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newstfionline · 7 years

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The Jobless Youth Of Gaza Have Lost Faith In Everyone

Cyrille Louis, Le Figaro, Oct. 19, 2017

GAZA CITY--Their world doesn’t extend much beyond this piece of sidewalk that never seems to change. Glued to their white plastic chairs, Khaled, Mohammed and Abdel Rahman spend their time talking about everything and nothing while fiddling with their smartphones. There’s no 3G coverage, so their only connection to the rest of the world depends on a router powered by a portable battery. The hairdresser’s salon down the street, which is forced to turn on its generator whenever a client comes, lets them charge up during power shortages, which is most of the time. This is daily life for these three young men in the poor neighborhood of Shuja’iyya, on the east side of Gaza City: closed and dull.

“The world out there is like the future: I don’t think about it,” jokes the 20-year-old Khaled Sukkar, who gets by selling second-hand clothes.

Abdel Rahman says he and his friends are part of a “lost generation,” and looks back on the past as if talking about a golden age. “When they were our age, our fathers and grandfathers would earn 10 times more by working for the Israelis,” he says.

The same complaint echoes all along the narrow strip of land. More than half of the 2 million people crammed in Gaza are under 25, and most of them have never set foot outside the territory. They have been isolated by the Israeli blockade since the Islamist group Hamas prevailed in its military conflict against Fatah, in June 2007, as well as by the almost permanent closing by the Egyptian authorities of the Rafah Border Crossing, after the summer of 2013. The young here know little more than the repetition of wars, the restriction of freedoms and a shrinking economy.

Despite a remarkably high level of education, unemployment among that age group reaches a record high of 60%, with a peak of 73% for recent graduates. “With such a pool of skilled labor and a slowing birth rate, all the ingredients are there for strong economic growth in the Gaza Strip,” says Anders Thomsen, the United Nations Population Fund’s representative to Palestine. “But the many constraints hindering its development threaten to turn these assets into a burden.”

Shayma al-Naji, 24, has her own perspective. Unlike Khaled and his friends, the young woman looked as if she was holding all the keys to a successful career. The daughter of a former high-ranking police officer, she obtained her architecture certificate from the Islamic University of Gaza in the spring of 2015, and immediately started looking for a job.

“That’s when things got complicated,” she says. “In Gaza, too many people have been raised with the strong belief that a woman shouldn’t work--or in a low-ranking job. So the few internships I was offered all led nowhere.”

Her classmates haven’t been much luckier. Shayma says that most of them are unemployed, and many have resorted to work as taxi drivers so as not to be a financial burden on their families. “Being young in Gaza means first and foremost feeling useless,” she says. “I wake up every morning asking myself what I could do with my day. We clean the house. We spend hours on Facebook. Then I go out with my friends and we dwell on our depression together ...”

Unlike some of her friends, who she says are hoping to bring meaning to their lives by getting married, Shayma dreams only of leaving Gaza. Coming from a rather open-minded family, it was easy for her to convince her parents to let her--successfully--apply for a grant to go and study in Hungary. “They can see that there’s no future here for me,” she says.

Two of her older sisters already moved to Britain. For Shayma, however, the battle isn’t over yet. The Hungarian embassy in Tel Aviv recently approved her visa application, but the Israeli authorities are slow in granting her the required paperwork to leave the territory. “Unfortunately, I don’t have good connections, and without that, things are very complicated here,” Shamya explains.

Many young people share this urge to flee Gaza, but for the vast majority it’s far out of reach. After the summer 2014 war, dozens of them risked their lives by climbing the fence that separates them from Israel, or spent all their savings to sneak into Egypt through the few smuggling tunnels still in use, in the hope of being then able to go to Europe.

“People from my generation, unlike our parents, don’t think the situation is going to improve for Palestinians,” says Ahmed Kraia, 22. He is freshly graduated from the Al-Azhar University but hasn’t found a job yet. He hopes to obtain a grant to be able to continue his studies in France. In the meantime, he spends hours on Facebook, chatting with people he vaguely knows who took the plunge and moved to Europe.

“They’re traveling from city to city, going to the cinema or to concerts and nothing seems to stand in their way,” the young man says with a sigh. In Gaza, the last cinema closed down in 1998 and the Hamas takes a dim view of the rare concerts organized by local rap bands.

Anywhere else, such malaise might have led to a youth rebellion. Will that happen here in Gaza? Jouman Abou Jazar, 28, gives a faint, wry smile. In January, he took part in a rare demonstration to protest against power shortages. “There were more than 3,000 of us, but Hamas quickly dispersed us with their truncheons.”

The violence of that reaction was enough to quiet the rebellious instincts, at least momentarily. But the despair is now expressed out loud in the streets of Gaza. “We are already dead, so to speak. What have we got to lose?” Jouman asks. “Everybody would accept to go and work in Israel without hesitation, including some members of Hamas who can’t make ends meet,” he adds.

Like so many other people here, Jouman started to work when he was 12 and until just a few years ago, he would earn a very decent living working in the smuggling tunnels to Egypt built by Hamas. He would dig, bring out the sand, transport flour or cigarettes ... until their sudden destruction in 2013 by the Egyptian army ruined this business. The city at the Egyptian border, Rafah is “a dead city now,” he adds.

Hamza Redouan, a 24-year-old journalist who works for a radio station affiliated with Hamas, says he dreams of studying in France, but only for a while. Afterwards he’d want to come back home. “The situation is undoubtedly more difficult now than it was 10 years ago,” he says. “I remember the spirit of hope after the Israelis left. The only thing people we were thinking about then was to build a free and prosperous Palestine, liberated from the corruption of the Palestinian National Authority. But in hindsight, I wonder whether Hamas hasn’t made a mistake in taking control of the government and locking itself into a fruitless power struggle with the Palestinian National Authority, rather than focusing on resisting occupation.”

Negotiations in recent weeks between Hamas and the Fatah leaders of the Palestinian Authority offer signs of reconciliation on a political level, but long-term questions about the society and the economy will not go away. “According to our forecasts, a million working-age youths will enter the Palestinian job market by 2030,” says Thomsen of the United Nations Population Fund. He warns that the situation could turn into a “humanitarian catastrophe” if the constraints hindering the economy in Gaza aren’t removed until then.

On the sidewalk in Shuja’iyya, Khaled, Mohammed and Adel Rahman shrug. “We’re sinking so quickly,” one of them states matter of factly. “Why would we even look toward the future?”

#Gaza #Palestinians #Palestinian youth

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newstfionline · 7 years

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Trapped between Israel and Hamas, Gaza’s wasted generation is going nowhere

By William Booth and Hazem Balousha, Washington Post, August 6, 2017

They are the Hamas generation, raised under the firm hand of an Islamist militant movement. They are the survivors of three wars with Israel and a siege who find themselves as young adults going absolutely nowhere.

In many circles in Gaza, it is hard to find anyone in their 20s with real employment, with a monthly salary.

They call themselves a wasted generation.

Ten years after Hamas seized control of Gaza, the economy in the seaside strip of 2 million has been strangled by incompetence, war and blockade.

Gaza today lives off its wits and the recycled scraps donated by foreign governments. Seven in 10 people rely on humanitarian aid.

Young people say they are bored out of their minds.

They worry that too many of their friends are gobbling drugs, not drugs to experience ecstasy but pills used to tranquilize animals, smuggled across Sinai. They dose on Tramadol and smoke hashish. They numb.

Hamas has recently stepped up executions of drug traffickers.

Freedoms to express oneself are circumscribed. But the young people speak, a little bit. They say their leaders have failed them--and that the Israelis and Egyptians are crushing them.

Why not revolt? They laugh. It is very hard to vote the current government out--there are no elections.

“To be honest with you, we do nothing,” said Bilal Abusalah, 24, who trained to be a nurse but sometimes sells women’s clothing.

He has cool jeans, a Facebook page, a mobile phone and no money.

He and his friends get by with odd jobs, a few hours here and there. They worked at cafes during the busy evenings of Ramadan in June. They will help an uncle in his shoe shop as the school year approaches in August. They make $10 a day at these kinds of jobs, a few coins for coffee and cigarettes.

“We are the generation that waits,” Abusalah said.

Reporters asked a 25-year-old college graduate, who got his degree in public relations, what he did for a living.

He answered, “I stare into space.”

Raw sewage washes onto the beaches. The water looks blue at the horizon, where Israeli gunboats lurk, enforcing a six-mile blockade. But the surf line is a foamy brown.

The rappers of Gaza see this as a metaphor. They are literally trapped in their own excrement.

Most young people in Gaza have not been out, either through Israel, which is almost impossible, or through the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been mostly closed for the past four years.

Electricity service is down to four hours a day. The young activists in the refugee camps who dared in January to protest power cuts? They were hustled off to jail.

In the dusty gray cement-colored world of Gaza, now sputtering along on Chinese solar panels and Egyptian diesel, young people spend their days, day after day, playing with their phones, their worlds reduced to palm-size screens, to YouTube videos and endless chat.

Unemployment for Gaza’s young adults hovers around 60 percent. This is not just a dull World Bank number. This is a stunning number, the highest in the Middle East and among the worst rates in the world.

Think-tank scholars warn that Egypt’s youth unemployment rate of 30 percent is “a ticking time bomb.” In Gaza, the jobless rate for young people is double that.

The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says what happens in Gaza is all the fault of Hamas, a terrorist organization. Hamas leaders traditionally blame the Israeli blockade for their problems. Gaza is allowed no seaport, no airport and limited exports, mostly fruits and vegetables, alongside some furniture and textiles. Lately the pressure on the strip has only gotten worse, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently slashed payments for Gaza’s electricity, to squeeze people to reject Hamas.

Gaza’s young people describe their lives as a kind of sick experiment.

The literacy rate in Gaza is 96.8 percent, higher than in the West Bank. The “Palestinian engineer” was once the gold standard in the Middle East. In the past, immigration was the door to life. That door has slammed shut. Few get out of Gaza these days.

Yet the universities of Gaza are still pumping out graduates by the thousands, even though the least likely person to find work in Gaza today is a college graduate, especially a woman.

The most recent surveys reveal that half of the Gaza population would leave the enclave if given the chance.

“I don’t believe it,” said Mohammad Humaed, 24, who studied cinema at a university but works a couple of nights a week at a coffee shop in a refugee camp. “All the young people would leave.”

Economists use the term ”de-development” to describe what is happening.

Young people in Gaza have a joke to say the same thing.

They say their unemployed friends “are driving the mattress,” meaning they spend their daylight hours sprawled in bed.

Two years ago, the United Nations warned that Gaza could become “unlivable” by 2020. U.N. officials recently said they had been overly optimistic: The place could collapse next year.

This is the generation that grew up immersed in the rhetoric of the Hamas version of the Palestinian resistance, a moralistic message of piety and opposition to Israel hammered home in Hamas-controlled mosques and military-style summer camps for children and teens, who were taught first aid and how to throw a grenade.

But in many interviews, in their torn-just-so jeans and fresh white sneakers, Gaza’s young people today say they would rather fight for a job in Tel Aviv than fight Israelis.

“If the borders were open, I’d work in Israel in a minute. I got absolutely no problem with that. Everybody would work in Israel,” said Iyad Abu Heweila, 24, who graduated with a degree in English education two years ago but now spends his days hanging out.

“I have no achievements,” he said.

Heweila asked if he could make a confession.

“I know it’s bad, but sometimes I wonder, if there’s another war with Israel, maybe there would be work for translators?” Heweila asked.

“That is sick, I know. I tell you this to show how desperate we feel,” he said. “I want a job. I want money. I want to start my life.”

This summer the nights are inky dark, now that power service has been reduced to three or four hours a day.

Every evening a group of friends gather on a rooftop. They sit on cheap plastic chairs or pieces of cement block. It is cooler up there. The night sea breeze rattles the fronds of date palms, and you can hear some Hamas official on a radio program playing in a nearby apartment. Nobody on the roof pays any attention.

Asked what he did that day, Ahmed Abu Duhair, 25, said he slept until late afternoon.

He lives for the night. “Just talking, laughing, smoking on the roof to make us a little bit happy before we die,” Duhair said.

“We are closer than brothers,” he explained, as they passed the water pipe around and took deep huffs of apple-spiced tobacco. “We’re not lazy guys. We’ve been working since we were kids.”

They began to tell stories about their first jobs, selling cigarette lighters in traffic, helping vendors at the market. Asked how old they were then, they answered they were 8 or 9 or 10.

They were envious of their friend Tamer al-Bana, 23, the only one among them who was married. Bana has two young children and a third on the way. He had to borrow $7,000 from a relative to wed, a debt that would take him years to pay off.

If the young men on the roof are desperate, so too are college graduates. Mona Abu Shawareb, 24, graduated with a degree in psychology a year ago but hasn’t gotten her diploma yet because she owes the university money.

Shawareb tries hard to keep busy. She takes free English classes at a Turkish charity; she volunteers at an organization that works with street youth; she did an internship with the U.N. refugee agency and learned Microsoft Word and Excel.

But like many unemployed young people here, she lives on the Internet, feeding friends and followers a stream of updates on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Snapchat.

Like most women in Gaza, Shawareb dresses conservatively when she leaves the house. But she confessed that when she looks at the Internet and sees women in the West running in athletic clothes, “I feel envious,” she said. “I want to jog.”

Mohammad al-Rayyas, 25, said his heart aches for Cairo, where he received a degree in accounting. In the two years he’s been back home in Gaza, his life has stalled.

“It is more than boring,” he said, struggling to find the words. “It is very slow. The time. It seems different here.”

He has tried to find work in his field--at businesses, banks, international aid agencies. No luck. “No wasta. You know what wasta is?”

It is an Arabic word that, loosely translated, means connections or clout, and it often underscores a system plagued by corruption or nepotism.

Rayyas is unique among his contemporaries. He’s traveled, he’s gotten a taste, he’s lived abroad.

It is a cliche to call Gaza an open-air prison, but to many people it feels not only as if there is no way out, but also that the walls are closing in.

Gaza is just 24 miles long on the coastline--less than the length of a marathon. At its narrowest it is just four miles, an hour’s walk.

The enclave is surrounded by Israeli perimeter fence, bristling with cameras, watch towers and remote-controlled machine guns. On the Egyptian border, once honeycombed with Hamas smuggling tunnels, there is now a broad buffer zone, scraped clean by bulldozers, as forbidding as a no man’s land.

And the sea? Gaza fishermen are blocked by Israeli gunboats and forbidden to venture beyond six miles. For young people, the sea that once brought relief is now so polluted by untreated human waste that the Health Ministry has warned bathers to stay away.

#Gaza #Hamas #Palestinians

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