and vegetable freezers filled with dozens of bodies.
I saw corpses on the floor, some with nametags on their chests, while others remained unknown. We held our noses, for the stench was unbearable, as flies filled the air.
Ibrahim Hamad, 27, removed his 5-year-old son’s shroud-wrapped body from a vegetable freezer. Fighting back tears, he told Al-Monitor, “He died as a result of a reconnaissance drone missile attack. His body has been here since yesterday. The dangerous situation prevented me from coming to take him any sooner.”
My relatives were quickly buried, and my cousins Mustafa, Malak and Ismail did not remain long in a freezer, lest their bodies freeze, and their souls now rest in peace, leaving us with nothing but the silence of death and bodies forever trapped in the postures of their passing.
On the 5th day of the war, when I went to write my Rafah report about the shelling of the Ghannam family, I stopped by to visit my cousin’s house. I saw my relatives and we took photographs together. During the war, my cousin Wael’s wife had given birth to twins, Mustafa and Ibrahim, who were like two tiny angels, harbingers of hope and joy.
How could I have known that this would be our last meeting?
I wish I had stayed longer and talked to them some more. Hanadi, Asmaa, my uncle and his wife laughed as they joked about the twist of fate that brought us together in the middle of a war, at a time when Israeli occupation forces had not yet begun perpetrating their wanton war crimes against Rafah.
Endings are so strange, as are living moments that suddenly become relegated to the past. We will never see them again, and the pictures that I took of the twins are now so precious, as one of them, Mustafa, was killed, while the other, Ibrahim, remained alive.
I wonder how they could differentiate between them, for they looked so much alike. Who identified them when their father died and their mother lay wounded in intensive care? Who was Mustafa, and who was Ibrahim? It was as if they had merged upon one twin’s death.
In the photos taken after their death, my family looked so peaceful, asleep with their eyes closed. None of them were disfigured or burned, unlike hundreds of dead children and civilians that US-made weapons killed before them.
We wondered if they died in pain. What happened when the missile, carrying tons of explosives, impacted their modest house and exploded, creating air pressure so fierce that their internal organs burst? Their suffering was perhaps lessened by the fact that they were sleeping.
I didn’t see them when I went to Rafah on Aug. 2. I wrote about the death of the Ayad Abu Taha family, which was targeted by warplanes, and saw the corpse of Rizk Abu Taha, one year old, when it arrived at the Kuwaiti Hospital.
I observed him at length. He looked alive. One could see that he had been playing when he died, dressed in his pink pants. How could he be at such peace? The bodies of war victims look so different from how they appear on television. They are so real, so substantial, suddenly there before you, without any newscast introductions, music or slogans.
Bodies lay everywhere, and it was if everything in life had been to prepare us for this moment. Suddenly, the dead left their personal lives behind: their cell phones, homes, clothes, perfumes and daily chores. Most importantly, they left the fear of war behind.
Distances in the small Gaza Strip have grown larger, distances and time expanding as a result of the fear and death that shrank the life expectancy of the populace.
We were unable to join the family for the funerals. My uncle, Ahmad al-Ghoul, later told me over the phone, “Because of the inherent danger, our goodbyes to them lasted mere seconds. Malak’s eyes laid open, as if to ask, ‘What wrong did I commit?‘”
I was born in 1982, in that same house in Rafah’s refugee camp, where the family’s large household expanded. I grew up there, and everything else grew with us: the first intifada, the resistance, my nearby school that I walked to every day.
There, I saw my first-ever book library. There, I remember seeing my grandfather fall asleep as he listened to the BBC. And there, I laid eyes on the first Israeli soldier in my life, striking my grandfather to force him to erase the national slogans that adorned the walls of our refugee camp home.
Now, the house and its future memories have been laid to waste, its children taken to early graves.
Homes and recollections bombed into oblivion, their inhabitants homeless and lost, just as their camp always had been. Never ask me about peace again.
Note: Italian journalist and photographer Simone Camilli died as a team were dismantling an unexploded Israeli/US missile in Gaza a few days ago
”Camilli once said a favorite story of his was about a group of clowns performing for young Syrian refugees, bringing moments of happiness to the lives of the boys and girls who fled the civil war.”
Indeed Simone Camilli did an amazing job. he really captured the right atmosphere with his lens. And he was looking forward to doing more videos about social clowning.
here’s the link of his work. we were lucky to have him with us. What a special person/artist he was.
