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Khalil Kishawi shares his personal history from when he first worked in Libyan oilfields to when he worked dayshifts as an accountant and nightshifts as a taxi driver.
Standing at the six-cornered intersection where Elston Avenue crosses Western and Diversey is a woman in her mid-30s patiently waiting to cross the street. But the virtually imperceptible way her eyes darted from car to car tell veteran taxi driver Khalil Kishawi she is actually trying to flag down a cab.
This ability to read pedestrians is a skill he had developed when he first began driving in the mid-1980s. Three decades and a combination of careers later, Khalil lets me in on some of his most personal experiences living far from his home in occupied Palestine.
Khalil Kishawi is one of nine siblings born to Abdelrahman and Mozayyann in the dense Remal neighborhood of Gaza City. Born just a year and a half after Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in 1948, he watched Gaza’s landscape transform from colorful economic and cultural prosperity to the drab green of military fatigues surrounding the territory.
For the first seventeen years of his life, Khalil bore witness to the harsh realities of foreign occupation. Control of Gaza transferred from the British to the Egyptians and then to the Israelis. His prospects for a stable future seemed to slip away after each subsequent military operation so, in 1967, he left Gaza and joined three of his older siblings in Cairo.
Khalil graduated from Cairo University with a degree in commerce (equivalent to a Bachelor’s degree in accounting) four years later. Intending to become entirely self-sufficient and to help support his younger siblings back home in Gaza, he traveled to Libya to work for Esso, known today as the Exxon Oil Company in Brega. For just under a year, Khalil handled the oil terminal’s inventory and accounting. He would work for two weeks straight before taking a weeklong vacation outside of the industrial settlement and seaport.
Eventually, Khalil moved on to work as an accountant for Libya’s state television network. Himself being Palestinian, he felt particularly sensitive to the way the television network unabashedly colluded with the Libyan government in exploiting the Palestinian struggle for its own political advancement. When Muammar Gaddafi’s 1977 speech was met with a tremendously low turnout, he contacted Khalil’s managing director and demanded the network broadcast footage from an old and more lively rally in which he championed, among other things, the Palestinian cause.
No longer capable of tolerating the network’s attempts to deceive the public in the government’s favor, Khalil quickly resigned and left the country for the United Kingdom. [Read more...]
A Public Appeal: “The doors of hell” have opened in Gaza
I’m writing this as F-16s and Israeli-operated drones target Palestinian “objectives” (which we’ve come to realize encompasses everything from olive trees to bread factories), plunging Gaza City into darkness, destroying homes and apartments, and worst of all, maiming and possibly killing innocent civilians and their children. Where is the foreign intervention when you need it? Why isn’t there a no fly zone over Palestine? Why is the radio still playing yesterday’s news?
Everyone’s big on intervention these days. The West recently came to its senses and launched strategic military attacks against pro-Gaddafi monsters in Libya. Maybe it’s for the oil. Maybe it’s a way of saying that America really doesn’t hate Arabs. Maybe NATO finally realized Gaddafi serves no purpose but to terrorize his own people. Maybe. But why isn’t Gaza getting the same type of response?
Just yesterday, the Israeli Air Force carried out an indiscriminate bombing raid that left up to nine people dead, including children. Dozens more were injured and it’s likely that the death toll will increase. The only news coverage I found came from small media outlets. American press coverage didn’t even see fit to identify the victims by their names.
Less than a full day later, a small bomb went off in Jerusalem, killing one Israeli and injuring 30 more. Virtually every major news network broke the news in one way or another. The identity of the bomber has yet to be discovered or confirmed.
I’m going to ignore numbers because, frankly, I refuse to compete over who experiences ‘more’ deaths. It’s a problematic thinking process that implicitly advocates for 1:1 death ratios. After all, there really is no need to play the Pain Olympics. I don’t need to prove that Palestinians have been winning gold since 1948. So if we look at these two scenarios as flagrant attacks against unarmed civilians, why do the Israeli victims receive more coverage than the Palestinian victims?
Before you answer the question, let me remind you that the Israeli Air Force has a swarm of apache helicopters, drones, and fighter jets currently circling the skies over Gaza, prepared to rain fire on the terrified yet upstanding Palestinian population. Reports are leaking in; special Israeli military units have already made the incursion into northern Gaza and several eye witnesses report tank sightings. A house in Beit Lahiya has already been cleared of its inhabitants.
Although these eye witness accounts haven’t yet been confirmed by investigators and media watchdogs, the world is at a very crucial crossroads. Either it can confirm the testimonies itself by focusing its lenses and training its cameras toward the plumes of smoke in the Gaza Strip or it can provide the same foreign intervention that it has for the last 63 years: nothing.
Speaking to Israel’s Channel 2 News, Knesset member Baruch Ben-Ari informed viewers that “the doors of hell are to be open on Palestinians”. Even after revealing to the world the intentions of the Israeli military, the international community refuses to stand up to the indescribable horror imposed against the Palestinian population. What more does the world need in order to get its act together and defend justice in its entirety and not just for select groups of people? So much for intervention on behalf of a global interest in peace, security, liberty, and human dignity.
There is a military escalation in the Gaza Strip whether the U.S. State Department want to believe it or not. Paralleling Gaddafi’s brutal response to the frustrated Libyan people, this escalation pits the military of Israel against the people — the men, women, elderly, and children — of Palestine. Please do something before CNN broadcasters are forced to manually scratch out any possible headlines reporting the deaths of dozens upon dozens of innocent people. Please do something before we face another Operation Cast Lead.
Sami Kishawi