In Gaza, we aren't mourning Clinton's loss
On December 14, 1998, we had a day off at school. As an eight-year-old child, I couldn't be happier.
All the shops were closed and there were roadblocks everywhere. The streets were filled with Palestinian flags, and white and red striped flags I couldn't recognise. I asked my father and he explained that those were American flags, and that Bill Clinton, the President of the United States, was going to visit Gaza City later that day.
Little did I know that I would be hearing Clinton's name almost every day for the next 18 years, but it will not be on happy occasions.
The late Palestinian President, Yasser Arafat, had invited Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton to inaugurate the Gaza International Airport . Clinton's helicopters landed on the airport's runway in Rafah and then took off to Gaza City, where Clinton addressed the Palestinian National Council in what went down in history as the first visit ever by an American president to a "sovereign" Palestinian entity. The following year, my siblings and I joined 65 other students in the newly opened American International School in Gaza, a school fully staffed by American and Canadian teachers, with textbooks that had come all the way from the United States to Gaza. In the meantime, Senator Hillary Clinton joined Elie Wiesel in addressing "anti-Israel" and "anti-Semitic" rhetoric in Palestinian textbooks ( PDF ). In 2001, she sent a letter to President George W Bush urging him to force Yasser Arafat into changing the Palestinian Authority's "hateful rhetoric" as a condition for peace.
In 2007, she questioned Mahmoud Abbas' eligibility as a "partner for peace", given that textbooks issued under his administration were "inciting hatred".
This came after she co-sponsored a Congress resolution that supported the building of Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank, which she defended by saying: "This is not against the Palestinian people, this is against terrorists."
Despite Clinton's passionate interest in Palestinian education, she had little praise for Gaza's American school; on the contrary, when two American supplied Israeli F-16 jets razed the school to the ground in 2008/9, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had nothing to say.
Her indifference came as no surprise, and was no different than her reaction, or lack thereof, to Israel's destruction of Gaza's Airport three years after she herself had inaugurated it with Arafat and her husband.
Driven by a mission from God to spread peace and democracy in the Middle East, Bush pressed for a Palestinian National Council against all odds in 2006. But when Hamas, as predicted, won the elections, he approved a plan to overthrow Hamas by igniting a Palestinian civil war with the help of Israel.
In the meantime, Clinton was busy co-sponsoring a Congress resolution entitled, "The Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006". The resolution, which was introduced after Hamas won the elections and taken over Gaza as a result of Bush's interference, denied Hamas any participation in the "peace process" unless it recognised Israel, disarmed and renounced violence.
The bill was signed into law by Bush in December 2006, and was effectively the approval Israel needed to launch its ongoing siege of Gaza. Effectively, Bush and Clinton tried to change the results of the elections they forced upon us with a violent civil war, and when that failed, they decided to punish us for making the "wrong democratic choice".
When Hamas won Bush's elections, I had just graduated from school and was ready to leave Gaza to study at the American University in Cairo. From that year on, crossing the border out of or into Gaza turned into a fine experience of hell on earth.
The US, like any other country on a divinely inspired global peace-promoting mission, had decided to lead an international boycott of Palestine due to the failure of both the elections and the civil war it ignited in tipping the balance of power as it wanted it. The boycott entailed vigorous US support for Israel's complete imprisonment of the Gaza Strip's inhabitants with occasional military assaults - three in less than six years.
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