Gaza to New York: Road movie with a difference

It is, if nothing else, a road movie with a difference. A trip made by 15 bright teenage boys to the US would hardly be the stuff of a compelling documentary film – and UN film-maker Johan Eriksson’s award-winning “No Sharp Objects” is certainly that – were it not for the fact that they are Palestinians from a closed Gaza which most have never left before and are unlikely to do so again any time soon. Every experience, from passing through Erez crossing into Israel (the film’s title comes from the warning the boys are given about whatnot to take through the forbidding terminal’s heavy security) to boarding a Jumbo jet at Amman airport, to overlooking Manhattan from their 38-floor hotel, has all the indelible vividness, tinged with a little fear, that you would expect from boys who have never been to Jerusalem, let alone New York.

The boys are astounded by the landscape they see for the first time from their bus in Israel, only a few miles, but another world away, from the territory imprisoned by the military border fence they have left behind them. “We saw green fields and parks on both sides of the road and houses in all this greenery,” says one of the boys, Samer Manaa, soberly in the voiceover. He notes that it is the first time the boys, the top students in the human rights course at their UN Relief and Works Agency schools, have seen civilian Israelis “in their own community” and that they “seem to be enjoying their rights.”

The boys revel in their “classy” Amman hotel rooms—with their “five star” bathrooms and the minibars they are warned not to use—the American diner where they are delighted to find the manager is a Palestinian from Tulkarem, and the kind of play stations “we didn’t even know about” of the boys from Maryland they befriend in Washington. Approaching New York’s Times Square at night, they are frankly incredulous. “It’s like I’m living in a dream or something,” says another, Motaz Aljamal. “When I saw the beauty in America. I didn’t think that I’m going to say that, but when I saw America I thought that this place should exist. It should stay there… And the whole world should be like this”

But this was also a trip with a double purpose—”for their own education and to educate” as UNRWA’s Gaza Operation’s Director John Ging put it at the film’s first Jerusalem screening this week. “Anyone who met them was moved by what great kids they are… with the same dreams, wishes and ambitions as kids everywhere.”

The itinerary is tailored to an ambitious curriculum intended to instil in the Gaza UN schools’ 200,000 pupils a respect for international law and non-violence as the path to the freedom they are currently denied. In Atlanta, they visit the city’s two unique monuments to the goals of peace and non-violent change, the [Jimmy] Carter Center and the King Center, where they see Martin Luther King’s seminal Lincoln Memorial speech from 1963 and are told by the guide how King’s “idea was that you have to make the person you want to influence realize what his actions are doing to you” And at a holocaust exhibition at the UN in New York they are told by Rafiq Murad, a Gaza teacher accompanying them: “And so guys, because we faced suffering and injustice we have to appreciate and understand the suffering of others, regardless of their religion and race. Jews were persecuted in Europe in the Second World War and we understand that.” Nor has the message been lost on the boys. “We wish what happened in World War II will never happen again,” Motaz Aljamal, 16, told me in Gaza this week. He went on to reflect on what the trip had done for him. “I didn’t have that much confidence in myself before I went to the US,” he said. “After the people we met and the places we visited I learned how to improve my self-confidence.”

Just how key the human rights curriculum now is in UNRWA’s Gaza schools was evident this week at two classes I sat in on this week at Gaza City’s Beach Camp Co-Ed C school. One, of seven and eight year olds, were playing the roles of two rabbits, a sparrow and a butterfly –complete with makeshift paper ears and wings– to drive home the message that males and females are equal and that co-operation is the way to get things done. After it Hussam, seven, was asked what he would do if his father gave him one shekel pocket money and his sister only a half shekel “I would ask him to give us both one shekel,” he declared, on cue.

At another 11 and 12 year old girls were conducting workshops on scenarios like how a daughter who broke her leg on a family trip last year could persuade her reluctant father to organize another this year. Here the message was: find the right time and place for a meeting; listen to the other person even if he is angry; show that you have the will to co-operate. But could these admirable tenets really be applicable to the wider struggle for Palestinian rights? “We have to be patient,” insisted Raha Dardasawi, 11. “We should not be fed up or disappointed. We should never give up.”

The human rights curriculum, along with other Ging innovations like the summer games for both boys and girls, have come under attack from Gaza extremists—including a few Hamas hardliners—but Ging, one of the most consistent and outspoken critics of the Israeli-imposed siege, insists the critics are a “small minority” which does not include the vast majority of Gaza parents. “There’s a competition for influence here,” he says. “We have to rise to that challenge. The competition comes from the physical environment, what we might call the rhetoric environment and the sense of confinement. You have to have a very effective programme to counter that.”

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