Entering the prison

The Gaza Strip is a giant open-air prison. As soon as you enter the Palestinian side from Israel you are immediately greeted by shy Palestinian officials and a landscape littered with dust, debris and demolished structures. Driving down the central arterary of the Strip is like driving down the boulevarde of nihilism. A lengthy monument to decades-long occupation, it hints at the difficulties the Palestinians will face in creating a functioning state. Most of the road is raw, the bitumen in large part having been dug-up by Israeli bulldozers during the disengagement period that ended a few weeks back. What utility do such actions have other than to create misery for the Palestinians?
Yes, there is even the savaged reminance of a synagogue (pictured above). It looks more like a twisted, heaped roll of water-logged paper than anything recognisable as a place of worship. My instantenous reaction upon seeing the wreckage was fear, fear towards the type of anger and hatred that generated it. And sadness. Why couldn't the synagogue have been converted into a mosque or, at least salvage. I've been told much of the synagogue's materials were salvage. But it doesn't look like they did a very good job.

What is equally obvious, but which has not received much mainstream media attention, is the Jewish settlement structures (particularly homes and farming infrastructure) which are now totally destroyed. The Jewish settlers deliberately destroyed everything they could not take with them, thanks as always to the Israeli Defence Force.

Access to Gaza is via the Erez Checkpoint in Israel (Israel has presently blocked access between Egypt and Gaza). It must rank as one of the most astonishing alternative tourist sites in the world.

At present only internationals with good reason to enter Gaza may enter the Strip. The only place you do this is through the Erez Checkpoint in Israel. The checkpoint is basically a giant corridor. The first segment of this corridor begins when you pass three small concrete bunkers which are manned by Israeli soldiers when the checkpoint is fully operational (aka when Palestinians are travelling through it). Passed that is the standard booth where young female Israeli soldiers do their best to impersonate immigration officials checking your passport. Once this process of procedural brinksmanship has been completed you are motioned towards a lane which resembles a giant faraday cage. The end of this cage is closed by an electric gate. There is no way of knowing when or how it will open, although there is a small video camera trained keenly at you from the roof. In my experience, the gate opened, ever so slowly, after around two minutes.

Following this electric gate there exists another, larger electric gate which completely covers a long concrete corridor some 15 metres wide, 10 metres high, and, as I soon would discover, around a kilometre long. Again, further uncertainty ensues at this juncture. Do I say something? Do I just wait? When will the gate open? This time there did not appear to be any video camera (although I am certain there was a video camera somewhere)... And eventually the gate did open, even more slowly than the previous one.As I began to walk through the opening I was startled by a loud, garbled message emanating from a mega-phone on the Israeli side.

"Oh shit, what is it now?" was my immediate, audible response.
"Don't worry, it's probably just us." Was the response from a man standing on the Palestinian side with a camera crew. Somehow I had managed not to notice them until then. This despite the corridor being long and straight. Amazing the tunnel vision you develop when you're caged in.
"Oh, okay."

I walked on through as the gate closed before the others could cross and the man who had spoken to me began to let off a string of expletives in the mega-phone's direction.* This from an 'international', a white television crew. I wonder what the locals must think?The long corridor was really something else. I've been through the labrynth underground train stations of many a major city, but the Erez checkpoint corridor took the cake. It was straight, claustrophobic (yes, that word again) and completely featureless except for the myriad of bullet holes peppered liberally along both sides of the corridor's walls. Some of the holes were neat, small and needle like. Others were chunky, messy, blob-like gaps. It was as if I was being given a free lesson on the different types of bullets you can fire from a machine gun. In the photo above you can see the part of the corridor where the Palestinian and Israeli sides begin. The Israeli side is to the right, coloured off-green.

(The Palestinian side of Erez Checkpoint.)

* I later discovered that the journalist was none other than the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Matt Brown.