Newly released by Just World Books:
With Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between, El-Haddad takes us into the life and world of a busy Palestinian journalist who is both covering the story of Gaza and living it—very intensely. This book is El-Haddad’s self-curated choice of the best of her writings from December 2004 through July 2010. She was in Gaza City in 2005, watching hopefully as the Israelis prepared their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. She covered the January 2006 Palestinian elections—judged ‘free and fair’ by all international monitors; but then, she watched aghast as the Israeli government, backed by the Bush administration, moved in to punish Gaza’s 1.5 million people for the way they had voted by throwing a tough siege around the Strip. Tensions then escalated between Israel’s very lethal (and U.S.-backed) military and the forces loyal to Gaza’s elected Hamas leadership. As the casualties and privations they suffered soared, Gaza’s people found that Israel’s much-bally-hooed withdrawal of 2005 had led to something very different from what they had hoped for…
El-Haddad was not only covering Gaza’s situation as a journalist and correspondent. She was also living them, including by trying to explain the ongoing events to her own young children. Her husband, U.S.-trained physician Yassine Daoud, is also a Palestinian but one without the (Israeli-administered) right to reside in or even enter Gaza. In 2006, El-Haddad left Gaza to be with Daoud in the U.S., but her beloved parents stayed behind. In the book she recounts the angst of a person stranded outside her homeland when it was came under intense Israeli assault at the turn of the year 2008-2009– though she was also able to publish and amplify the experiences of her parents as they cowered in central Gaza City under Israel’s harsh, 22-day bombardment.
In Gaza Mom El-Haddad shares many intimate details of her life as a parent. We watch her young children growing up throughout the text. She also tells us about her life as a journalist and a media activist, including her involvement in the many new Palestinian-rights initiatives that emerged after Israel’s late-2008 attack on Gaza.
The Bush (and Obama) administration(s) punished Gaza alone, but Gaza did not (alone) elect Hamas -associated candidates. The election was by the PA and covered all of occupied Palestine. The big surprise was not that Hamas-associated candidates were elected in Gaza, but that they were also elected in West Bank (so deep was the aversion to perceived corruption in Fateh). One would imagine that if another election were to be held today, and Hamas-associated candidates were again to run, they’d win hands down, and perhaps that’s why the once-burned-twice-shy USA and its Israeli master have elected (p.i.) not to have another election as the so-called “peace process” process continues with the (widely perceived to be) Quisling PA (long since past the terms of their elective offices).
Isn’t this similar to the present U.S. Government? Soon, the people will find out that the elected people are not who they said they were, in order to get elected. As for Gaza, any sane Government body would realize that it’s time to change tactics, even walk away from a government, that chooses to suppress the very people that they pretend to help. It’s obvious that “O” can’t stop the Right wing blabber mouths in the U.S. , so to continue being a partner with Israel today, is a lost cause that will only continue to erode the goodwill that used to be what the U.S. stood for.