A look inside ‘Gaza Ghetto’

An invitation to experience the ‘world’s largest open prison’ from the inside at film screening and talk by leading Palestinian academic, Dr Shahd Abusalama. Report by Katy Colley, Chair of Hastings & Rye Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Hastings locals are being offered the chance to take a filmic trip behind the barbed wire fences and inside Gaza, considered by many the ‘world’s largest open prison’. On Saturday 11 June, prominent Palestinian academic Dr Shahd Abusalama will present a ground-breaking film, the first feature-length documentary on Gazan refugees, giving a glimpse of life under military occupation.

Today, Gaza is home to over 2 million Palestinians – mainly refugees – who have been under a strict Israeli blockade for 15 years, leading to economic collapse and levels of poverty so desperate they were described by the UN as ‘unliveable’.

Third generation refugee, Dr Abusalama, was ‘born at the barrel of a gun’ as her mother went into labour in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza during a military curfew and she was stopped by armed soldiers on her way to hospital.

As a child, she survived three deadly military assaults in Gaza before moving to the UK to study.

Despite her traumatic past, Dr Abusalama thrived in the UK and today she is a well-known anti-racist campaigner, as well as a founding member of the all-female Hawiyya Dance Company, bringing Palestinian folk traditions to all parts of the UK, including to Hastings last September during the cultural festival, ‘Palestine on the Pier’.

For her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, she investigated historical representations of Palestinian refugees in documentary cinema and will present the documentary film  (1948-1984) to the meeting.

This ground-breaking 1984 documentary about the life of a Palestinian family in the Jabalia refugee camp – where Dr Abusalama herself was raised – was the first to be filmed within Gaza about refugees living there and, intercut with interviews with Israeli politicians and soldiers on patrol, it explores the historic origins of Gaza, as well as the brutal realities of life under occupation.

The documentary follows the family as they attempt to go about their daily lives amid suffocating curfews, military patrols, humiliating restrictions and devastating demolitions – and revisits the villages from which they fled in 1948.

Hosted by the Hastings & Rye Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the afternoon meeting is free to attend and will be followed by a Q&A and refreshments.

The group recently held a memorial event for the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh in Hastings town centre. Shireen, 51, was shot dead wearing her Press vest, while covering an Israeli military assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.

Shireen’s death at the hands of Israeli forces – and their assault on the mourners at her funeral – is considered part of a wider campaign of increased violence against the indigenous Palestinian population by the decades-long military occupation. Her death has come as a shock, but it is one act within a system of institutionalised violence and terror which extends to all Palestinians.

It is a year since the deadly assault on Gaza which left 261 dead, including 67 children and 113,000 internally displaced. This attack was marked for its intensity, its destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure, not to mention hospitals and schools.

This was not a one-off. If you are a child over 15 in Gaza today you will have spent your entire life under a crippling blockade and will have lived through four wars. In Gaza, trauma is repetitive, ongoing and systematic.

What has led us to this point? How can we understand what is happening in Gaza and what can we do about it? This meeting is an attempt to get to the historic roots of what we witness today and to form an ethical response.

For Shahd, speaking out against persecution has come at a personal cost. Earlier this year, she came under attack from the Israeli lobby in the UK, which attempted to smear and defame her, threatening her teaching position at Sheffield.

Ultimately these attempts to derail her career failed and though the harassment and intimidation continue to this day, she refuses to be silent.

‘For a Palestinian living under the relentless terror perpetrated by the Israeli state, all we have is our voice,’ says Shahd. ‘I’ve been utilising that voice in writing, in painting, in dabke dancing, ever since I was a teenager, if not a kid.’

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