A Day at the Beach in Gaza

The Agony of Abandoned Gaza
by Antony Loewenstein

Israel's recent war against Gaza has been condemned by virtually every human rights group in the world. An Israeli NGO of combat soldiers called Breaking the Silence released a report in July, based on the testimony of veterans of the Gaza campaign, that found excessive violence and the use of human shields during the battle. Noam Chayut, co-founder of the group, told me recently in Tel Aviv that many veterans were shocked by the Israeli army's behavior but still believed in the morality of the war itself.

Gaza creates contradictions in us all. I went there in July to investigate everything from war damage and the Western-led siege to the rule of Hamas and freedom of speech. Hamas control of Gaza is often seen as an impediment to peace. Militancy, extremism, terrorism and deadly rockets create an image of fundamentalism and irrationality.

Islamization is undoubtedly growing in the Strip. Government ministers are urging women to wear loose-fitting, modest clothing and asking shopkeepers to remove female mannequins from their windows.

During my visit, I saw a warning given to adults and children not to wear T-shirts or sweaters with certain "inflammatory" English words and phrases, such as "Madonna," "pork," "kiss me," "I am ready for sexual affairs" and "vixen."

Journalist Fares Akram, whose father was murdered by the Israelis during the January war, told me that he feared the people of Gaza were too exhausted and preoccupied with daily life to worry about the creeping implementation of Sharia law. Akram showed me posters being distributed by Hamas that depicted the dangers of smoking, the Internet, drugs and television. None of these suggestions are legally enforceable, but they may soon be. Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told the assembled at Friday prayers in Khan Yunis in July that Islamic "virtue" was important in any society.

But this is only one picture of Gaza, a territory under siege for years by Israel and the Western powers. I was expecting a threatening place, not least because I'm Jewish; instead, I found humility, generosity and desperation.

The effects of the December/January campaign were pervasive. Some parts of Jabaliya, in the north of Gaza, looked like an elephant had trampled the ground beneath its feet. In other areas, some buildings had been pulverized by Israeli missiles while others were left standing. "The Israelis work randomly, like us," my fixer, Ahmed,
joked. In one area I visited, the Israelis had ordered Palestinians to evacuate, so very few lives were lost. Some locals told me they thought the onslaught was in retaliation for a previous invasion, when militants killed some Israeli army troops.

Abdullah Alathamma, 27, lost his home in the bombardment. Eleven days into it, with the Israeli military shelling and shooting at houses in the area, his family decided to flee. He said he saw the Israelis open fire on a woman walking to get water. His brother was arrested after the war and hasn't been seen since; Abdullah doesn't know where he is being held, or for what alleged crime. "Israel are merciless killers," he said, spitting.

Abdullah's father, Majed, is balding, with wisps of gray hair and a deeply lined face. He was angry as he showed me photos of his six crushed yellow Mercedes taxis, the lifeblood of his business before the war. He dismissively called the Israelis "Jews" and couldn't understand why they were "obsessed" with the Qassam rockets "that don't kill anybody anyway." We sat under a shady roof, mosquitoes buzzing around us, as Hamas jeeps slowly snaked their way through the rubble. Young children collected the remains of destroyed homes and placed them on donkey carts to be reused or sold.

Majed took me to his home, a twisted mangle of steel, metal and discarded toys. He stood on what was once the roof and held aloft two pieces of beautiful tile that had been part of the bathroom floor. He showed me where his family now had to cook, a grubby kitchen on sandy ground. Three sleeping children, one a baby, lay peacefully under a makeshift tent, their temporary lodgings. I was told Majed used to be a relatively wealthy man, with property worth $300,000. Today, he constantly reminded me, he has nothing. He asked for help and to tell his story.

Such stories were ubiquitous in Gaza. A territory under blockade since Hamas assumed control in a violent pre-emptive takeover in 2007, many people said they wanted to leave to visit family or friends in Egypt or beyond but were rejected with no reason given.

Some said they would refuse to leave, even if the Israelis or Egyptians granted permission. They were a proud people and seemingly took a level of perverse satisfaction in surviving in Gaza, despite the onerous conditions. The blockade would not crush their spirit.

Dr. Nafez Abu Shaban, head of the burns unit at Al-Shifa Hospital, told me that he and his colleagues struggled with the extreme nature of the burns suffered during the recent war. Nafez is a stoic man, but he could not help but be personally affected by the conflict.

"Every night I slept under the stairs of my house with my family to keep them safe; there was nowhere safe to go," he said. "This was not a war; it was a holocaust."

He had to rely on foreign doctors, friends and the web, when electricity was available, to learn how to treat injuries sustained by white phosphorus. One day when Israel threatened to (again) bomb the hospital, he gathered the nurses, doctors and other staff to tell them he was staying but they were free to go home. Very few walked out the door.

The Fatah/Hamas split -- a brutal little war exacerbated by US-trained Fatah troops committing human rights abuses against the democratically elected Hamas government -- is regularly discussed.

The vast majority of people I talked to wanted the moderates in both parties to reconcile. Division is death in Palestine and simply makes it easier for Israel and Washington to claim there is no partner for peace.

Dr. Haider Eid, an academic and activist for the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine, despaired that Hamas was already talking about accepting the parameters of a two-state equation, like the previously failed Fatah endeavors. "Hamas has to choose between resistance and leadership," he said, "so this is now a moment of truth for the movement." Dr. Ahmed Yousef, Hamas deputy foreign minister and former
adviser to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, was the epitome of moderation when we met. He talked about accepting a state within the 1967 borders, though he warned Israel that "resistance" would continue if colonization in the occupied territories continued, which he acknowledged was likely.

The sight of Hamas security forces on the streets was surprisingly unthreatening. Virtually every street or major intersection saw armed men in uniforms (seized, along with their cars, when Hamas overthrew Fatah in 2007). My fixer, a Fatah man, cursed the Hamas men whenever we drove past, and we heard almost daily of deadly gun battles between the two sides. It was a division that militants I interviewed said was unlikely to be fully resolved any time soon.

Haniyeh doesn't give media interviews anymore and has rarely been seen in public since the war, though I was able to attend the Friday prayers in Khan Yunis that he was leading. The security around him was immense--large, well-armed men with beards and steely eyes. The audience lapped up Haniyeh's presence. Like Barack Obama, Haniyeh is an orator of striking proportions. His words rose and fell in a hypnotic rhythm. (I was later told he spoke of accepting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders if it included East Jerusalem as the capital and the right of the refugees to return.)

The mosque's fans blew on the masses below as they listened intently. Men of all ages rocked from side to side as Haniyeh delivered his speech.

As Haniyeh left, there was a surge behind me, and I was almost swept under a sea of people. The security forces were clearing the area for the leader, pushing and slapping anybody in their way. One man cried out Arabic words of support, and the crowd shouted its response in unison. We were pushed and pulled as Haniyeh, after briefly stopping and raising his hands to acknowledge the salute, exited the building.

A few hours later Haniyeh attended one of Hamas' first public rallies since January. An outdoor sports ground in Khan Yunis was the setting. Hundreds of armed Hamas security forces surrounded the venue, positioning themselves on adjacent rooftops and surveying the crowd, mostly men in traditional thobes. Hamas flags waved from every flagpole, and posters of assassinated Hamas leaders Sheik Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi hung behind the raised stage. The large speakers blared music, warming up the crowd. When Haniyeh appeared, he mounted the platform, waved to his followers, sat down and began to speak. I thought how easy it would have been for Israel to bomb the event and take out many levels of the Hamas leadership at once. My fixer told me that Fatah was far more eager to do that than the Israelis.

Gaza is unlike anywhere on earth. I regularly sat near the beach overlooking the ocean, sipping a cool fruit drink. The stylishly appointed bar at the hotel where I was staying could easily have been at some fancy resort elsewhere in the Mediterranean. It was designed for a tourist industry that no longer comes and an elite that now thrives on property ownership and the tunnel-smuggling industry. Just outside the hotel, however, stand an ever-increasing number of beggars amid rubbish-strewn streets, not far from the destroyed parliament building.

Many Gazans think the world, including the Arab states, has forgotten them. Egypt's role in maintaining the siege was constantly damned by the people I talked to. Israeli behavior, while terrible and universally condemned, was better understood than that of their Arab neighbor. People expressed fear of Iran despite its public support for Hamas. The Islamic Republic's strict clerical rule simply does not appeal to Gazans, who need more than rhetorical support. The world community has yet to deliver.


Antony Loewenstein, a Sydney-based journalist, is the author of My Israel Question (Melbourne University Publishing) and The Blogging Revolution, (Melbourne University Publishing).

Copyright © 2009 The Nation – distributed by Agence Global

Happy Jobbing

Working for Happiness
Alex Frankel
Some workplaces are happier than others. Journalist Alex Frankel tried to discover why.
Image of the author working
The author during his stint at UPS

I started at UPS on Monday. I drove to the San Francisco UPS headquarters, a block-wide fortress of freight. A staffer from human resources took me to get a uniform and pointed me toward the locker room. I changed out of my street clothes and into the brown outfit. I had the locker room to myself; after buttoning up my shirt I took a second to stare into the mirror. As I changed into this new brown uniform, I was changing my attitude. I was becoming one of them.

For a decade I had worked as a journalist, covering business and the rise of branding. But by that fateful morning, I'd decided to leave my desk behind and dive deeper into a subject that had long intrigued me: the role of corporate cultures in large companies. In what became a two-year adventure through the world of commerce, I served as a driver's assistant at UPS, poured coffee at a busy Starbucks cafe, folded garments at Gap, rented cars for Enterprise, and sold iPods at an Apple Store.

Though my mission was primarily to study modern workplace cultures—reporting that turned into my 2007 book, Punching In—I came away with an appreciation for the roots and benefits of on-the-job happiness. Companies like the ones where I worked are not necessarily aiming to create staffs of happy people. They seek hard workers that believe in what they do, and if this makes people happy, that's a secondary benefit. Happy people, in other words, don't necessarily get the job done.

And yet some workplaces are definitely happier than others. Employees at Gap, I discovered, couldn't wait to leave; UPS drivers, on the other hand, often enjoyed their work and were even able to discover a larger meaning in what they did. Just how companies create positive work environments was something that revealed itself to me slowly. I learned that it had a lot to do with how employers choose employees, and how applicants decide just where to apply.

Here are my three secrets to a happy workplace.

One: Go for flow

"Dude," said one of my colleagues at Gap. "This place messes with time. It slows down, it crawls, it moves backward." He was right: At Gap (we were told to never call it "the" Gap) my chief duty was to fold clothing that had been unfolded by customers, a Sisyphean task. Sisyphus, you might recall, was condemned by the gods to keep rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity. And that's just what working at Gap felt like: an eternity. This was also true of working at Enterprise rental car and Starbucks, where all of our movements were measured and monetized. Perceptions of time, I found, are closely linked to the employees' feeling of freedom: The more constrained the environment, the slower things moved, and the less happy employees were.

In contrast, work at the Apple Store was set up so you were focused on accomplishing goals, not filling up time. At Apple, most product layout was left to one "visual merchandiser" who was passionate about keeping the store neat, leaving others like me to interact with customers, share information, and be ourselves instead of following a script. I was judged about what I did instead of how I did it. By having long leashes, Apple employees could forget about the hours and get into the "flow" state, so well articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which one is "completely involved in an activity for its own sake."

Anthropologist Edward Hall originally described the way in which time is viewed in the workplace. Most hourly jobs treat time as monochronic—"an infinitely divisible linear ribbon that can be divided into appointments and other compartments, but within which only one thing can be done at a time." But at Apple, the polychronic view of time prevailed, so that we could do several things simultaneously, manage our own tasks, and feel pride in accomplishing things, as opposed to just waiting out the hours. This certainly made me happier, and it seemed to work for the other employees as well.

Two: Foster authenticity

Apple helped work hours fly by in part by encouraging employees to be themselves. At Apple I got to hang out, share my knowledge, learn, and stay current with cutting-edge technology. In each discussion with a customer, I continued to feel more at ease, and interactions with my colleagues even came to feel natural. Employees at Starbucks were told to "be authentic," but Apple gave us a more honest variation on this theme. "Be who you are," a recorded voice told me in training. "You know the feeling you get from people who just say what they have to say."

This notion of authenticity is key. If workers feel like they are a part of a plastic, inauthentic culture, they may feel less "real" themselves. UPS has a workplace culture with 100-year-old history and traditions. Through the camaraderie among drivers, the day-to-day company rituals, and the leeway I was given on the road, UPS came to feel like a place where I belonged. And at UPS I gained a strong sense that I was a part of the thumping, beating heart of capitalism, connecting sellers to buyers and family members to each other. It felt much more critical than any other job I held. Its culture felt authentic to me, in a way that even Apple did not.

To function, a culture has to be organic and move of its own accord. People have to believe without being persuaded to do so. Through all my jobs, once the corporate minders pulled something out and identified it as a part of the culture, it immediately lost its authenticity for me. Evolution of the culture is crucial, and to evolve means to change. As a new worker, I had to feel that I could not only join the culture but also add to it.

Authenticity occurs, to some degree, in the mind of the employee. UPS and its culture worked for me. Starbucks did not; I viewed the training I received as simply teaching me how to act. But I remember talking to a fellow barista named Steve after a busy shift: He loved the hard work and the flow state it engendered. Unlike me, he viewed himself as having gained the skills of a craftsman. All of these workplace cultures are fabricated, so what feels authentic to one employee might feel inauthentic to another. Selection, by applicants and employers, is the best way to create happy workers.

Three: Find the right match

It may seem obvious, but it took me almost two years as a front-line employee to understand that not every prospective employee (even if they are all "good" and "hard-working" people) will excel equally in each workplace. We all have different needs and wants in a job, and we will succeed by being matched well to the place where we work. The smarter companies knew this and worked hard to identify the right talent before hiring.

The Container Store, a chain of some 30 retail outlets, didn't hire me. The company, which hires just six percent of applicants, made the right call—I would have been a poor match for the job. Unlike me, many of the other applicants in our group interview had the requisite passion for organizing and selling storage systems.

Thus, asking employees about their passions, and gauging the quality and truthfulness of their responses, is critical. The first thing that companies can do to maximize the happiness of their employees is to pick those employees wisely, by choosing people who will flourish in their particular corporate culture.

Similarly, prospective employees should try to identify those places in which they will flourish most. Applicants for the Container Store are fanatical about organization and about sharing their organizational skills with others. Apple isolates true enthusiasts and true believers in Apple products, of which there are many. People who self-select for UPS are extroverted, athletic, and restless, which are perfect traits for UPS employees—but perhaps not so good for Starbucks baristas, who spend much of the day standing in one tight place.

To attract employees, you need to offer them something that goes beyond money: a brand, a calling, a community. This force is larger than a person; it is a force that feels worth allying with and merging into. Some companies mold their corporate cultures to appeal to the population they hope to recruit and employ.

In the best situations, the applicant hears a calling to the company long before applying; there is something out there that makes the place seem like the right fit. In the best case scenario, there is a moment when you are working at that place when you feel alive, when you are no longer questioning and thinking about life on the outside, life before the job, life after the job. In that moment, you are the job. It's a rare, elusive feeling, I discovered. But it's the secret to happiness at work.
Alex Frankel is the author of Punching In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee, and Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business. His articles have appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside.