Interview of Mohammed by EB ’21.
Mohammed is from Gaza, Palestine, and that made my interviews with him hugely interesting. He was initially born in Saudi Arabia, but as I learned, the connection his family felt for the land lost in 1967 was too great to resist and he subsequently moved back to Gaza with his family. Mohammed, as he explains in his interviews, essentially grew up on the “front lines.” He has been a UNRWA volunteer and this made his insights from events such as the 2014 Summer War even more valuable, and was able to supplement my understanding of Israel-Palestine.
Transcript:
“I am from Gaza Strip, Palestine, and currently I am studying global studies program, it’s a graduate program at the University of Southampton. I was born in Saudi Arabia, I lived there for five years, then I moved to Gaza Strip, to the refugee camp.
It’s another story, it’s like you’re living in a parallel universe, it’s out of this world.
The thing is that, you wake up every day, you turn into an individual person who just thinks deeply, that faces the ideas in his mind. I’d say it’s a deep experience, like you’re doing deep contemplation, you don’t listen to music, you don’t have any distraction in life, you don’t have much to do. It’s just you, the land, and the sky, you live in complete unity with the nature.
My family used to work in Saudi Arabia. 1967 catastrophe when people have fled Palestine, that was my family, part of them when they left Palestine and come back. People feel very attached to the area, to the land, to their families who still living there.
So, if you like for example, if you are a citizen with security issue and you want to go to the police station, there is no police station because it has been bombed. What you will find is the sort of patrol that you have to walk down the streets to search for that patrol – which is a group of five security officers who keep driving around because they don’t want to be bombed.
When you have a blockade on the Gaza Strip that strict, that hard, what did they expect people to do? To throw flowers? I don’t justify the use of violence because it has worsened the situation but at the same time what did they expect? You’re just starving people there, you’re taking all their resources, you’re preventing – Israel is building up the tension right now in Gaza Strip. We have the blockade that is strict siege. What does Israel expect from Gazans?
If both sides were serious about reaching an agreement and solving this problem then they should have a kind of discussion of the Palestinians in diaspora. Let’s say we have a million Palestinians in diaspora. We can check and see who of those Palestinians is willing to stay in his second country as a refugee. We should figure out the percentage of those who are willing to stay in their second countries, the percentage of those who are willing to come back to Palestinian lands, and the percentage of those who are willing to go back to their lands in Israel. So we have – I think there should be three portions – of not just right of return but three rights of return: those who are willing to stay, those who are willing to come back to Palestine and those who want to go back to Israel, and the three partners of this process should accept that each one of them will take a percentage of Palestinian people.
I have many Israeli and Jewish friends whom – I am proud of them, they are very supportive of peace, I’m honestly speaking, I would love for those people to be in a strong power position in their countries, I would say there would be real serious prospect for peace and agreements. The thing is that when you say we want a state that we want a nation, and – but we’re against the violence, the thing is that it’s not about what you want, it’s about what is happening on the ground.
So I’ve always been living on the front lines since I was a child and so I’ve always had that in mind, that when I grow up I would do something like that, I would offer help to people, I would do something to assist those in need and those in bad situations. I got my undergraduate degree in English language and then I started working for the UNRWA which is the largest humanitarian relief platform in the Middle East.”
https://soundcloud.com/nancy-kalow/interview-with-m
