Thursday, November 2, Gaza City

I’m sitting here in my room in Gaza City. With the windows open I can hear car horns beeping, the drums and music of wedding parties (we have seen two this evening), sirens, the call to prayer being sung from the nearby mosque, fireworks and, below my window, the sound of the sea. This place could have it all; the weather is beautiful, the people are welcoming, the fresh produce tastes like real food and along Gaza’s 40km western side is the sea. A dream. But the dream isn’t happening.

Everyone we have met here says the same things: "We live in a big prison". Israel controls the borders to the north and east of the Gaza strip, and maintains some control over the crossing at the southern border with Egypt. Some 15,000 people rely on the fishing industry in the Gaza Strip. But fishing is severely restricted, people have told me. Fishermen, on the rare occasions that they are allowed out in their boats, must stay within three nautical miles of the beach. An Israeli naval ship sitting in the bay gives the incentive to follow this rule. Fishermen have been shot at for being too far out to sea, their boats, destroyed.

We have been traveling around the West Bank and Gaza for the last few days, and have been asking the same questions: "where do you find your hope? What keeps you going?" One man who spent over fourteen years in an Israeli jail told us today that to give up your hope is to give up entirely. A priest in Gaza, who has suffered along with his parishioners from the Israeli restrictions on freedom of movement, said that he has to keep hope alive, because he preaches hope on Sundays and: "I cannot be a liar in church". In the West Bank, a group of young men from Ramallah said that the thought of a Palestinian state keeps them going.

But for others, this hope must surely be hard to cling to. In the old city of Hebron, wire mesh covers the city streets from above, creating a cage-like effect. Why? Because a small group of extremists throws rubbish, furniture and sometimes bleach down at the Palestinians on the street below. And yet, there is hope here. The people are the hope; the well educated, passionate Palestinians who have told us they want peace, the Israeli activists who can criticize their government from within, the many Trócaire partners we have met who work from early morning to late at night for the rights of Palestinians and for a just peace for both communities. And then there is us. We can’t let ourselves off the hook and say that we did not know what was happening.