notes of a non-combatant

the road to gaza; day three, rafah

Bouncing along rural roads across the North Sinai, through the barren desert landscape full of scrub brush and occasional unfinished cinder block structures, so many thoughts rattle through my head. The bus is the last of three caravaning to the Rafah border crossing, and it is full of relatively subdued folks including myself who, for some reason or another, have to keep reminding ourselves that we are indeed headed to break the siege on the Gaza Strip. As the colorful green bus rolls down the road, following an identical purple and magenta bus also full of CodePink delegates, we entertain ourselves with conversation, impromptu songs, and random group activities. We cheered as we left the town of Arish and rolled past the plethora of tourist police who had been guarding our hotels, clapping and whistling until we not only passed the police, but also the flatbed truck carrying the playground equipment we are aiming to deliver to children in Gaza.

There is a mixture of emotions and thoughts resonating through my head. In between lighthearted moments on the bus, spontaneous cheers whenever anybody does something highly entertaining, I can still catch a glimpse of our police escort through the windows. Units of calm, somber men professionally dressed in perfectly clean white or light khaki uniforms, occasionally seen gazing longingly at this perfectly carefree group of Americans gallivanting across their country. In between those moments of catching the soldiers trading smalltalk with each other or blankly staring at the landscape while they run their fingers along weathered Kalashnikov rifles or holstered sidearms belted to their waists, you can see in their calm eyes that underneath the neat uniforms and heavy presence of weapons, they are simply regular, working men.

It is in stark contrast to a memory from last night, after Norm lectured the group on the topic of Israeli military history and the recent engagement in the Gaza Strip. He briefly quoted a few major human rights organizations while speaking on the topic of white phosphorus, and a member of the delegation approached him after the talk. As I stood nearby and waited for the chance to thank Finklestein for the information he shared with us, Billy began asking Norm about white phosphorus, mentioning its use in previous military engagements. He said that in Vietnam, they used white phosphorus interchangeably with high explosive or smoke rounds. In fact, he said, anytime they geared up for combat, they “grabbed whatever was there, explosive, smoke, wi-pi, whatever,” and would toss phosphorus grenades in bunkers until men staggered out and, as he said, “the skin was dripping off their faces, so bad that you put a round in their head to end their pain.” Billy and Norm continued their conversation long after I found the moment to thank Norm and run along, but those statements stuck in my head, my imagination turning words into pictures.

A tangle of thoughts clutters my head as we near the international boundary between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Sitting in Rafah, Egypt, directly across the border from the Gaza Strip, I remain on this comfortable but slightly rickety bus tapping away on my laptop, hoping to sort these thoughts out. Images flash through my imagination of fire raining from the sky, like thunderheads breaking overhead as phosphorus shells explode into incendiary parcels delivered from above. The stench of burning hair and flesh filling the air, screams of agony echoing along the landscape. In contrast to Gaza City, where we hope to arrive by nightfall, the tales Billy recounted from Vietnam, both from last night and today on the bus, only differed in the fact that Vietnam was a ground invasion. As such, when civilians died while writhing in agony with phosphorus melting their skin, at least American soldiers were able to end their misery with a round to the head. Israel didn’t even offer that much to the Gazans it rained fire upon.